Windswept (34 page)

She paused, then thought of something else. “You haven’t signed anything, any papers for this con man, have you?”

“No, but . . .”

“Good. Then walk away from him, tell him not to call you. Get yourself a real job, make your own money, and you won’t have to ask Davis for any, if you really want to invest in these idiotic messes.”

“But I can’t do anything anybody would hire me for.” He looked downright woebegone.

“My God, you are so pathetic. I can’t take any more whining and self-pity, I won’t ask your brother for money for you, and I don’t have time for this. Will you please go?” She pointed toward the door.

“But, Barrett, I need your help.” He slumped in his chair.

“You just need my help to get out of here.” She grabbed him by the shirt collar, pulled him out of the chair, and hauled him down the hall toward the front door. They passed Davis, who had just come in through the kitchen.

“Barrett! Bill! What in the hell?”

“Stay out of this, Davis.” She reached the front door, flung it open, and pulled Bill to his car.

Just as they got there, the wind whooshed through the trees and a pelting rain followed, drenching both of them instantly. Between the volume of water and the sound of its passage, Barrett felt like she’d just stepped under a waterfall, but she ignored the elements because she’d had a brainstorm as she towed Bill down the foyer.

“Listen up, Bill.” She pulled his face down to her level and shouted to be heard over the rain. “I’m not going to tell Davis a thing about what you asked me to do. But I will if you don’t do something about yourself or if you ask him for money for this harebrained scheme. Damn it! Get yourself a life that means something.” She jerked on his collar for emphasis.

“Now here’s an idea. You have the looks, charm, and contacts of a born fund-raiser. Hook up with a good charity, like a homeless shelter, literacy, bone-marrow transplants, food banks, something very specific. Not a big umbrella organization, but one where you as an individual can make a difference. Volunteer to raise money, but not through those damned highfaluting parties. Go one on one with donors after you’ve done some time in the trenches with the real volunteers.”

She gave him a little shake. Even with the water dripping in her eyes, she could tell she had his attention. “You don’t need a salary, you’ve got your damn trust fund to live on. There are numerous people out there who would love to give you money for a good cause. Little old ladies would fall all over themselves. Fund raising is respectable, and you’d be doing some good in the world.

“And you’ll make so many more contacts, people will be begging to hire you once they see you’re serious about something and they recognize your abilities. Then sit down with Davis and talk about how to recognize these scam artists so they can’t bamboozle you again. I know he’ll help you if you just ask for advice instead of money. So will Martha.”

She gave him a shove toward his car. “Now, go home and dry off.” She spun on her heel and headed back to the house. She thought he had listened to her. What he did with the suggestion was up to him.

Davis had watched Barrett give his brother a piece of her mind, but the rain was coming down so hard he couldn’t hear what she said. “Barrett?” he said as she squished into the hall.

“Not now, Davis, I’m too angry to be coherent.” She took off her sneakers and ran up the stairs with one in each hand. She turned right at the top of the stairs and headed toward her bedroom.

Davis looked at Gonzales, and the houseman returned his raised eyebrows with a shrug of confusion. He heard Barrett stomping on the balcony above him. The woman was a tornado. First she grabs
her
brother and hauls him out, now
his
brother gets the same treatment. Where had he gotten the idea she was a “tame” anything? He shook his head and asked, “When will dinner be ready?”

“In an hour, sir.”

“Good.” Davis took the stairs two at a time. As he walked into her bedroom, he heard two bonks. Probably her shoes hitting the bathtub. He stopped in the bathroom door to watch the spectacle before him.

Standing with her back to him, Barrett was muttering to herself as she removed the wet clothing.

“Brothers!”
Schloop
went the Harvard T-shirt as it hit the tub.

“Strangle them all at birth!”
Schlurp
went her jeans.

“A case of arrested development!” Her socks made little wet
thuds
.

“My God, I’m wet clear through.” She struggled a moment with her bra clasp before it yielded and the bra silently joined the socks.

“And I’m freezing.” Her panties came off with no problem and made a tiny
plop
.

