To Love a Man (33 page)

“You do it,” she said, holding out both the box and her left hand to him.

He took the ring from the box, took her hand in his, and gently slid the ring onto her finger. Then he lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed a lingering kiss to its back. His eyes, looking at her over her hand at his mouth, said a thousand things she knew he would never put into words. She smiled tremulously back at him.

“It must have cost you the earth.” The words had been hovering around the back of her mind, but when she heard them come out of her mouth Lisa could have kicked herself. That was the worst thing she could have said—especially when she loved the ring and the man so much that she wanted to die and he was sensitive about their relative financial positions anyway.

He lowered her hand from his mouth, his movement deliberate, and stared at her. Lisa looked back at him with trepidation. She had spoiled it—that lovely, lovely moment—with her big mouth. She couldn’t even find the words to try to mend it. All she could do was share at him wide-eyed.

“Do you always ask your suitors how much their presents cost?” he asked presently, with a distinct edge to his voice. Lisa was galvanized into speech.

“Oh, Sam, I’m sorry,” she said miserably, clutching his hand. “I didn’t mean it—I just don’t want you to feel that you have to buy me expensive presents. I don’t need them. . . .”

“I think you’d better shut your mouth before you get into real trouble,” he said quite gently, giving her chin an admonitory tap. “Believe me, I can afford the ring. The question is, do you like it?”

Relief that he was going to let her off so easily made her response especially fervent.

“I love it!”

He smiled crookedly at her. “Just the ring?”

It took Lisa a moment to catch on to that. When she did, she flung herself against him, her arms closing tightly around his neck and her mouth burying itself somewhere behind his ear.

“You too. Of course, you too!”

The force of her impetuous action nearly sent both of them tumbling over the edge of the bed to the floor. Sam managed to save them at what was almost the last minute. His arms closed tightly around Lisa’s waist, and he returned her hug with interest, his face buried in her hair. After a moment he twisted around, maneuvering his cast with some difficulty, and lowered her back down onto the mattress. His eyes gleamed brightly blue as he leaned over her.

“Show me.”

The words and the look that accompanied them were unmistakably lascivious. Lisa smiled bewitchingly up at him, her hands coming up to slide seductively along his broad shoulders in their terrycloth covering.

“What did you have in mind?” she whispered, her hands slipping beneath his robe to trail over his hair-covered chest, her nails delicately torturing his hard muscles.

He told her. And showed her. His hands and mouth were unbelievably erotic as they explored her body, leaving no part of her unclaimed. At his direction, she did the same to him, feeling a hot, sweet satisfaction as she elicited groan after groan from his hard mouth. Her nightgown and his robe had long since been discarded; naked, their bodies writhed together, burning where they touched, on fire with a passion that threatened to consume them in its flames. Still Sam withheld the final hard glory of his possession until Lisa was sobbing with desire against his shoulder, wanting him so badly that she was going out of her mind. When he could control his own need no longer, he took her. Her little cry of ecstasy was muffled by his mouth. His body worshipped hers, feeding it and being fed from it in turn. By the time it was over, Lisa felt as if she had been drowned in a red-hot lava sea.

It was nearly dawn before they fell asleep in each other’s arms. Lisa, with no thought of sending him back to his own bed, barely had enough strength left to pull the blankets over them before curling against his chest and falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.

XVI

A
brief knock brought Lisa blinking from sleep. She lay still for a moment, not sure exactly what had awakened her. Sunlight poured in through the windows, bathing her bedroom in a cheery golden glow. A delicious warmth rested against her back. Close to her ear she could hear a man’s steady breathing, and a hard arm curled possessively around her waist. Sam. Lisa smiled, stretching luxuriously as she remembered what had taken place between them the night before, and turned in his arms, meaning to kiss him awake.

“Lisa!”

The muffled summons, accompanied by an impatient knock on her bedroom door, brought her bolt upright. Beside her she could feel Sam stiffen suddenly, and she knew that he had heard it, too. Before she could answer, the door swung open. A handsome, moderately tall young man with a shock of tobacco-brown hair stood regarding them from the doorway, surprise plain on his face.

