Tender Loving Care (8 page)

All smiles seemed to be locked on the other side of her head. Her heart had been suddenly replaced by a trapped butterfly, her lips were parched enough to crack, and air was having a problem getting in and out of her lungs.

The room was dark, and that helped, but then he switched on her bedside lamp. The soft glow illuminated him as he carefully pulled down her spread and blankets. When he tossed the pillows on the floor, she felt heat travel slowly up her cheeks. The white-sheeted mattress looked too bare. And then he turned to her, and she saw those blue eyes again.

Gently, he unfastened the first button of her blouse. “So…are we going to be nervous?” he murmured softly.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Do we want to change our minds?”

She shook her head, but she certainly didn’t look down. All of her blouse buttons seemed to be undone. Firm, callused fingers pushed the garment off her shoulders.

“Are there two of us scared witless here, or is it just me?” he asked patiently.

“Blast you, Rafe,” she said helplessly. “Would you stop being so darned reassuring and just kiss me?”

His brows shot up in an expression of comical surprise. That relaxed her as even his touch couldn’t have. Her nervousness reflected how long it had been since she’d made love, but she felt no unwillingness. This was Rafe, a man she loved and trusted. A man she could be honest with, a man she could even be nervous with.

A man she wanted very much to make love to, and his first kiss was dangerously delicious.
Hello, Zoe, welcome to earthquake country.
Her fingers fumbled with his shirt buttons, even as she returned pressure on pressure of kiss on kiss. She pushed the shirt off his shoulders as he’d pushed off hers. Under her fingertips was a playground of warm, bare flesh.

His palms skimmed her shoulders, her spine. She felt the clasp of her bra being opened, and then that barrier was gone. Air rushed from his lungs when he felt her bare breasts crushed against him. He murmured something. If she didn’t catch the exact words, the intimacy of his tone was enough to make her knees quake.

His knuckles brushed against her tummy when he unsnapped her jeans. His palms slipped inside to bare flesh, and he learned her with his hands as he languidly pushed down the denim fabric. His lips wandered from her throat to the tips of her breasts, and by the time she lay outstretched on the bed, she had no clothes on and neither did he.

When she felt him trace the scar below her navel, her fingers burrowed in his hair. He must have felt that sudden tension, because his head lifted. For a moment, he just looked at her, and then his head dipped down. He branded her right breast with a kiss, then placed another just over her heartbeat; he counted her ribs with more kisses, but that caressing trail aimed relentlessly lower. Her eyes squeezed closed when she felt his mouth on the thin silver ribbon.

The scar had no feeling; she could have sworn it had no feeling, yet when his tongue traced the line of it, she felt a shattering inside, like color exploding, like a fierce ache that was more compelling than pain.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

He heard her. He climbed back up her body, kiss by kiss, and when he was face-to-face with her, he leaned up on an elbow. As if his heart weren’t pounding nor need tearing through him, he played lazily with a strand of her hair. The thick, low whisper came from the back of his throat. “
Don’t
isn’t a word for lovers, Zoe, and never for us. What’s yours is mine in this bed, and it goes both ways.”

Her skin glowed like ivory under the lamplight. He was aware—too aware—that Zoe was only sure for the moment that she wanted him. Whatever had changed her mind, he didn’t want to know. His conscience pricked him for not asking. It seemed more important—he hoped it was more important—to show her how it could be between them. He kissed the tips of her fingers, then the palm of her hand.

“I read somewhere you should never bring frustrations to bed,” he murmured. “I always thought that was dead wrong, Zoe. This is the worst place I can think of to fake anything. Know that you can bring frustrations to this bed. Or fear. Or old hurts, or a damned rough day. Your scars are mine when I make love to you. I want who you are
with
me.”

She touched his cheek, mesmerized by the thick fringe of black lashes that softened his eyes. The strain on his features, the sapphire sheen in his eyes, was so clearly for her. She answered him in the only way she knew how, by lifting her head and touching her lips to his.

He offered her honesty. He offered her the intimacy and allure of yielding to a man who needed her, just her. He offered her the fragile sensation that she was precious to him. He offered her the irresistible promise of being wanted without boundaries, beyond sense, above thought, past right and wrong.

