Think About Love (23 page)

"Maybe you want to wash in the stream," he said. "There's mud all over your face."

She realized she'd been holding her breath, and carefully let it out. She crouched beside the stream and rinsed her mud-streaked hands in the icy water. Then she used hands and water to bathe her face as Cal crouched beside her and washed his hands.

"Your face is OK," she said, "but your jacket...." Her muddy handprints marred the smooth beige of his jacket, where she'd clutched him when he kissed her inside the cave.

"It doesn't matter," he said.

She stood and stared down at his sweater. It had been pale blue when he gave it to her, but now it was streaked with mud, and at one spot near the peak of her left breast, she must have snagged the sweater on the rocks.

"I think I've ruined your sweater."

"Forget it," he snapped.

She backed away from the stream and pulled her helmet off. The strap snagged in her hair, and she ripped the clip and pins out and sent hair tumbling down her back. All around her, the trees stretched tall and dark green, the ground under her feet a carpet of last year's cedar droppings. She couldn't remember ever feeling quite so uncomfortable.

Last night she'd been crawling with awkwardness until they made love. Now, after what she'd said to him in the cave, he might never touch her again.

"My jeans are muddy," she said stiffly. "I can't get back into your sports car like this."

"For Christ's sake! Just get moving!"

She turned and started climbing those cedar-lined stairs fast, but the steepness took her breath away and she had to slow. The sun through the overhead blanket of fir and cedar trees warmed her back and her head, and she pulled herself up, grabbing the rail and pulling with each step.

She wasn't going to look back, didn't care if Cal followed. She'd get out of here, up the stairs, then down the steeply sloping path and across the footbridge to the clearing where the car waited. She'd beat the dust out of her jeans, because the mud would be dry from the sun by then, and she'd enjoy the peace, the evergreens, and the bird-song.

Cal could take his time.

He caught up with her at the top of the stairs.

"Take the sweater off," he said, his voice hooking her from behind. "You're too hot."

Because she realized she didn't want to turn around, she turned and faced him. Nothing showed in his face, neither irritation nor affection. Even when he'd said he loved her, in the restaurant this morning, his face had been carefully blank. She'd always liked that about him. The control, despite the passionate emotions she'd sensed underneath from the beginning. Emotions she'd believed safely channeled into his work, his company.

Today his control frightened her, because she understood that he wanted to control her.

"I can figure out when I'm hot and when I'm not," she said grimly. She
was
hot, and she could feel rebellion boiling in her blood, a child's determination to do the opposite of an adult's command.

She dropped the helmet in her hand, ducked her head, and pulled the sweater off, emerging with her hair tumbled around her face. "Your sweater," she said, pulling it right way out and folding it in half lengthwise with the mud tucked inside before she handed it to him. "I don't need it anymore."

"Running isn't going to help anything, Sam. We need to talk."

"Talk is the last thing we need." She shoved her hair back from her face and bent to pick up the helmet again. "We need a new contract."

Those were the last words either of them said on the walk back to the car, where Cal put the dirty sweater and helmets in his trunk while she stood on the cedar carpet and beat her jeans, driving the dust out in clouds around her.

"I need a bath," she muttered. "A shower."

He used a towel he fished out of the trunk to beat the dust out of his jeans. This was the first time she'd ever seen him in jeans, and maybe that was part of the problem today. After last night she'd felt off balance enough. Then he'd gone back to the cabin and emerged in jeans tight enough that every time she looked at him, she remembered how he'd felt, rising above her, then thrusting inside in a long slow stroke that had her gripping his tightly muscled buttocks, crying out as her world spun away.

"Your helmet," he said, still standing at the trunk. He'd unzipped his windbreaker and tossed it in, dirt and her palm prints resting on the floor of his sports car's trunk.

She picked up her helmet from the ground and handed it to him.

He slammed the trunk and asked, "How do you expect to negotiate a new contract without talking?"

"I don't want a new contract." She'd just said she did and knew she'd better shut up until her brain started running things again. "I want to break the one we have. You signed it under false pretenses. You lied to me."

