A Place Called Home (37 page)

“I was in a hurry,” he explained in a low growl.

“Yeah?” she asked softly, slipping her hand deeper inside his jeans, cupping him.

“Oh, yeah.” He lowered his head again and applied himself to her other breast. His teeth worried the nipple. He pushed himself against her hand. It was at once too much and not enough. “Out of these clothes.” His voice was muffled against her skin but the urgency was communicated even if the command wasn’t. Mitch began working Thea out of her jeans.

There was a shifting of positions, an unwinding of tangled arms and legs as they tugged at the material, first on each other, then abandoning that as too complicated, on themselves. Mitch banged his elbow on the steering wheel hard enough to make his fingers go numb. He swore softly and clumsily tried to manage with one hand what Thea was speedily managing with two.

The light from under the truck brightened the interior of the cab as Thea opened the door long enough to pitch her jeans out. Mitch had a glimpse of little panties in the same lime sherbet shade as her bra. She was out of those in a heartbeat and then she was helping him, sparing a kiss for his elbow that he couldn’t properly feel but imagined he did anyway.

Finding a position that suited them had all the elements of a wrestling match except for the referee.

“Here,” he said, pinning her into the corner.

“I’ll fall out.”

“Lock the door.”

She shifted, sliding under him. He had no choice but to follow her down. “You lock it,” she said.

Mitch’s tingling fingers caught the lock as his hips settled against her. She squirmed, trying to raise her thigh to give him a cradle for his body. He heard her head bump the armrest. “You okay?”

She nodded, bumping the armrest again. “This isn’t going to work,” she whispered. “You’ll knock me unconscious.”

They moved again, groping, straining, lifting. Mitch pushed them away from the steering wheel. Thea straddled his lap. “Better take the gearshift,” he said.

Thea rolled her eyes but she circled his erection with her fingers. “This thing have reverse?”

He shook his head, groaning deeply, his head thrown back as she began stroking him. His hands found her hips. She came up on her knees. A choked cry of encouragement came from the back of his throat. There was the heady sound of the damp parting of her lips and the release of a musky scent that made his nostrils flare as he breathed deeply. She moved, rubbing herself against the tip of his cock. “Yes?” she asked, her voice at once a question and its own answer. “Yes,” he said. “Oh yes.” His fingers pressed dimples into her taut flesh as she lowered herself onto him. Her head fell forward. Her arms circled his shoulders. She kissed his neck, the hollow just behind his ear. Her teeth caught his lobe, pulling slowly as her own body was stretched and filled. “Mmmm,” she murmured. She let him go and found his mouth, kissing him deeply, wrapping her tongue around his in an echo of the movement of her hips.

Mitch felt every contraction of the muscles in her arms and thighs and rocking pelvis. His shoulder bumped the rear window. His lean arms bunched. He leaned back, trying to give her more room and protect her head from hitting the roof of the cab. Their mutual laughter was short on breath. Thea lifted her hands and placed her palms flat on the roof. Mitch palmed her breasts. The interior of the truck was steamy with their heat and moist breath. He could feel himself starting to lose control. One shudder chased another and his own hips were trying to lift against hers.

He wedged one hand between them. His fingers brushed her clitoris and it brought her to almost immediate and complete stillness. Her mouth opened but her cry was silent. She moved again, this time more slowly, rubbing herself against him rather than the other way around. The pace was hers. She controlled the tempo and timing up until the very end.

She came moments before he did, the fluttering of contractions taking him with her. He gave a hoarse shout, levering her backward onto the seat and pumping himself into her with a rawness of passion that left them both weak and a little stunned.

Mitch lifted himself off Thea with far more care than he had used taking her down. He could feel the fine tremor of her body as he helped her up. His own muscles still thrummed with the barely visible vibration of a plucked string. Thea was massaging the back of her neck, her head tilted to one side. Mitch’s expression took on a guilty cast. “Did I hurt you?”

She shook her head. The movement made her wince. “It’s just a crick,” she said quickly. “Maybe I shouldn’t have locked the door. There would have been more room if it had popped open.”

