Slow Hands (20 page)

Chuckles gave way to quiet sighs of good humor, and Sam’s good humor gave way to the desire he’d denied for the past week. Any doubts he had about disguising his need to kiss her were gone the moment she raised her chin a fraction of an inch. In silent invitation she dropped her gaze to his mouth and then slowly brought her eyes back to his. Sam wished she were issuing the silent invitation on purpose; he would have accepted with pleasure. But he knew better than to believe everything he saw.

Before he broke his promise about giving her control in the relationship, Sam stepped away, wishing he hadn’t noticed the fragrance of spiced apples underscoring the perfume she wore. He had a hard enough time keeping his hands off her without remembering the way her body played peek-a-boo with a bubble bath. Deliberately, he
dropped his arms. “We’ve got to hurry if we’re going to pick up the kids and catch an early show.”

Clare tried not to frown as he stepped away. She’d been almost sure he was finally going to break down and kiss her. In fact, she’d been counting on it. Some newly discovered part of her heart wanted Sam to give up before she did. Her body had turned traitor because Mother Nature slipped a joker in the deck. His name was Sam.

Dropping her file onto the window seat, Clare made a decision. “Let’s go.”

“Not yet.” Sam pointed downward. “Shoes, Clare. You know—the leather things that go on your feet?”

“Oh, shoes! I forgot.” Clare hurried toward the entrance hall. “I’ll only be a minute.”

“Good,” Sam said as she left the room. Then added, “Any longer than that, and I’m coming after you.”

As Sam raised his hand to knock on Pamela’s door, Clare’s heart beat more rapidly than she wanted to admit. Meeting Sam’s sister wasn’t a big deal, she told herself. Pamela would probably love any woman who agreed to take her kids to the movies. Hadn’t her own aunt always jumped at every chance to unload her daughter and niece for an evening? What mother wouldn’t want a few hours of peace and quiet?

“Cheer up,” Sam whispered in her ear. “She won’t bite.”

Clare dredged up a smile. “No, but after listening to you, I suspect her kids do.”

“Do what?” the grinning woman asked as she opened the door. She looked like a petite, pretty version of Sam.
Except her tawny mane was tamed and pulled back into a beribboned ponytail.

“Bite,” Sam answered with a straight face, and ignored the flustered gasp from the woman at his side. “Clare thinks your kids might bite her.”

Without blinking or missing a beat, Pamela turned to Clare. “And you came anyway! What a good sport. Sam’s other girlfriends were never any fun. Of course, the boys were younger and not nearly as well-trained then. A lot younger. It has been such a long time since anyone would go out with Sam. I was afraid he’d forgotten how to …” Pamela winked. “Well, you know.”

Now it was Sam’s turn to choke and Clare’s chance to twist the knife. She nodded sadly. “Oh, so
that
explains the problem.”

Pamela’s grin broadened and she said, “I like this one, Sam.”

“Of course you do. You think you’ve found a partner in crime,” Sam told her as he pushed Clare through the door.

“I think you’ve found a partner,” Pamela quietly corrected him, looking from one to the other as they passed her. As she shut the door and followed them into the den, she said, “My God, look at the two of you. If William were beside you, you’d be a movie poster for
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
!”

Clare stopped right in the middle of sitting down and stared uncomfortably at Sam, noticing his clothes for the first time. The thin, braided leather belt through the loops of his jeans added the only bit of color to his clothes—jeans so faded they could be called white, an immaculate white rugby shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and his favorite white leather tennis shoes. Unintentionally,
Clare had chosen black—black jeans, black loafers, black shirt, black onyx earrings, even the postage-stamp-sized purse she had with her was black.

“Well, I guess we know who’s ‘the good’ and who’s ‘the bad,’ ” Sam said with a grin as he fell back into the overstuffed pillows of the couch. “I’m not sure William is going to appreciate being cast as ‘the ugly’ though.”

“Then don’t tell him,” Pamela advised loudly over the sound of cowboys and Indians coming down the hall.

“Uncle Sam! Uncle Sam!” Two small blond bodies screamed as they sprinted into the room and leapt into his lap. At the words, Clare’s mouth fell open and she looked at Pamela. Somehow she’d never connected the fact that Sam had nephews with the fact that they would call him
Uncle Sam.

