Cupid's Confederates (12 page)

A rush of excitement flowed through her. A callused palm claimed her breast; then he rolled its tip between his thumb and forefinger. Flickers of intense pleasure vibrated through her body. There was such a hush in that darkness. Just the sound of his breathing and hers. The sound of flesh against flesh. The sound of hearts beating out of control. How had the fuse ignited so fast?

“Zach. We’re in the front hall,” Bett murmured weakly.

Obviously, he didn’t care. Beds were very nice and comfortable; he clearly wasn’t interested.

Was she supposed to be? She’d almost gotten used to being inhibited, to a distracted feeling of
hurry
before they could be interrupted. There was no one in the house with them. The door was locked. For the first time in far too long, she felt all the promise and richness of privacy.

Silence was golden; the darkness was delicious. Bett flicked open the snap of his jeans. At that instant, however black the room was, she could make out the luminous quality of his eyes. He hadn’t uttered a word of complaint in all these long weeks. He hadn’t made out in any way that he’d found her any different in bed, that he might be unhappy that she had been less than…totally giving. She saw it now. She saw his patience…and his impatience.

She skimmed off his jeans, her palms sliding the fabric down at the same time that she stroked the hard curve of his legs. When his jeans were off, she was kneeling on the floor; Zach knelt down beside her, arranging a very odd mattress of velour and denim and Orlon sweater. The tile still felt cool and hard beneath that as he urged her down, a cool that her body welcomed. Her senses were that much richer because she couldn’t see, but only feel, and taste, and smell, and hear him. That one lost sense heightened all the others.

His palm stroked with sudden softness, stilling the fierce rush of their passion. His fingers threaded through her hair and his soft, liquid eyes sought hers. Bett lowered her lashes and raised up on one elbow, her lips closing first on his mouth, then on his chin, then on his throat. She shifted, slowly, so that her lips could reach the spot right over his heart. Her tongue gently caressed one of his tiny nipples, then the other. They hardened to small points, exactly like her own. Lifting up, she swayed over him, brushing her breasts teasingly against those two hard, dark, tiny points on his chest. Zach’s hands clutched responsively at her hips, urging her back down to him. In the darkness, she smiled, gently pushing aside his hands, her head dipping down again.

She could feel wanting in her toes, her thighs, her chest. And power—sheer feminine power. She brushed her hair out of the way, but nevertheless strands stole down to tickle his abdomen as her lips pressed and lightened and smoothed. There were very few places on his body where his skin was soft, not touched by the sun. They belonged, she’d decided a very long time ago, to her. Zach suddenly sucked in a breath and forgot to let it out again.

He reached for her, but she ignored him. Loving was raging inside of her. A man could call it wanting, a woman never. He’d been so patient, so giving, so gentle through this trying time. Zach was human, not superhuman; it had all taken an effort. She wanted to tell him how much she loved him for it, without wasting any time on words.

Her fingertips trembled over his most sensitive flesh, drawing a shudder from him as they stroked through rough, curling hairs. The lapping of her tongue cooled his overheated flesh. Zach had taught her any number of games to play with her tongue. To tickle, cool, soften, stroke, tease. His six-foot-one-inch frame was a big playground. She raised up and crouched on her knees, her palms slowly caressing the length of his hair-roughened legs. Her mouth was settling in for a new brand of creative kisses she’d just invented when his whole body convulsed.

She sat back, extremely pleased with his reaction. She was even more pleased when he roughly pulled her down next to him. Her body stretched to make full contact with his, sensitive nerve endings igniting like fireworks. “If you were any hotter, you’d be on fire,” he murmured.

“You don’t want to play anymore?” she whispered.

“A serious business, playing. You just went past Go, two bits. Now you get to collect.” His voice changed to a husky whisper as he leaned over her. “Dammit, I’ve missed you!”