“There would have been more room if I had taken you to bed.”

Thea smiled. She leaned toward Mitch and kissed him on the mouth. “There’s that,” she whispered. “But we seem to do all right in tight, cramped spaces.” Thea patted his cheek lightly. “Stop looking at me like that. I’m fine, Mitch. Better than fine. If I have any regrets they have to do with turning you down all those years ago. I missed out by not climbing into that fire truck with you.” Thea reached for her panties on the dashboard. The effort to untangle them proved too much and she threw them back. She accepted Mitch’s help with her shirt instead.

“You going to button that?” he asked when she pulled it over her shoulders.

“No.” She sat up a little, smoothing the tail of the shirt under her butt so she could sit down on it. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Are you kidding?” He found his jeans and wrestled them on, only partially zipping the fly and leaving the snap open. “What?” he asked when he glimpsed her staring at him.

“Someone’s going to get caught by his short hairs,” she warned him. “But I like the look. Very sexy.”

Mitch’s mouth quirked as Thea wiggled her dark brows. “Come here,” he said, reaching for her wrist and pulling her closer. One of her legs was drawn up on the seat. Her knee bumped his. His hand moved to her bare thigh, caressing her just above the knee. His own expression turned grave as he searched her face, looking for some hint of what she was thinking. “You okay with what happened?”

She nodded. “You?”

He murmured his assent. “You want to spend the night?”

“I—I’m not sure that’s—”

“Forget it,” he said quickly. “No pressure.”

“No ... umm, I was thinking about the kids. I don’t know—”

He cut her off again. “It’s all right, Thea.”

She stared at him, a little exasperated by his unwillingness to permit her to pursue a complete thought or finish a full sentence. It was something that Gina had told her on the occasion of their first meeting, about her and Mitch not having much time alone. Thea had had the impression that Mitch’s girlfriend did not spend the night. Now she wondered if she had been wrong. “I guess I’m not comfortable being here when the kids wake up,” she said. “It just doesn’t feel right somehow.”

Mitch hadn’t been thinking about the kids when he’d asked her. He blamed the blood loss to his brain for the oversight. “I know what you mean.” He lifted his hand, cradling the side of her neck in his palm. Silky strands of dark red hair tickled his skin. His eyes shifted from Thea’s face as her shirt parted and slipped over her right shoulder. Light glanced oddly off her upper arm, drawing Mitch’s attention to a mark he had not noticed before. Her skin had a sheen here, the gloss of flesh pulled taut by an old injury. A faint but unmistakable band of scar tissue circled her arm halfway between her elbow and shoulder. Without thinking of any possible consequence, he touched it. Before he could ask her what happened, Thea was jerking her arm away.

“Sorry,” he said.

Thea pulled her shirt up quickly. “It’s nothing.” She shrugged, her eyes darting away. “I’m a little self-conscious about it, is all.”

A little? That hardly described her reaction to something that was barely there. Mitch decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. “Was it a burn?” he asked.

“No. Nothing like that.” Her head came up, and she regarded him frankly for a long moment before she made her decision. “Can you picture one of those old-fashioned wringer washers?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, but I don’t think even my grandmother had one.”

“My parents did,” she said. “It was ancient when I was a kid. I remember it was rusted and battered and it sat on the back porch. I don’t think my mother actually used it. It was the kind without the safety guard to stop someone from getting their hand caught between the rollers.”

“Is that what happened?” asked Mitch. “You were playing around and put your hand in?”

“There was no playing. My father did the honors.”

Chapter 12

Mitch lay awake in bed, his legs sprawled on top of the covers, his head cradled in his clasped palms. The light from a street lamp slanted into the room through the open curtains. An occasional breeze shifted the curtains and cast shadow play on the wall and the ceiling. He saw the movement out of the corner of his eye but he wasn’t distracted by it.

He was thinking of Thea.

It wasn’t exactly a new pastime. Mitch figured that if someone probed his brain they would find entire regions of it had been surrendered to the consideration of Thea Wyndham. Thank God for the autonomic nervous system; otherwise most days he wouldn’t be able to breathe.