She took what was hers. The right to love and be loved. She matched urgent touch for urgent touch, kiss for kiss, the heat of her body with his. Heartbeats clashed and skin kneaded skin, and she’d known from the beginning he wouldn’t be a careless lover. He was never that.

When he finally claimed her body, he filled her up, engulfed her with him, with wanting, with long, lean hands and lips and the fierce cadence of heat and desire. Rafe showed no interest in basic satisfaction. He wooed her with abandon, with giving, with the uncontrollable force of an avalanche, with speed and fire and ice. He wooed Zoe, all of her, cells and pores and fingertips and toes. And even when that diamond brightness of release glowed through her on one fierce, sweet cry, she held on to those rights of loving. To that wonder of feeling loved by him, to the awe of loving him. There was the treasure.

Silent as a cat, she’d nearly reached the door when she heard Rafe’s groggy “Where on
earth
do you think you’re going?”

“Go back to sleep,” she whispered. “It’s three in the morning, Rafe. I’m just going out to the couch.”

They’d both napped after making love. She’d wakened to a second fantasy of swift, strong passion, but then afterward she hadn’t slept, couldn’t. She knew she’d have to move away from the warm circle of his arms and return to the living room; the children would be up at six. She wasn’t about to let Aaron or Parker find her and Rafe in bed together.

“Come back here,” Rafe ordered in a low voice.

She shook her head, undoubtedly a motion he couldn’t see in the darkness. Silently, she lifted the chair away from the door. There was no point in talking about it. For two hours, her conscience had tried to make her regret having made love with him. She regretted absolutely nothing, but the reality was that two small children made a relationship impossible. She was guilty of being foolish, but never of being a fool.

She’d just turned the knob on the door when she felt his arms swamp her from behind. Sleepy and warm, he turned her around and wrapped her up as if she were a fragile present and he were the ribbon. His chest hair tickled like a memory, and his forehead touched hers in the darkness. He hugged her, and life seemed so simple. And then his finger lifted the strap on her nightgown. “I like it better when you don’t wear clothes,” he said sleepily.

“This is my favorite nightgown, I’ll have you know.”

“Still no good, Zoe.”

“No?”

“Bare is better. Your skin is better.” He touched the fabric. “This is just silk.”

She smiled, nuzzling just a moment more in the hollow of his throat. He smelled so sleepy and warm, so uniquely like Rafe. His whiskered cheek scraped against her forehead. “Come back to bed.”

“I can’t. You know I can’t. The children…”

“At the moment, Zoe, the only one I care about is you, and you’re not going out to a cold couch in the middle of the night.” He added, “I’ll stay awake; I’ll get you up before they’re up. But you’re sleeping with me.”

His words both warmed and disturbed her. How many thousands of times had she desperately wished for a man who wanted her more than he wanted children? Only that man couldn’t be Rafe. He
had
to care about the little ones, and he had to care more about them than about her, because their future mattered so much.

Still, he wasn’t an easy man to argue with at three in the morning. He led her back to bed, and then, like a man, still wasn’t pleased. Her cheek had to be pressed to his shoulder, her leg anchored gently between his, the covers arranged just so. He even bullied her into closing her eyes, but she whispered, “You
can’t
fall asleep.”

“I won’t. Zoe?”

“Hmm?”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Not
that
kind of I-love-you. Not the words that get said automatically after making love. I mean I
love
you.”

She didn’t have to think. She didn’t even have to open her eyes. “No, you don’t.”

“Funny, but I’m damn sure I do.”

“No. It’s just…needing each other right now. Because we’ve been thrown together in this situation with the kids.”

“If I’d been thrown together with a three-hundred-pound battle-ax with warts because of the kids, I assure you I wouldn’t be in bed with her right now.”

“Thank heavens you’re discriminating,” she murmured, but his mood would not be lightened.

“What I feel for you has nothing to do with the children, Zoe. I’ll tell you as often as I have to, until you finally believe it.” Before she could answer, he’d heaved up on an elbow. Dark eyes bore down on her as he stole first one pillow and then the second from beneath her head. “Honey,” he scolded gruffly, “what I would like you to do, just once, is
not
think about anyone but yourself, what
you
feel, what
you
want, what
you
need. I realize you think you’re a very selfish lady—you certainly keep telling me how selfish and cold-blooded you are—so just try to be that way. Just once.”

“Rafe—” Her nightgown seemed to be skimming over her head.

