Beautiful Stranger (11 page)

She laughed. “No, thank you. I'm quite chatty enough already, don't you think?”

That was one word for it, but he thought a better one was
charismatic.
The waiter kept finding excuses to stop by the table and flirt in a demure and admiring way. A man in a booth across the room hadn't taken his eyes off her for more than three seconds the entire time they sat here. When she laughed, there was such exuberance in it that even women looked up and smiled, too.

He lifted a brow. “Can't blame a guy for trying.”

A woman abruptly showed up at the edge of the table. “Marissa? Oh, my God! It
is
you!”

Robert repressed a scowl. The woman was a country club gal—that ever-so-perfectly-frosted hair, gelled into perfect messiness; even a sweater tied around her neck. But Marissa shot him a mischievous little glance and he couldn't rob her of a moment. “Julie! It's been ages. How are you?”

“I'm fine.” She put a hand on her hip. “You know I kept thinking you looked familiar, but I didn't figure it out until a minute ago. How much weight have you lost? A hundred pounds?”

The grin slipped a little. “Close,” she said.

“I can't believe it.” She smiled again at Robert, and he caught a strange little tail of something in it. “At least your choice of company has improved.”

“Robert Martinez, this is Julie Allen,” Marissa said.

“Pleased to meet you.” Brightly the woman turned back. “Well, you should stop by. I'm off to Switzerland at the end of May, but come by and we'll have a drink.”

“I'll look forward to it,” Marissa said.

“You're welcome to come along,” Julie said with bright falsity to Robert.

He only nodded, aware of an odd shutting down in
Marissa, a dimming of the light that had been radiating from her only a moment before.

“Nice to see you,” Julie said, waving her fingers. Robert watched her return to her table and bend over urgently to her companion, a hale fellow in a ski sweater, then looked back at Marissa. Her smile was gone, and the light, and everything else he'd spent the whole evening reveling in.

“Why do you let her do that?”

“I don't know what you mean,” Marissa said. She ran a finger along the line of her cast.

“Steal away all that—” he sought a word that captured it “—joy. That's why she did it, you know. Couldn't stand to have you over here enjoying yourself when she's clearly miserable.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “You sound just like my mother. ‘Oh, honey, they're just jealous.”'

He grabbed her hand before she retreated entirely, grabbed it and pulled it over to him, raising the palm to his mouth. “I don't know about the others, but, babe, she was jealous.” The feeling of her soft, clean palm against his mouth was so rich, so right, he kissed it again.

“You're awfully good for my ego.” She sighed, and he saw a little of the cheer come back.

“You're pretty good for mine.” He let her go. “Let's get out of here.”

She smiled. “Great idea.”

He helped her with her sweater and took her hand, inclining his head at the blonde at the booth. Outside, in the brisk night, he halted in front of the window. “Let's give her something to talk about, huh?” he said, catching Marissa close.

“What do you—”

He kissed her. Slid his hand around the back of her neck, his other against her face, and bent to capture her mouth. He told himself to make it look good, to make it hot and tender at once, because that woman in there had never had tender.

But he didn't have to pretend. This wasn't like the last time, when the touch of their lips had caused an explosion. This was sweet. The taste of salt and chili and tequila on her lips, the softness of her breath sighing out of her mouth. Gently he tasted that full mouth, easily their tongues tangled, exploring, wondering.

He'd intended just to make it look good. But he found himself lingering, shifting a little to draw her into a loose embrace, close enough that her breasts pushed a little into his chest, that she had to put her arms around his waist, that he could touch her neck beneath her hair. All the while kissing her slowly, so slowly, so deeply. A kind of brilliance seemed to seep through him, like a submarine's spotlights cutting the gloom in the depths of the ocean in Crystal's movie.

When the first jagged threads of red spiked through him—sexual hunger—he lifted his head a little, touching his thumb to her jaw. Her eyes opened slowly, and she only gazed up at him, her expression serious. “Was that for her?”

“No,” he said quietly. “I don't think it was.”

“Neither do I.” She lifted a hand and touched his hair, just let a swath of it pour over the outside of her hand. “Did you wear your hair down on purpose to tempt me?”

He grinned. “Guilty.”

“It's working.”

