Fool for Love: Fooling Around\Nobody's Fool\Fools Rush In (27 page)

Claire nodded, gave the policeman a grateful smile, and warned herself that when Mark placed his hand at the small of her back, it was only to guide her over the uneven surface of the road's shoulder. As soon as they were both seated in the back of the cruiser—Claire did her best to ignore the cage-like divider installed to keep criminals from attacking the officers in the front seat—Mark pulled his hand from her and left a chaste space between them.

She twisted to peek out the rear window as Officer Beldon drove away from the scene. The tow-truck operator was busy hooking Mark's car up to his
wrecker. “How bad is it?” she asked Mark. “How much damage?”

He shrugged. “I'm no expert. Windshields are an easy repair. The hood, I don't know.”

“You seem to be taking it well.”

“It's just a car,” he said.

“It's a very expensive new car.”

“You could have been hurt—or killed.” His voice broke slightly on the last word.

She was touched by his concern. “So could you.”

He shrugged again. “I never get hurt,” he said. “But you…Thank God you're all right.” His voice drifted off, and she felt a wave of emotion in its wake. Mark seemed more relieved than Claire herself that she hadn't been injured.

The inn Officer Beldon drove them to would not have received many stars from the Michelin Guide. A sprawling, dilapidated building surrounded by pine trees, it featured a well-lit front porch and lopsided shutters adorning the windows. A wooden plaque reading Lake Vue Inn hung from a post near the front steps. Claire wondered whether the misspelling was deliberate.

Officer Beldon dropped them off with a reminder that in the morning he'd transport them to the body shop where Mark's car had been towed, and he'd fax Mark a copy of his accident report once it had been processed. They watched him drive away, then climbed the porch steps and entered the building.

A sturdy, dark-haired woman no more than a few years older than Claire greeted them as they crossed the threshold. “Come on in, folks!” she bellowed, a welcome almost as enthusiastic as Mark's parents'.
“I'm Betty. This is such an honor, having a pair of celebrities like you staying here! I've set aside my best room for you.”

“Celebrities?” Claire muttered. Mark scowled.

“When Ray gave me your name,” Betty said, nodding to Mark, “I recognized it right away. The radio station, right? You're a famous bachelor, and
you
—” she turned to Claire “—are the woman who made him give up his wild bachelor life.”

“How do you know this?” Claire asked as Mark's frown deepened.

“It was in the
Boston Globe.
”

“You read the
Globe?
” Mark asked. “We're miles from Boston.”

“To tell you the truth,” Betty admitted, motioning for them to follow her up a crooked flight of stairs, “no, I don't read the
Globe.
But you're on the Web site.”

“The
Globe
Web site?”

“No, the
Boston's Best
bachelor Web site. There's a whole bunch of us who've been following the
Boston's Best
bachelors over the years. A girl's allowed to dream, right?” She marched down a narrow hall as she prattled on. “When word got out that the City Hall woman lassoed you, well, I've got to tell you, the chat room just about exploded. Some people thought it was a betrayal of everything
Boston's Best
stands for. Others said, ‘Hey, what are you gonna do? When Cupid's arrow pricks you, that's it. Today a bachelor, tomorrow a hubby.' Love can be that way. Me, I think the whole thing is awful romantic.” She swung open a door at the end of the hall and flicked on a light. “Here it is—best accommodations
in the place. I've stocked the bathroom with soap and shampoo, some toothbrushes and a little toothpaste sample. Ray explained the circumstances of your stay, and I figured you'd need some toiletries. Stranded so far from home, thanks to that turkey's stupid boat. I told my sister when she married him, I said, ‘Donna, he loves kayaks more than he'll ever love you.' But did she listen to me?”

Apparently not, although Claire kept her mouth shut.

“I've only got one key for the room—” She pressed it into Mark's hand “—but that shouldn't be a problem for you two lovebirds. There are a couple of other guests here—the season hasn't started yet, so it's pretty quiet. If you need anything, I'm downstairs. Just pick up the phone and dial zero. There's coffee and muffins in the morning.”

Before Mark could respond, their garrulous hostess vanished down the hall.

Claire surveyed the room. Like the stairs, the floor was slightly crooked. The rug looked as if a dance troop had been holding step-dance rehearsals on it, and the bedspread was so faded she couldn't guess its original color. The curtains were equally faded, the dresser's surface scratched, and the light emerging through the bathroom door was a sickly yellow. A single queen-size bed extended from one wall.

“Do you think this building is a landmark?” Mark asked with a sly smile.

“I think it deserves a demolition hearing,” she shot back.