“I’d better confess right now that three times in a night for an old man like me might be close to a miracle. But we’ll try. Someone’s got to teach you to be selfish, to be greedy, to be just a little bit of a taker. The whole rest of the world mastered those vices a long time ago. It’s not so hard. But you want to pay close attention, because this is a very serious test about what
you
want.”

“Rafe—”

“Are you concentrating?”

There was just no talking to him.

Just as Zoe lifted the toothbrush to her mouth, the bathroom door was nudged open. “Morning, Snookums.” Parker was still trailing his blanket.

“Morning, pumpkin,” she replied to the wearer of the sagging teddy-bear pajamas, and whisked an eye to the doorway where his sidekick stood.

“Morning, Snookums.” Aaron yawned.

“Morning, lovebug.” Her hips shifted back to make room as both boys climbed up on stools and reached for their toothbrushes. Especially this morning, she would have appreciated an ounce of privacy, but the assembly line was already being organized. They brushed and spit in a harmonious trio, followed by three face washes, and then immediately the boys scrambled up on the vanity and perched on either side of her. Aaron patiently held the hairbrush and Parker automatically started to open lipstick tubes to figure out which one matched her outfit. Some day that decision could take time, but today her outfit for work was jeans and a fisherman’s sweater. Parker could choose any color he liked, his favorite game.

“Which perfume today, Zoe?” Aaron asked sleepily.

“This one. You can spray it.” Neither showed the least expression when she unlocked the medicine cabinet to remove a vial of perfume, though they both knew darn well she usually kept the scents on the dresser in her bedroom. “Did you give Uncle Rafe a hard time yesterday?” she asked casually.

Two small jaws dropped. “’Course not. We were wonderful,” Parker assured her.

“I take the question back,” Zoe said wryly. “Let’s put it this way. You are going to go
easy
on Uncle Rafe today, understand?”

“Sure.”

“Sure.”

“Because if you go
very
easy on Uncle Rafe today, late this afternoon you can come visit me and my whales.”

“We will be
awesome.
”

She listened patiently to the rash promises. Aaron was going to make lunch for everyone. Parker was going to remember to flush every time. Both planned to cultivate silence. No one was going to hit anyone even if Aaron hit him first.

“’Scara, Zoe?”

“Thank you.” With the mascara wand in her hand, she leaned closer to the mirror, her movement mimicked by the two urchins, who never seemed to lose their fascination with the mascara wand. She’d just finished one eye when a fourth reflection appeared in the mirror.

All she could think of was:
and now we pay the piper.

The man standing behind her was wearing navy blue pajama bottoms, which were tied with a drawstring below his navel. His arms were loosely folded over a golden chest peppered with dark hair. His whiskered chin gave him an unkempt, dangerous look; his muscled shoulders again made Zoe think of a lumberjack’s, and there was an elemental maleness about this particular man-fresh-out-of-bed that set her nerve endings rippling like the stir of a breeze on the surface of a cool, smooth pond.

His slash of a smile set off waves of more intimate proportions. Suddenly and privately conscious of a delicate tenderness between her legs directly related to the man in question, Zoe felt color seep up her cheeks. It deepened when he uncrossed his arms and moved directly behind her.

“You helping Zoe get dressed?” he asked the twins.

“We always help her,” Aaron affirmed. “She couldn’t do it without us.”

“And I can see you do a terrific job.” Yawning, he reached for his toothbrush…by sliding both arms under Zoe’s from behind her, and made the boys giggle when he applied toothpaste to the brush the same way.

“You look like you got four arms, Snookums!”

And one set was distinctly male, not to mention what was pressing intimately against her back. She scolded him with her eyes in the mirror.

“Shouldn’t I be brushing my teeth in front of the kids?”

Such innocence, and she must have jumped sky high when the fingers of his left hand walked all the way down her spine and ended up with a private little pat. “We’ll just go out and start breakfast,” she said swiftly.

He behaved no better in the kitchen. When she leaned over the table to pour Corn Flakes, her fanny was treated to a surreptitious squeeze. When she reached into the refrigerator for milk, Rafe reached in front of her, slid his hand over her breast and emerged with butter for toast. At the sink, he stood behind her length to length. At the table, he brushed imaginary toast crumbs from her lips. When she bent down for goodbye kisses at the door, Rafe was third in line. He managed a loud smack like the kids, but those weren’t a child’s eyes staring back at her. They were a man’s, and that unrepentant grin made sure she knew it.

