Sweet Liar (32 page)

He was the most perfectly formed man she'd ever imagined. He was movie stars, men in underwear commercials, guys at the gym, the construction worker in the red T-shirt who'd whistled at her but she'd pretended she hadn't heard; he was the men in three-piece suits whose brains were as sexy as their bodies; he was lazy, insolent seventeen-year-old boys whose muscles bulged out of their clothes, rodeo stars, and those smooth-cheeked, eyeglassed men who held their children tenderly. He was all of them.

Running her hands over his body while he lay still, so still he might have been asleep, she began to kiss the back of him. When her lips had kissed him from the nape of his neck to the soles of his feet, she straddled his legs and began rubbing her hair over his skin. Stretching out on top of him so she could feel her breasts on his skin, she fit her torso into the hills and valleys of his body.

Somewhere along the way she stopped thinking about him as a person, even about whether she pleased him or not, and began to think only of herself. Remembering seeing that soft bit of skin where his legs joined his buttocks, that hairless, enticing little patch that she'd once seen in the mirror when he'd walked away from her, she hadn't realized then that she'd wanted to kiss that bit of skin. So now she did kiss it: kissed it, sucked on it, ran her tongue over it while Michael lay absolutely still.

It was some time later when Samantha lay beside him, her body vibrating, her breath short and shallow. She wanted him, wanted him inside her, but she was afraid to tell him so. Once, after she and her ex-husband were first married, she'd asked, “Could we do that again?” Instantly he had become furious, telling her that she was saying he was a bad lover. “Don't you know anything? Men
can't
right away. It's physically impossible.”

Now, she was timid with Michael, not wanting to insult him or make him angry. “Michael,” she said softly, but it was difficult to control her voice. “I was wondering if maybe, we could, well, possibly, do that again—if you can, that is.”

With the fury of a storm at sea, Mike roused from his seeming acquiescence to jump on her, his hands on her hips, fingers digging into muscle and skin, as he slammed into her so hard she was sure he'd loosened a couple of back teeth. Samantha saw stars.

Mike halted instantly, hovering over her, looking as though he was afraid he'd killed her. “Sam, baby, are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

Samantha blinked up at him in surprise. “Golly, Michael, I think you
can.”

“Imp,” he said as he stretched out on his back and pulled her on top of him.

In the manuals she'd been given, Samantha had read about different positions, but missionary was the sum total of her experience. Sitting on Mike, she looked down at him with an expression of, Now what do I do?

Lacing his fingers, Mike put his hands behind his head and gave her a look of, You figure it out.

Samantha did.

Lying still beside Mike, her skin sweaty, every muscle in her body limp, Samantha smiled dreamily. “What was that?”

There was a little smugness in Mike's voice when he spoke. “Sam, my dear, you have just experienced what is commonly known as an orgasm. Like it?”

She chuckled. “Michael, had I known you were capable of producing such an effect, on the first day I met you I would have grabbed you by the neck, pulled you into the house, and had my way with you on the foyer floor.”

“Then we would have been in perfect accord, because that's just what I had in mind for you.”

“Ahhh, but would you have respected me in the morning?”

“Speaking of respect, we have two alternatives now: One, we can snuggle together and go to sleep or, two, we can fill the tub with hot water, put in some of your smelly stuff, wash every nook and cranny of each other's bodies, get out, dry each other off, come back in here and I can give you what I think will probably be your very first lesson in oral sex.”

Opening her eyes just a bit, Samantha gave a jaw-cracking yawn and said, “I'm awfully tired, Mike. Maybe we should sleep.” His face fell, making him look like a boy who'd just been told that he wouldn't get to go to the circus after all. Yawning again, she scratched her ribs. “On the other hand, I could use a bath.”

He had her in the bathroom before she could say another word.

I
t was in the bathtub that Mike asked her why she'd waited so long before going to bed with him. He tried to make his question sound as though the answer didn't matter to him, but she wasn't fooled by his tone.

“Richard told me I wasn't any good at sex and that's why he had to go to another woman.”

“And you believed him?” Mike sounded as though he thought she were the dumbest person in the world.

