Lightning That Lingers (6 page)

The sensual features seemed to soften as he studied her. “You’ve been abandoned to the wolves, darling. She didn’t so much as hesitate. It helps, of course, that she’s known me since the days my eyebrows didn’t reach the top of the checkout counter and I was signing out picture books in crayon.”

The inside of her mouth and her throat were
bone dry and stinging in the cold air. She tried to swallow and couldn’t. “You just … lied to her?”

“No.” His smile entered her senses like wine. He moved closer. “I do want to pick you up. You might as well resign yourself and come along passively.”

His strong fingers took hold of her upper arm, propelling her toward the car, and she yelped, “Now see here.…”

“I intend to. But not until you’re sitting in the car.” Amusement edged the easy voice. “I don’t want you to freeze the end of your stuck-up little nose.”

Though she didn’t quite struggle, alarm made her stiffen as he bundled her into the passenger seat of the station wagon, and she was breathing in jerky little gasps as he climbed into the front seat beside her.

“You can’t push me around,” she said, somewhat inaccurately.

“Oh yes I can. As a matter of fact, I’m probably only one of a long line of people who can push you around.”

She made a noble attempt to pull herself back together. “I have my moments. Of courage, that is.”

“Yes indeed.” He shoved the key into the ignition and turned to face her, one long shapely denim-clad leg resting on the driveshaft hump. “If you recall I was treated to one of them on Saturday. It was very impressive.”

Her gaze had wandered somehow to his mouth, and a strange feeling began to float inside her. She looked straight at him. “Is that why you’re
here? Do you plan on doing something horrible to me for revenge?”

A touch of his hand turned on the overhead light, shutting the world outside to a distant blackness, shutting her in a flare of glossy yellow light with this utterly beguiling stranger. His face was tilted slightly as he studied her, a slow smile teasing at the corners of his blue eyes. One of his hands rested on the steering wheel, the gloved fingers strong and classical in their grace as they curved along the line of the black plastic. He stretched out his hand to rub his index finger once gently under her chin.

“If that’s the best fight you can put up when you think something horrible is about to happen to you, I’m going to enroll you in est. Do you know what’s in front of us?”

Her heart had given up its weak effort to do anything more than syncopate, and all she knew how to do was handle this strange thing that was happening to her one moment at a time. She pretended to squint out the blank front windshield before she said,

“A dumpster?”

The smile widened briefly. His eyes searched her face. “I scare you, don’t I?”

“I can’t help it. I wasn’t born with much of a backbone. Congenital defect. Go ahead, though—I’m braced. What have we got ahead of us?”

His eyes had become very bright. “A long night.” “And?” she said with acute apprehension.

“I’d like you to spend it with me,” he said gently.

With a low moan, she slid downward in her seat, pulling the brown tweed hat down to cover her entire face. She heard his laughter and the
changing purr of the engine as the car moved in reverse, dipping into the street. They traveled down Lake Drive. His hand came to her shoulder and rubbed lightly.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said in a kind tone, “there are other ways to do these things. For example, we could date, if you think that would be reassuring.”

Jennifer thought, I’m dreaming all of this. Her voice, muffled by the hat, said, “Date?”

“Date. That phenomenon of human group behavior where you devote a goodly amount of time to wondering what to wear and fixing your hair and I empty the McDonald’s cartons out of my car and we both make sure we’ve had showers and sprayed ourselves with all the appropriate chemicals that the advertising industry assures us we can’t do without. We dig up clean sheets and underwear and make sure they don’t have any suspicious stains, just in case that’s the—I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing.” Muffled voice. “I moaned.”

“You do that a lot.”

“Only around you.”

“It’s a promising sign,” he said. “Where was I?”

“Sheets and underwear.”

“Right. Then I pick you up, or we can meet some place if we’re trying to be correct and modern, and try to find some way to behave like ourselves and impress each other at the same time. You try not to disagree with my opinions too often so as not to risk bruising the legendary male ego. But you don’t want to agree too often either or you might bore me. You know, if you smother under that hat I might find it a little hard to explain.”