She grabbed one of the big fluffy towels and, bending over, buried her face and head in it to dry her dripping hair.

The sight of her bare bottom was too much for Davis. With the swiftness of a lightning bolt from the storm outside, raw possessiveness surged through him. He moved up behind her and pulled her back against his rapidly growing erection.

Barrett froze. She’d had no idea he was behind her until she felt his warm hands and then his body against her cool skin. “Davis?” she asked through the towel.

“It better be.”

She dragged the towel off, straightened, and stared into his eyes in the mirror above the sink. The heat in his reflected gaze warmed her to her core. Their bodies were a study in contrast: hers completely naked and his completely suited, hers pale pink, his dark blue. She watched his large hands travel up her ribcage and around to cup her breasts. The eroticism in the picture almost made her moan.

He bent his head, kissed her neck, then nibbled his way down her shoulder, his mustache clearing the way. Between kisses and fondles, he said, “I’ve just been watching one of the most provocative strips I’ve ever seen.”

He turned his attention to her other shoulder, then took the towel from her limp hands and threw it into the bathtub. When he cradled her breasts again, he smiled at her in the mirror. “You smell like rain,” he murmured.

Barrett sank into him and put her hands on top of his. She gasped when he skimmed her nipples with his thumbs and she felt an electric tingle all the way to her toes. Laying her head back against his shoulder, she watched his gaze travel down her body. The intensity in his eyes, in his touch, was almost too much to bear. Closing her eyes, she rubbed her bottom against his hard arousal.

“I’m in need of an appetizer before dinner,” he whispered in her ear. “How about you?”

She arched against his hands as he massaged her breasts. Her breathing and heartbeat increased as her own arousal prowled through her. She wasn’t cold any longer. “Yeesss,” she said on a long exhalation.

He skimmed a hand from her breast to her dark nest of curls and probed gently, provocatively. At the jolt of sensation his fingers caused, she gasped again and pushed into his hand. His hands moved to her hips and she was expecting him to turn her around. When he pulled her back a step and used his body to bend her at the hips, she opened her eyes and looked back at him in the mirror.

“Brace yourself on the counter,” he said.

Surprised, she did as he asked, her hands on the edge, her arms slightly bent. She’d never made love this way, and she found the idea both interesting and exciting. She watched him in the mirror take a condom out of his pocket, unbuckle his belt and drop his pants and boxers. He swiftly applied protection, nudged her legs farther apart, and slid between her legs.

She arched her back at the intimate contact, and he entered her in one long, deep thrust. Locking eyes with her in the reflection, he held her hips and began stroking. He moved slowly at first, taking his time, prolonging the experience. Although his face was set in sharp, hard lines, he seemed to enjoy the moment. She certainly did. Her body began to tense, and her interior muscles tightened, clasped him as he moved in and out.

Then he reached around her hip, touched a fingertip to the sensitive nub hidden in her curls, and thrust harder and faster.

“Davis!” she whispered and closed her eyes. An earthquake of a climax rippled through her, stealing what breath she had left, leaving her shaking from its power, her wobbly legs barely able to keep her upright.

Davis held her to him with one hand and watched her throw back her head in ecstasy. She was tight and hot, and it felt so damn good to be in her. He would have laughed with joy if he’d been able. She milked him so intensely he could only thrust once more before his own release hit him like a hurricane-force wind. He didn’t know how he kept them from falling, but he managed to brace himself with one hand on the counter and the other around her as she sagged, almost limp. He withdrew slowly, straightened, and brought her up also to rest against him as he hugged her.

She put her hands on his arms and slowly opened her eyes. Their gazes met in the mirror again. She smiled, a slow, sultry parting of the lips accompanied by a gleam in her eyes that Eve must have used on Adam to indicate her satisfaction with his love-making.

And he knew in that moment his decision of the previous night had been the right one: he would never, could never let her go. She was his.

She turned in his arms, rose on tiptoe, and molded her body to his, her arms around his neck. “Some appetizer,” she mumbled against his lips, punctuating her comment with kisses.

