Robards, Karen (33 page)

Then his hand slid beneath her turtleneck and bra and found her breast, closing over it, touching her nipple, rubbing it with his thumb, and she forgot evervthing else in a fiery burst of pure erotic hunger.

Gasping, arching her back, Grace shivered and clung to his shoulders as his large warm hand moved from one breast to the other, playing and teasing, arousing with each touch. When his mouth left hers to trail hot kisses along her jaw, she moaned.

Thwarted by the turtleneck protecting her throat from his mouth, he gripped her top with both hands and pulled it over her head, and then with his next movement reached between her shoulder blades to unclip her bra and tug it off

Grace had a moment of clarity when his hands were not on her body, and she opened her eyes and took in the scene. She saw herself, slender and fine-boned, with small pink-tipped breasts and pale skin, bare from the waist up in the warm pool of lamplight, curled up on Tony’s lap. He was fully dressed if a little mussed, the hem of his T-shirt out of his jeans, his black hair tousled, his eyes more golden than brown now, agleam as they were with desire for her. His shoulders in the plain white T-shirt were broad and thick with muscle. His skin looked very brown against her paleness as his hand found her breast again.

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For a moment she just looked at that large brown hand splayed out possessively against the crearny smoothness of her skin. Then his hand moved, and she couldn’t think at all.

Her last relatively clear image was of the muted eleven o’clock newscast flickering across the TV screen in the background, and of one of his feet, clad in a snug white athletic sock, shoving the coffee table out of the way—

Then he bent his head. She caught just a glint of silver as the lamplight struck the thick black and silver waves of his hair.

Hot and wet and hungry, his mouth closed over her nipple. Grace gasped, and her hands moved up to clutch the back of his head, holding him to her. Her eyes closed, and she arched her back, offering him her breasts with abandon.

When his mouth finally left her breasts, her nipples felt cold and wet and hard as pebbles in air that seemed arctic after the heat of his mouth. She whimpered in protest at the loss, only to find herself being gathered into his arms and lifted.

She opened her eyes. He had turned off the lamp and TV, she realized groggily, so that the room was dark except for the light spilling in from the kitchen. The only sounds were the harshness of his breathing and her own softer gasps. He lowered her onto the rug, the rose-and-blueand-tan oriental carpet that she had picked up for a song at a flea market years before and never thought to put to such use. Its texture was rough against her bare back, and the hardness of the floor beneath was readily apparent.

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A measure of sanity returned to her.

“Tony,” she whispered. He loomed over her, stripping off his own T-shirt and tossing it aside, so that her hands, as she lifted them to hold him off, encountered the warmth of his bare shoulders. Sliding her hands along the muscular width of those shoulders, almost lost in the blaze of his eyes, she nevertheless managed to murmur: “I don’t think-not here in the house, I . 11

But she never finished her protest, because as she spoke he unbuttoned and then unzipped, with an audible sound, her khakis, and pulled them down, along with her panties, so that when he was finished she was naked, lying on the oriental rug in her darkened family room naked, with him in his jeans on his knees beside her and his hand sliding with slow, hot intimacy up one soft inner thigh.

He touched her, finding the tiny moist bud that quivered desperately beneath his caress, and then he bent over her and his mouth followed his hand and the wet heat of his tongue touched her, too-and she was lost, totally lost, to conscious thought.

Under the scalding tutelage of his mouth, her nails curled into the roughness of the carpet, scratching over its surface, clawing for some sort of grip to keep her anchored to earth. Her thighs fell open helplessly under his ministrations, allowing him free rein, and he took full advantage, his mouth and hands stroking and caressing, delving and withdrawing, wickedly teasing until she was gasping and writhing and moaning his name.

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And then he bit her, softly, gently, but it was enough, in that particular spot, to send her over the edge, to send her hips arching up off the rug to press hard against the source of her torment as her body exploded with passion, sending her spinning, her mind whirling away while her body quaked and shook and shuddered.

Finally she collapsed limply back against the carpet, drawing in great gulps of air, feeling light-headed and peaceful and in urgent need of sleep.

But what she had reckoned was finished was not. He was between her legs now, hard and hot and urgent with need, sliding inside her, stretching her and filling her and demanding her response when she weakly tried to close her thighs only to find them firmly pinioned apart by the muscular strength of his.

Grace opened her eyes in protest-all she wanted to do was rest-to find him bearing down on her, his face and body deep in shadow. She could just make out the muscular outline of him, limned as his body was with light from the kitchen, and the bright glitter of his eyes. Even as she prepared to utter some variation of “uncle!” he kissed her, his tongue as hard and hot as it invaded her mouth as that other part of him. His hands found her breasts, her nipples, at the same time as he started to move. He thrust fiercely, taking now instead of giving, blatantly intent on satisfying his own need. To her surprise Grace found her body awakening again, found herself responding to his urgency, found herself quivering and clutching and cleaving to the hard body that swept her along with it on a tide of

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driving passion. Her nails dug into his back instead of the carpet. Her legs wrapped around his waist. “Tony,” she gasped as her world exploded for a second time. He groaned in response, thrusting deep, and found his own release, burying himself deep inside her quivering body.

Cbapter

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N THE BRIGHT LIGHT of morning, Grace blushed to remember the night. They had made love again C

and again, until they were both exhausted. In between lovemaking sessions, they talked. Tony told her about his childhood, about what it was like to be one of six boys-a cross between a world championship wrestling round-robin event and the close camaraderie expressed by Shakespeare’s “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” bit, as he described it. And Grace told him about her much lonelier childhood, which to all intents and purposes ended with the death of her mother. They described their respective marriages-bad, they both agreed-and enumerated the positive and negative points of their jobs. One thing they did not talk about was Rachel. Grace got the feeling that Tony could not bear to have that wound touched on again so soon, and she respected his reticence.