Surely he didn’t think he was alone? Her legs wound around him, drawing him in, her hands busy, in long, languid strokes on his shoulders and neck and back, anywhere she could touch. A sweet, sweet wildness kept building in both of them. The front hall of all places; the strange blackness all around them, the cool tile beneath her, the smooth sheen that covered their flesh—all of it induced wanton delights, fresh bursts of trembling desire.

He covered her finally, surging inside of her, filling her. Her whole body arched; his mouth seared on hers; and a rush of hot liquid fire flooded through both of them.

***

By ten o’clock, the front door was unlocked and the porch light on again. Bett was stretched out next to Zach on the couch, dressed, cuddled and sleepy. Her eyes were closed. “Don’t you think she should be home by now?” Zach asked idly.

Bett opened one eye. “You sound distinctly like an overprotective father with a shotgun across his lap. It isn’t as if we both have to wait up for her.”

“She’s a grown woman. Neither of us has to wait up for her.”

Bett smiled, snuggling closer. “I’m too sleepy to move. You’ve totally worn me out.”

Zach brushed back a strand of hair from her forehead, kissed her and then rearranged her, one of her legs tucked between his, his arm around her waist. Her body was limp, soft, pliant. “I want you again,” he murmured.

“You couldn’t possibly.”

“I do.” His palm cradled her hip, drawing her close enough to prove what he said.

“You have the most endless capacity for fooling around of any man I’ve ever met,” she remarked sleepily.

“Ah. The voice of experience talking.”

She poked him.

“They could have had a flat tire,” he worried.

She chuckled.

The front doorknob clicked open a few minutes later. The two loungers both bolted up to a sitting position, Zach shifting the fit of his jeans, Bett rapidly restoring some kind of order to her hair with her fingers. They were both grinning rather inanely as Elizabeth walked in with a bright smile.

“Well, my goodness, are you two still up?”

“You left at seven. It’s twenty minutes after ten,” Zach informed her flatly, ignoring the elbow Bett poked in his side.

“Really? I didn’t even notice.”

Bett gazed at her mother, searching for signs of mental wear and tear, as Elizabeth hung up her raincoat, describing what she had eaten for dinner right down to the rolls. “How I love homemade yeast rolls. But I’ll tell you, my breaded veal cutlet is better than theirs. I was telling the waiter, you have to be careful what coating you use…”

Elizabeth disappeared into the kitchen. Bett and Zach exchanged glances, and then Bett struggled to her feet, following her mother. “The thing is, did you have a good time?”

“Of course I had a good time. You know how I love to go out to dinner.” Elizabeth frowned as she wandered to the stove and lifted the cover on the stainless-steel pot. “Good Lord. What is this?”

Zach slipped behind Bett. “Spaghetti.”

“You cooked it for dinner and then didn’t eat it?” Elizabeth asked bewilderedly. “What did you two have for supper, then?”

“We…” Bett floundered.

“There just seemed to be a dozen things we were more hungry for than spaghetti,” Zach interjected blandly.

“I should think so.” Elizabeth wrinkled her nose at the congealing mess. “I wouldn’t like to think the two of you couldn’t get by without me as far as making yourselves a decent dinner goes.” She glanced at both of them, her eyes suddenly widening with rare perception. “You weren’t
worried
about me?” she asked incredulously.

“Of course not,” they both assured her.

“For heaven’s sake, let’s get some sleep, then.”

All three of them agreed on that.

“…and the continuous use of a specific residual herbicide has traditionally resulted in poor weed control in the orchard…”

The speaker droned on. Zach crossed one ankle over his other knee, and used his thigh as a table for his pad of paper. His pen rushed across the unlined page in flat, bold strokes.

“So in selecting herbicides for orchard weed control, let us first examine diuron, simazine, and terbacil…”

Half an hour later, the farmers were shifting in their chairs. Most of them wanted the information as much as Zach did, but hadn’t anticipated paying such a high price to get it—suffering through a monotone delivery so hypnotizing that the audience was blinking continuously in an effort to stay awake.

