Born Innocent (16 page)

He cupped her breasts, and squeezed them, feeling for the response of her nipples, which rose and hardened like dark pearls in their lacy nest. And then, a little roughly, he fumbled for the clasp of the bra, found it, at last felt it give. He then slid the straps down her arms, so that her breasts were bare for him.

She let out a little sigh, as if she liked being bare for him. He sipped that sigh from her willing mouth in another extended, thoroughly arousing kiss.

Then he kissed his way downward, so he could get his mouth on her breasts, too, take the nipples beyond his
hungry lips. As he suckled her, he felt her body yearning back and up, offering him everything, eager and so achingly, innocently carnal, that the taste of her was everything sexual—and everything pure.

He nuzzled his way over, so he could taste the other breast. And she offered it the same as she had the first, pushing herself so sweetly up against his mouth, sighing and holding his head to help him keep his hold.

As he had the last time, that night when she had come and brought her light and goodness into this darkened house, he wanted to touch her in that most intimate of places. He wanted her completely naked, at the command of his hands.

So he worked at her jeans, unhooking, unzipping, and finally sliding them and her panties down her slim legs. She helped him toward his goal, kicking off her shoes, kneeling to push off her socks and then rising again, stepping free of the hindering jeans. He pulled her close again and his hand slipped into that nest of curls, until he found the center of her desire. She was wet and eager, and he loved the way she stood on tiptoe, holding herself up for him, so he could love her body and make her moan.

But then she was pushing at his shoulders, murmuring half protests, and though he didn’t want to stop or even pause in what he did to her, he forced himself to pull back a little.

The minute he hesitated, he knew what she was up to. She wasn’t satisfied with being the only one without clothes on. Eagerly, like a child with a large present, she began to unwrap him. She yanked his shirt from his pants and, with little urgings and cooings, she slid it up and away. She knelt— he stared, aroused as hell, at the beautiful curve of her back—and she pulled off his boots and then his socks. Slowly, rubbing herself along his legs and body, she stood once more to unsnap his jeans, parting the plackets with an
adorable little sigh, and then slithering them down his hips and off, taking his briefs along, too.

Then she took a step back. “It does look like it’s healing well, ’ ’ she said huskily.

He stared at her, uncomprehending, until she placed her lips on the red, puckered scar at his shoulder where that bullet he’d got in Mexico had gone clean through.

“
Yes, it’s fine.” He heard himself groan. And he gathered her close, feeling the whole nude length of her against him and thinking that it was worth it to live thirty-two grim and dreary years for this moment and the few like it they might share in the next brief days alone together.

He held her tighter, as if he could squeeze out the thought that their days here were numbered, that what they were doing would have an end. Now was not the time to think of endings.

She squirmed a little. “Joe?” she asked, sensing his dark thoughts. He made soothing noises and loosened his hold.

As soon as he did that, she slipped around him. Laughing, she disappeared into the hall.

He followed where she led him: to his own bedroom, pausing only for a detour to the bathroom, where he found the condoms he’d put away when he carried her suitcase to the guest room.

With the needed protection in hand, he went into his own room and stood in the doorway. She was stretched out on her side across the bed, smiling, her eyes dreamy, her body pale and pure as her name: Snow. Softly, in that polite voice bred into her as a Snow and a
somebody
in her community, she complimented the new easy chair in the comer as well as the king-size bed on which she lay.

Never taking his eyes from her, he approached the bed. He wanted her so much, it hurt. His manhood stood out, hard and ready. She watched him come, her eyes meeting his. And when he reached her, she held out her hand.

After seeing that she was protected from pregnancy, he set the rest of the condoms aside, and took the hand she offered. He went down, beside her, and then, at her tender urging, he kissed her and rose over her.

She wrapped her beautiful legs around him, and she pulled him down again, this time into the sweet heart of her softness. He went willingly, sighing, holding himself back enough that she could fully take him at her own pace. He found he was more in control this time than that other time, when his need for her had been the need of a drowning man for air.

He held his weight on his hands and thighs enough that she could set the rhythm, and when he felt it and knew it, he moved with her, a slow, heating build of sensation, one that he was able to sustain for an eternity of ever-mounting ecstasy.

But then the rhythm changed. Her movements became hard and frantic. He allowed himself to surrender to the insistence of her hips meeting his. His need grew in tandem with hers. They moved together, rolling, from one side of the big bed to the other, until, finally, he was on top once more.

He drove into her. She took all of him. She cried out, and her body closed around him with her completion, tight and so sweet he thought he might die. She held him so hard, forever it seemed, and then, with a long sigh, she began to relax.

Her sudden total softness, her utter surrender, was the finish of him. His climax came like something sucked out of him. He pushed into her. She opened fully. His mind spun away as his body knew an utter, numbing release.

He collapsed on top of her. She wrapped her arms around him and held him to her heart.

He lay there, thinking what he knew he shouldn’t, what he was going to have to be very careful never to say aloud to her: that she had shown him twice now what beauty and wonder there could be in this troubled, hurtful world. That in her arms, however briefly, he’d found something he’d never thought to know.

She breathed his name against his skin. Gently he rolled away and then gathered her into his body. She sighed. With a cherishing hand, he brushed damp tendrils of hair from her forehead.

“
Oh, Joe. I feel so peaceful. I could just drift off to sleep right here....”

He murmured his agreement and closed his eyes.

A while later, they got up and showered together and went out to the kitchen looking for something to eat. They made fat sandwiches, poured milk, and sat at the table together.

