Springer, Jan - The Pleasure Girl [The Desperadoes 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (9 page)

“What are you thinking?” he asked, his gaze now back on her face. His eyes had a nice twinkle to them, and she recognized it as curiosity.

“Well, I am wondering who you are. Where you come from?” she admitted.
And why am I reacting so much to you?

He shrugged his shoulders and frowned, giving her the impression he didn’t like her question. Well, tough.

“I am a man who comes from here and there.”

“Hmm, here and there and everywhere, right?”

He winked in answer and helped himself to more bacon and potatoes.

“What kind of work do you do?” she asked.

“Let’s just say I’m a traveling salesman and leave it at that.”

“A seller of bacon, no doubt.”

He grinned. “No doubt.”

“Mystery man.”

“It keeps the ladies curious and interested.”

I’m sure.
A fissure of jealousy at the thought of him being with other women reared its ugly head. Suddenly she needed to know this man. Needed to peel away the layers of mystery he hid behind.

“Where were you when
it
happened?” she asked. By the way his shoulders tensed and the fork full of food halted midway to his mouth, she could tell he knew what she meant. She also realized her mistake. Never ask personal questions of your clients. It helped keep the relationship strictly professional and kept an emotional barrier between them. But she realized she’d never wanted so badly to crash through that wall he’d just erected.

“Let’s say it was a bad day for everyone and leave it at that.”

She nodded jerkily, but questions began to form in her mind. Did he have a wife? Girlfriend? Kids? He had to be around her age. Maybe he had had a family and they all died? Just like hers had died. All turning to ash or dust or whatever one called it when one simply self-combusted.

Remembering how she’d found dust on her parents’ kitchen chairs when she’d gone searching for them made the bacon and potatoes she’d been chewing turn into a flavorless cloth. She struggled to swallow it. Left the rest on her plate. Best not think about family. Best to live in the present. He was right. It was best to leave it.

He continued eating, his watchful gaze on her, but he remained silent. That is until he finished.

“I’ve got something that’ll cheer you up.”

He pulled his saddlebag closer, reached in, and to her surprise and delight, he pulled out a tin of peaches.

“Oh my God. They’re making canned fruit again?” she asked as she took the heavy tin into her hands and read the paper pasted to it.
Made in Florida
. No way! She’d heard that Florida was a cold place now and all the citrus trees had frozen and died.

“Actually, no, I picked it up a few days ago. It was made before the Catastrophe, but I’m told it’s still good. Shall we find out?”

Teyla nodded and he produced a can opener from his bag.
My, the man came well prepared, didn’t he
?

He chuckled. “Cost a pretty penny. Hell, I never thought a can of peaches would be worth the same amount of money that a car used to sell for before the catastrophe.”

Alarm bells once again whispered through her head. Where did a man get so much money? Illegally was the only answer she could come up with. But how unlawful was illegal?

Who cared. It wasn’t her business where he got his money. He was her client and that was all that mattered. Right? Right, she firmly told herself. Not her business.

Her mouth watered as he lifted the lid and proceeded to divvy up the healthy-looking peaches. They were sliced just the way she liked them. In quarters. And her taste buds literally exploded when the sweetness of the peaches splashed around in her mouth as she chewed. Definitely still good.

They both made sexy moans as they slowly savored the treat. Teyla was smart enough not to rush it, accepting the flavor, committing it to memory, knowing she may never have another chance at having canned peaches again. At the very least, not for a very long time.

They both tipped their plates and allowed the remaining juices from the peaches to slide into their mouths. She made sure to lick her plate, too, savoring the sweetness. When they were both finished, he gazed at her untouched glass, half-full of whiskey.

“How about shooting down your whiskey, and then we can take a nice walk outside.”

His suggestion of a walk both disappointed and excited her. Having the peaches had chased away the sad memories of the past and brought back the need for more sizzling sex with him. Taking a walk in the dark had been something she hadn’t done in quite some time. The dark spooked her, but taking a walk with Logan sounded very nice.

“As long as I can wear some warm clothes,” she teased.

“The minute we come back, I want those clothes off,” he commanded in a hoarse voice.

“Only if yours come off, too. I’ll drink the whiskey when we come back.”

He nodded. “Okay, get dressed, and hurry, or I just might take you right here again.”

She wanted to tell him that’s what she wanted, but he was already heading to the hook where he’d left his leather jacket. As he zipped it up, he saw her watching him and chuckled for her to get a move on.

Minutes later, she’d put on a pair of jeans, snug wool socks, a warm pink sweater, and her burgundy cardigan. Giving her long hair a quick brush, she enjoyed the look of appreciation in Logan’s eyes when she joined him at the kitchen door. Stuffing her feet into a pair of her late husband’s warm work boots she followed Logan out the door and into the darkness.