He moved to stand beside her. His gaze followed hers to the bed. “If this is no good, Claire—”

“It's fine,” she said curtly. The bed was large, and she was exhausted after this long, eventful day. All she wanted to do was wash the glass out of her hair and go to sleep. She definitely didn't want to have to explain to their hostess why a room with only one bed in it wasn't acceptable to the celebrity couple whose alleged engagement had been dissected and debated on the Internet.

“You're sure?”

Claire crossed to the bathroom. The ledge of the sink held two cellophane-wrapped toothbrushes and a mini tube of toothpaste, and a bottle of shampoo and a bar of soap were perched on the rim of the tub. “All I need is shampoo and a pillow.”

“All right.” Mark gave her a dubious look, then crossed to a lumpy-looking easy chair and settled into it. “You can have the bathroom first. Be careful with your hair. You could cut yourself on any glass splinters that might still be caught in it.”

“Don't worry,” she said. “I won't cut myself.” She stepped into the bathroom and shut the door.

Was she crazy?
She gazed at her distorted reflection in the warped mirror above the sink. She looked weary and pale, except for the scuff mark on her chin, but she didn't look crazy. She and Mark were adults and they'd been through a traumatic experience. They'd wash up, get some rest, and go back to Boston tomorrow. She'd sleep in her clothes. Nothing was going to happen. She didn't
want
anything to happen. Mark didn't love her, he didn't want to make a commitment to her, he hardly knew her…

Nothing
was going to happen.

Turning from the mirror, she felt a shiver trip
down her spine. A memory of the instant the kayak had hit the car flashed through her, and she felt dizzy—not from pain but from shock. Mark had brought her to Williamstown to meet his parents—to convince his parents that he and she weren't lovers. And somewhere along the way, she'd realized she'd let herself fall in love with him, which made her the biggest fool the world had ever seen. And then his car had been hit by a kayak.

The whole trip seemed surreal.

It still seemed surreal after she'd showered, after she'd dressed again in the clothes she'd worn all day, brushed her teeth and wrestled the pocket comb she had in her purse through her wet, tangled locks. Surreal and exhausting. She was too drained to think about love or Mark or what might have been if he wasn't a famous Boston bachelor. She needed to get some sleep. And she needed to return to the life she'd had before April Fool's Day.

A
S SOON
as he heard the shower spurt and hiss behind the closed bathroom door, Mark grabbed the room key and left. His brain was jangling, overcrowded, unable to sort itself out. He needed fresh air and solitude.

The inn sat on an unlit country road. He began a slow circuit around the rambling building. The night was crisp and cool and the ground was solid beneath his feet, loamy from the spring thaw. Just putting one foot in front of the other felt good.

He was a bachelor so famous that women across the state discussed his marital status on Web sites. He
liked
being a bachelor. He liked the freedom, the unabashed selfishness of it, the irresponsibility. The fast car.

Yet when that kayak had smashed into his roadster, all he'd been able to think about was Claire. Was she hurt? he'd wondered desperately. Why wasn't she opening her eyes? Had the glass shards from the windshield cut her? He hadn't even bothered to check whether he himself had been injured. His mind hadn't been cluttered then. It had contained only one thought, as clear as a laser piercing through all the crap that usually preoccupied him.
Claire.
If she'd been hurt…or killed…Just contemplating the
possibility caused his gut to knot and his vision to blur.

What a day. What an insane, overwhelming day. Why had he introduced her to his parents? Because his mom had wanted to meet her. Because she'd dragged him to
her
mother's. Because he owed his parents a visit, and it was a long drive, and the trip would be more pleasant with company. But if all he'd wanted was company, he could have invited Sherry to join him—well, maybe not Sherry, but he knew other women. Or he could have invited a male buddy. He had some close friends among the guys he played pick-up basketball with at the gym, and a couple of buddies from college and grad school who lived in the Boston area, and his neighbor Pete. His neighbor Lisa, too. She was sort-of-almost divorced, and she'd been sending him looks ever since the
Boston's Best
article had appeared.

But it hadn't occurred to him to make the trip to Williamstown with anyone but Claire. He'd wanted her with him. Only her.

It had been unsettling to have Claire with him in the company of his parents, who were arguably the most happily married people he knew…He came from a solid family, and he appreciated his good fortune in that. He understood what a loving marriage was all about, what a magnificent gift it was. He wanted a loving marriage himself—someday. Not now. Not yet. Not while he was one of the most desirable bachelors in Boston.

But…
Claire.
She meant more to him than anything he could think of, even his precious Mercedes.

After three orbits around the inn, he went back
inside, climbed the stairs and sauntered down the hall to the room. He unlocked the door, pushed it open and confronted yet another cause of his current agitation—the bed.