The meeting finally ended at nine; Zach bolted impatiently from his chair and stalked out of the stale air of the classroom. Pickup doors slammed all around him as he buttoned his alpaca jacket against the stiff November wind. A few other growers stopped to wave or exchange a word or two before he slammed the door of the pickup and started the engine.

At least half of the other farmers were accompanied by their wives, most of whom usually stayed in the back of the room near the coffee machine and shared gossip at these agricultural meetings. Bett usually came, but not to drink coffee. If she’d been there this time he could well imagine her hand waving in the air, the men’s affectionate and sometimes amused glances, her very polite demand to know the exact difference in chemical composition between diuron and simazine, what studies had been done on the effects of those chemicals on the environment, and in what conceivable way they might react with other chemicals used in an orchard throughout the year. Last year the agronomist from the local university had not been prepared for such a cross-examination. This year the speaker had occasionally leveled Zach a wary glance, as if waiting to be challenged.

Zach had not been in a challenging mood. Cold air nipped at his cheeks and nose; he turned the dial on for the heater and pulled out of the brightly lit parking lot onto the lonely black strip of road. Snow was in the air. Thanksgiving was a week away, and the last autumn leaves were whirling down in the bitingly cold night. He could have owned the road; no one else was on it.

Fall had always been his favorite time of year. Work wasn’t over—work was never really over on a farm—but the pressure was off; there was the satisfaction of a harvest completed and all the luxury of sudden leisure time. When you walked outside, the crisp autumn air burned in your lungs and made you feel alive…

Often in the fall, he and Bett bundled up and walked the farm on a cold night. Just as often, he associated November nights with a hot fire and cider and Bett curled up next to him in silence, her eyes half closed. In the late afternoon, they would gather chestnuts sometimes. And there was the nuisance job of raking leaves—he had half a dozen pictures stored in his head, of Bett making huge efficient piles of crackling leaves; of Bett, laughing, flat on her back, waving her hands back and forth while he patiently explained that one made angels in the snow, not leaves; then of himself on top of her, burying both of them, most methodically…

There had been none of that kind of thing this year. Zach turned down another lonely side road.

This fall had been an exercise in continuous chaos. The household had ridden the merry-go-round of Elizabeth’s new social schedule. Popularity had mysteriously sneaked up on his mother-in-law. Zach had dragged home Jim Barker from the bank; Bett had discovered the man who owned the local dress shop, a widower named Fred Case. Then there’d been Horace, Graham, Bob—who made the unfortunate mistake of putting the moves on Liz—Joe Greeley, and the Michaels man. There was someone else; she was often gone at lunch, but he’d forgotten the name. Even the neighbors had become involved in the conspiracy. Everyone knew a widower, a bachelor, a divorced man; Susan Lee had a brother…

Bett and Zach had made lists, checked references, vetted the contenders. Elizabeth did not call the outings dates, because she was too old to date, she said. These were engagements, duly noted on an engagement calendar. Each was a complicated project, involving hairdos, clothes, anxiety, anticipation, lengthy debates over shoes and purses, a pre-hash of worry, a post-hash of exactly what had transpired over the evening.

Elizabeth was under the impression that they always invited people to dinner three or four times a week during the fall. Zach had been coerced into donning a suit and going out at least every other weekend; Liz said four at a table made conversation easier. Company came continuously to the house. No crumb dared fall on a coffee table; one never knew who was going to come by.

Liz didn’t seem to be falling for any of the men, but she was certainly happy. Bett was happy because her mother was happy. The chain reaction stopped with Zach. He’d initiated the matchmaking game, so he said nothing.

Actually, he’d been saying less day by day. And tonight the silence all around him as he drove seemed an outer manifestation of something he felt inside.

A few minutes later, Zach twisted the knob of the front door and let himself into the house. The glare of far too many lights assaulted him first. The rest of the room kind of hit him like a sniper’s bullets, one thing after another, as he hung up his coat and, for some strange reason, just stood there.

