Hold on Tight (8 page)

The questions he’d had were lost in his amazement. His arms enclosed her in a hungry, breath-stealing embrace. He held her as if he were a desperate lover about to be separated from her forever, and he kissed her with a passion that sought to shove away the past and the future for a present that was sheer sensation.

“I want you,” he told her. “More than I’ve ever wanted anyone.”

Rucker drew her onto his lap and ran one exploring hand up the outside of her body from knee to breast. The slow, gripping journey of his fingers set off volcanoes of sensation under her skin, and when he cupped
her soft, full breast in his palm she nearly cried from the exquisite care and concern in his touch.

His mustache had a delicious, coarse texture that tantalized her as he trailed his mouth down the smooth skin of her neck. At the base of her throat he sucked gently at the skin over her pulse. The sensation was incredible, and Dinah sank her hands into his thick hair and let her head drape back.

“Tonight,” he murmured. “And after tonight.” He put his lips against the flushed skin beneath her ear. His thumb found the ridge of her nipple under the sweater and rubbed it rhythmically. “I’ll do anything for you, Dee. In bed, out of bed. Just give me a chance.”

She cried out in bittersweet protest and, putting both palms against his shoulders, pushed firmly. He leaned back, and she looked down at him with sorrowful eyes. “We don’t have enough in common,” she begged in a hoarse voice. “It’s all well and good to laugh about it, to tease each other, but you don’t want to get involved with a woman who doesn’t particularly like to cook, who doesn’t like the same music or hobbies you like, who has a full-time career and intends to keep it.”

“I want to be with you,” he emphasized. “And nothing else is important but that. ” He looked at her with a sudden frown, his worried eyes showing how wounded he felt. “Do you really think I’m some sort of stupid, backward cretin who needs a harem girl?”

“No,” she gasped, shocked. He was so hurt. Dinah shook her head fervently. “Oh, no, of course not. And I’m not some sort of elitist snob. But Rucker, there’s too much … we’re not compatible …”

“That’s an excuse, not a reason,” he said hoarsely. “You don’t want to compromise. You don’t want to take a chance. Dammit, this is a grand thing between us, a special thing, and I can’t believe you don’t want to admit it.”

“I do admit it. I don’t want to ruin it.”

His hands gripped her arms. “We’re not gonna ruin it.”

She took a ragged breath, inhaling determination
with it. “That’s right. Because we’re not going to be anything but friends.”

His hand slid slowly down the center of her sweater and paused over her left breast. Anger and sorrow were molded in his features. “Your heart’s beatin’,” he said, “but does it feel anything?”

She nodded and thought, It aches as if you were tearing it out. But she only told him, “I’m sorry.”

“I pushed too hard, is that it? Too hard, too fast.”

“No. I let you push. I didn’t tell you how I felt because I didn’t know how I felt. But I do now. I think you better leave.”

One of his hands stayed on her arm as she moved off his lap and stood up. Dinah squeezed his shoulder, then forced her hand away from him before she gave into the urge to place her fingertips on his face and caress away all the bewilderment and sorrow she’d put there. “I’ll get your jacket,” she told him. He nodded and let his hand trail away from her.

When he stood at the door, the jacket in his hand, he looked down at her with a pensive frown, as if he were certain that he could understand her if he only studied her long enough.

Dinah cleared her throat and hoped that he couldn’t tell how close she was to tears. “If you’d like to go back to Birmingham right away, I’ll make your excuses about the pep rally tomorrow,” she assured him.

“I don’t run from problems, Dee,” he said in a low, grim voice.

“So I’m a problem?” She smiled wistfully.

“No. A mystery. One I intend to unravel.”

She gazed up at him with worried, searching eyes. “Is that the writer or the man speaking?” she asked.

“Both.”

Dinah almost reached out to him then. Her hand rose but halted in midair. “There’s nothing to know,” she said.

Rucker’s look said he didn’t believe that in the least. He raised one hand to stroke her cheek. The sensual gesture was a warning that he knew at least one way to destroy her defenses if he had to.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night.” Her stomach in knots, Dinah followed him onto the porch and stood at its edge, watching as he walked to his car. He turned, held up one hand in a final good night, and got in the car. She waited motionless in the chilly night air, hugging herself as the Cadillac disappeared down the long driveway toward the paved road.