"What about Kippy? We've got a court appearance this coming Wednesday, to prove we're good parents for your niece."

Kippy. Her anger drained away into a feeling of dread.

He opened the car door on her side. "Get in," he said tonelessly. "We don't need to settle this right now."

She slipped inside the car. How could she have been so selfish as to forget about Kippy? One night alone with Cal, followed by his declaration of love over toast and orange juice, and she'd become so tangled that she'd completely forgotten Kippy, waiting back on Gabriola Island, where Dorothy was only allowed to care for her because she had a medical doctor with her.

"Do up your seat belt." Cal ordered as he slid behind the wheel.

She fumbled with the belt. She'd forgotten about Dorothy, too. How could Samantha be struggling for power with Cal, when Kippy and her grandmother needed her, when she'd promised Dorothy she would look after everything?

She was no better than her mother, promising, then disappearing. Kippy was her responsibility now, and she'd find a way, somehow she would find a way through this minefield with Cal and she
would
make a stable world for Kippy.

They drove back to the resort in silence as the sun slipped lower in the sky. When Cal pulled up outside the cabin, he turned off the engine but didn't undo his seat belt.

She turned her head. She felt cold, empty, needed to stay that way, to clear the emotional turmoil of the last week.

Cal said, "I'll be in court Wednesday, no matter what. I wouldn't harm Kippy."

She managed to swallow the desert dryness in her throat. "Thank you. I—" She swallowed twice, hard. "I'll be back at work after I've got permission to bring her."

The silence grew. She looked away from him. She wanted to release her seat belt, wanted to escape the confines of the car, and wanted him to turn and look at her, to smile.

To smile?
Was she insane?

"My mother always fought with her husbands. Not at first, but after a while she'd be screaming at them." Her throat was so dry she couldn't seem to moisten it no matter how much she swallowed. "I didn't know I was like that, too. I'm sorry I shouted at you." He'd said he loved her and she'd said no, and she'd been looking for a fight ever since. "I'm off balance, and this marriage—I thought it was a business deal. I don't know how to cope with anything else."

He turned his head and after a moment, held his hand out. Her hand joined his, and she stared at her fingers lying in his. She hadn't managed to get all of the cave dirt from under her nails. Her fingers twitched, curled, and he tightened his grip.

"Friends?" he asked.

She nodded tightly.

"Let's get cleaned up, then."

She nodded abruptly and escaped the car.

Friends. They'd be friends and after dark... lovers after dark. He wasn't Howard, he understood now that she wasn't going to fall in love, that she wasn't going to become soft and malleable, and she'd apologized—sort of—for turning irrational and picking fights all day.

Friends.

Inside the cabin, they shed their shoes and socks at the door. She walked straight into the bathroom and turned on the shower, then turned back to leave the bathroom for fresh clothes before she shut herself in.

Cal stood in the doorway and she stopped abruptly, eighteen inches from him.

"Do friends shower together?" he asked.

She felt her heartbeat in her throat, the moisture again drying from her mouth. If she was going to lose her saliva every time he looked at her, she'd better start carrying lozenges.

He held his hand out to her again. She stared at his hand, couldn't seem to look away. The gold wedding band on his finger, telling the world he belonged to her. Her left hand clenched and she felt her wedding ring tighten with the movement.

Her heart wouldn't stop hammering.

She didn't move the hand closest to his, but her left hand, the one wearing his ring. Their fingers caught, tangled together, and she couldn't look up. She knew it was a bad idea, that letting the loving into the day—no, letting
sex
into the day—would make it harder to separate things in her mind.

She shouldn't have taken her hair down outside the caves, should have kept her bun and her inhibitions and control, at least until dark.

The sun would soon set. Three quarters of an hour more, and she could have hidden her weakness under cover of darkness. He would touch her, his hands sliding into her hair, his mouth seeking hers, and she would hide her response in darkness.

"Have you decided?" he asked gently.

The water pounded into the shower behind her. "Yes," she said soberly.

