The Hellion (14 page)

"It's nice to hear you laugh again," he said.

"It's been a long time since I have. It feels good."

She thought for a moment he was going to touch her; the look in his eyes said he was thinking about it. But then, abruptly, he twisted around to fetch himself a beer from the cooler.

"Want one?" He popped the top and tossed it over his shoulder into the water.

"No, thank you." She bit back the reprimand about littering the lake with pop-tops and told herself it was none of her business. She was only spending one afternoon with him. "Just lime water."

He wedged the can between his legs, tight against his swim trunks, while twisting to reach for the cooler again. Realizing her gaze had followed the can of beer, she turned sharply to study the water beyond her side of the boat until a cold touch on her arm announced the lime water.

They cruised the lake, too aware of each other, yet maintaining a cautious distance at all times. She counted the cigarettes he smoked, the butts he threw into the lake, the beers he downed. When he'd begun his third, she moved restlessly and suggested, "Why don't we swim?" thinking that if he was swimming he couldn't be drinking.

"Anything you say," he complied. "Anyplace in particular?"

"You know the lake better than I do."

"All right. Hang on." His latest

cigarette butt went the way of the
       
161 others, and again the boat shot forward at hair-pulling speed until a few minutes later Tommy Lee throttled down and killed the engine completely.

Rachel glanced around quizzically. "Here?" she asked. They were in an inlet with trees all around, but it was a long swim to shore in any given direction, and there wasn't a soul in sight.

"You want to go somewhere else?"

"I thought we'd go to one of the beaches."

"With all those people? You really want to?"

She turned to find his shaded lenses facing her, but couldn't make out his eyes behind them. "No ... no, this is fine."

"Okay, I'll drop anchor." At the touch of his finger, an electric buzz accompanied the soft shrrr of the anchor line paying out. Silence followed, vast upon the sunny stretch of the blue water with its canopy of matching sky. The sun beat down and shimmered while Tommy Lee downed the last of his beer, fished a Styrofoam floatboard from beneath the foredeck, tossed it over the side, leaned down again, and came up with a lightweight ladder.

"You first." He waved Rachel aft, and she slipped between their two seats toward the stern of the boat, then turned to find him bending to hang the ladder on the side. Straightening, he was already yanking at the single snap at his waist, and a minute later the terry-cloth jacket lay on the seat and Rachel found herself confronted with the entire stretch of his bare chest, mesmerized by the dense Y of pewter gray while it struck her again how much more masculine a man is at forty than at sixteen.

Guiltily she turned her back while releasing the hook at her waist and removing her cover-up. She found it difficult to confront the changes wrought upon them by the years, not only her thinness but his heaviness.

"Last one in buys two bucks' worth of gas," he said quietly.

She looked back over her shoulder, then turned to find him with a nostalgic look on his face. Years ago, when they'd crowded into somebody's car with a gang of kids and driven out to City Park to swim, that had always been the challenge. Nobody had money then, and how happy they'd all been. Now they both had all

the money they needed ...
               
163

She searched for something to say, anything that would lift the heavy weight of remembrance and bear her back to the present. But the past created a tremendous gravity between them, and she sensed him deliberately training his eyes above her shoulders. She knew what control it took to keep them there, because it was equally hard for her to keep her eyes above his waist.

Attempting to sever the skein of sexuality that seemed suddenly to bind them, she quipped, "If I were you I'd take my glasses off before I issued any challenges." Then with a deft movement she was over the side, diving neatly into the deep, cool sanctuary of Cedar Creek Lake. She heard the muffled surge of his body following, then opened her eyes to bubbles and blueness, kicking toward the surface while Tommy Lee was still on his way down. Emerging, she skinned her hands down her face, then saw his head pop up six feet away.

He swung around, tossing his head sharply, sending droplets flying in a glistening arc from his hair.

"Waugh! That's a shock!" he bellowed.

"But much better," she added. "Now I can see your eyes at last."

"I didn't know you wanted to or I'd have taken my glasses off an hour ago."

"They're very attractive, but it's hard to tell what a person's thinking when you can't see his eyes. Can you see without them?"

"Enough to know where I'm going. Come on."

He struck off at an energetic crawl while she followed at the carefully paced stroke of a well-tuned swimmer. In no time at all she met him coming back, puffing. She chuckled and continued on a leisurely turn around the boat, passing him once, twice, then three times while he floated on the miniature surfboard. His arms were crossed upon it, feet drifting idly as she came around for the fourth time and joined him.

"You're back." He smiled.

Rachel dipped below the surface, emerged nose first, her hair seal-slick, and crossed her arms on the opposite end of the four-foot board.

"Yes, I'm back." She propped her chin on her crossed wrists. "You didn't last very long."

"I'm all out of shape."
           
165

"You shouldn't be. Not with the lake right here. You should be swimming every day."

"It looks like you do."

"Just about."

"It shows. Rachel, you look great."

The water washed over the surfboard and she swished it lazily with one hand, her chin still propped on the other. "I told you, I'm too thin."

"Not to suit me." His eyes without glasses were extremely sparkly, almost beautiful with a wealth of deep brown lashes shot with droplets of glittering water. With his chin on a fist, he reached out his free hand to swish the water along the surface of the board, missing her fingers by a mere inch. "Do you remember when I used to see if my hands could span your waist?"

She watched his hand brushing near hers. "Mmm ... in those days I'd have been ecstatic if they had. But now, when they probably could, it would only point out that I'm shriveling up."