“Isn’t it a hoot?” Pamela grinned happily. “One of the main reasons I had children was to hear those two words. You know, since the boys were born, I have never seen Sammy wear red, white, and blue.”

Sam glared at her over the boys’ heads while trying to answer the questions that were being thrown at him. When they settled enough to notice a stranger in the room, Sam made the introductions and was surprised to find that Clare charmed the boots and moccasins off the boys by being properly frightened of the green garden snake that was shoved in her face. Winking at Pamela, she told them their snake was about the scariest example of a garden snake she’d ever seen, and Sam realized his nephews were completely under her spell.

“Oops,” Pamela said. “I should have warned you. They found him this morning. And he goes back right now,” she said sternly to the boys. “We agreed.”

“Ah, Mom, do we have to?” asked the younger one.

“That’s where we were going when we saw Uncle Sam’s car,” the older one explained very primly, as though he were disappointed that his mother hadn’t realized this fact.

“Come on, men,” Sam said, pushing up off the sofa. “I’ll go with you, and you can show me the new tree house.”

“Yeah, we’ll show you the tree house
and
the new tent” was echoed excitedly by both boys as they rushed out of the room with Sam in tow. They took the chaos with them, leaving quiet behind with Clare and Pamela.

“Sam didn’t tell me you liked children,” Pamela said, and appropriated Sam’s vacated spot on the sofa.

“What’s not to like?” Clare asked.

“Let’s see,” Pamela teased as she made a pretense of patting her pockets as though she were looking for something. “Where did I put that list?”

“Careful. You’ll have me believing everything Sam says about the boys if you keep that up.”

“Believe him. They’re little heathens. We’re hoping for a girl this time.”

Startled, Clare shifted her gaze to her hostess’s trim waistline. “You’re pregnant?”

“Six weeks.”

“Sam never said a word.”

“That’s because he doesn’t know. We haven’t told him or the boys yet.”

Clare smiled; she didn’t know what else to do. She’d never been the recipient of family confidences before, and she wasn’t quite sure what was expected of her. Each day sank her a little deeper into the fabric of Sam’s life. Everyone around him seemed to accept that she belonged. Everyone but Clare herself.

“I’m the world’s worst hostess,” Pamela said suddenly. “Here I am boring you to death with my news, and I haven’t even offered you something to drink or eat.”

“You’re not boring me, and to be perfectly truthful, I couldn’t eat a bite if you paid me.”

“Has William been force-feeding you?” asked Pamela.

“Every chance he gets,” groaned Clare. “Living in Sam’s house is hard on the nerves and worse on the waistline.”

Pamela smiled and pulled an imaginary piece of lint from the sofa back. “You know I’m very happy about you and Sam.”

Stunned, Clare looked away briefly and then back at warm, tobacco-brown eyes that were obviously a Tucker family characteristic. The resemblance between the siblings was more than physical, Pamela had that shoot-from-the-hip attitude. She even had the same tendency to jump to the wrong conclusions. Clare met her gaze squarely and said, “I don’t know what Sam’s told you—”

“Not nearly enough,” Pamela assured her. “But I’m not deaf or blind. I’ve wanted to thank you for a while now.”

“For what?” Shifting uncomfortably, Clare shook her head. “I haven’t done anything.”

Pamela leaned over and briefly squeezed Clare’s wrist. “Oh, but you have. You’ve given me Sam back. When Pop died, so did a part of Sam. Of course, he’d never admit it. He’s much too strong for that. But inside he was missing a little spark he used to have. And now he has that again. Thanks to you.”

A frown drew Clare’s eyebrows together. “I didn’t—”

An unladylike snort cut her off. “You did. Good God, Clare, can’t you see the difference in him? When Pop killed himself, all Sammy could think about was how he’d failed, about how he’d made all the wrong choices with his life. It’s very difficult for a man who’s made a great deal of money to admit that he’s been a failure at life.”

Clare held herself very still, as if by moving she might scare away the answers she’d been looking for. “I didn’t do anything. He’d already changed his life before he met me.

“Even when he turned his life around, he was still only going through the motions. He wanted a generic two point five kids, a comfortable wife, and a dog.” Pamela grinned a cat-lapping-cream grin. “Now he wants you. And there’s not a thing generic about you, my dear. You’re so wrong for him that you’re perfect.”