But sex tonight, right now, was too much. Dangerous
for reasons he didn't care to examine too closely. “I'll wear it down again.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.” He pulled away, took her hand and went back to his truck. They were quiet, not in awkwardness, but a strange, deep kind of calmness as he drove back to her place. A deep, soft Van Morrison tune was on the radio, and when he pulled up, Marissa held up her hand. “Do you mind if I listen to the rest of this? It's not much longer.”

“Not at all.” So they sat there, in the cozy dark, listening to Van sing a soft, bluesy love song.

“My sister has met him,” Marissa said. “He's friends with some musician who did the score for her last movie, and she sat with him at a cast party.”

“Is your sister an actress?”

“Writer,” she said. “I think Crystal will like meeting her.”

“Do you think Crystal could write?”

“I don't know. I haven't seen anything she's actually written.” A scowl crossed her face. “I didn't tell Crystal, but I will tell you. You need to be careful with that English teacher. She's old school and I think Crystal has had a rough time with her.”

He nodded, trying not to bend close and put his mouth against Marissa's neck, right at the spot above her collar where moonlight shone down on it. Some of the same light must have fallen on his wrist, because she raised a finger and traced a line around it. “You have interesting tattoos,” she said.

If only she knew. “A lot of them, anyway.” He lifted a shoulder.

“Really? More?”

“Yeah,” he said gruffly. A lot more, but he didn't
say that. Didn't like to think about it, think about the fact that if he reached across the cab now and put his hands on her the way he wanted to do, he would almost certainly have to reveal them. And maybe that was more than he wanted this particular woman to see about him just now.

“Robert,” she said quietly, her hand on his. “I'd like to just kiss you good-night.”

It was said almost wistfully, and any resistance he'd been mustering abruptly collapsed. He turned and bent his head, keeping his hands firmly on the wheel. At least for a minute. It was like giving up drink, he thought a little wildly, feeling himself fall. One taste was too much, and a thousand would never be enough. The jagged red spike shot through him—sex and something more than that, something that ached to feel her soft body against his. She slid free of the seat belt and put her hands in his hair, stroking her fingers through it, and made a soft little sound of pleasure.

And suddenly it didn't seem all that important to keep his hands on the wheel. So much better to put them against her shoulders, narrow against the heart of his palms. So much better to let one of his hands slide downward, slowly enough that she could stop him, and cup one heavy, full breast, the nipple rigid against the last joint of his middle finger. A nipple that begged to be stroked, stroked the way he stroked her tongue with his own, the way his organ longed to be stroked by the hand combing through his hair.

He rubbed his index finger over that rigid flesh, feeling his sex grow more rigid still, filled with blood rushing to his aid, and her kiss suddenly grew more urgent, her teeth catching lightly at his lower lip before she opened, taking his tongue deeper into her mouth.

He heard a rattling groan and realized he'd made the noise himself, made it as he urgently pulled up her shirt, his palm stinging with pleasure as he skimmed it over incredibly soft skin, upward to that heavy breast clasped in some silky something, the nipple easily freed with a small tug on the skimpy cup. He rubbed the edges, thinking of that very dark areola and the contrast with her very white skin, and his organ started to pulse more urgently, the blood thumping with his heartbeat as he touched just the top with one finger, just one—

A knock sounded on the cab, and they broke apart hastily. Marissa jumped so violently she smacked Robert in the nose with her cast, sending scalding pain across the bridge and into his teeth. He yelped, but Marissa was urgently pulling away, straightening her clothes. She rolled down the window. “Mr. Peterson? Is something wrong?”

An older man stood there, scowling. “Your lights are shining right in my window. A person needs sleep, ya know.” He stalked away.

“Sorry!” Marissa called. She looked at Robert. “Are you okay? That had to hurt.”

“I'll be all right,” he said. But it hurt like the devil. Black eyes—hell, he hoped not. “But you'd better get that hot little body inside before we end up having sex in the truck.”

“Let's just go have sex inside.”

He heard a noise, the sound of his will to resist crumbling. He looked at her for a long moment, trying to summon just one of the many reasons he had come up with not to do this. But she reached out and slid a hand up his leg. “Just for us,” she said. “Just for tonight. No one has to know.”