She reached for the doorknob with a heart gone thumping and her nerves in shreds.

“Forgot your jacket, Zoe,” he said idly.

“Yes.” She rushed back to the front closet for her navy parka.

“Forgot your purse, Zoe.”

The shoulder strap was dangling from his finger. Completely addled, she snatched that, too.

“Zoe?”

She turned back one last, exasperated time.

“Just wanted to make sure you hadn’t forgotten anything else,” he said cheerfully from the door.

Over lunch with her coworkers, Zoe considered sending Rafe a package of darts in payment for his dangerous sense of humor. She knew exactly what he didn’t want her to forget. The foolish man—if she were knocked out, half dead, unconscious or suffering from amnesia, she still couldn’t forget having made love with him the night before.

But she wasn’t about to pretend that making love solved their problems. She knew it simply aggravated them. For the long term, the twins had to come first. Slowly, her feelings about children had been changing over the past four weeks. Long-closed emotional doors were creaking open, sometimes painfully. Possibilities skimmed the corners of her mind, but nothing she was absolutely sure of yet, any more than she was sure of Rafe. No matter how often she’d seen him bestowing love and caring on the kids, he’d never once mentioned his willingness to take them on without her. All she knew—all she could know—was that making the best long-term decisions for the children had to be her first priority.

But those decisions didn’t have to be handled quite yet, and it was short-term options that plagued her as she slid on a wet suit later in the afternoon. Rafe wasn’t going to be content with making love one time, she knew that.

And she didn’t want him to. Before Rafe, she’d never had to face how seriously both the surgery and Steven’s rejection had affected her confidence as a woman. Because of Rafe, she was coming out of limbo. Feeling again, hurting again, living again, wanting again.

Zoe, you’re in such trouble…

“She’s in the third holding tank. Come on, I’ll show you.” Sandy bobbed a grin at the two boys and threw a quick appreciative glance at Rafe before pushing open the lab door.

Rafe bundled the twins into their jackets, which he’d unzipped during the makeshift tour of the lab and institute Sandy had insisted on giving them.

“Where is she?” Parker tugged at his arm.

Which was the problem that was twisting his gut. According to the little brunette, Zoe was in the water. With a blasted whale. Evidently, she spent a great deal of her time in the water with whales.

Teeth clenched and adrenaline pumping through his bloodstream, he leaned against the metal fence with the kids and waited. When a sleek white fin emerged on top of the water, he felt his stomach tighten up in an acid ball. When the whale arched in the water and lunged back down, he caught a glimpse of the mammal’s size and came darn close to losing his lunch. Zoe was
in
there? Sure, she’d told him what she did for a living, but if he’d really had any idea…

“Well, hi! Darn it, I expected to be done by the time you guys got here!”

“Zoe!”

“Snookums!”

Both boys rushed over to the ladder. Rafe had to wait a minute before the bile trickled back down to his stomach. In a sleek black wet suit, she looked even more petite and far more vulnerable than usual. Halfway up the ladder, she tugged off the hood and tossed her hair. Her smile was natural and infectious, her eyes sparkling with life.

“Well? Did you see George?” she asked the little ones.

“Is
that
George?” Aaron motioned to the water.

“That’s George…probably the biggest baby in the entire Pacific. Not that he’s so large for an orca, he isn’t; he just seems to require more pampering than your average ten whales put together.”

“Did you pet him, Zoe?”

“I’ll tell you exactly what I did with him in just a second.” After peeling off her scuba gear, she tugged off her flippers and then started to unzip her wet suit, talking all the while.

She told the kids how whales had a fantastic gift called echolocation. “See, toothed whales, like the orca, can send out sound beams so powerful that they can detect the presence of their prey, or their enemies, and they can use those same sound beams to find their way if the water’s dark or murky.” She told them that when something went wrong with a whale’s echolocation powers, it could become disoriented and confused; it could even swim toward shore and get stranded at low tide. She told them about the experiment she was doing with George, and a two-ton magnet in the water. “See, the deal is this, guys. Scientists figured out that those sound beams are affected by magnetism. You know what a magnet is, don’t you? And whales are incredibly smart, but not smart enough to understand that certain parts of the land are loaded with magnetism—just as if there were zillions of little magnets in the ground. And we don’t want those whales to get stranded, so we figured…”

The kids asked questions almost faster than she could answer them. Rafe listened, and loved her. Her hair dried fast in the brisk breeze, and locks of chestnut silk fluttered around her face. Her skin turned pink from cold, and she shivered when she first climbed out of the wet suit and tugged on a navy sweatshirt that was obviously three sizes too large for her. Her slim hands moved expressively when she talked; he loved those hands.

