Desired (Miranda's Chronicles Book 1) (10 page)

I needed sleep all right. I was spent. He surely was, too. We drifted away, locked in an embrace. “You know something?” I mumbled sleepily. “It’s a good thing we’re both in good shape.

My mental clock that never failed me woke me before daylight. I could see almost nothing but the digital clock on the bedside table glowing 5:00 a.m. in red letters. We hadn’t called for a steward to remove the table. The comingled smells of sex and grilled steak lingered in the air, making me hungry for two different things.

You’ve got to be kidding
, my inner voice chided.
You won’t be able to walk if you fuck him again.

That much I knew.

I also knew I had to get home. I should have left here before now. My sight began to adjust to the gray light. I eased to a sitting position, placed my feet on the floor and carefully stood. I was sore everywhere. Even my scalp. He’d had a death grip on my hair while I had made love to his beautiful cock.

I gathered my clothing from the end of the other bed and tiptoed into the bathroom. The shower tempted me, but waiting until I got to my own trappings at home would be easier. What I really needed was a bath so I could immerse my overused parts for a long restorative soak.

I stared at Tack’s toothbrush, debating if I should use it. Why not? His tongue had been inside my vagina; his penis had been in my mouth. Sharing a toothbrush seemed like a small thing.

Before leaving the bathroom, I paused and considered morning after etiquette. Should I wake him and say good-bye? It hit me suddenly that I might never see him again and a burn rushed to my eyes.

Stop it, stop it, stop it. You knew what this was from the beginning.

I banished the would-be tears with a deep sniff. I needed to leave now. Truthfully, I didn’t want to be distracted by him anyway.

I tiptoed back into the bedroom where I shrugged into my blazer and stuffed my stockings into my pocket. I found a hotel notepad and pen. He didn’t stir. I returned to the bathroom and wrote a quick note.

After reading it, I didn’t like it. I strained my tired brain for something witty and sexy and wrote a second note. I tore it up, too. God, he had fucked me senseless. “Damn,” I whispered. “Get your wits about you, Miranda.”

I shook my head to clear it and wrote a third note:

Have to get home and get ready for this afternoon’s open house. You were wonderful last night. Not quite a dozen, but the one long one made up for the shortfall.

I ended it with a smiley face.

From my purse, I dug out a business card that had my cell number and my home office number. If he called me at either number, if I didn’t answer, he would get my voice mail where he could leave a message. I laid my note and my card on top of his toiletries bag.

Then, rather than flush the toilet again, I gathered the pieces of the torn-up notes and stuffed them into my blazer pocket, too. Carrying my purse and shoes, I eased through the doorway and pulled the heavy door closed behind me. In the hallway, I slipped on my shoes without stockings and made my way to the elevators. My feet and ankles were so sore from yesterday, I was almost limping.

While I had never awakened in a hotel room with a strange man, at least I wasn’t in a totally strange place. I knew how to get home. On a Sunday morning at 5:30, freeway traffic was light, giving my mind an opportunity to sort all that had happened in the past twenty-four hours.

I’d had moments in which I pondered how life could change in the blink of an eye. I had experienced a dozen of those moments the past day. This time yesterday morning, I’d had no idea I would meet a man good-looking beyond description and rich to boot or that he would be so skilled, so in tune with my body and my desires that he would take me to an ecstasy I hadn’t known existed.

I also was aware of something about myself that was new. Yesterday, I knew I was naïve about sex. Today, I realized just how naïve. I had chattered with various girlfriends about men and sex uncountable times. Girl talk about men was what single girls did. We, or I should say,
they
joked about BJs, G-spots and a dozen other sex-related topics. One thing stood out in my memory. They talked about how hard it was to find a guy good at mind-blowing sex and how after they had found one, they were reluctant to let him go, even if he was far from perfect or even abusive

My girlfriends could have talked all day and never imparted what I had learned with Tack overnight. The emotion, the physical feeling—both were indescribable. I felt like a deflowered virgin all over again. I doubted sex would ever be the same with anyone.

