California Girl (18 page)

He grabbed a condom from the stand. Responsibility was his
middle name.

Alys gaped at him in surprise when he stepped into the
shower with her. Short hair clung in dark curls to her cheeks and forehead, and
her huge eyes widened to silver pools of appreciation as her gaze dropped to
the present he brought her. He grew harder at her smile.

“I never thought—” she started to say.

“I noticed that about you. You don’t think often enough. I
like that.” He cut off any protest by covering her open mouth with his.

She braced herself, but as their tongues collided and
stroked and her hands circled his neck, he could feel her melting in his arms.
He’d always thought of himself as the epitome of modern civilized man, but the
Neanderthal lurking in his soul roared in triumph at her surrender. She was wet
and naked, and her full breasts crushed wonderfully against his chest.

Leaning his shoulders against the tiled wall, he lifted her,
and she wrapped her legs around his hips without hesitation, taking him in as
if they hadn’t parted at all last night. With a shudder of pleasure, Elliot
rocked in place until she cried out in release. Only then did he give in to the
urgency of his need, taking her with all the force pent up inside him.

She bit his shoulder to muffle her cries and climaxed again.
This time, her cries and pleasure took him to the brink and over.

The hot shower plastered his hair in his eyes and ran down
his face like tears of joy. Gasping, he snuggled Alys close, letting her pull
away enough to find her feet but keeping his hold on her buttocks. They fit his
palms as if made for him.

Always sensitive to the beat of his heart, he knew it
pounded against his chest, but no more so than if he’d been running. This was
far better than a good run. He wanted to explode with the joy of holding Alys.
He’d had no idea how good this simple human contact could feel.

“We can’t do this again,” she said breathlessly, startling
him.

Prying open one eye beneath the pounding water, Elliot
looked quizzically at the dark wet head resting against his shoulder. “If we
didn’t kill ourselves this time, I’m sure we’ll survive another.”

She pulled from his arms, turned off the shower, and climbed
out, reaching for a towel. “Nope. Sex is way too addictive.”

He
ought to be consoled that she liked their lovemaking so much that she considered
him addictive, but rationalizing had no effect on irrational anger. “So is
food
. That doesn’t stop you from eating it.”

Rather than turn the shower on again, Elliot stepped from
the tub to fight this out. At the moment, he felt as if she’d stuck her fingers
into his chest and ripped his heart out.

“I don’t get personal with food. If I did, I’d have to give
up eating.” She wrapped a robe around her, completely engulfing the view he’d been
appreciating. “We’re only a few days from Albuquerque. Neither of us is in
search of a relationship. Why fool ourselves into pretending we have one?”

“Because the sex is good?” he growled, although he took her
point. He might be interested in a relationship, but he couldn’t be cruel
enough to coax her into one.

Despite his intent to consider her a flake, he liked Alys. She
had good reason to be skittish about permanent attachments. She didn’t deserve
the pain of a family genetically programmed to die young. “What if I treat you
rotten all day, and we just have mind-blowing sex at night?”

The musical chimes of her laughter didn’t salve his
frustration. He’d waited all his damned life for a woman as enchanting as this
one, and when he finally found her, she wasn’t meant to be his.

He’d better stop thinking like that damned quick, but he was
having a hard time thinking of deadlines and radio shows when faced with a
handful of radiant woman. Not just any woman, but one who stimulated him on
levels he could scarcely comprehend. Without even trying, she challenged him.
Most people simply capitulated to his determination, or got out of his way
before he noticed their existence.

There wasn’t any way he wouldn’t notice Alys. Or that she’d
let him ignore her.

“I’d rather you treated me nicely all day and ignored me at
night, thank you.” She slipped from the bathroom.

Proving
his theories about her independence and leaving him alone to glare at the foggy
mirror.
You’re a dead man
, he told the ghostly image in
the mirror.

He probably ought to be checking himself into the hospital
right now. Indigestion didn’t last this long or hurt this much. He rubbed the
place above his rib cage where the ache had taken root.

One of the many reasons he’d never practiced medicine was because
he empathized too strongly with his patients’ pain. He’d hoped his research
could produce the miracles his lack of practice wouldn’t.