Memories of last night washed over him like a fog. He couldn’t let her go. She was a blend of fragility and incredible courage, all give and subtle stubbornness. Animated like this, she gave the impression that she thrived on blithe laughter. He’d never met a more complex woman, or one so deeply caring at the core.

“You
sure
that doesn’t hurt George?”

Zoe leaned over to ruffle Aaron’s hair. “Of course I’m sure, lovebug. I’d never do anything to hurt George. In fact, he’s perfectly free to go whenever he wants, but he’s sort of adopted us here. See, he lost his mom, and we fed him from the time he was a baby, so I think he’s got this idea he’s half human—”

“You have some kind of weapon when you’re down in the water?”

“Weapon?” She raised surprised green eyes to Rafe’s. At that exact instant, he felt something tight begin to ease inside him. She just looked at him, but it was the way coral suddenly touched her cheeks, the way her lips parted, and the sparkle in her eyes turned helplessly soft. All day long, he’d been afraid she’d do something damn foolish, like think too analytically about what had happened the night before. All day long, he’d been braced for the argument that last night had been a one-time-only occurrence for her.

He knew she wasn’t ready to talk about a lifetime commitment; he knew she didn’t yet believe such a commitment was possible for her, not in any relationship where children were involved. Truthfully, he was so certain he’d have a fight on his hands when he saw her today that her soft smile took him aback. Maybe that enigmatic curve of her lips disturbed him even more than a fight would have.

“A weapon, Zoe. Do you go down there protected, in case something goes wrong?”

She shook her head. “Of course not.”

“You usually go down with another diver, at least?”

“Often, yes, but not always. There’s a monitor in the lab, and no one’s ever down for long without someone checking, so occasionally we dive alone. Some whales, particularly the orcas, develop confidence in only one person.” She cocked her head, as if trying to fathom the reason for his questions. “Rafe, even a toothed whale wouldn’t hurt a human unless it was threatened or hungry. Believe me, I know what I’m doing.”

“Exactly how much does George weigh?”

“I don’t know, somewhere around three tons, I imag—”

“Get dressed, would you? You and I are going to have a little talk.”

He delivered his little talk on the beach after dinner, to Zoe’s amusement. He phrased his questions very carefully, so he wouldn’t come across as a Neanderthal-macho-chauvinist. “Look, you could rent out boats if you like the water so much. Or teach oceanography. Or run an aquarium…”

The boys had raced ahead and were playing catch with the tide. The wind had calmed down like a dream, and the water had the sheen of a green pearl blanket. Waves lapped softly, with a rhythm like music and a salt-sting freshness that she inhaled greedily and that was heady as champagne. She tucked her arm in Rafe’s to comfort him because he was so distraught. “Have I said one word about your work with earthquakes? You’re going to tell me that doesn’t have an element of danger in it?”

“That’s completely different.”

“Certainly it is. Because you’re a male, you ox.”

He gave a frustrated sigh. “This has nothing to do with my being a man. It has to do with you being damn fool enough to play with three-ton breaching ‘babies.’”

“Earthquakes are harmless, hmm?”

“I study them. I don’t make a point of being there when one hits.”

“I study whales. And I’m really outstanding at avoiding those that aren’t too fond of humans.”

“You’re only a hundred and ten pounds!” Rafe roared.

“So
that’s
it.” She nodded sagely. “I can’t tell you how easily that problem’s solved. All we have to do is buy doughnuts on the way home. Believe me, I could gain another two pounds really fast.”

He knew better than to push Zoe, but damn the woman! It wasn’t his fault; she gave him no immediate choice. He swung her around and laced his arms around her neck and clamped down on her lips fast and hard. He wanted her
safe.
Preferably naked, warm, beneath him safe, and then if she was still in a sassy mood, he’d welcome that, too.