A dozen images whirled in his head, all splashed with
vivid color—her glass-blue eyes, the white of her teeth when she laughed, the darkness of her hair, falling in that elegant swathe to her shoulders, the green of the margarita tonight—and the fragments coalesced somehow, rearranged themselves, morphed into that Tiffany screen in her house.

Too much. Too rich. Too dangerous. Gently he kissed her and moved her hand from his raging organ. “Not tonight, princess.”

She didn't seem to mind. A twinkle lit her eye and she tossed her head. “Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me.” Laughing easily, she opened the door and jumped out, a jaunty little spring in her walk as she went up the sidewalk. From the porch, she turned around and gave him a little wave.

Damn.

L
ouise waited through the first whispers of twilight settling on the mountains, through the first solid nightfall, till the silence of the mountains spread like a warm fur blanket through the house and town, till most of the lights in the valley had winked out.

Only at midnight did she act. She came out of her bath wrapped in a thick chenille robe, noticing that the light was still on beneath the guest room door, just as she'd known it would be. Quietly she made big mugs of cocoa from scratch, sliced some nut bread and carried it all to the room, balancing it on one arm as she knocked gently.

A muffled “Come in” came through the door.

Crystal leaned against the headboard, her eyes red from crying and watching movies for hours and hours back to back. Her hair fell like wrinkled satin ribbons over her arms and shoulders. “Hi,” Louise said, closing
the door behind her. “I can't sleep, either. Want some cocoa?”

The girl wiped her nose with a tissue. “Okay. If I won't keep you up.”

“Heck, no.” She settled the tray on a table and gave Crystal the heavy mug. “Older I get, the more I seem to wander, like a ghost, all through the late hours.”

A wan smile.

“How 'bout you?” Louise asked. “What's keeping you up?”

Crystal shook her head. “Probably the medicine.” She rubbed a place between her eyebrows. “Every time I lie down, I think about—”

Louise sipped her chocolate, waiting. It took a long time, so long she thought maybe she needed to do some prompting, though her usual tack was just to let folk talk. Children, especially, got talked
to
a lot. Giving them room to talk themselves was often all they needed.

But finally Crystal said, “I want to keep my baby.”

“I can understand that.”

“My boyfriend was the only good thing in my life, ever, till I came here,” she said. “Ever, you know? If I give up the baby, it feels like I'm betraying him.”

“Mmm.” Louise sipped her chocolate. “Betraying him?”

“Yeah,” she said heavily. “He lost everything because of me.”

“Like what, sugar?”

But Crystal put down her cup and let her head fall on her knees, and began to weep in earnest. Deep, heartfelt, heartbreaking sobs. “I miss him so much!” she cried.

Louise knew that sound. She put her own cup down, climbed up on the bed and put her arms around the girl. “Go ahead and cry, sweetie.” She stroked her hair,
rocked her back and forth, and Crystal did cry. Not just the leaking tears she had been indulging so easily, but the kind of recognition weep that brought out the truth of a thing.

“He was so good to me,” she choked out. “And the gangs got him. I know they did. Nobody knew where he was the next day. Only that the 50s got him. When I went in the alley, I found all this blood. All over. On the walls and the pavement and even some on a trash can.” A rigidness in her body, a stiffening at the horror of the memory and a soft, mournful howl. “The police said nobody got killed, but I went to all the hospitals and he wasn't at none of them. I asked and asked.

“And then—” a falling cadence, resignation. “I went to his mom's house and it was empty.”

“Oh, darlin',” Louise said, “I'm so sorry.”

“I just wish I could find him,” she said.

Louise just rocked her. And in a little while, the sad little girl, the brokenhearted woman, the mother-to-be, fell into a hard, slack-mouthed sleep against Louise's grandmotherly bosom, like an exhausted five-year-old. And Louise didn't go anywhere. She held the child in her arms and thought.

And it was good, so good, when her own man came to the door with concern on his brow, his hair ruffled and standing up, to see if everything was okay. When he saw the way of it, his mustache twitched and he nodded, waving a hand.

 

Marissa was humming as she went inside, literally and not so literally. She put her purse and keys down, locked the door and heard herself singing a lighthearted piece of music that must have been playing at the restaurant. Feeling light as air, she floated upstairs to take off her
makeup, her mind flashing little pieces of the evening back to her.