“How the hell was I to know that he wasn't telling me the truth?” she fairly shouted at him. “He'd been to bed with lots of women; I'd been to bed with him and only him. What was I supposed to do, get a second opinion? Was I supposed to go to a bar or somewhere, pick up a man, go to bed with him, and find out whether I was actually bad in bed or not? Let me tell you something, Mr. Confidence, when you believe you're not desirable to men, you bloody well
aren't
desirable.”

It was later, after the extraordinary success of Mike's very special lesson, that he asked her more questions about her ex-husband. Now, rather like boxers resting between rounds, Samantha snuggled her cheek on Mike's bare chest.

“You want to tell me about your ex-husband?” he asked.

“No.”

“Um-hmm.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that I've never yet met a woman who could resist telling anyone who'd listen what a jerk her ex-boyfriend or ex-husband was.”

Lifting her head, Sam glared at him, but he pushed her head back down. For a moment her pride and her wish to talk warred with one another. She didn't want to tell him about her marriage or her divorce because they both made her feel like a failure, but at the same time she'd like to tell someone the truth—not the sugar-coated version she'd told her father, but the
truth.
Spilling her guts won out over pride.

“The first two years my marriage was all right, I guess. We never had any great passionate affair, but we learned to adjust to each other. Richard had a partnership with two other men in a CPA firm, and I worked at ComputerLand.

“Everything was fine, I thought, but one day he came home and told me he was profoundly unhappy. Profoundly. Not very unhappy or extraordinarily unhappy but
profoundly
unhappy. He went on to say that the reason he was unhappy was because he had always wanted to write the Great American Novel, and he knew he wasn't going to get to because he had to spend all his time earning a living.”

She shook her head. “I was shocked. It was the first time I'd heard of this great ambition of his, and I felt guilty because I'd lived with the man for two whole years and had no idea he wanted to do anything except calculate people's taxes. We sat up all that night and talked.”

Pausing, she thought about that night. “I think that night was the closest we ever were before or at any time afterward. We made a bargain that night that for one year I was to support the two of us while he devoted his time to writing. Part of the bargain was that he was to take care of the house since I'd be holding down two jobs.”

She couldn't seem to keep her anger from rising. “I don't know what happened. It started out all right, but then I'd come home from work and the kitchen would still be a mess from breakfast, so I'd clean it up before going to my evening job at the spa, then the laundry would pile up so I'd wash it on Sunday. By the end of a year I was doing everything—housework, earning the living, everything. But I didn't mind because every Sunday afternoon Richard would read me descriptive passages from the marvelous book he was constantly working on. He'd never tell me the plot, he'd just read me those elegant, isolated paragraphs.”

She had to take a breath before going on. “We used to talk about what we were going to buy and where we were going to go when he received his multimillion-dollar advance for the book. Planning our future helped make me feel less tired so that I didn't mind doing housework and earning the living.”

As Mike stroked her hair, she realized that the time with Richard was beginning to fade in her mind. “But the agreed-upon year turned into eighteen months, then into two years, and by the end of two years I was so tired I'm not sure I was even alive.”

Mike felt her body tense as she continued speaking. “But then one day I was at the store and received a call from my father's neighbor.”

Mike didn't say anything, but he had been with Dave then. He was the one who had persuaded Dave to allow the neighbor to call Sam.

“The neighbor told me my father was dying, and when I heard, I just wanted to go home to Richard and have him hold me.” She gave a little snort of derision. “When I heard the news of my father's impending death, I thought I'd reached my breaking point.

“Anyway, when I got home Richard wasn't there. I must have been a little frantic because I began searching through his desk looking for something that might tell me where he'd gone. When that turned up nothing, I went to his bookshelves. Looking back on it, I think Richard must have thought I wouldn't dare look at
his
books because he hadn't gone to a lot of trouble to hide his conspiracy. The books had markers in them and passages highlighted. One by one I read all the passages he'd read to me during the Sunday afternoons. Not one of them had been written by him, all of them were by other writers.”

She took a breath. “By the time I figured out that he hadn't been writing, I wanted to know what he had been doing for those two years, so I looked at his computer. One of the first things he'd asked me to do when I'd set it up for him was to show him how to encode his files so a person had to know a password to read them. It took me only seven words to find his password—the name of a dog he'd had when he was a boy—and I looked to see what he'd been writing.”