Before Clare could frame an answer, chaos erupted in the household again as Tim, the younger boy, skidded into the room. “Mama! Aunt Clare! Come quick! The tent sort of fell down, and Uncle Sam’s inside it.”

Sam checked his watch as he unlocked the front door. “Eleven fifty-five.”

“Let’s just hope your watch isn’t slow.” Hiding a grin, Clare followed him inside. One of the high points of her evening had been watching Sam struggle out of the heavy canvas tent while trying to explain how it had fallen. “The last thing you need after tonight is William’s wrath or anything else coming down on your head.”

He shot her an unappreciative look as he crossed the threshold. “That’s about enough out of you.”

“Don’t be so touchy,” she advised. “Can I help it if my aunt liked to send me to camp to get rid of me? So, I’m a better Boy Scout than you are. The world has not stopped revolving.”

“I didn’t
need
your help. I would have gotten the tent up eventually.”

Clare tossed her purse on the entryway table and mumbled, “Maybe when the boys were old and gray.”

Turning back from his purposeful march toward the kitchen, Sam asked, “What?”

“I said—maybe we can take the boys to a movie another day.”

Sam didn’t look completely convinced, but after what looked like a momentous struggle with himself, he simply said, “Good night, Clare.”

“Good night, Sam,” she called softly, and bounded up the steps two at a time.

As she showered, Clare wondered how a simple outing to the movies could have gone so far astray of the original plan. While they’d fussed with the tent, the night had slipped away from them, and it had been after eleven o’clock before the boys remembered the movie. If Clare regretted anything about the evening, it was that she wouldn’t be around to give the boys a rain check on the movie. Being with Pamela and her kids had been so easy, so natural.

Sighing and telling herself not to romanticize family life, Clare reached for the faded black shirt hanging on the back of the bathroom door. No matter how often she put Sam’s shirt in the hamper, it reappeared on the peg, freshly laundered. What Clare couldn’t figure out was
exactly who kept putting the shirt back—William or Sam?

Last night she’d given up and slept in it. The soft cotton hugged her body and made her feel less lonely. Wearing the shirt was her reward to herself for resisting Sam and temptation. Kind of like having a bowl of ice cream as a reward for refusing cake.

Clare fastened the last button and reached for her purse to get her mother’s wedding ring, which she’d taken off when she and the boys decided to dig a rain run-off trench around the tent. “Damn,” she muttered. The purse was downstairs on the table.

If she left it there, she’d get an earful from William when she went down for breakfast the next morning. He’d hold up the purse by its thin strap, look at her, and inform her that he had a great many more important things to do than pick up after her all day. Groaning, she left her room and hurried down the stairs.

As she scooped the purse up from the hall table, she heard a thump from the kitchen and Slick’s soft meow. “Double damn,” she whispered. William liked the cat, but he absolutely drew the line at animals on the kitchen counter. Sighing, she decided she’d better go and check for footprints.

Quickly, she padded toward the kitchen, slowing when she saw the glow that illuminated the darkness. Reaching the doorway, she found Sam, still dressed in jeans and rugby shirt, holding open the refrigerator door, and bent double—his head stuck inside. Slick wove a lazy figure eight around Sam’s ankles. Obviously the two were partners in this midnight raid on the kitchen. Discreetly, she cleared her throat. “Ahem.”

Sam’s body jerked backward. He straightened like a cat burglar with his hand caught in a jewelry case, and whirled around. Relief flooded his face when he saw her. “Don’t scare me like that. I thought you were William.”

“Stealing anything good?” she asked playfully as she crossed the cool linoleum to peer into the refrigerator. She found she had to maneuver around him.

Sam let her wander between the open refrigerator and his body as she inspected the contents. He noted her silk gown had been replaced by his shirt, and at the moment he was irrationally jealous of his own shirt. When he had her right where he wanted her, he leaned one hand casually on the door and the other on the side, neatly boxing her in as she turned to face him. “The only thing I have any intention of stealing at the moment is a kiss.”

Suiting action to words, Sam closed the distance between them and dragged his bottom lip against the bow of her mouth. At the first touch of his lips to hers, the hunger that had driven him back to the kitchen changed. He suddenly wanted more than food for the body; he wanted food for the soul. He pulled at her lips again and willed her to respond.