Calamity Mom (7 page)

He turned her face toward his and searched her eyes with a somber, intense scrutiny. “You did nothing to make either of us ashamed or embarrassed. We both know I’m too old for you. That doesn’t make me regret what happened just now.” He traced her lips slowly with his hand, and there was a faint unsteadiness in his fingers. “I’ll dream of you as you were tonight for the rest of my life,” he said through his teeth. “God, Shelly, why do you have to be so young…?” He caught her to him and his mouth burned into hers for endless moments while he fed an impossible hunger. He forced himself to lift his head. She lay against him, her lips swollen, her eyes wide and soft and willing. He groaned audibly. “You’d let me, wouldn’t you?” he asked in a hoarse, agonized tone. “You’d lie here in the moonlight and let me undress you. You’d open your arms and lie under my body and envelop me in your softness…”

She blushed at the images he was creating in her mind, shivering as she pictured his muscular, hair-roughened body
pushing hers into the sand while he possessed her. She moaned.

“Shelly!” His cheek lay against her soft breasts and he shivered in her arms. “Shelly, I want you so badly, honey!”

“I would let you,” she whispered brokenly. “I would, I would…!”

His arm contracted and he rocked her against him with rough compassion, his face lifting to nestle against her throat, in the scented softness of her hair, while the wind blew around them and the surf crashed.

“I’m years too old for you,” he said quietly, looking past her at the ocean. “And while my son wants a mother, I do not want another wife.”

“Then why are you marrying
her?
” she asked.

“I’m not. And she knows it. She likes to pretend that things will change, and so does her father, who owes me money and thinks that my marriage to his daughter would negate his debt.”

“I see.”

His cheek nuzzled her hair. “I’m in my middle thirties and you’re a college freshman. We’re a generation apart. I come from a social set that you couldn’t begin to cope with,” he added when she was tempted to speak and deny what he was saying. “I come from money. Plenty of it.” He laughed bitterly. “You’d have to organize and plan luncheons, dinner, business gatherings. You’d have to know how to dress, how to defend yourself at social functions, because I have enemies and former lovers who would savage you.” His chest rose and fell heavily. “Marriage is out of the question, and I can’t offer you an affair because my conscience would beat me to death.”

“I see.”

“Will you stop saying that?” He lifted his head and searched her eyes, looking for secrets that they wouldn’t yield. She looked odd. Faintly amused and bitter, all at once.

“You want to make love to me, but that’s all it is.” She summed up what he’d told her.

“Basically that’s about it.” He couldn’t tell her what he was beginning to feel for her. The cost was too dear. She’d forget him and he’d forget her, because they had no future together. Let her think it was only physical with him. It might make it easier for her to get over him.

She smiled with controlled dignity. “In that case, we’d better break this up and go back to the motel, hadn’t we?” She got up, brushing off her jeans. She retrieved her sweater, shook the sand out of it and slipped it on. She was suddenly chilled.

He got up, too. “I’ll walk you back to your room,” he said formally.

“Thank you.”

They didn’t touch. She felt betrayed. He thought she was several years younger than she really was, and that she was beneath him socially. She could have told him the truth, but if he couldn’t accept her as he thought she was, then he obviously didn’t care about anything except her body. In fact, he’d said so. Thank God he was too much a gentleman to take advantage. She’d been crazy for him. It was embarrassing to remember how wanton she’d been. The memory was going to hurt for a long time.

She couldn’t love him, of course. It was impossible to think that when she’d only been around him briefly. It was physical infatuation, surely, and she’d get over it.

They were at her door all too soon. “Thanks for the music,” she said, without quite meeting his eyes. She even smiled. “Tell Ben good-night for me. Nan and I have plans, so I don’t imagine I’ll see much of him until we leave for home.”

He frowned. Until now, he hadn’t remembered how close Ben was getting to her. “You don’t have to jettison Ben because of what happened tonight,” he said curtly.

“I’m not.”

He tipped her face up to his, scowling at the way she avoided his eyes. “Look at me, damn you!” he said sharply.

The anger shocked her into meeting his eyes, and she wished she hadn’t. They were blazing.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he said shortly. “I never meant to do more than kiss you. You deliberately baited me until I made love to you, so don’t put all the blame on me!”