Lisa gaped at him, as surprised as he was, completely forgetting that she was naked and that, sitting up as she was, he had an excellent view of her bare body to the waist. Beside her, Sam levered himself into a sitting position against the pillows, thrusting the sheet into her hands and indicating that she should cover herself. Blushing, she did.

“Who the hell are you?” Sam growled at the intruder, looking menacing. Which was no small feat, Lisa thought hysterically, when one was caught naked in bed with another man’s wife—by the other man!

“I’m Jeff Collins,” her legal husband answered, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning negligently against the doorjamb. To Lisa’s annoyance, she saw that he was starting to look amused. “You, I take it, are Eastman.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed. Before he could reply, Lisa hastily intervened.

“Did you want me for something, Jeff?” Which was a stupid question, she knew. Obviously he did, or he would not be standing in her bedroom door grinning at her.

“I brought you your Christmas present,” he said, straightening and thrusting his hands into the pockets of his impeccably tailored tan slacks. “Sorry to be so early, but I thought you’d be up: you usually are, by this time. And I’m going out of town on business after lunch, so it was now or never.”

“That’s all right,” Lisa said, feeling a fool as she clutched the sheet to her, miserably aware of Sam’s hard eyes moving from her face to Jeff’s. “You’re right, I’m usually up. But this morning . . .” Her voice trailed off. It was glaringly obvious what had kept her in bed this morning. How could anyone possibly overlook six feet four inches of belligerent male?

“I can see that you got tied up this morning,” Jeff said with admirable gravity, only the twinkle lurking in his eyes revealing that he was laughing at the predicament she was in. “I’m sorry I intruded. I never expected . . .” His voice trailed off, too, as he met Sam’s distinctly unfriendly eyes.

“No, of course you didn’t,” Lisa prattled, hardly aware of what she was saying but knowing that she had to get Jeff out of there before Sam decided to react to the situation. “If you’d wait for me in the sitting room, I’ll be right there. I just have to get something on.” As soon as she said it, she felt herself blushing furiously again. Jeff grinned, saluted her mockingly, and turned away. As he walked down the hall toward the door that opened into her sitting room, he called back over his shoulder, “Oh, by the way, nice meeting you, Eastman.”

Sam did not reply. Lisa clambered out of bed, retrieved her nightgown from where it had wound up on the floor nearby, and pulled it over her head with hands that were not quite steady. Then she went to close the bedroom door. Sam didn’t miss a move she made.

“What the hell is he doing here?” he said with a growl as she picked up her robe from the chaise-longue and slipped her arms into the sleeves.

“You heard him: he came to give me my Christmas present.” Lisa was as flustered as she had ever been in her life. Why, oh why, had she never told Sam the exact nature of her relationship with Jeff? From his deepening scowl, she knew she was going to have to do a lot of explaining before they recaptured the mood of the night before.

“Why the hell is he giving you a Christmas present?” Sam demanded harshly. “Doesn’t the fool know you’re divorcing him? Or did you ‘forget’ to tell him?”

“Of course he knows I’m divorcing him,” Lisa answered indignantly, her hands busy tying the belt of the gray satin robe. “But we’re still friends. Oh, Sam, I’ll explain it all to you in a few minutes. But first let me get rid of Jeff.”

Sam looked at her, still frowning heavily. “All right,” he conceded finally. “Go get rid of him. But if you’re not back here inside ten minutes, I’ll take great pleasure in getting rid of him myself.”

Lisa was back in eight minutes exactly. Sam was seated on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigarette, the toweling robe he had worn the night before belted around his muscular waist. He looked up as she came in. His eyes were a hard, glittering cobalt.

“Well?” he drawled, when she had shut the door but hadn’t immediately said anything.

Lisa sighed, then came to kneel in front of him, looking earnestly up into his stony face. In that position, she told him about Jeff.

He was silent for so long after she had finished that she began to get worried. His face told her nothing. It was totally expressionless.

“Sam?” she queried softly, when she could stand his silence no longer.

“So he’s the only man you’ve ever slept with—besides me?” he asked ruminatively.

“Yes.”

“No wonder you were hot as a firecracker,” he said, his eyes bitter. “And to think I thought it was me! You would have been like that for any man: you didn’t want me—you just wanted sex!”