Dinah continued to stand in the dark, her throat closed with restrained sorrow, her mind blank. Suddenly she was aware of a soft clicking sound, the sound of small feet scraping across old wood. Frightened, she hurried inside and flicked a switch. Light poured onto the porch from an overhead fixture, and Dinah caught her breath.

“Possum,” she said tenderly, and knelt by the door as the rotund, ugly little creature waddled toward her. He stopped, sniffing the air suspiciously, and she knew that he was looking for Rucker, not her.

Dinah held out her hands to him, and eventually he came to her. Tears slid down her face as she picked him up. “You just couldn’t leave that rascal alone, could you?” she said raggedly. “I don’t know if I can either.”

“Pump it, Ms. Sheridan, pump it!”

“Go for the burn, the burn!”

Dinah exhaled a long, strenuous breath and curled the twenty-pound barbell up to her chest one last time. Then she grabbed it with both hands and lowered it gingerly back to its rack. She straightened the delicate mauve material of her chic, double-breasted suit dress and eyed the two students with a mildly baleful gaze. Eddie Burcher captained the wrestling team. Lorna Lancaster was ranked highly in state track and field events. They were both in disgustingly fine, teenaged condition, Dinah thought.

“I just came down to the weight room to ask a quick question about technique,” she protested. “I’m an old woman who’ll be thirty in just three years. What are you trying to do? Give a teacher heart palpitations?”

They laughed. “If you want to learn, you’ve got to suffer and sweat,” Lorna told her. “We can’t just tell you how to lift the weight. You have to practice.”

“Suffering is beneath me,” Dinah joked. “I’ll work out devotedly, but I’ll never forget what Cicero said: ‘The pursuit, even of the best things, ought to be calm and tranquil.’ ”

“Cicero,” Eddie echoed. “Didn’t he play for the Rams?”

Dinah smothered a smile. “The Romans,” she corrected drolly. “An Italian team that was big on philosophy.”

“Oh,” he grunted. “Well, we better go. We gotta get a good seat for the pep rally. See ya at the game tonight.”

Dinah grimaced as she rubbed her aching arm. “Perk up, Ms. Sheridan,” Lorna urged. “It’s Friday afternoon. Class is over for the week.”

“Go away. I’m old and out of shape. I’ve got no perk.”

They laughed again, and she shooed them with a graceful wave of one hand. Dinah watched Eddie and Lorna stroll out of the weight room hand in hand. Love, Dinah thought pensively, can blossom even in the most unusual circumstances. But not with Rucker McClure, she added. Alone among the cool, concrete-block walls, she let sorrow and concern settle inside her again. She walked wearily to an ancient soft-drink machine in one corner.

Her small mauve purse lay atop her briefcase on a weight bench nearby. Dinah retrieved some change and put it in the machine, which rattled, hummed, and produced absolutely nothing in the way of a canned drink.

Dinah jiggled the coin return. No response. She put in more money. The machine ate it. Dinah’s eyes narrowed. She hadn’t slept well after last night’s disturbing dinner with Rucker. She wasn’t in the mood to be flamboozled by a mechanical monster. “ ‘These violent delights have violent ends,’ ” she muttered. “So sayeth Shakespeare.” Then she raised a fist and whacked the machine hard.

“Let’s hear some applause for the Mount Pleasant Masher and the Killer Soda Machine!” an unmistakable voice boomed behind her. “This rasslin’ match is one fall and a ten-minute TV time limit!”

Dinah whirled around to find Rucker leaning against the door to the weight room, his arms crossed over his chest. In honor of the pep rally he had on his speech suit: the boots, corduroys, houndstooth jacket, white shirt, and brown tie. A slight smile tugged at the corner of his mustache, but his eyes looked tired.

Flustered, Dinah said nothing for a moment. Then she pointed to the soft-drink dispenser. “I suppose, seeing as how you’re a macho man and all such men have innate mechanical ability, that you can retrieve the can that seems to be stuck in this thing’s craw?”

He nodded and walked toward her, smoothly sidestepping weight equipment, his stride easy and his body twisting in a confident, athletic way that riveted her eyes to the movements. Unanswered questions and emotion seemed to thicken the air as he stopped in front of her, his eyes intense.

“So you need a real man,” he said smugly. The smile hinted around his mouth again, belying the awkwardness between them. “Admit it.”

“I need a sledge hammer.” She bit her lower lip to keep from smiling back at him. “You’re a good substitute.”