She went scarlet. She was too sick with embarrassment and too flustered to even answer him. Jerking away from him, she fumbled the door open and went through it, locking it nervously behind her.

Faulkner stood staring at the closed door with shocked self-contempt. He couldn’t believe he’d made a remark like that to her, when she’d been so generous and uninhibited with him. He hadn’t meant to make her ashamed of such a sweet giving, but the look on her face had hurt him. He cared deeply for her, even if he didn’t want to. He had no right to wound her, to scar her young emotions by taunting her with her responsiveness.

“Shelly,” he said quietly, one big hand against the door. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t know if she’d heard him, but he hoped she had. He turned and walked away, aching with regrets.

Shelly went to bed, pleading a headache from the music. She figured that Nan wasn’t fooled, but she couldn’t face questions now. She’d moved away from the door so quickly that she hadn’t heard Faulkner’s apology. She climbed under the covers, and her pillow was wet when she finally slept.

* * *

S
HE MEANT TO AVOID
B
EN
, so that she could avoid his father, but the boy was waiting for her in the restaurant the next morning. He stood up, beaming, when she and Nan came in.

“I’ve already ordered coffee for both of you,” he said with a flourish. “Do sit down.”

Shelly and Nan chuckled involuntarily as they took their seats.

“What am I going to do with you?” Shelly asked softly.

“Adopt me,” he said. “She saved my life,” he told Nan. “Now she has to take care of me for as long as I live.” He frowned. “She’s sort of reluctant, but I’m working on her. I really do need a mother, you know. And don’t say I’ll have one when Dad marries Marie,” he added gruffly when Shelly started to speak.

“Where’s your dad?” Nan asked, because she knew Shelly wouldn’t. Something had happened the night before, and it must have been something major for Shelly to be so tightlipped about it.

“Dad’s gone to a meeting,” Ben said. “He sure was upset. He didn’t even want breakfast. I guess he’s missing
her,
” he added miserably. “He said something about us going home earlier than expected.”

Shelly felt her pulse leap. So he was that anxious to be rid of her. Did he think she’d make trouble? Embarrass him with confessions of undying love? He needn’t have worried. She wasn’t that sort.

“I’ll miss you, Ben,” she replied, smiling. “But life goes on.”

“You look sick,” Ben remarked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m just fine. No more hangovers,” she promised.

* * *

B
UT SHE WASN
’
T FINE
. She went through the motions of having a good time, joining in a volleyball game on the beach and sunbathing and swimming. But her heart wasn’t in it. Nan had paired off with a nice student from New York she’d met on the sailing trip, and Shelly wished she had someone, if only to keep Pete at bay.

“We could go back to my room and have a drink or two,” he suggested. “Come on, Shelly, loosen up!”

She looked straight at him. Courtesy wasn’t working. Perhaps stark honesty would. “I don’t want to have sex with you.”

He actually flushed. “Shelly!”

“That’s what you’re after,” she said flatly. “Well, it isn’t what I’m after. I came down here to have a good time. I’m managing it, barely,
in spite of you!
”

He got up, looking embarrassed, and shrugged. “Okay. You don’t have to get upset. No hard feelings.” He walked off, and very soon he was talking up another girl. Thank goodness, she thought. One complication resolved.

She felt tired and drowsy, and she began to doze. A sudden sharp movement brought her awake.

“This is stupid,” Faulkner said roughly. “You’re baking yourself. Haven’t you put on any sunscreen at all?”

“Of course I have.”

“Not on your back.”

“Well, I can’t reach it, can I?” she asked angrily. She sat up. “And don’t offer to do it for me, because I don’t want you touching me. Go away.”

He searched her eyes slowly. “I apologized, but you didn’t hear me, did you?”

Her eyes dropped. She didn’t like looking at him in swimming trunks. He was disturbing enough fully clothed.

“I have to go back to the room,” she said stiffly. “Nan and I are going shopping with some other—Faulkner!”

He had her up in his big arms and he was carrying her lazily down the beach to the water.

“Listen, you…!”