Lisa stared up at him, barely able to believe what she was hearing.

“That’s disgusting,” she hissed, jumping to her feet and glaring at him furiously. “Sam, if all I wanted was sex, there have been dozens of men I could have slept with! They just didn’t turn me on! You did—do—though God knows why! Do you think you’re the only man who’s ever tried to get me into bed? Don’t be ridiculous! If all I wanted was sex, I could have had plenty!”

“You should have tried it,” he said ironically. “You might have liked it.”

Lisa had to control a strong impulse to slap his stubborn face until he saw stars.

“Do you realize how very insulting you’re being?” she asked at last, her voice deliberately even. “What is between us is special, and it has been from the beginning, and you know it. Your problem is that you’re afraid to trust me, afraid to trust what’s happened to us, because you might get hurt! I never thought you were a coward, Sam!”

He didn’t say anything to that, but he didn’t much like it, Lisa could tell from the sudden narrowing of his eyes.

“What do you want me to do, Sam?” Her voice was softly provocative. “Prove to you that you’re special? I could go out and sleep with another man—or two men, or six men—then come back and compare. Is that what you want?”

Sam’s jaw tightened until white lines appeared around his mouth.

“I’d want to kill every one of them,” he admitted, the taut lines around his mouth adding veracity to his words. “And then I’d probably start on you.” His blue eyes gleamed at her. Lisa felt her anger begin to die.

“Then what do you suggest, Sam? I’ve told you I love you. What do you want me to do to prove it?”

He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes slowly losing that frightening glitter. Then he smiled at her, his mouth rueful, and Lisa knew with an overwhelming sense of relief that it was going to be all right.

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for it,” he said dryly. “It’s too late now for anything else. You’re mine, and I’ll be damned if I’ll give you a chance to change your mind. If you want sex, you’ll have to make do with me.”

Lisa glared at him, torn between anger and laughter. The latter won out.

“I’ll force myself,” she said with mock seriousness. “But you’d better not fall down on the job. Because if you do, you’ll have to take the consequences!”

“No, you’ll have to take the consequences,” he said with a growl, reaching for her and pulling her down on his knee. “If I ever see you even look at another man, I’ll paddle that luscious little bottom of yours until you can’t sit for a year. And then I’ll make love to you until you’re so exhausted you can’t look at anything but me.”

“Threats, Sam?” Lisa murmured into his ear, where her tongue was making a teasing foray.

“No,” he answered, bending her back over his arm and pressing his mouth to her satin-covered breast. “Promises.”

It was past noon before they got downstairs that day.

In the week following, everything seemed fine between them—outwardly, at least. But Lisa, her love making her extrasensitive to Sam’s moods, thought she detected a certain wariness in him that had not been there before, a tendency silently to question her motives where once he had been ready to accept her actions at face value. When he brought her to the point of crying out for his possession while they were making love, she could sense a kind of cynicism in him before he complied with a controlled savagery that he had never previously displayed. She suspected that he still harbored nagging doubts about the sincerity of her love for him, and she could have kicked herself for not having told him about Jeff from the beginning. The whole thing was silly in the extreme, she knew, and if she had not been so crazily in love with Sam she would have giggled endlessly at the idea that he thought she wanted him only for his body or his prowess in bed. Under the circumstances, however, she had never felt less like laughing. But she feared to bring the subject out into the open, feared that any overt action on her part might precipitate a confrontation that she could very conceivably lose. And if she lost Sam now, she thought, she would want to die. She loved him in a way she had never thought to love anyone.

Ever since the night he had come to her room, Lisa had spent her nights in his bed. She told herself it was simply to keep him from making that risky journey up the stairs again, but secretly she knew it was because she feared to give him too much time alone, time to decide he didn’t want her enough to face all the difficulties that loving her entailed. She tried to be circumspect about her behavior, leaving him before anyone else was awake and creeping downstairs after they had all gone to bed, but she had the feeling that every member of the household from Amos to Jay to the most anonymous part-time housemaid knew that she and Sam were lovers. In that day and age, when women took lovers more easily than they bid a hand at bridge, it was ridiculous to feel uncomfortable about openly sleeping with a man to whom she was engaged, she knew. But knowing it and being able to help it were two different things.