It hadn’t. With careful monitoring, he might live longer
than his father, but nothing would ever counteract genetics. And if he didn’t
find Mame soon, sheer anxiety would kill him.

Grimly, he returned to the main room to find Alys feeding
the cat from her hand. She wore her new boots with a pair of snug blue jeans
and a black halter-neck ribbed shirt with no cloth to cover her white, nicely
rounded, shoulders. He had to fight the memory of how she’d earned that love
bite on her right shoulder.

“Do you think we can put Purple in the saddlebags when we go
riding?”

She’d erased the night as if it had never happened. Narrowing
his eyes, Elliot threw his robe over the bed and stark naked, reached for his
suitcase. He’d be damned if he would behave as if they’d never shared a bed.

Admiring the muscular expanse of shoulders and tight butt of
the angry man rooting through his suitcase, Alys sighed in regret. Elliot Roth
might dress like Mr. Conservative, but underneath that polish he hid raw
male—the kind one admired in the movies and never met in real life. Or at
least, she hadn’t, though admittedly her life was pretty limited.

Maybe she’d been too hasty in writing him off. She just knew
she’d woke up this morning feeling better than she had in her entire life, and
she’d panicked. She wasn’t supposed to feel this way again.

“I moved straight from my parents house into marriage,” she
tried explaining while he hunted through his clothes, taunting her with his
nakedness. “I don’t know how to live on my own.”

“I’ve got a surprise for you. It isn’t all that great.” He
pulled on knit boxers that clung like a second skin, discarded the wrinkled
white dress shirt he’d worn the first day, and donned the cowboy shirt from
yesterday. He hadn’t packed for a lengthy trip.

“But most people use the single life to figure out what they
want to be,” she argued. “I never did. I wanted to be Fred’s wife, and that’s
all I was. I got my Realtor’s license because he suggested I’d be good at it.”

He jerked on yesterday’s blue jeans. “I’m sure you’ll be
good at anything you decide to do. What’s first on today’s itinerary?”

Okay, he wasn’t buying her explanation. Neither was she, not
when faced with what she was throwing away. Of course, she couldn’t throw away
something she didn’t have in the first place. Her survival instincts were still
good, even if her reasoning wasn’t.

“The Route 66 Museum in Clinton, Oklahoma. We could just
check the guest book to see if Mame stopped in.”

“Fine, let’s go.” He pulled a belt through his belt loops,
slammed shut the suitcase, and zipped it.

She could cave into his anger or ignore it. Passive
resistance was her specialty. She rubbed her nose against Purple’s. “It’s you
and me, babe, and the sooner I find you a home, the better off we’ll both be.”

Never let it be said that she was wishy-washy. She’d plotted
her course, and she meant to stick with it.

“We need to speed up this search.” Elliot grabbed her heavy
bag while Alys slipped the kitten into its travel cage. “I have a deadline to
meet, and a radio show on Sunday.”

Alys bit her lip against disappointment. “I can’t imagine
how you’ll speed up Mame, but you’re welcome to try.”

As they’d loaded up the car, she regretted caving in to his
demands so easily. This was her one chance to see a small piece of the world
before she settled in to waiting tables or whatever she’d have to do to
survive. Just because Elliot had a life didn’t mean he had to interfere with
hers. Or Mame’s. She had a suspicion Elliot had been in the driver’s seat too
long. He needed to learn how to go along for the ride.

While he arranged suitcases in the trunk, she strapped the
kitten’s cage into the back seat, secured her orchid, and stole the Caddy’s
keys from the trunk lock where he’d left them.

He shot her a black look when she slid into the driver’s
seat. “I’m paying for this trip. I ought to have some say in where we go,” he
said.

“Fine. Mackie D’s or Braun’s?” She revved up the engine.
“Most of today’s journey is on I-40, and you’ll be lucky to get plastic food.
If you want to munch acorns and raisins for breakfast, we can find a grocery
store, and you can snack in the aisles.”

“Whatever,” he answered in resignation.