He grasped his chest dramatically. “That’s no way to get what you want. Didn’t they teach you anything in those beauty parades? Like how to be sweet and simperin’ when you need something from a man?”

Dinah batted her eyelashes and looked up at him coyly. He provoked absurdity and silliness. She loved it and was glad they could still joke after last night’s unhappy discussion. “You big, strong, masculine toad, won’t you please help helpless, itsy-bitsy me?”

“Of course, little lady.” He squatted beside the machine and jabbed his hand under the metal flap that covered the dispenser opening. While he fiddled and felt, she studied him.

“What can I do for you today?” she asked.

He tugged his jacket sleeve back and wiggled his hand higher into the machine. A look of amused distaste crossed his face. “This reminds me of the time I went over to my cousin Lucy’s farm and the vet was payin’ a house call to an expectant cow.”

Dinah burst into soft laughter and he looked up, smiling under troubled eyes. “I like it when you laugh,” he told her. “I don’t like upsettin’ you.” He paused. “Like last night.”

“Oh, Rucker.” Her heart aching, she knelt beside him on the room’s stained green carpet. “I don’t like upsetting you either. I didn’t enjoy that.”

He paused in his assault on the soda machine, his hand still inside its metal maze, to look at her with bittersweet yearning. “Will you sit beside me at the pep rally?” he asked in a mock-shy tone. “I’m scared to be
around all these teenage girls alone. They have a lot of hormones and they like mature men.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about,” she assured him dryly. “Oh. By the way, your possum came back. If you want him—”

“My baby!” he exclaimed gleefully, grinning. “My little dumpling wants to stay with its daddy? I never thought—” The machine emitted an ominous metallic click. “What the …” Rucker’s grin faded as he tried to pull his hand out of the dispenser opening. “Aw, come on, this is ridiculous.” He pulled harder.

Dinah’s eyes widened in alarm. “Are you stuck?”

“Nah. When I was a juvenile delinquent I used to rig these machines and … dammit!”

“You’re stuck,” she confirmed.

He looked at her with a deadpan expression. “I’m stuck.”

Dinah sat down on the floor, tucking her feet, in their mauve pumps, under her. He sat down, too, awkwardly, then leaned his shoulder against the machine. He crooked one leg under him and drew the other up so that he could rest his free arm on it with at least a degree of jaunty aplomb. She lifted the dispenser door and slid her hand inside, contacting Rucker’s large muscular wrist.

“Let me see.” She slid her fingers up his wrist to the imprisoned hand. “I might be able to help.”

“It’s hopeless,” he said wistfully. “Don’t be brave.”

“You’re trapped between two cans and the rack that holds them. Oh, Rucker, I better go get the janitor.”

“I don’t need to be mopped or swept. I need to be rescued.”

She began to laugh. “Some macho man!”

He frowned in grand fashion. “Even John Wayne, God rest his fine soul, couldn’t have conquered this damned sneaky machine!”

“I wish I had a camera! I wonder how many magazines and newspapers would love to have a photograph of Rucker McClure being eaten by a soda machine!”

“Aw, Dee, you mean thing.”

She laughed harder. Dinah clasped his shoulders
and leaned forward, unconcerned that she was cackling like a deranged hen. Through years of beauty competitions she’d been rigidly trained to modulate her voice and her laughter. Now that training deserted her, but oddly she didn’t mind. She made boisterous squeaking sounds and rested her forehead against his shoulder. No other man in the world could provoke me this way, she thought suddenly.

“You’re … in-incredible!” she yelped. “Fantas … tic!”

“Well, howdy do,” he retorted dryly. “Women get turned on by the strangest things.” Then his free arm swept around her waist. Shocked into silence and gulping for breath, Dinah tilted her head back and stared at him warily. “Forget the janitor. Stay here and console me,” he ordered. His voice dropped languidly. “The least you can do is give a prisoner a little entertainment.”

Her lips were parted in surprise when his mouth covered them. Without thinking, Dinah made a soft, grateful sound. He echoed it in gruff harmony and twisted his mouth on hers with slow, erotic intent. Several long seconds passed as indecision warred with affection and desire. Finally Dinah sighed in defeat. I can’t resist a man trapped in a soft-drink machine, she thought raggedly. It’s not fair. She slipped her arms around his neck and kissed him back, darting her tongue into his mouth to taste and excite, brushing her lips over his mustache, nuzzling the delightfully coarse skin of his cheek.