“Dump my body by the roadside and leave no fingerprints,” she advised him, pulling up her hat. The cold air against her hot skin stung. She took a sideways glance at his profile, stark and stunning in the sparse light from the dash. “Go on. While I’m trying to navigate the ticklish straits between being either a threat or a bore …”

“You’re also thinking, Lord, is this dude going to make a move on me tonight?—which is an important question because you don’t want to give in to me too soon because even in this day and age, the double standard is alive and well, though more subtle. On the other hand, if you wait too long, you run the risk that I’ll get tired of waiting and move along. In the meantime, I try to figure out when you’re ready on the basis of what are probably some very mixed signals.” Braking for a stop sign, he turned and gave her a smile that could have baked bread at twenty paces. “So, do you wanna date?”

Dangerous. Oh, this man was dangerous. He was smart as well as beautiful. What a combination. Someday they were probably going to make him president of something. Of all the men she could have so carelessly thrown down the gauntlet toward, she couldn’t have chosen worse. Rubbing the slow, erratic pulse in her throat, she tore her gaze from his and stared out the window at a landscape of dark trees, cold sidewalks, and shadowy snow-covered lawns lit in patches by lattice patterns from the television screens that flickered behind drawn curtains.

“You are aware,” she said shakily, “that there are a couple of people left who still consider dating a romantic institution?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m willing, if it would make you feel more secure.”

There was no way on God’s green earth that she would ever feel secure within ten miles of this man. She tried to inject some of the frost that twinkled on the side windows into her voice. “Just what do
you
believe in, Mr.—”

“Brooks. Philip. I believe in a lot of things. Do you mean concerning you?”

I can’t take it. I can’t take it. “Yes.”

“I believe in your ruffled hair on my pillow. I believe in your breath on my skin, and in holding your flushed body—”

“Uncle!” she gasped. “Uncle, uncle!
Please.”
She propped her elbow against the car door and dropped her reeling brow into her mittened palm, but her head came up sharply as she realized that the houses had been replaced by a deep silhouette of wind-gnawed trees and dark blue open fields. She turned toward him in alarm. “Where are you taking me?”

“I’m just driving. You haven’t told me where you live.”

“Oh.” She was beginning to feel like a total idiot. “The Victorian Cottage apartments.”

“Okay. We can turn ahead.”

For an uncertain moment, she studied the smooth flowing hair, the chaste purity of the bone structure, the brilliant eyes. The quivery feelings in her chest persisted. Then she turned forward, watching the road, haloed in the apricot headlight reflection.

“You know,” she said, “you could have found much better prey than me.”

“I seriously doubt it. You cringe. That’s rare.”

“I don’t cringe!” She felt a sudden, incredulous fury.

“I’m sorry, but you do.”

“Damn it, you’re sadistic!”

That made him smile. “No. Actually, I’d like to find a way to make you stop cringing.”

In an absent gesture, the hand he had loosely draped over the seat back dipped enough to touch her. His thumb slid to the side of her neck, brushing tinglingly into the lowest hairs. The tip of his middle finger discovered the hollow at the back of her neck and lightly stroked. Sparklike prickles raised all over her body and her movement away from his fingers was almost violent.

“I don’t want you to touch me. If you think one unfortunate remark of mine justifies your repeated assaults—”

Inspiration failed her as the wagon twisted sharply to the right, slicing through the open gateposts in a barbed-wire fence onto a field access road. The headlights picked out the dapple of withered corn shocks half-buried in drifted snow. Gears scraped, and the wagon rocked to a halt. He faced her, a hand on the seat back, the other on the steering wheel.

“I think it would be much healthier if we didn’t have to operate on this level of illusion.” Lazy passion glowed in his eyes. “Let’s straighten things out. Come here. And in a minute, we’ll decide together if it’s an assault.”

Anger flared inside her, then died into blankness like the sinking glitter of a drained firework. It would be much healthier … men had promised her a thing or two in her life. Philip Brooks
was the first who had ever promised to make her healthy.

Most puzzling to her, as she found herself drowning in the shadowed glimmer of his eyes, was how close she was to giving him that chance. Somewhere inside her, the mindless struggle grew still. Why, why, why?