The bathroom was one of her favorite rooms in the house. She'd knocked out one wall to include two dormer windows. An enormous claw-footed tub sat between the windows, and there were ferns hanging from hooks by each one. The walls and floor were finished oak—simple and elegant.

She shed her clothes in the same airy pleasure, pinning up her hair and riffling through the various bottles and boxes of bath scents she kept for one that suited her mood. Green Goddess—oh, yes. She started the water running and poured in a generous handful, inhaling the soft green scent happily.

Robert, Robert, Robert. His name sung over her nerves, down her spine and the backs of her thighs.

She turned and caught sight of herself in the long mirror over the sink.

And just that fast, her mood plummeted, so fast and so far that it felt as if she were falling off a cliff. Because the body she saw in the mirror was not one she wanted him to see. The arms were still too big. The breasts were not as high as she wished. But the worst was her belly—too soft, still too much
of
it.

She thought of him sitting across the table tonight in his white shirt, his body hard and lean and muscular. She could only imagine how perfect he looked without his clothes. How could she bear the mortification of having to be naked with him?

Idiotic thoughts. She closed her eyes. She'd been naked in the past with men who were in much better shape than she. But in those days, it had been a what-you-see-is-what-you-get proposition—her last boyfriend had definitely liked her extra weight. A lot of men did.

But now she looked a lot better with her clothes on than she did with them off. He might be expecting something completely different. He might not—

The doorbell rang.

Victoria! Marissa laughed. Grabbing her robe from the hook, she turned off the water and scrambled down the stairs. It was just like her sister to show up early as a surprise, and with a broad smile, she yanked open the door.

For a moment, she only stared. In all of her life, she had never been wrong on this. She knew when Victoria was on the phone. She could feel her when she was close by.

But it was not Victoria on her porch. It was Robert.

An almost visible aura of tense heat surrounded him, taut and orange, and just the sight of him made the little hairs on her body stand up, every single one, at solid attention. She had one second to remember a flash of his hand on her breast, his mouth on her neck, the thick heat of his sex below her hand.

Then he pulled open the screen, stepped in, turned, closed the door behind him and pushed her against it. “I could have been a murderer,” he said roughly, and then bent and kissed her.

And it was like the first time they kissed—a pure, wild, deep explosion of sexual connection. She opened to him completely, taking fistfuls of that hair into her hands and pulling it around her. His hands cupped her buttocks hard, hauling her close. Marissa arched into him in a blistering swell of lust, pressing her breasts against his chest, her belly against his rigid sex. There was nothing in her mind but a sense of utter starvation, of pointed, clear need.

Robert.

In her.

Now.

There was nothing elegant about it. “Condom?” she whispered against his mouth, reaching for his belt buckle.

“Front…left…pocket,” he said, pulling open the top of her robe. Air struck her breasts a millisecond before the heat of his hands covered them, and it was so intensely exactly what she wanted that she squeezed her eyes tight for a moment, then stuck her hand in his pocket, closed it on the slippery packets and pulled one out. Safe.

She went back to the belt and zipper, fumbling with it as she kissed him, sucked at his mouth. His hand slid between them and Marissa shifted a little to give him access, biting a little on his lip when his fingers slid home. She let go of a small, tight cry at the sensation of it, hurrying to free him, to touch him, the silky, rigid flesh of his sex leaping into her palm. For a blind space of moments, their hands and bodies collided, breath and skin brushing. Marissa struggled with the condom, tearing at the package with her teeth, and covered him.

With a groan, he suddenly lifted her, and Marissa felt a shock of pleasure at this evidence of his strength, the power of his body. She met his urgency with her own, bracing herself on his shoulders, wrapping her legs around his waist, a faint thought in her mind that she'd done it many times, many ways, but no man had been able to lift her like this against a wall before. But then he grasped her hips in those wide hands, and he plunged.

