Slow Hands (11 page)

The awkward silence grew as William got up, scraping
the wooden chair legs against the floor. Efficiently, he gathered up the newspapers covered with stems and damaged beans and threw the neatly folded bundle in the garbage. When he turned back to Clare, a smile split his lips as if he knew a secret. “It’s been a long time since a young lady asked this old man for help. You better stop chewing on the words and ask me quick, so I can say yes before I remember how much trouble favors can be.”

Helplessly, Sam listened to the tolerant chuckle in William’s voice and realized his mistake. Grinding his teeth produced a grimace, but he managed to hold back the expletive that rose to his lips. He’d been counting on William’s ingrained sense of propriety. He’d been counting on William to give Clare a lecture on honesty and facing up to life. But he’d forgotten that his butler had taken a fancy to Clare the first time he met her. He’d forgotten that Clare had a knack for handling the older man. And he sure as hell hadn’t expected William to agree before he even heard the request!

“Don’t you think you ought to listen to what Clare has to ask before you blindly agree?” Sam asked, unwilling to believe that William would go along with Clare’s scam once he understood what would be expected of him.

Bristling visibly, William drew himself to his full height. “Miss Clare is a lady.”

“And how would you know?” Exasperation deepened Sam’s voice. “You’ve met her only a few times! For God’s sake, William, she wants to borrow the house for the next two weeks and pretend she owns it to impress her supermodel cousin. You’re supposed to be her butler, and I’m supposed to be the poor, struggling boarder who
rents a room over the carriage house! Are you going to put up with that kind of foolishness?”

William raised an eyebrow, and Clare closed her mouth which had dropped open during the flurry of words. On the wall behind the stove, an old round-face clock ticked loudly into the silence. To Sam, the ticks sounded a lot like accusations—jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk.

Breaking the clock’s rhythm, William said, “If I catch our boarder raiding my refrigerator, I expect I’ll be laying a baseball bat upside his head.”

“You’re going to do this!” Sam huffed in disbelief and threw up his hands. The impossible situation he feared had become a reality. “You’ve both lost your minds. You deserve each other. Now, if you don’t object, I’ll go pack a few essentials while you and
Ms. McGuire
iron out the details of renting
my
house to her.”

After Sam made his ungracious exit, Clare expelled the breath in her lungs in one long whoosh. As she held out her hand, she noted that her handshake was steady at least, even if her emotions were shaky. “Thank you, William. I appreciate this. My reasons are a little more complicated than Sam’s explanation.”

“Are they now?” William asked with a knowing look, and then tilted his head as he shook her hand. “Doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t mind?”

Chuckling, William dumped his beans into a colander. “Mind? I suspect life is about to get interesting around here. You’re going to bother that boy a darn sight more than name tags in his shorts.”

Clare leaned against the counter and hugged her midriff with her arms. “It’ll only be for a couple of weeks. Maybe less. And you’ll like Ellie. Everyone does.”

“Do they now?”

“Always. You’ll see when you meet her tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!” William fairly shouted the words as he dropped the colander in the double sink. “Child, why didn’t you say so sooner!

“Tomorrow,” William mumbled, unrolled his sleeves, and reached for a gray Windbreaker that hung on a peg beside the back door. “Lord. Company’s coming tomorrow and nothing but leftovers in my refrigerator.”

“But—” Clare began, trying to slow William down before he stormed out the door.

“But nothing. I’d best get to the store. If Rebecca gets here to cook in the morning and finds out we’re expecting company and there’s no food in the house—” William shuddered. “Well … she’ll be mad as a cat in an alley full of hound dogs.”

The slam of the door reverberated through the kitchen, and in a few moments Clare heard the sound of a car engine. Finally, the ticking pulse of the old clock replaced the noise of William’s departure and reminded Clare that she was alone in the house with Sam. Nervously, she poked her head into the dining room, half expecting to see Sam striding toward her, ready to change his mind about the house regardless of William’s approval.