He slipped one hand out from behind his head and absently ran it up and down his chest. Her hand had made this same trail only a few hours earlier. He wished she was the one making it now.

Shine and Shield. He smiled now, thinking about it. It was the thing that had tipped the scales and catapulted her into his arms. He hadn’t understood it then, but she had eventually explained. She always did that, he realized. If he had the patience to wait her out, she would find a way to tell him what he wanted to know. Sometimes she found her way to telling him things he didn’t.

He conjured up an image of a wringer washer. The one he saw had a large white enamel barrel and four spindly legs. Two cream-colored rubber rollers, each about eighteen inches long, were set in the wringer apparatus that extended above the tub and could also be positioned out to the side. Clothes could be fed from the wash water through the rollers and into a laundry tub. The advantage of a moveable wringer was that it could be repositioned over the divider of a double laundry sink and the clothes could be wrung out a second time. The one he remembered seeing rusting in some neighbor’s backyard had had an automatic wringer.

That wasn’t the kind Thea described. The one her father had used to teach her a lesson was manually driven, which meant he had not only fed her small fingers between those hard rollers, but that he had flipped the lever to close them over her hand, then turned the handle to make the rollers begin their slow rotation.

Thea didn’t have a clear recollection of it happening. She imagined that she had screamed because a neighbor had come to their apartment. She could hear the pounding on the door with more clarity than the raw pitch of her own voice. Later there were police and doctors. X-rays. Cries for her mother that went unanswered. Strangers. Pictures. Angry people talking in hushed voices, almost but never quite out of her hearing. A Gund bear that was nearly as big as she was to sleep with her in a consciously cheerful hospital room. The certain knowledge that all of it was her fault.

The pain of that night was buried deep, but Mitch understood now that it leaked into every aspect of her life like toxic waste in a landfill.

Some of what she knew, she’d been told, and so she told him. She had her scars, some said, to remind her how fortunate she was to have been taken away from her parents. She might have died in the care of her psychotic father and her terrified and terrifying mother. Failure to protect, they called it when they spoke of the woman who had done nothing except stand by as her husband tortured their child.

Doing nothing was tantamount to participating, the social workers argued, and the judge agreed. What Thea remembered was her mother clinging to her father as he was taken away and then turning accusing eyes on her.

“That’s what I come from,” she’d said when she had finished. “When I look at Emilie and Case and Grant, and I think of trying to be a parent to them, I can’t forget what’s in
my
blood. No laughter. No warmth. I remember hurt. Deep, abiding pain. I never wanted to know more about my parents. Never searched for them when I could have. I was afraid, I suppose, that what I would discover would be even worse than my memories. Emilie was right about me. She told you I was nervous around her and the boys. She just didn’t know why. I’m not sure even Gabe understood. He never asked me about my arm. If the Reasoners ever talked about me in front of him, he never let on.”

“You let me believe it was the drugs,” Mitch said quietly. “Why would you want me to think that?”

“Because it’s something I did to myself, I suppose. Talking about it doesn’t make me feel entirely helpless. And people can relate to it in some way. There’s hardly anyone who doesn’t have at least one experience with drinking, eating, gambling, smoking, or spending too much.” She had touched his face, then, cupping his cheek so gently in her palm that it was not pressure he felt, but warmth. “But this other thing ... a father who puts his daughter’s arm in a wringer because she annoyed him with her clumsiness and her crying ... and a mother who did nothing because she was too afraid or too needy or as sick as her husband ... well, it was done to me and it lives inside me and sometimes I think I’m only containing all that ugliness, that it will come spilling out and I’ll hurt someone, too.”

Thea took a shallow, steadying breath. “Those medical problems I had as a child ... the ones that kept me from being able to stay with the Reasoners ... that was because of the abuse, Mitch. Getting kicked, tossed, shaken, a couple of times too often, I guess. My father had a short fuse. And in the event I took after him, I found drugs that kept my fuse long. Really long.”

Mitch allowed her to talk. Even when she finished, he remained silent, watching her grave features settle until they became merely solemn. She actually believed what she was saying about herself, Mitch realized. It stunned him.