Sandra Brown - Play Dirty

“It was to me.”

She raised her head. Her swimming eyes found his. Then with a long, mournful sound, she turned toward him and pressed her face against his chest. His arms went around her, drawing her to him, holding her close, tucking her head beneath his chin. He sank his fingers into her hair and massaged her scalp.

She wept and he let her. It was a female thing, a maternal thing. The tears were essential, cleansing, as necessary for healing as the bleeding. He didn’t know how in hell he knew that. He just did. Maybe in times of crisis, you were graced with superior insight like that.

When her crying finally subsided, she tilted her head back against his biceps. “Thank you for coming back.”

“I couldn’t leave.”

“I didn’t want you to.”

“You pushed me away.”

“To keep myself from begging you to stay.”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

He looked deeply into her eyes. “They’re pretty.”

“What?”

“Your eyes. When you cry, your eyelashes stick together in dark spikes. They’re pretty.”

She gave a soft laugh and sniffed. “Yes, I’m sure I look radiant right now. But I appreciate the sweet talk anyway.”

“It’s not sweet talk. I don’t make sweet talk.”

She hesitated a moment, then tucked her face back into his neck. “You’ve never had to. Have you?”

“I never wanted to.”

“With Marcia?”

“She was paid to sweet-talk me.”

“And with me, it certainly wasn’t necessary. With or without it, you were being paid.”

He placed his finger beneath her chin, forcing her to look at him. “Do you think that on that last day I was thinking about the money? Or making a baby? No. I broke every speed limit to get there for only one reason, to see you. That afternoon had nothing to do with anything except you and me. You know that, Laura. I know you do.”

Slowly, she nodded.

“Well, good.” They smiled gently at each other.

She was the first to speak. “You’re not rotten.”

He laughed. “We’re back to that?”

“Did you ever look for your parents? What happened to them after they abandoned you? Do you know?” He didn’t say anything for such a long time that she said, “Forgive the questions. You don’t have to talk about it.”

“No, it’s okay. It’s just ugly.”

But she continued to look into his eyes, hers inquiring.

He supposed she was entitled to know just how ugly it was. “My old man died of alcoholism before he was fifty. I tracked my mother to Omaha. Right before I checked in to Big Spring to start serving my sentence, I worked up enough nerve to call her. She answered. I heard her voice for the first time in, hmm, fifteen years.

“She said hello again. Impatiently, like you do when you answer the phone and the caller doesn’t say anything but you can hear them breathing. I said, ‘Hey, Mom. It’s Griff.’ Soon as I said that, she hung up.” Although he’d tried to form a callus around it, the pain of that rejection was still sharp.

“It’s funny. When I was playing ball, I used to wonder if she knew I’d become famous. Had she caught me on TV, seen my picture on a product or in a magazine? I wondered if she watched the games and told her friends, ‘That’s my son. That Pro Bowl quarterback is my kid.’ After that call, I didn’t have to wonder anymore.”

“Your call caught her off guard. Maybe she just needed some time to-”

“I thought the same thing. Glutton for punishment, I guess. So I hung on to that phone number. For five years. I called it a few weeks ago. This guy answered, and when I asked for her, he told me she’d died two years ago. She had a lot of pulmonary problems, he said. Died slow. Even knowing she was going to die, she made no attempt to contact me. Truth is, she simply never gave a shit about me. Not ever.”

“I’m sorry, Griff.”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters. I know how bad it hurts. My mother abandoned me, too.” She told him about her father. “He was a real-life hero, like a character in the movies. His death shattered Mom and me, but eventually I recovered. She didn’t. Her depression became debilitating, to the point where she wouldn’t even get out of bed. Nothing I said or did made her better. She didn’t want to get better. One day she put herself out of her misery. She’d used one of Daddy’s pistols and left herself for me to find.”

“Jesus.” He pulled her close and kissed her hair.

“For the longest time, I felt that I had failed her. But now I realize that she failed me. Even though this baby was infinitesimal, only weeks from conception, I felt fiercely protective of it, Griff. I wanted to guard it from being hurt, emotionally as well as physically. How could a parent, any parent, relinquish the parental instinct to nourish and protect her child?”

He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. He didn’t have an answer. He’d been asking that about his mother for as far back as he could remember. “I should have been up-front with you about my background. But I was afraid that if I was, you’d think I was the bad seed and choose someone else as a surrogate.”

“I admit I didn’t think too highly of you at first.”

“Tell me,” he said, a smile behind his voice.

“My opinion of you changed when you brought the lubricant.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you again.”

“Hmm, and got very upset when you discovered I hadn’t used it.”

“Yeah, but what really made me mad was that you thought I wouldn’t mind hurting you.”

“So you said. Your angry reaction changed my opinion of you. You cared much more than you wanted to show. I saw that you weren’t nearly as rotten as people think. As you think.”

“Don’t go pinning any medals on me, Laura. You were still another man’s wife, but I started looking forward to being with you. I wouldn’t admit it, even to myself. But I did. It was his idea, and every time you met me, it was because he insisted on it. But after that day you had the orgasm, I stopped kidding myself.”

“So did I,” she confessed softly. “I knew it would be dangerous to be alone with you again. That’s why I told Foster I wouldn’t go back. But I did. And, despite everything that’s happened, I can’t honestly say I’m sorry I did.”

He came close to saying something then, making some kind of profession, the likes of which he’d never thought he would make to another human being. But the timing was off. Way off.

Instead, he took her hand and laid it against his chest, pressing it close to his heart. She wouldn’t know, couldn’t know-for him, who never invited a touch-how significant that small gesture was. But he knew.

She said, “I always wondered…”

“What?”

Looking chagrined, she shook her head. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“What you used.”

“Used?”

“To…you know. While I was in the bedroom, waiting. I always wondered what you did, what you used to get aroused.”

“Oh,” he said around a soft laugh. “I used you.”

“Me?”

“The first time we met there, you had on a soft pink top under your ball-breaker’s suit.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You were wearing the kind of business suit that said you wanted to be taken seriously. Seen as an equal in the workplace, not as a woman. But it didn’t work, because to me you still looked like somebody I wanted to have sex with. Especially that top. It was about the color of this robe.”

“I know the one.”

“So to get it up, I thought about your breasts under the top, all soft and warm. Thought about sliding my hands up under your top and touching them. And that did it.”