He unbuttoned her blouse slowly. She stood passive, every nerve stretched for the sensation of his hand brushing her nipples, but he worked the buttons open very carefully without touching her.

When the blouse hung free, he stepped closer and pushed it back. She let it slide down her arms to the floor, then she soberly began unfastening the buttons of his short-sleeved cotton shirt. She had to reach up to push it back, off his shoulders, and her nerves hummed when her breasts brushed his chest through her bra, but he said nothing, although she saw his eyes.

He wanted her. Here, now. In the shower, with evening light bathing the world.

He unfastened the button at the front of her jeans and pulled the zipper down, then smoothed the jeans down over her hips. When he kneeled in front of her, she felt a pulse beat at her center, only inches from his face as he looked up at her.

He placed one of her hands on his shoulder and murmured, "Lift." She lifted first one leg, then the other, as he stripped the jeans from her. Then he smoothed her panties down over her legs, without once touching anywhere near where the pulse was beating so hard and heavy. She should have felt embarrassment, but she stood motionless as he slowly got to his feet, his hands sliding up the outside of her thighs, her hips, settling on her waist.

"Turn around," he commanded quietly.

She turned slowly. Her nerves were screaming from the way his gaze raked over her mostly naked flesh, from the throbbing of her veins. Maybe it wasn't the veins that throbbed and pulsed. Maybe it was the arteries. Maybe—

His fingers slipped under the back of her bra and she felt it spring free. She reached up and slid the straps down off her shoulders and let her bra fall to the floor with her other clothes. He stood behind her now, and every inch of her body was tingled, throbbed, as if he'd sensitized her with his eyes. She waited for him to touch her, to take her breast or her hips or—anything, to allow her to let this painful tension free, to let her free.

His hands settled on her shoulders, and it wasn't enough. She was strung so tight she dare not move, dare not speak, but he didn't pull her back against him and she almost whimpered.

"In the shower," he said. "I'll join you."

She didn't look back, couldn't because she wanted to beg him to touch her
now,
to thrust inside her so she could scream as her crawling nerves demanded.

She stepped into the stream and let water flow through her hair and down her back. She reached for the soap and turned to face the spray, her eyes closed.

She felt him when he stepped behind her. He took the soap from her, his arms bracketing her with bars of muscle as he worked the soap into froth in his hands and put the bar back on its holder. Then he began to lather her.

Slowly, so slowly she had to stop breathing to feel every sensation. Her shoulders and her back, so slowly. Her breasts throbbed, and when his hands slid over her buttocks with lather, she jerked and he murmured something she couldn't hear.

He turned her and she was putty in his hands, enduring the slow lathering of her arms and her throat and the flat planes of her chest above her breasts. Then his hand, freshly lathered, slid down the flat between her breasts and she whimpered as he lathered her midriff and her belly. She felt pressure build painfully between her legs, and he crouched down in front of her, his face intent as he slowly lathered her thighs and her calves and her feet.

Then he began again and she pulled the soap from him and started to lather his chest but he kissed her and she felt his erection bump against her hip. She heard a sound, like a plea in her throat, and he started again, slowly lathering every part of her except her breasts and the pulsing curls between her legs.

"Cal, I can't bear it."

He murmured and her voice lost sound, and he turned her and began lathering her back again and she heard herself cry, "Cal, please, now.... If you don't touch me, if you don't—"

"Hush." His mouth against her ear, and he pulled her back against him, and she melted and sagged, his chest pressed into her back, his sex hard against her buttocks.

"How long...."

His hands, slippery with suds, slid around to her midriff and she closed her eyes and let her head fall back, the water on her face. If he didn't touch her, if he didn't—she couldn't bear... oh....

His fingers slid up the under curve of her breasts and she moaned. Then he began stroking her breasts, milking them with his fingers, his erection hard against her behind, and his hands... she shuddered, heard herself whimper, sobs with each slow stroke.

"I'm going to fall. I can't...." Her legs were failing her... his hands... how could just his hands be doing this to her?