She took a while before going on, and Mike didn't say a word, just waited patiently for her to continue. “On the screen was a detailed diary of his sexual liaisons with the woman who used to be his secretary. To this day, Mike, I don't understand why he chose her over me. I don't want to sound vain, but I'm better looking than she is and a great deal more intelligent, and I have a sense of humor whereas she has none. I still don't understand it. I tried very, very hard to please Richard. I tried to give him whatever he wanted. Where did I fail?”

“When did he give you the sex manuals to read?”

“Oh, that. I put my foot in my mouth. After we'd been married a few months, we went to see a movie—I don't remember what it was—but afterward I thoughtlessly said that I didn't understand what all the fuss was about, as sex was so boring. Richard said that maybe our sex lives wouldn't
be
so boring if I just knew a little about sex.”

“And how did you do at your jobs? Successful?”

She smiled. “Yes. I was always being promoted at ComputerLand, and at the spa they had me teach the instructors.”

“And how was Richard's CPA business?”

“I see what you're getting at. He did all right for a while, but then he lost some clients and I think his partners were planning to get rid of him.”

“Sounds to me like you terrified him.”

She sighed. “You know, that did occur to me a few times. I learned to tell him only of my setbacks and my frustrations. He'd listen to my account of something that had gone wrong, then lecture me about how I
should
have done so and so, and afterward he'd be nice to me for days. I kept promotions to myself, but he saw them reflected in my paychecks.”

“Maybe this other woman looked up to him, thought he was her big, strong hero.”

“Jackrabbits would seem brainy to that woman. I used to spend Friday afternoons trying to help Richard by teaching her how to run the office, how to answer the phone by saying something other than, ‘Yeah, what'd'ya want?' She was stupid, plain, thick-waisted, thick-ankled, and never washed her hair. She was rude and tasteless and couldn't comprehend a joke—and she took
my
husband away from me. When we were getting the divorce, Richard said she was a great deal better in bed than I was. He said that plastic dolls were better in bed than I was.”

“And he knew that from experience?”

Samantha giggled. “Maybe a doll would give him someone pretty to look at now and then. Oh, Mike, I don't understand it. Why would someone want to hear of the failures but not the successes of someone they loved? I knew Richard was frustrated in his job. That's why I agreed to support us and give him a chance at big-time success, but he never even
tried
writing. I don't think he so much as wrote a single chapter. He used the two years to ski and play tennis and…and…”

“Bang his secretary.”

“Yes! If he disliked me, why didn't he just ask me for a divorce,
then
have an affair? Why did he have to make me so miserable?”

“Maybe he thought it was fair to make you unhappy since you were making him wretched.”

“Me? But I did
everything
for him. I supported him, cooked for him, cleaned for him, ironed his shirts, hand-washed his sweaters—”

“You did all that and
still
managed to be a success at
two
jobs? It's a wonder he didn't kill you.”

“You're taking his side!” she half shouted as she started to move away from him.

But he pulled her back to him. “Your ex-husband was a stupid, frightened coward, and his lifelong punishment is that he lost you.”

She hugged him, kissed his shoulder. “Oh Mike. I tried so hard to be what he wanted me to be.”

When Mike spoke, there was a definite whine in his voice. “You don't try very hard with me. You haven't hand-washed anything for me, and I didn't even know you
could
iron.”

She didn't laugh in return but was utterly serious. “As far as I can tell, all you want from me is laughter and sex.”

“Found out at last. Meet Michael Taggert, the personification of shallowness.”

Looking up at him, her eyes were filled with what she felt for him. “No, Michael, you're not shallow. Richard was shallow. Shallow and superficial and petty. You…you know how to love.”

As he kissed the top of her head, he put his hand on her bare breast. “Especially right now. Wanta play ‘sit on the tent pole'?”

“Not
again?”
she said, giggling. “I don't know if I'm ready again so soon.”

“Want me to talk you into it?”

“Yes, please,” she said politely, sounding as though she were asking for a second watercress sandwich. “If you wouldn't mind, that is.”

But Michael had his mouth full and couldn't speak.