They both let go of a guttural, amazed cry at the power of it, and halted for one instant, looking in shock at each other, but it was too late to change anything now, and there was so much force of need in Marissa that she
wouldn't have let him go anyway. She kissed him, feeling a wild pulse of reaction to the thrust of his tongue and his organ, all together in a violence of need that thrilled and terrified and aroused her. She found herself coming apart too quickly, shattering in completion. A low, deep moan of pleasure escaped her, and she bent forward, biting at his long throat as the waves shook her, then him, his body going still and rigid as he pressed her hard against the door.

“Marissa,” he whispered, panting, and pressed his forehead against her neck.

“Don't think,” she murmured fiercely, her hands and arms trembling in reaction. “This is now, this is us, that's all.”

His body, too, was trembling, and she eased away, put her feet down. He was far more dressed than she, and she pulled her robe together a little, but he caught her hand, and pushed it away. “That night I was here before,” he said softly, his hand raising to clasp her breast in one palm, “you were wearing a little blue bra. I've been dying ever since to see—” he looked down “—this.” His thumb grazed her nipple, and then he bent and kissed it. Lightly.

His loose hair fell around his shoulders like a cape, so dark and silky and thick, and she put her palm flat on it, a shivery kind of wonder echoing through her. “Robert,” she whispered, just to say it aloud.

He straightened, looking down at her gravely, putting his hands on her face, then shook his head and pressed his brow against hers. “I keep wanting to say I'm sorry. I don't know what got into me. But that would sound like I want to leave, and I don't, unless you want me to.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Take me upstairs.”

And Marissa thought again of her body, revealing it to him. “Robert, I'm not…I…”

A quizzical expression. “What?”

“I don't look that great without my clothes on.”

His smile was so tender it pierced her. “Neither do I,” he said. “It's not about what anything looks like, is it?” He curled his hand around her neck, touched his lips to hers lightly. “It's about how it feels.”

“I have candles,” she offered.

“Candles are good.” He reached behind her, turned the dead bolt and tugged her hand. “Show me.”

 

He should have been less anxious after that wild scene at the door—what got into him?—but a tangled sense of nervous anticipation moved in him as they went up the stairs. This was insane. He should never have come back.

And every step convinced him that much more. The elegance of details in her house. The richly padded carpet under his feet, the delicate lace curtains, even the sight of her pink-and-white feet—all of it made him feel like an imposter, an interloper. The peasant with the princess.

But the other part of him—the part that had insisted he had to come back—wanted her too badly to even consider leaving. A pool of anticipation stirred in his belly as she led him into her bedroom and let his hand go. It was a big room, with five or six windows, and a four-poster bed, just as he'd imagined. She moved, picking up a book of matches to light candles on the mantle and windowsills and dresser. He waited, watching her self-conscious movements—the quick tightening tug she
gave the tie to her robe, the restless brush of her hands through her hair.

And he suddenly realized that everything about her would be revealed when she took off that robe. He knew a lot more about her than she knew about him.

He settled on a tiny, chintz-covered chair and bent to untie his boots. “My mother,” he said, “had me when she was fifteen. She was lost, even then.”

He let the left boot fall, started on the other. “She had drug problems, man problems, problems that got worse and worse and worse.” The right boot. “When I was fourteen, one of her boyfriends kicked my ass for talking back to her, and I'd just had enough. I ran away from home, lived in the streets for two years.”

She listened through all this, her hands tight on the ties of her robe. Standing, he unbuttoned the front of his shirt. “In those days,” he said gruffly, feeling the tension even in the confession, “we marked ourselves.” He took off his shirt and let it drop, watching her face carefully. “I marked myself.”

Whatever she was thinking didn't show, not right away. She moved closer, her face unreadable, and touched his wrist first, the bracelet of Celtic knots she touched before. Then her finger tips moved to his left biceps, where a gangland tattoo sprawled in ugly blue ink. “So many,” she said softly. She trailed her fingers over his arms, his chest, his belly, brushing each one, the violent marks and the sorrowful ones, the declarations and the wounds.

At last, she bent close, and pressed a kiss to his chest, to the stylized cross there. When she raised her eyes, there were tears in them, and he shook his head.

“It was a long time ago.” He reached for her. “Come lie down with me, Marissa.”

“Fair is fair,” she said, and stepped back, still so desperately reluctant that it broke his heart. She reached for the ties of her robe and, with a quick intake of breath, let it fall.