As they ate, she asked him questions—about his mother, and his father, and what growing up was like for him. Joe found it wasn’t hard at all to answer any question she asked.

He talked for hours, and she listened to every damn word. He told her how his father brought his mother to the ranch to live, and then kicked her out when he found out what she was. He talked of the years he lived with his mother, about all the men, in and out all hours of the night—until she finally found a man she thought she loved. He was a mean sonofabitch, and Joe had the scars to prove it. In the end, partly to keep from losing that man and partly to protect her son, Belinda Sweeney dropped Joe off with John Tally.

Joe told Claire, “My father was...a quiet man. He didn’t know how to...show himself to other people. I think he took one chance, with my mother. And when he walked in on her with someone else, he never took a chance like that again. Folks thought he was crazy, because he would come into town and turn away, mumbling and looking freaked when people would try to talk to him. But... contact just scared him, I think. Hell, I guess I don’t really know. He came here from Kansas alone. If I’ve got other family, I don’t know who they are.

“
I could never get through to him. He wouldn’t
talk,
you know? But the day he came and stuttered out that he wanted to make me his legal son, I knew what I meant to him. And that was enough.”

Claire asked softly, “Where is your mother now?”

“
She’s dead, too. I got a letter from one of her girlfriends. About six years ago now. Lung cancer. She never would give up those smokes.”

“
Did you hate her?’’

He smiled. “Nah. I loved her. She was so damn beautiful.”

Evidently, Claire had heard that before. She nodded. “That’s what they all say. In town. That she was beautiful and bad.”

He shook his head. “I think she was lost, more than bad. It was like she was looking desperately for something, and she just never could find it. Maybe, finally, she did find it. I hope so.”

They were lying across his bed together at this point, looking at the few pictures in his father’s one dog-eared album. She pointed at a studio portrait of a wide-eyed little boy. “That’s you. It is, isn’t it?”

“
Yeah. I couldn’t have been more than three. My mother had it taken, I guess. She sent a bunch of old pictures of me in the mail, after she left me with my dad. I think this was one of them.”

Claire stroked the picture’s plump face. “Oh, Joe. You look so innocent....”

He shrugged, watching her, realizing that he wanted her again. “I was born innocent, like everybody else in this world,” he told her as he flipped the album closed and set it on the nightstand. “I just saw too much, too soon, to stay that way.”

He pulled her toward him. She came with a soft, willing sigh.

That evening, after dinner, they wandered out to the
porch and sat in the glider, with the dogs snoozing at their feet. Not bothering or really needing to talk, they watched the stars grow brighter as night claimed the world.

Claire, who was experiencing pure happiness at that moment, and grateful beyond measure for the feeling, leaned her head on Joe’s shoulder. Then she discovered she did want to talk.

“
Joe?”

“
Umm?” He had his arm around her. He pulled her a little closer and brushed a kiss against her hair.

“
Tell me some more.”

“
About what?”

“
About you.”

“
What?”

“
I don’t know. Something that’s not about the past. Something about you right now.”

“
Like what?”

“
Well, if I knew, I wouldn’t be asking.” She lifted her head enough to kiss his cheek, then she rested against him once more. “I know what. Tell me who you’d be, if you could be anyone—anyone in the world.”

He was quiet. The glider silently rocked them. She almost wondered if he’d chosen not to answer. Then he said, “Sheriff Brawley.”

She sat up and peered at him, to see what he was getting at. “Sheriff Dan?”

“
Yeah. If I could be anyone in the world, I’d be Dan Brawley.”

Claire gaped, and then realized gaping was not a way to get him to tell her more. She closed her mouth and tried to look interested instead of stunned. “Why Dan Brawley?”

Joe laughed. It was a good, deep laugh. When the laugh faded, he said, “Claire. You’re like looking through a window sometimes. My answer surprised the hell out of you, huh?”

She sighed and shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t what I expected, I’ll admit. I love Sheriff Dan, I really do, even with... everything that’s happened to me lately. But the man is past sixty, Joe. And if he doesn’t cut back on the pralines, he’s heading for a heart attack.” She punched his arm playfully. “Now tell me why you’d like to be him.”

Joe looked off toward the dirt road beyond the break in the fence. “He’s a good man, with a job that matters. He does what he has to do, and
I
think he makes a difference. When I was a kid, he used to... stick up for me with the other kids.”

Claire hadn’t known that. ‘‘He did?”

Joe nodded. “Yeah. And he always did it with class.” He glanced at Claire, and then looked out again, past the dirt road this time, to the pine-covered mountains beyond. “You know how, when I first came here, I had my mother’s name?”

“
Mmm-hmm.”

He grunted. “It took my old man a while to get used to having me. My mother never told him I existed until she dropped me off on him. Oh, he believed I was his, all right. It was kind of hard to dispute that, since I looked so much like him—and I had his weird, yellowish eyes. But he didn’t rush right over to the courthouse and demand I be declared his legal son. That came later. So, for two years I was walking around looking just like him, and yet named Sweeney. Even the dim bulbs knew I was a bastard.”

Claire winced a little at the bluntness of the word but was careful not to interrupt. It was so wonderful to be sitting here on Joe’s porch and listening to him talk to her so easily about who he was and how he’d become that way.

He went on. “And kids can be mean. A couple of them, Ben Brown and Filo Morris, used to try to get me after school and mess me up a little, just to let me know that I was... well, you know, trash.”

Claire had to bite her lip to keep from announcing her outrage. During their growing-up years, Ben and Filo had truly been a couple of bullying creeps. But Claire knew that to speak right then could mean Joe would decide he’d said enough. She said nothing.