Tack’s words echoed through my memory....
I love your hair…. I love how you smell…. I love how you taste…. It’s better to engage on more than one level….

Had I been engaged on more than one level? Had he? It had felt as if we both were.

My thoughts did a one-eighty and Donald and his ineptness in bed barged into my mind. I was twenty-five years old the first time I had slept with him and he was five years older. Until then, I’d had sex with exactly four people and no one of them had come close to what I’d read about in books. In the beginning, Donald, or I should say ‘we,’ had been clumsy. I hadn’t known what his previous experience had been. Still didn’t. Looking back on it, at thirty years old, it seemed that he should have known more about pleasing a partner than he did.

Over time, he, or we, had become adequate in bed, but on Donald’s best days he hadn’t compared to Tack Tackett. Part of it, without question, was emotional. Simply put, I had never been in love with Donald. I had stumbled into a physically committed relationship with him, but I had never seen him as my dream man, something I couldn’t say about Tack Tackett.

My inner voice berated me.
Dream man?
You are so dumb! You cannot let yourself get emotionally invested in a man you’ll never see again.

“But I will see him,” I said to the air around me. “I left him my phone number. He’ll call.”

Phone calls. Crap.
Lisa’s call of yesterday morning took over my musing. I couldn’t rely on her to see that Mom got back on that medication. I stepped back into reality and started to think about the trip I had to make to West Texas.

Mom.
I sighed, as I always did when it came to her. My eyes misted. My love for her was more like mother and child than daughter and mother. I couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been a burden, either directly in front of my face or indirectly lurking in the back of my mind. Even when I was a little kid, more often than not, I had been forced to be the adult in the room. To this day, I felt guilty for leaving her and for leaving Lisa.

When I was sixteen, Mom married, Husband #3, Richard Garland, an overbearing brute of a man I had both feared and hated. Richard had moved Mom and Lisa to Abilene, but I stayed in Roundup with my grandmother. At that point, Grandma had started pushing me to save myself.

Mom’s marriage to Richard hadn’t lasted long. A year later, she and Lisa were back, bringing the chaos that always accompanied my mother.

The year that followed that was a fateful year. My grandmother passed from a sudden heart attack, leaving everything she owned in a trust for my mother’s benefit. Her estate hadn’t been large—a little bit of cash in the bank, her house, an aging Cadillac and a few acres of farmland leased for cotton. I graduated from high school that year and left Roundup the day after graduation. A few months later, Mom married Darrel Jones, an old high school friend who had become a second-rate lawyer. It had taken him and Mom no time to break my grandmother’s trust and take ownership of her assets.

By the time her marriage to Darrel ended, all Mom had left was Grandma’s old house and an aged Cadillac.

Indeed, I might have left her and Lisa, but I hadn’t escaped. For the ten years I had been gone, I had still dealt by long distance with Mom and her problems—her highs and lows, a new marriage to Husband #4, then said husband divorcing her. As for Husband #5, no one even knew she had married him until after she had already done it.

Would I ever be able to escape? I had asked myself the question a thousand times. Where Mom and indirectly, Lisa, were concerned, I couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. At the same time I had those thoughts, I also recognized that I enabled them both, and even Arnie. But I didn’t know how to stop. They needed me.

Their needs frequently had come between Donald and me. The mess that was the relationship I tried to have with him finally became as much my fault as his. Had he cheated because he sought relief from the pressure that my family brought to my doorstep? Was someone less encumbered than I was easier for him to be with?

So if the answers to those questions was “yes,” he hadn’t really loved me and it was just as well that he was out of my life.

Could
any
man have the tolerance to put up with me and my family? Though an answer to the question had never come, I had learned one thing from the experience with Donald. I could never again allow a man I cared about to get involved with my family.