Tommy Lee laughed, his teeth white against his dark-skinned face. "Shriveling up? You're a long way from shriveled up, Rachel. I'd say you're in your prime."

"My prime," she said thoughtfully. "That's a palliative offered to people in their forties who don't want to be. I feel shriveled up, after the last two years."

His hand stilled and his expression turned concerned. "Was it bad, Rachel, going through all that with Owen?"

She shrugged and the motion brought a wave of cool water between her arms and the board. "At the time you don't stop to wonder if it's hard. You just do what you have to do, carry on from day to day. Toward the end, when his pain got worse ..." She stopped, mesmerized by the stunning brown eyes studying her across the floatboard. "I didn't come out here to talk about that. I came to forget it."

His cool, wet fingers captured and held hers loosely. "I'm sorry you had to go through that, Rachel. When I heard he had cancer and how bad it got, I wanted to call you a hundred times, just to say I was thinking of you and ask if you needed anything--if I could help you in any way. But I figured your daddy was there with you, and what was there I could do for you anyway?"

Rachel blinked, focusing wide eyes on his. "You did? You really did? It's an odd

feeling to think you were following the events of
  
167 my life all those years."

"But you knew what was going on in mine, too."

"Only what I read in the papers and what people told me. I didn't go driving past your house."

His fingers were warm as he continued holding hers. His thumb moved along her knuckles, then circled her diamond before he went on reflectively. "Funny how people who remember we used to date never missed a chance to tell me what was going on in your life. Sometimes I wanted to tell them to keep their damn mouths shut, keep all their social tidbits to themselves. I didn't want to know how happy and successful you were becoming with Owen. Other times I fed off it. And, naturally, I'd drive past your house and wonder."

Rachel's heart lilted. He was much more honest than she. There were times when she'd experienced some of the same feelings, only she was reluctant to admit it. "Wonder?" she prompted now.

"If he knew about us."

For a moment she didn't answer, thinking of the scar on her stomach that could hardly have been hidden

from a husband.

"Did he, Rachel?" Tommy Lee asked softly.

"He knew I'd had the baby, but he didn't know whose it was."

"Wasn't he curious?"

"We made a pact early in our marriage that the issue would never come up again, once we'd talked it out."

"It says a lot about a man that he can live with a question like that unanswered and never let it come between you."

She wasn't about to tell him that it had been between them, always. They might not have talked about it, but there had been hundreds of times when she'd caught Owen studying her across a room, and she'd known instinctively what he was thinking.

Tommy Lee's eyes pierced her across the speckled blue surface dividing them. "If you had been my wife all that time, I'd have gone crazy wondering."

"From the things you told me the night you talked about your wives, I would have said you weren't a jealous man."

His fingers pulled her hand closer to his chin and

he said raggedly, "They weren't you,
      
169 Rachel."

"Don't," she breathed, trying to pull her hand away. But he held it fast.

"Don't? Don't for how long? Until you really are shriveled up? Until your debt to Owen is paid--whatever it might be? Until you decide to take off his rings?" His hand squeezed so hard the rings dug into her skin. "How long do you intend to wear them, Rachel?"

Her heart was racing faster than before. "I don't know. It's ... it's too soon."

"Is it? Let's see." Without warning, Tommy Lee gave the float board a push that sent it sideways, and in one swift kick brought himself only inches from Rachel's nose. Her heart hadn't time to crack out a warning before one powerful hand circled her neck and scooped her close. He kissed her once, a hard, impromptu meeting of two water-slicked mouths while the wavelets lapped at their chins, accentuating how warm their lips were. During the brief contact their legs instinctively moved to keep them afloat, and the sleek texture of skin on skin brought shivery sensations.

The kiss ended and somehow they were each hanging onto the float board with one hand. Rachel's surprised lips dropped open as Tommy Lee pulled back, staring into her eyes. Her hair coiled around his fingers like a silken tether while he moved a thumb just behind her ear. Water beaded on his dark, spiky lashes and gleamed on his cheeks. They stared at each other, breathing hard, for several stunned seconds. Then Tommy Lee's hand drifted from her neck down one slick shoulder, and beneath the water his calf slid between her knees, then was gone. "Come on." He smiled. "Let's play." And with a twisting sideways dive, he disappeared beneath the surface.

It had been an elementary kiss. His tongue hadn't even touched her; yet she was trembling inside and felt hot and threatened and enticingly sexual. Needing to cool off, Rachel, too, did a surface dive, then took several enormous breast strokes underwater, hoping to come up a safe distance from him.

When she nosed into the daylight again he was trying to get to his feet on the surfboard--with little success. From behind, she watched him battle it,

wondering how many women he'd kissed in
   
171 all these years, and if his reputation had women chasing him, or if he did all the chasing. In particular, she wondered about the woman to whom he'd given the red earrings.

"What did you do that for?" she shouted, treading water.

"What'd I do?" The surfboard rocked and bucked him off. Immediately he began trying to master it again, giving it all his attention.

"You kissed me, Gentry, and you know it!"

"You call that a kiss? Hell, that was barely a nibble. I've learned a little more than that since we were teenagers."

"I'll just bet you have. And with how many different women?"

"I lost count years ago."

"And you have no compunction about admitting it, do you?"

"None whatsoever, because you could become my last if you wanted to."

He had one knee on the board, his backside pointing her way as he struggled to make it to his feet. With several deft strokes she swam up behind him, hollered, "Not on your life, you

no-account Lothario!" and gaily tipped him over.