When he didn’t materialize, she wandered through the rest of the downstairs, wincing at the occasional squeak of her tennis shoes on the hardwood floor. Skulking about the house and waiting for Sam made her feel uncomfortable. Guilty.
Dammit!
If Sam hadn’t wanted her there, why hadn’t he simply said so instead of relying on William to do his dirty work? If he wasn’t happy, it
was his own fault. She refused to feel guilty because his little plot failed. With a deep breath to fortify her courage, she climbed the staircase.

Only one door along the upstairs hallway was closed. Tapping lightly, Clare waited for permission to enter. When none came, she called, “Sam?”

“What?” The question was sharp, even cross in tone.

Resting her forehead against the door facing, Clare plunged ahead. “We need to talk.”

Suddenly the door swung wide, and as she jumped back, Sam filled the opening. “I don’t want to talk. I said you could borrow the house if William approved. He did. You can. Now, do you mind if I finish changing clothes?”

“N … no,” Clare managed to say, and forced herself to calmly face the half-naked man in front of her. Sam’s chest and feet were bare. The cut-up jeans hung precariously on his hips and the open button above the zipper formed a provocative V that drew her eyes downward. Her mouth and throat went dry at the sight of dark bronze hair disappearing into the V. Swallowing gave her something to do and eased the dryness in her throat.

“I’ll wait out here,” she said more primly than she intended. Unable to stop herself, she looked down the hallway, wishing the cavalry hadn’t just ridden off to the store.

Sam stepped back and leaned a forearm on the door edge. “I’m only changing shirt and shoes. If you think you can handle it, you can come in.”

“Of course I can handle it,” Clare said stiffly. “I was attempting to be polite. However, if I’d known you were an exhibitionist, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

As Sam pulled her into the room, his eyes glittered
dangerously. “Not an exhibitionist, Clare. Voyeur maybe. At least, where you’re concerned.”

Clare froze as the door clicked softly into place, and Sam stood silently behind her.

“You see,” he continued, leaning so his voice was close to her ear, “I don’t want to show off. I want to watch you hover on the edge and fall off the world with me.”

The thud of her heartbeat sounded in her ears, and her lungs fought to continue the subconscious act of simply breathing in and out. “Stop it, Sam. You’re going to make the situation impossible for both of us.”

“It’s already impossible for me,” he whispered into the soft skin at the back of her neck, his nose almost brushing against the nape. “I need you, and you’re completely wrong for me. You don’t want what I want. You don’t care about fun.”

“Sam—” Desperation invaded her voice. He hadn’t so much as laid a finger on her, and her knees were already beginning to buckle.

“Just say
no.
” He repeated the popular slogan not as advice to her, but as if he were pondering the power of those three little words. “So simple. But I didn’t. And now you’re here. Punishing my imagination. Of course, I’m not the only one who’ll be tortured.”

He adjusted his body to fit the curves of her bottom, pressing his bare chest against her back and holding her lightly by the shoulders. His words feathered the lobe of her ear as he spoke. “Look around. You’re in my bedroom. This is where you’ll stay because you don’t want to explain to Ellie why you haven’t taken the master bedroom.

“You’re going to sleep in my bed because your pride
won’t let you admit I get to you. That would be the first step in losing control, and you can’t do that. You don’t want people in your life who’ll endanger your safe, comfortable routine. You don’t want magic or surprises. That’s why you’ll tell yourself that sleeping in my bed won’t make the slightest difference.”

As he spoke, her gaze shifted to the wide four-poster, exactly as Sam had intended. Her imagination supplied images of tangled sheets and entwined limbs. Clare’s eyes widened as she realized that regardless of whether or not the bed was stripped and the sheets changed, it would smell like Sam. Going to sleep would be like immersing herself in his scent, wrapping herself in his essence. This was
his
room. All around her.

“I’ve never made love in that bed,” Sam said, his hands beginning to massage her shoulders.

Closing her eyes against the onslaught of feeling, Clare knew she was losing the battle for control. Sam’s slow hands erased the tension in her shoulders. She swayed backward, letting his strength support her for a moment before she angrily pulled away to put distance between them.

“Don’t do this, Tucker. It’s not fair.”

“Fair?” Sam’s eyes narrowed. “I never promised you fair.”

“You promised friendship,” she accused him as she turned around.