My thoughts veered back to Tack Tackett and a long string of “even ifs.” Even if Tack were a guy who
could
care about me...even if Lisa got a job or found a husband…yada, yada, yada. Then there was Mom’s illness itself. Bipolar disorder had a genetic component. Even if I didn’t suffer from it myself, my kids, if I ever had any, could. How selfish would I be to risk that?

Meaningless sex. One-night stands. Dead-end hookups. Was that all there was out there for me?

Mental groan. All of it was depressing and confusing, a conversation not good for much except passing the time as I drove up the freeway.

When I reached my condo, Miss Kitty was waiting for me by the front door. “Hi, pretty girl,” I said to her, gingerly squatting to rub her head. “Have you missed me?”

She gave me a long-suffering meow.

“I know I’ve been bad, baby. I didn’t give you supper last night, did I?”

I loved this scruffy orange and white cat. I loved her so much I had captured her a few months ago, stuffed her into a cat carrier and hauled her to a vet to be spayed and I routinely bought her an expensive collar so she wouldn’t become flea infested and suffer from one of those flea-borne illnesses. I even bought her the most expensive cat food that was supposed to be healthier. I wished I could make a pet of her. Sometimes I had been able to coax her into the house. She walked in, sniffed or brushed against everything and explored, then wanted to go back outside.

“It was chilly last night,” I said as I unlocked my front door. “Where did you sleep, baby? You see, if you’d come live with me, you’d always have a warm place to sleep.”

The cat purred and brushed against my legs. I carried cat food out of the utility room, filled her bowl and gave her fresh water. I tried to persuade her to come in, but with her belly full, she wasn’t interested.

Finally, worn out, I made my way to the bedroom where I shed my clothes, placed my phone on the lamp table beside my bed and crawled between the covers. A shower could wait.

Three hours later, I awoke, feeling refreshed. I had slept the sleep of the dead. I grabbed the phone and checked the call log. Miscellaneous missed phone calls and voice messages, but none from Tack.
Crap!
Had he already checked out and left town? Should I call the hotel and ask?

Bad idea
, my inner voice told me.

After soaking in the tub and doing my hair, I felt human again. I was starving. I went to the kitchen, but before I set out to cook breakfast, I checked the call log on my phone again. Nothing.

A blue funk took root within me. If Tack was going to call me, he should have already. I had believed I would hear from him, but he would be his way home by now. I didn’t even know if he had piloted his own plane or if someone else had flown him, but he was surely gone.

I watched the news on a small TV in my kitchen while I cooked and ate an egg white omelet. Then I dressed in a tailored black skirt and a royal blue satin blouse, pulled one side of my long hair back behind my ear and secured it with a blingy clippie. I added gold hoop earrings and a gold chain around my neck. I wanted to look my best. Maybe he hadn’t already left town. Maybe he would stop by the open house today.

I made one concession to comfort over vanity. Today, I opted for more sensible shoes. Another full day of those gorgeous pumps I wore yesterday could cripple me.

At Skyline, three Realtors from Lockhart Concepts were there and ready to go to work, so it appeared my day would be light. That suited me fine. I might try to sneak away before six o’clock. Standing all day held no appeal and might take more effort than I could muster.

Through the day, in slow moments, I called up Tack’s name on Google. His whole name was Harvey Owen Tackett. His initials were HOT, just like the monogram on his handkerchief. That still struck me as funny and I couldn’t keep from grinning. He was thirty-four years old. He had founded and owned a development company, Tackett Energy Corporation. He drilled for oil all over the world.
Hm. Well-traveled.
I hadn’t been out of Texas more than half a dozen times in my entire life.

I checked my phone a dozen times. A few calls, but none from him.

Mid-afternoon, Drake and his beautiful wife came by. I made a point to ask, “So did you sell Mr. Tackett a condo?”

“Not yet. He’s a tough customer.” He grinned impishly. “But I know him. I’ll hear from him. He was impressed with the penthouse unit.”