In one short sweep of words he had laid bare her lame rebuffs, with their curious residual touches of adolescent hysteria. And it brought her an unlooked for, painful relief, like sharp fresh air washed into a stale passage. And now, making no move to touch her, he watched her face in perfect silence with a patience that seemed as limitless as it was without effort.

The hot-cold pump of embarrassment beat through her. Tears formed, and yet a feathery peace had settled within. When the indelicate tears had been subdued and she was sure that her voice was going to do what she wanted, she said, “I panic around men.”

“Tell me.” The voice, the patience were a soft invitation.

“I … I have to know. Did you come for me tonight for revenge?”

“For telling me you were allergic to penicillin? Not at all. I don’t have that kind of energy. Why do you panic around men?”

“I don’t know. I’m just not …” She grappled briefly for a word, “debonair.”

His smile, a startled slash of delight, consumed the word before he began to laugh, an alluring sound, winsome and melodic, kindling to her senses. “I’ll admit debonair isn’t the adjective that comes most readily to mind. But thank God. Being
that well-protected is like living on the cutting edge of a scythe. You can never let anyone too close. I’ve been like that too much of my life. Tell me, why isn’t Jennifer debonair?”

Purling breezes stirred the corn stalks. Crisp blackness held up the stars in broken chains. The night gave the quiet between them the intimacy of a confessional and she folded her hands on the dash and dunked her chin on them, gazing at the bright moon. Tell me, the voice had softly beckoned.

“It’s a little hard to say. I didn’t grow up with a father and my mother blames that for everything. But I’m not sure.… It might be because I never wanted to grow up, you know? When my friends started getting interested in makeup and clothes and … and other things, I just kept thinking: It’s happening too fast! It’s happening too fast! And puberty—” she gave a low disdainful whistle—“puberty was disgusting. I thought it was going to kill me. These crazy things happening to your body and who asked for any of it?” Dear God, I can’t believe I just said that. Am I drunk? Falling apart? In suspended animation? Is he a hypnotist?

“I understand that,” he said. “A happy childhood, the warm cocoon that splits open slowly and there you are in a world you never expected. Famine. Aging. Competition. Sex. And you think, what am I doing here? I thought this place was going to be safe. You go to sleep in Kansas and wake up in Oz. I don’t know if it’s any consolation, but as puberties go, yours looks like it was a smashing success.”

“Thank you.” She blushed slightly. “No one’s ever admired my puberty before.”

“They have. Trust me.” A pause. Then, gently, “Jennifer? Why don’t you like to be touched?”

She felt an echo of buried pain and the sudden stomach-tightening awareness of him as a man. He was sweetly, tinglingly close, a motion away, and she squeezed her eyelids tightly shut, feeling the heavy pinprick sensations that anticipated his touch. She lied. “There isn’t a reason. It just makes me uncomfortable.”

Through the back of her thighs, she felt his shifting weight on the car seat and then the light presence of his arm, slowly stroking on her back.

“Does this make you uncomfortable?” he asked, a soft inflection in his voice.

“Yes.” The word barely escaped her dry mouth.

She felt the warm sliding pressure of his flesh as his hand followed the outline of her chin and then raised it gently.

“And this?” he whispered against her mouth as his lips found hers with the lightness of drifting shadow.

“Yes,” she breathed as he laid her back against the seat and slid one hand underneath the high knit collar to lay a sensuous massage into the curve of her neck. His mouth caressed her cheeks and then returned to ride liquid fire into her lips.

“Do you know,” he whispered, “this sweet little mouth has been haunting me. I could feel it against my skin when I closed my eyes.…” Warm sharpening strokes parted her lips, and his tongue swept over the access to her mouth and then inward in a light tease over the uneven line of her teeth, igniting heat waves that spread like velvet shimmers inside her chest.

The fragrance of his hair, fresh and piney, was potent in her senses. His lips tasted of the night breeze and the vivid tang of winter. His hands, moving with heart-lifting candor, had begun to burn through her coat, and then they returned to cradle her head, dragging her into his kiss, his ardent breath coming with thrilling rapidity against the damp tissues of her mouth. His palms brushed the underside of her chin and gently, carefully, spread open her coat. Her temperature fluctuated, flooding her veins with shuddering heat.