She fell asleep at last, dozing off in his arms while they were talking, and then awoke sometime near dawn to find herself wrapped in a blanket and appar-

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endy levitating up the stairs. It was a frightening moment before Tony’s face came into focus and the situation in which she found herself became clear. Maneuvering carefully through the almost pitch-dark house, he was carrying her up the stairs to bed.

“You don’t want Jessica to find you asleep in the family room in the morning,” he whispered in her ear when she blinked at him sleepily, his eye on Jessica’s closed door.

No, she didn’t. In fact, it was one of her hard-andfast rules never to make love to a man in her own house, and certainly not whenjessica was present, even if she was asleep. But what had happened with Tony transcended all the rules. It was like nothing that had ever happened to her before.

She had been consumed by lust.

The thought shocked Grace, an4 then she had to smile at the idea. For the first time in her thirty-six years of life, she realized, she finally “got it” about sex. Before, when she had heard her friends raving about this or that sex act or this or that man, she had smiled politely and secretly pitied them for their lack of selfcontrol. Now she knew better. She had learned over the course of one night just how earth-shattering, mind-blowing, and life-altering sex with the right man could be.

And to think that Tony Marino was the right man. That was almost the most mind-blowing thing of all. Grace was still smiling over it when she fell asleep.

And when the alarm went off and she slept right through, she had no doubt that she was smiling still. Jessica came and woke her, twenty nuinutes late.

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Thus began a mad rush for school and work that gave Grace no time to do more than flash Tony, met at the breakfast table, a sermembarrassed smile, gulp a cup of coffee and snatch up the day’s paper from the porch before she andjessica were on the road with the police officers assigned to protect them for the day. Tony would relieve both day officers at five o’clock, when he would be back on duty at the house.

Jessica’s officer, Gloria Baer, was a blond woman who looked no more than seventeen. Dressed like Jessica, in jeans and a loose sweater (with, Grace presumed, a gun concealed beneath), she would be introduced at school as Jessica’s cousin, visiting from out of town, and would stick with her like glue throughout the day. The officer assigned to Grace was Barry Penick. He was in his early thirties, a slim man of medium height with thinning brown hair. He wore a sport coat and tie, the better, Grace guessed, to blend into her courtroom.

As early as lunchtime, she was heartily sick of having a protection officer. Penick followed her everywhere, even to the rest room, waiting outside like a faithful basset hound until she reappeared. When she called the lunch break and stood up to head to her chambers, he stood too, prepared to come along.

Unable to stop herself, she gave him a disgruntled look. The thought that ran through her mind was, let’s call the whole thing off.

Jessica was in danger, not she.

Grace bit her lip and headed for her chambers. After allowing him to check the room for possible hidden assassins, Grace shooed Penick out the door, under the

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pretext that she had work to do, and locked it. For a moment she leaned against it with a sigh of relief. Then she headed for her desk, on which waited a deli fruit plate brought in at Grace’s request by one of the secretaries. Pouring herself a cup of coffee, Grace sat down to read her newspaper and eat.

When she got to the comics page, her eyes widened, and then she frowned. Although she had picked the newspaper up off her porch that morning in what she had assumed was a pristine state, she had apparently been wrong. Someone had gotten hold of her paper before she had.

Three horoscopes were circled in bright red marker, impossible to miss with even the most casual glance at that page. One, Virgo, was her own. The second, Pisces, was Jessica’s. The third ringed horoscope was Capricorn.

Grace stared at it and for a moment forgot to breathe. Capricorn. January 21. That date was one of the most significant in her life.

When she read the horoscope itself, she felt like breaking into hysterical laughter: A messagefrom someone in your past could have you lost in memories.

It was coincidence, of course. It had to be.

Maybe Tony was a Capricorn, and he had gotten to the paper before she had and circled the horoscopes. In bright red marker? And how would he know her

birthday, and Jessica’s? Oh, he might possibly have gotten them from a police report, she supposed. Was that kind of information routinely recorded on police reports? Grace couldn’t remember.

It was kind of a stretch to picture Tony even inter—

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ested in horoscopes, much less ringing three of them with a red marker so they would not fad to catch her eye—

But what other explanation could there be?

Maybe there was absolutely no meaning to it at all. Maybe the paperboy had been reading the horoscopes. Because the only explanation that made sense was

impossible. Grace could hardly bring herself to think about it.

Heart pounding with anxiety, Grace instinctively reached for the phone. She would dial Tony’s pager number. He needed to know about this.

Her hand stopped and drew back. She couldn’t call Tony. She could hear him saying, in that pained way of his, it’s a horoscope, Grace.

in other words, it’s nothing at all.

That’s exactly what he would think, unless she explained to him the significance of that particular date. Which she couldn’t do.

Wouldn’t do.

Couldn’t even bear to think about.

She had put it behind her years ago, released the past like ashes in the wind and vowed to go forward and make the best life possible for herself and, later, Jessica.

The only time she ever allowed herself to remember was on January 2 1. Of every year.

Nausea churned in her stomach. It was not possible.

it was not possible.

Possible or not, Grace was upset to the point of being physically ill for the rest of the day. Not only

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upset, but afraid. If the impossible should be true, she needed to tell Tony, urgently.

But this was something that she had never told anyone. It was the deep, dark secret of her life.

As Rachel was the key to Tony, this was the key to her.

And no one knew.

Maybe the horoscope meant nothing.

Please, God, let the horoscope mean nothing. Please, God. Please, please, please.

When Grace got home that night, with Pernick in the passenger seat of her car—she had refused to allow him to drive, although he had tried to insist-Jessica and Tony were playing basketball in the driveway. It was such a pleasant sight, such a homey sight, that Grace felt the tension that had been with her since lunchtime begin to ease.