It was a stranger’s room, his living room. A canary cage blocked the entrance. He was fond of animals, but had never taken to caged birds. The bookshelves had been cluttered up with knickknacks. Bett’s greenery had plastic flowers sticking out of the pots. A purple, green and yellow afghan had been thrown over the couch. The furniture had been rearranged—actually, it had happened some time ago, but he just now seemed to notice it. A velvet-cushioned rocker occupied the prime sun spot. Bett’s type of clutter—a sweater over a chair, four opened books, the pewter collection of tiny creatures, the spray of dried wild flowers on the coffee table—no longer seemed to exist. His magazines had been banished to the study.

He stared for a moment longer before silently making his way toward the chatter coming from the brightly lit kitchen. He found himself pausing for a moment in that doorway, too, before moving forward. Bett hadn’t come with him tonight because she was exhausted to the point of being cranky and wanted nothing more than to wash her hair, soak in a tub and fall into bed.

Her hair wasn’t washed yet. She was still wearing gold cords and his old brown sweater, and she was kneeling on the kitchen counter, dragging dishes down from the top shelf and passing them into her mother’s waiting hands. Liz popped him her usual bright smile before Bett swiveled her soft eyes in his direction, tossing a “Hi, honey” to him before she impatiently finished a sentence to her mother. He made no reply. But then, Bett wasn’t expecting one.

Absently, he opened a cupboard, while tuning in on the newest crisis under discussion. Thanksgiving. Evidently, everything in the cupboard had to be washed before Thanksgiving whether it was to be used or not. The preholiday mania emanated from Liz; Bett was laughing, but her voice was strained.

Zach studied the cupboard’s contents. These days the top shelf by the refrigerator held a full supply of alcoholic beverages; they needed those to entertain. After a moment, he decided on neat whiskey, poured a couple shots in a glass, and wandered toward his study.

He closed the door, and a feeling halfway between relief and anger pulsed through him as he slouched down in the old antique office chair behind the desk. The room was peaceful and silent, filled with his books and farming magazines, the oak desk he loved, the burnt-orange carpet that blended in a soothing way with the dark wood paneling. Bett’s pewter collection, he noticed suddenly, had been relegated to the top shelf in here. Restlessly, he shoved a booted foot against the desk, swirled the amber liquid in his glass and after a moment or two, leaned back his head.

***

He was in much the same position some twenty minutes later.

“Zach?” Bett’s head peeked around the corner of the door, her eyes uncertainly seeking the still form of her husband behind the desk. Zach had come in from the meeting with a rare aura around him that spelled
mood.
Her pulse had been beating unevenly ever since, and the cool blue eyes staring back at her didn’t help any. “What’s wrong?” she said quietly.

“Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted a few minutes of peace and quiet.”

The words were innocuous enough. It was the slight edge to his tone. Testy, unwelcoming…hostile? Bett forced a smile. “Did your meeting go okay?”

“Fine. Your mother go to bed?”

“Yes.” Tight little balls were collecting in every muscle in her body. They had been threatening all day. “Tired?”

“Not really.”

He hadn’t shut her out like this in a long time. In the next life, Bett decided, she was going to marry a ranting shouter. Zach was unbearably calm in anger. His rare silences sent a tense rush of panic up and down her nerves, anxiety she just didn’t know how to allay. “Something
is
wrong,” she said hesitantly.

“You’ve been up three nights in a row,” he said flatly. “Just go get some sleep, Bett.”

“You’ll be up soon?”

“Sooner or later.”

She edged back out of the doorway. His tone of voice gave her very little choice. She glanced at the stairs, but found herself wandering toward the kitchen again, dragging her hand through her hair. After spending the past three hours with the silver polish, all her muscles were complaining. Bett felt irritable. Her mother hadn’t even thought of the project until after dinner. It wasn’t a totally unreasonable idea; they were feeding three extra mouths at Thanksgiving, and Elizabeth always panicked if everything wasn’t just so for a holiday. Which was fine. Only now Bett was too darn tired to wash her hair, and when she didn’t wash her hair every second day she felt irritable.