He let his hands rove over her body, settle on her buttocks, and knead lightly. He grinned with his own pure satisfaction. God, he couldn’t get enough of this woman. “We’ll take on the main course tonight.”

Somehow they managed to make it to dinner on time.

Halfway through the meal, Davis could stand it no longer. “Are you going to tell me what was going on with Bill?”

“No.” She took another bite of the spicy chicken.

One thing about this woman, she wasn’t wishy-washy. “Why not?”

“Because it was between Bill and me, and I told him I’d keep his confidence. If the time comes I can tell you, I will. What we said to each other has nothing to do with you and me or anything else we’re involved with. I have nothing more to say on the subject.” She looked absolutely determined.

He understood keeping one’s word. “I can live with that,” he said. But as he thought back over what he had seen, he wondered if she’d just performed another rescue.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Friday was another gloomy day with intermittent showers, and Barrett started the morning standing in the conference room surveying her progress on both the inventory and her own research.

She had originally planned today to outline an article on plantation life as seen through the correspondence between Mary Maude, her mother and her sister who had also married a planter. The women had established a system whereby the writer sent duplicate letters to the two others. Barrett had worked her way up to 1855, so she had more than twenty years of family guidance, instruction, and suggestion--and triumph and defeat when actions taken succeeded or not. The article could be an interesting glimpse, both of women’s lives and of family dynamics as the sisters matured.

Barrett looked first at the stacks of photocopies she had made of the correspondence, then she let her eyes roam over the boxes, and finally she shot a glance toward the door beyond which were the hall, her office, and . . .

Davis’s office. In which he sat, having decided to work from home rather than deal with Houston’s wet, clogged freeways.

Her hands in the back pockets of her jean shorts, she paced the room, up and down the narrow corridor between the stacks of boxes and the long table. If he weren’t here, she’d be able to work at her usual pace, concentrate on the minutia of the documents, have the article blocked out by noon.

As it was, all she seemed able to do was think about him and yesterday in the bathroom and then at night in bed. She hadn’t expected him to follow her, had been thinking only about getting out of her wet clothes. Then, there he stood, a pirate of the corporate variety. And she didn’t have a stitch on. And before she knew it, he was in her and she’d had the strongest orgasm in her life. And he’d never even undressed.

But when he’d hugged her to him afterward, and she’d felt how he was shaking, she’d never felt so wanted. He’d been in a playful mood that evening, too. Main course, indeed.

Now she was hungry for him all the time. She couldn’t get enough of him. What she really wanted to do now was walk into the back office, haul him out of his big executive chair, strip his clothes off, push him down on the desk, and . . .

“Stop it!” she muttered. “Be professional.”

But, oh, how nice it would be to have all that wonderful male flesh under her hands. And other places. She felt herself grow hot simply thinking about him.

She wouldn’t even have to worry about protection. When she’d asked him last night how he “just happened” to have a condom in his pocket when they were in the bathroom, he’d replied, “I started carrying them around last Sunday. One never knows when one is going to get lucky, does one?”

And he’d grinned under his mustache like a Johnny Reb who’d spotted a Yankee supply train full of gold.

And she’d grinned right back.

Barrett stopped pacing and leaned on the back of a chair. Her head was spinning--or was it her heart? She had been stupid to imagine, even for a second, she could maintain any kind of internal equilibrium where Davis was concerned. He was inside her now in every sense of the word. Especially inside her heart.

She might as well admit it. She was in love with him.

And she was right back in the position she’d been in before he’d declared his interest in her--attracted to him, wanting him. Only now it was worse. Now, despite her career ambitions, despite knowing she had no time in her life for anything except achieving tenure, she craved him. Not just for the summer either, but long term.

What did he want? He’d given her no indication he was thinking beyond the end of the summer.

What if he were? History was what she was meant to do. Her career, her advancement, fulfillment of her dreams lay in North Texas. She wasn’t about to give those up; she’d worked too long and hard for them. How would her failure look to her family? How disappointed in her would they be? How would she be able to live with herself if she didn’t pursue her profession with everything in her?