He could ask for a separate room. If Ray refused to pay for it, big deal. This place wasn't the Ritz; a second room couldn't possibly cost much, and even if it did, Mark could easily afford the expense. But then Betty the blabbermouth would go online and all her Internet friends would discuss the fact that Mark Lavin, one of
Boston's Best
's top five, had declined to share a room with his intended. Mark didn't want to give that chat-room hen party anything more to cluck about.

He supposed he could sleep on the floor. Or he and Claire could share the bed. He could sleep with his back to her. He'd already kissed her once, and he'd seen the glow in her eyes when that kiss had ended, a glow that had asked far more of him than he was ready to give.

So he wouldn't kiss her again, because he wasn't ready to give more. He could spend a night in bed with her and not kiss her, because the last thing he wanted was for her to get hurt. She'd avoided injury in one collision tonight. He'd make sure she avoided injury in a second collision in this bed.

The room was quiet, no shower sounds filtering through the closed bathroom door. He couldn't wait to take a shower himself. He felt achy, not only from the accident but from hours of driving. He wanted to scrub off the fatigue that clung to him like a layer of grime, and then get some rest. He wanted to sleep without dreaming.

The bathroom door opened and Claire emerged, clothed except for her bare feet, a towel draped over her shoulders to keep her hair from soaking her blouse. She couldn't spend the night in that fancy blouse.

He pulled off his sweater. “Why don't you sleep in this?” he suggested.

She stared first at the sweater he extended to her and then at him. He had on a dark blue T-shirt and his jeans; it wasn't as if he'd stripped himself stark naked. But her eyes widened and she pressed her lips tight as if to hold back whatever she might have wanted to say.

“It'll be a lot more comfortable than sleeping in what you've got on now,” he pointed out. “And if it gets wet from your hair, who cares? It's just an old sweater.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I'm sure.” She still hadn't taken the sweater, so he tossed it onto the bed and hoped the rest of the night wouldn't be as awkward as that particular moment. “I'm going to wash up,” he said, moving past her and entering the steamy bathroom.

Standing under the shower's hot spray helped. If he thought about Claire putting on his sweater and crawling under the covers on the other side of the door, he'd have probably needed an ice-cold shower, so he distracted himself by thinking about the logistics of getting his car back to Boston tomorrow. He hoped that the tow truck transporting the car would have enough room in the cab for both him and Claire. Once the driver delivered them and the car to an auto body shop that specialized in Mercedes-Benzes,
Mark could call a cab. And he'd save the receipt for the cab fare. Ray was going to reimburse Mark for every damned penny this disaster was costing him.

He shut off the water, stepped out of the tub, and ran a bath towel over his body. He scrubbed his scalp with the towel, dug a comb from the hip pocket of his jeans and neatened his hair as best he could. His pockets contained a lot of necessities, but a razor wasn't among them. His cheeks, jaw and upper lip were dark with a stubble. Not much he could do about that.

The bedroom felt chilly after the humid warmth of the bathroom. Claire was already in bed, lying on her side near the edge, one arm resting atop the blanket. She'd cuffed the sleeve of his sweater to free her hand. He wondered how far down her legs the sweater fell, wondered whether she'd kept her underwear on underneath it—then shut down that thought before it could go anywhere.

The lamp on her side of the bed was turned off, but she'd thoughtfully left the other bedside lamp on for him. He lowered himself to the mattress, removed his jeans and left them on the floor beside the bed. Then he slid under the blanket and turned off the lamp, throwing the room into darkness. The sheets were cool and smooth and the room smelled of the shampoo they'd both used.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He'd already asked her if she was okay countless times, but he couldn't keep from asking one more time.

“I'm fine, Mark.” Her voice sounded distant, probably because she was facing away from him.

He told himself to shut up and close his eyes, but
his body disobeyed. His eyes remained open, adjusting to the gloom until he could see Claire's outline, the rise of her shoulder, the spill of her hair across the pillow. His mouth opened, too. “I know this is…well…not what you were hoping for.”

“Mark—”

“I feel lousy, dragging you out to Williamstown for the day, and then this mess.”

“It's all right, Mark. Things happen.”

“Yeah.”

She was so close, yet she could have been miles away. The blanket sagged between their bodies, forming a woolen barrier, and beyond the blanket was her back.
Things happen,
he thought—maybe because they were supposed to happen. Maybe because of fate. Maybe because if they didn't happen, the people they might have happened to would miss a vital lesson.

“I love your hair,” he said, reaching across those miles, across the barrier of the blanket, but unable to breach the greater barrier of her unwillingness to face him. Lying with her back to him meant presenting him with her hair, thick with rippling curls, cool and heavy and damp. He twirled his fingers through it and thought that if Claire were really his fiancée, he could touch her hair like this all the time, gather it, let it flow like rippling silk across his palms.