And she was about as sleepy as a young baby with colic. Who on earth cared about hair? Her stomach understood that Zach was angry; it was knotting up in fists. Actually, Zach was very rarely angry. Zach was the easygoing one, the patient half of the pair, the control-over-emotional-upheaval half. When he slipped out of character, it was amazing how fast the whole fabric of their lives unraveled. Absently, Bett gazed around the spotless kitchen, then wandered to the liquor cupboard. She poured herself something or other from a green bottle, took a sip and grimaced. Firewater, she thought dryly. The stuff did slide nicely down her throat, but it seemed to settle around all the knots in her stomach and not do anything about them. Nor did it miraculously make her sleepy.

There was another sip yet in the glass, which she carried back with her to the study door. Taking a breath, she pushed open the door again. With her chin just slightly uptilted, she very determinedly and in total silence curled unobtrusively in the far corner of the old leather couch behind Zach’s desk.

Zach said nothing at her second intrusion. His hair was layered from the wind, thick and brown and warm under the light behind him, but his face could have been carved in marble. He looked strikingly handsome when he was like that. An artist would have seen it: the compelling male, the ice of anger, the pride and control; it was bone and flesh and man and Zach, handsome in a way no other man could be. Only Bett didn’t need him quite that good-looking. “It’s been building all week, hasn’t it?” she said softly.

“There is no crime in wanting a few minutes alone.”

“You’re angry.”

He didn’t hesitate. “As hell.”

“At…me.”

“At you.”

She set down the glass, thinking of all the times they’d bickered. Zach was darn close to a bastard when he had a cold; she was impossible to live with about the third day into a snow-in. That was bickering. This was something else. If on rare occasions Zach had turned icy before, that was like the cube versus the berg this time. And she didn’t have the least idea what was wrong.

Zach picked up a pencil from the desk, weighing the thing in his hands, and then started idly flipping it over, eraser tip to lead, then lead tip to eraser. “It’s way past time you called it off,” he said flatly.

She waited. If that was supposed to mean something, she most definitely didn’t understand what.

“I’m the one who asked your mother here. She always did strike me as a little off the wall. In a nice way. Whatever. Maybe I didn’t really understand how nerve-racking she’d be day by day, but I thought I could handle it.” His eyes suddenly met hers, hard and flat. “And over time, I discovered that I
can
handle it. She drives me absolutely nuts, but I love her, too. And if I hadn’t given a damn about her, I would have found a way to deal with her. For your sake,” he said quietly. “Only, Bett, you’re undermining both of us, and I’m furious.”

She opened her mouth, but he didn’t give her a chance to say anything.

“You’re the one who’s always had trouble with her, Bett. I know you as wife and lover, not as daughter. That whole scene of daughter makes you unhappy, guilty, unsure—I don’t know what you want to call it. Sometime or other you had to work out those feelings. This seemed like a good time. She needed you, and you wanted to be there for her—fine. Because even if every chip was down, I was there to help. I thought we’d deal with it together.”

“I thought that’s what we’ve
been
doing,” Bett said softly. “I don’t understand, Zach. That’s exactly what’s been happening—we talked. If you don’t think I appreciate what you—”

“To hell with that.” Zach lurched out of his chair, tossed the pencil on the desk, jammed his hands in his pockets and leaned back against the bookcase in the shadows. “I walked into this house tonight and didn’t even recognize the place. It isn’t home. It isn’t my house. It isn’t the place you and I put together anymore. And while Liz may be the one who made the changes, she’s made them with
your
consent.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Bett said defensively. “
You
were the one who asked her here. She could hardly come and stay for any period of time without leaving her things around—”