“And you used it to get what you wanted—this house for show-and-tell with Ellie.”

Then Clare sucked in a breath, and Sam ruthlessly quelled the impulse to apologize or drop his gaze. What he’d said was the truth. Whether she liked it or not. He wanted more than sex from Clare. He wanted a little self-realization.
She had to see that the pattern of her life would eventually leave her empty and alone. She didn’t want people to care about her, and he had to find out why.

Clare’s chin snapped up as she said, “I didn’t use you. I offered to pay you for the house. I’m going to pay you. This is a business deal.”

“This isn’t about money, Clare. This is you hiding from your past. Which is why you’re never going to have a future.” Sam turned away from her before she could answer and walked to his closet. He swept several neatly hung shirts aside, considering and discarding them without conscious thought.

“And who the hell are you to make that assumption about my future?” Clare demanded when she could finally speak.

Sam pulled a white polo shirt off the hanger and turned. “Who am I? You don’t want to know, Clare. When you know a person’s secrets, good or bad, you can’t ignore your feelings anymore. The secrets are always there in your mind, something you share with that other person. Creating a bond. You still want to know who I am, Clare?”

She put out a hand to steady herself against the long mahogany bureau littered with bits of Sam’s life: loose change, cuff links gathering dust, school photos of tow-headed young boys, and an open paperback mystery. She nodded and said, “I want to know how you can stand there and presume to tell me I have no future. I’ve worked damned hard for five years to get what I want and where I want.”

Tossing the shirt onto the bed, Sam crossed the room until he stood in front of her. “Because I learned the hard
way that the people in your life, people you love, are all that matters. When I spent all my time and energy avoiding chaos and unpleasantness, I also avoided the joy in life. When I spent my days worrying over budgets and meetings, I didn’t have any time left for my widowed father or the woman in my life.”

He paused, making sure he had her complete attention. “Because while I was busy being busy, my father committed suicide when the loneliness in his life became unbearable.”

Stunned, Clare felt the pain of his confession wash over her. Guilt over a parent’s death was something she understood. Instinctively, she reached out.

Sam caught her hand before her fingers touched his bare chest. “I changed my life, and I won’t go back to schedules and profit margins, Clare.”

“Who asked you to?” Clare whispered, nervously aware that Sam’s gaze shifted from her eyes to her mouth and that he hadn’t let go of her hand.

“You did.” Sam inched closer, never taking his eyes from her mouth, making her a promise. “I want more than you can give, and if you stay here, you’re going to have to learn that people and family are more important than a tidy life.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No?” Sam whispered the question against her lips and then drew back a fraction, waiting.

Clare couldn’t answer without opening her mouth to the heat of his. Ironically, that’s exactly what she wanted to do, and the impulse scared her. For the umpteenth time, she asked herself:
Why him? Why not him?
came the uneasy reply. She wasn’t a virgin. An adequate affair in
college had opened her eyes to the mysteries of the sexes. She knew exactly what he wanted.

So why was she suddenly dismayed by the prospect of kissing him? Because this wasn’t college, and she instinctively knew that Sam was a great deal more than adequate. She closed her eyes, only to see his strong hands in her imagination as they slid over her body. A moan of frustration escaped her. Her body wanted something her mind knew would be a mistake. Body and soul overpowered logic as she leaned forward.

Sam let her come to him, but the wait was unbearable. Seconds felt like minutes. Finally, he heard the soft sigh of surrender, and her lips met his. His body responded hard and fast to the feel of her fingers as they brushed across his nipples.

He tried to fit her body to the length of his, and growled angrily when the bureau didn’t provide the support he wanted. He needed to feel every inch of Clare against every inch of himself. He needed a wall or a bed. He had both. Clare gasped when he scooped her up, but his mouth on hers silenced any protest she might have made. Depositing her on the bed, he followed, letting a leg rest between her thighs and his arousal press into her belly.

The slow, sensual movements of his body against hers made Clare conscious of the pulse of desire that arched her back and began her own rhythmic movements against his thigh. At the motion, Sam made a sound that was unmistakably satisfied as he pulled her shirt off her
shoulder far enough to trace her collarbone with his tongue.