Frosty air snapped against face and hands as she locked the door. She didn’t expect anyone to be around out here, but having all that money in her basement called for some sort of security. Sliding the key into her cardigan pocket, she turned around and realized it wasn’t actually that dark.

The sky literally danced with white and green moving lights. She’d heard the light had something to do with the magnetic layers surrounding the Earth’s atmosphere which had been disturbed since the solar flares. That was another reason the climate had gotten colder since then. A mini Ice Age, they said, was happening on the other side of the Earth. Surviving scientists couldn’t agree if the Ice Age would eventually encompass the entire Earth or if things would stay the same or get warmer someday.

She followed him down the stairs, and they walked along the dirt road that wound through her property. They walked side by side for a long time in the stillness, and she really felt safe having him here. Gone was the feeling that every shadow was a murderer and every sound a pack of wild dogs sneaking up to rip out her throat.

“I want to apologize for my earlier behavior,” his deep voice burst through the quiet night air like a thunderclap shaking her feelings of security.

Earlier behavior? Until now, he’d been quite the gentleman. Had she missed something?

“You asked me where I’d been during the Catastrophe, and I gave you the brush-off.”

“It’s my fault,” she said, trying to reassure him. “It’s none of my business.”

He gave her a weak smile. “If you can talk about it with me, a complete stranger, I should do the same. I owe you that much.”

“You don’t own me any explanation.”

“I had a wife and two daughters,” he said quietly, and she immediately detected the pain in his voice.

“You don’t have to—”

His gaze snapped to her face and his eyes softened.

“I know. I want to. I figure it’s as good a time as any. And I’ll have you to drown my sorrows in after.”

She swallowed and waited.

“I was with my daughters when
it
happened. We’d gone on our annual dad-daughters camping trip. My wife hated camping, so she always stayed home. But my girls…” His voice thickened with emotion.

“How old were they?”

“Jenny was twelve. Lynn was eleven. They loved to go to a new camping place every year. So this time around, we decided on a group of caves two days’ drive from home. We were going to make it a weeklong trip. We were actually inside the caves when it happened.”

Horror raced through her. He must have seen them disintegrate.

“We had no idea anything was wrong until we returned to the campground and realized there weren’t any people around.”

Relief swept through her. “The girls survived the solar flares.”

He nodded. “My daughters survived the Catastrophe. I wish they hadn’t. It would have been a much easier death.”

Uneasiness snapped through her. Obviously, his kids had died.

“I couldn’t get the car started, couldn’t find a soul to help. Not one person. It was eerie, and I could tell the girls were getting uneasy. There was nothing but static when we tried to use our cell phones. I knew something was seriously wrong when we went to the campground office and found the door unlocked and no one inside but a whimpering dog who was lying beside a pile of what looked like ashes on the floor.

“I thought maybe some nutcase was on the grounds and had maybe tried to build a fire indoors and everyone had been evacuated. That’s when I also noticed there was no electricity. The coolers full of food and drinks weren’t humming. The air conditioner wasn’t going as it had been the couple of times we’d gone in during the week, and it was pretty warm inside the building. Things were just off, you know what I mean?”

Teyla nodded. Yes, she understood. All survivors understood the desolation they’d experienced after realizing something of cataclysmic proportions had happened.

“We found a car with a key in the ignition and piles of ash on the front seats and back seats. I sat on the ash, turned the ignition, nothing happened.”

He sat on the ash. On a dead person.

“How did you get home?” She didn’t have to ask if his wife had survived. She knew instinctively she hadn’t.

“We stayed at the campsite that night. Realized we were totally alone. Realized something bad had happened. We spent the next day outfitting ourselves with knapsacks, filling them with non-perishable foods from the store. Bottled water. I had a gun, and we found some hunting knives for the girls. My youngest, she wasn’t handling it too well. Crying. We were worried about Ann.”

“Your wife?”

He nodded.

“We started walking. You know kids that age; they can’t walk as long as an adult, so after a few hours, they were pretty tired. We noticed a farm with grazing horses. Helped ourselves to four of them, and of course, no one was around at the nearby farmhouse or barn. My oldest daughter had a passion for horses and knew all about saddles and bridles and what horses ate. Don’t know what we would have done without her. She showed us how to ride, and we followed the highways home. We saw no one. Just abandoned cars and trucks—ashes in them. I kind of got the idea they were people, disintegrated.

“Checked out a couple of houses for more food. It was the same story. Unlocked doors. Pets going hungry. We left the doors open so they could get outside. We couldn’t take them with us. When we got home, we found Ann in the bed. Nothing but a pile of ashes beneath the covers. She was probably taking an afternoon nap. She did that sometimes after working in the vegetable garden. We buried her out back and tried to make do the best we could.”

“And your daughters?” she asked softly as they turned and headed back to her farmhouse.

“I made the mistake of leaving them home alone one day while I went foraging at some neighboring homes for more food. When I came back, they were both dead. Hung themselves in the basement.”