He put his mouth softly over hers, closing the words inside it, while he waded far out into the ocean until they were up to their shoulders in it. Only then did he release her, just enough so that he could bring her body completely against his and deepen the long, slow kiss that locked them into intimacy.

“Oh, don’t,” she pleaded, but her arms were already holding him, her mouth searching for his.

He gave it to her. His big hands slid down to her hips and
his fingers teased under the brief yellow bikini bottom as he pulled her to the hard outline of his body and moved her against him.

He nibbled her lower lip while he positioned her in an intimacy that made her gasp and shiver.

“I can’t get you out of my mind,” he whispered into her mouth, groaning. “You torment me.”

“Faulkner…!”

“I want you so, Shelly!” He kissed her hungrily. His hands released her hips and slid up to untie her top. It fell to her waist and his hands caressed her while his mouth teased and tormented hers. She felt his fingers teasing her nipples into even harder arousal, and she moaned sharply.

“Come here.”

He caught her against him, rubbing his chest against her breasts in a soft, sweet abrasion that made her cry out. His arms enfolded her and he buried his face in her wet neck, holding her, rocking her in an intimacy she’d shared with no one else.

“You feel of silk and it excites me when I touch you and you make those sharp little noises deep in your throat. Shelly, you want my mouth on your breasts, don’t you?” he whispered, letting his cheek slide down hers until he could reach her mouth.

The thought of it made her body ache. “Yes,” she moaned. “But we can’t!”

“I know. I’d have to lift you out of the water to get to you, and we’d be seen. Shelly…!”

His mouth fastened onto hers and his hands slid down her back, under the bikini briefs. He touched her with slow, deft intimacy. He held her like that, feeling her shiver and moan against his mouth as the intimacy took away all her inhibitions.

But he was too hungry for her. He had to pull back while
he still could. An unwanted pregnancy was a terrible cost for a few minutes of pleasure.

For her, he thought as he restored her bathing suit to belated decency, it probably wouldn’t be very pleasant at all, after the foreplay. Because she was virginal. Virginal. His head spun wildly at the thought of initiating her into sex, teaching her how to feel and give the ultimate sensual pleasure. But she was young. Too young, and too far away socially and economically.

“Why did you do that?” she asked miserably when he was holding her, soothing her in the heated aftermath.

“For the same reason you didn’t stop me,” he replied quietly. “Because I needed to touch you. Just as you needed to be touched by me.”

“I’m too young and I don’t know anything and there’s Marie…!”

He bent and brushed his mouth softly, softly, over hers. “Open your mouth,” he whispered tenderly. “You know already that I like to touch the inside of it with my tongue while we kiss.”

She moaned. He could have thrown her down on the beach and made love to her in full view of the population and she didn’t think she’d have a protest in her.

He drew back with evident difficulty. His face was drawn and wan as he looked down at her. “There are just too many obstacles,” he said, thinking aloud.

She knew it. Standing in his arms, with her whole body screaming to belong to him, she realized that after the pleasure would come regret, shame, hurt. “Far too many,” she agreed sadly.

He sighed heavily. “You deserve more than a man’s lust.”

She swallowed. “Are you…sure…that’s all it is, Faulkner?” she asked miserably.

His face closed up. He let go of her. “Yes,” he said flatly, ignoring the denial building deep inside him. “An uncontrollable
, feverish lust that makes me ashamed. I’m sorry. I genuinely meant to apologize, not to compound the problem.”

“I know.”

“I go mad the instant I touch you.” He laughed coldly. “It’s a quirk of nature. Fate mocking both of us.” He grimaced. “This can’t happen again.”

“I know. It won’t. I was trying to avoid you,” she confessed.

“So was I,” he agreed ruefully. “And you can see where it got us both.”

She flushed, averting her eyes as she remembered with unwanted vividness exactly how intimate they’d become in the water.

“I’ll try to think of it as a reality-based exercise in sex education,” she said bitterly.

He turned her face up with a long sigh. “Oh, no,” he said. “It wasn’t that.” His eyes dropped to her soft lips. “It’s been years since I’ve enjoyed a woman’s body, since I’ve indulged the need to touch and stroke and arouse. You make me want to find out how gentle I could be, Shelly.” He stopped, looking puzzled and irritated and even a little vulnerable.