She turned, and her hair slipped out of his grasp. “Mark.” Her voice was quiet and steady. Just like her.

He should apologize, but he wouldn't. The only thing he felt sorry about was that he was no longer touching her. He was a selfish son of a bitch, touch
ing her because he wanted to, because he
had
to, and if he had a shred of decency in him he'd get out of bed and sleep on the floor. He'd leave her alone. She was too good a woman, and he wasn't a good enough man. Not yet.

“You're wrong,” she murmured.

“About your hair?”

“About what I might or might not be hoping for.”

Too cryptic. He didn't know what she was getting at. Once again, he wished he had mind-reading gifts. “What are you hoping for?” he asked.

She turned from him. “Things I can't have.”

Her voice was almost too soft to hear—except that she'd said exactly what he was feeling. He was hoping for things he couldn't have: her. Tonight.

What did she want that she couldn't have? Something he could give her? Something he could do? After seeing her strapped into her car seat, helpless and unmoving, with broken glass strewn over her and that welt on her chin, he would have given anything, done anything for her, just to save her. Just to make her all right. Just to see her open her eyes and smile.

He still felt that way, that he would do anything she wanted. Give her anything she hoped for.

He slid his hand under her chin, careful to avoid the bruise, and steered her face back to him. Their gazes met, and in her eyes he saw what she hoped for, his own hopes reflected.
I'll do anything,
he thought, then pulled her into his arms and covered her mouth with his.

 

S
HE'D BEEN HOPING
for
this.
Actually, she'd been hoping for much more, but she was a realist. She
knew that this was the closest she would ever get to Mark, while they were trapped in some limbo unconnected to the world of their everyday lives. In the morning they would accompany his damaged car back to Boston and he would resume his bachelor ways, and the balloon that lingered near the ceiling of her office would ultimately swoon to the floor.

She hoped—stupidly, futilely—that Mark could renounce his top-bachelor title for her. But no matter how sweetly he'd behaved toward her today, no matter how solicitous, no matter how loving a son he was, how playful a dog-lover, how charming a companion, she knew her hope would never be fulfilled. That didn't mean she couldn't have one night, just one night when they could belong to each other.

From the moment she'd pulled his warm, soft sweater over her head, she'd been at war with herself—wanting him and knowing he could break her heart simply by doing what she hoped he would do. If he hadn't made a move, she would have let that hope die.

But he'd kissed her. And she was kissing him back, promising herself that whatever happened tonight would be worth the heartbreak tomorrow.

His mouth moved on hers, hot and hungry. The kiss he'd given her outside her building a week ago might have been a mere handshake compared to this. It was possessive, demanding, consuming. His tongue took everything she had to give, and then took more, filling her, claiming her. His unshaven chin was scratchy, making her lips tingle. His hands cupped the sides of her face, his fingers weaving into her hair. She'd wished she had a hairdryer with her,
because her hair never looked good if she didn't brush and blow-dry it after a shampoo. But Mark loved her hair. He'd said he did.

And she loved his kiss. She loved the heat of his body spreading under the covers, the lean length of him, the firm contours of his shoulders beneath the thin cotton of his T-shirt. She loved the fresh-showered scent of him. She loved the disheveled waves of his hair and the thick shadows of his eyelashes, visible as her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. She loved the strength in his hands, in his tongue, the pressure of his chest bearing down on her, easing her onto her back.

He rose to his knees and the blanket skidded down the slope of his shoulders. For a long moment he gazed at her, as if he could read all the yearning in her face, in her heart. Then he reached for the ribbed edge of his sweater and dragged it up over her hips, over her waist. She'd left on her panties but removed her bra, and when he pulled the sweater high enough to expose her breasts, she heard him sigh.

That faint sound brought her mind into focus. “Mark?”

He bowed to kiss first one and then the other breast, and they both sighed this time. Her nipples grew tight, burning from the contact of his lips.

“Mark,” she said again, forcing out the words, “I don't…” She lost her voice as he yanked the sweater's sleeves down and off her arms, as he hauled the sweater over her head and tossed it over the side of the bed.

“God, you're beautiful,” he whispered, then bent to nuzzle her throat.

“I don't have anything.” She had to force out the words.

He lifted his head and smiled. “You have everything I could ever possibly want.”

She might take that either as an unbelievably romantic compliment or as a commentary on his rather limited wants. She chose the latter interpretation because it made her laugh, and laughing relaxed her. “I'm talking about protection, Mark.”

“Oh.” He touched his lips to the hollow between her collarbones, then the hollow between her breasts. “I have a condom.”