October in Oklahoma offered weather as changeable as her
wardrobe, Alys decided, watching black clouds scuttle over the once blue sky.
“Cold front moving in,” she said in disappointment, bumping the car into a
Braun’s lot and parking. “No horseback riding today.”

He climbed out and headed for the diner-like ice-cream
specialty store that populated this area more frequently than McDonalds. “Maybe
some other time.”

There might not be another time. She’d never rode on a
horse, and she’d been anticipating it with glee for months. “The man hasn’t
learned to enjoy what he’s been given,” she told Purple. At least the kitten
would be comfortable in the car in the cooler weather. She wouldn’t have to
give her up yet. She let the cat free to explore the car and filled her bowl
with food.

Elliot was already standing in line and looking at the menu
before she caught up with him. So much for the gentlemanly treatment he’d been
practicing. The real Elliot Roth was wearing through.

He finished his meal first and walked outside to make his
daily call to the police from his cell phone while she dallied, debating
whether she ought to go back for some of the restaurant’s famous ice cream.

Deciding against it, she hung on to the keys. Elliot’s grim
frown said there had been no sign of Mame, so she didn’t bother asking.

No sunlit cornfields today. In a fog of rain and clouds,
they crept through traffic along the remainder of four-lane Route 66. It
narrowed to two lanes and the traffic cleared outside Yukon, but eventually the
old road disappeared, and they returned to the interstate. Mile after mile of
desolate flat land stretched before them, unbroken by even a single golden
arch.

The odd-sized spare caused the Caddy to tilt, but it was
manageable. Puddles of water thrown up by semi tires splashed the cracked
driver’s window and seeped through to roll down the door, forming a damp spot
on the carpet.

They stopped at the Route 66 museum in the small town of
Clinton, but it wasn’t open yet. Alys advocated waiting to see if Mame showed
up. Tapping away at his laptop, Elliot insisted on heading for the next stop on
the itinerary.

Determined not to let Elliot’s sour mood ruin the day, Alys
handed him the packet of Tums, located a country station on the radio, and sang
along with a new arrangement of “Ring of Fire” that had Elliot finishing off
the Tums.

She drove through rain until Amarillo, stopping only to take
a picture of the towering WELCOME TO
TEXAS sign before dashing back into the warmth of the car. She was
certain Oklahoma was a very nice state, but all she saw of the western half was
windshield wipers and taillights. Her excitement at seeing new places had paled
slightly since leaving Springfield.

Elliot glanced up from his work at her exclamation over the
tilted water tower in Britten, but even she didn’t have the heart to make him
get out and take a picture in the downpour.

The clouds relented before they reached Amarillo. Alys
laughed at her first sight of tumbleweed and stopped the car for a picture of a
windmill. The rays of sun beaming from beneath the heavy clouds threw an orange
light over the gullies and hills, and with a sigh of bliss, she figured out the
wide-angle mode on the camera and snapped more pictures. This was what she’d
come to see.

Entering Amarillo, she blithely decided to bypass their
motel on the right to take the Highway 335 loop Mame had indicated as a
shortcut to the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum down in Canyon. She thought
they could find lunch easier outside the heavy traffic of the city, but
realized her error as Amarillo disappeared behind them, and they passed miles
of open field without sight of a single fast-food restaurant.

Elliot snapped off the radio and glanced around. “I thought
Amarillo was our next stop.”

“For tonight. But we’re supposed to see the museum and the
canyon this afternoon. Or maybe one today and the other tomorrow. Mame’s
itinerary is pretty loose.”

“I think we ought to find the hotel and wait for her there.”

“Like, that would have worked well yesterday,” she scoffed.
“Mame isn’t predictable. She could be riding down the canyon right now.”

Stopping in a traffic backup, she glanced at Elliot to see
how he was taking that news. He didn’t look happy. In fact, he didn’t look well
at all. “If you want to go back to the hotel first, we can.” She didn’t want to
be totally selfish if he wasn’t feeling well.

All
right, maybe she
wanted
to be selfish, but she
couldn’t be. Scratch up one more piece of knowledge about herself—she couldn’t
ignore others. Probably went hand in hand with her need to be with people.
Maybe she could be a sales clerk. They talked to people all day.