Kathleen Creighton - The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes

His hands were on her neck, now, so warm and rough…callused and gentle. She wanted to lean and round herself into them, like a kitten; she could feel herself vibrating inside with a deep inner current, like purring. Her eyelids wanted to close.

“I’m not sure…” she licked her lips and felt his lips, his tongue…their moisture blend with hers “…what I should do.”

“Silly girl…you don’t have to do anything, don’t you know that? Just be. ”

She looked at him then, really looked at him, her passion-fogged eyes struggling to focus on his familiar beard-stubbly face. And all at once, as if the fog had suddenly lifted, she felt as if she were seeing him for the first time. Oh yes, there was the openness and honesty she’d seen there before, the character and strength and compassion. But now, for the first time she saw loneliness and longing, and realized that they’d been there all the time. And something else, now, too, lurking like a wild thing behind the challenge in his eyes…a hunger so intense and so agonizing, her loving, giving soul cried out in instinctive rejection of it-though all she let him hear of that was a tiny sound that might easily have been mistaken for a laugh.

Confidence flooded her. Her heart felt certain and strong-in bewildering contradiction to the trembling weakness in other parts of her. “Take my shirt off,” she ordered in a shaking whisper.

She heard a low growl of warning that seemed to come from deep inside his chest, and then his hands were on her shoulders, clutching, pulling…gathering the cold clinging material of her T-shirt and peeling it up and off her like an old skin. The growl deepened in intensity when she reached for him, meaning to return the favor, and he put his hands up like a barricade, holding hers at bay while he looked. Just…looked. Her heart flip-flopped. A great shiver tore through her.

Instantly, he reached for her, offering her his warmth, a sigh of compassion on his lips. But now it was she who held him off, with a scolding cluck and a murmured, “Uh-uh- me… ”

Then she divested him of his shirt, though not nearly as quickly and cleanly as he had hers. Her fingers fumbled on the buttons, and she had to fight a childish urge to rip them apart. She was whimpering, barely realizing it, by the time she’d managed to pull the two halves of the shirt apart; her breathing ceased…her heart hammered as she pushed them back over his shoulders and down.

And just like that the game of seduction they’d been playing collapsed. A shudder rocked her. She gave a horrified cry and dropped the shirt to the floor. “Oh God- McCall, your arm,” she cried as she reached instinctively toward the ugly, dark-crusted slash across the fleshy part of his shoulder. “Oh Lord-I forgot-we should have-here, let me-”

Again, the sound he made was much like a growl. “Sister,” he warned, “don’t you dare stop now.”

His arms came around her, and she gasped when his cold skin met hers. He trapped her gasp with his mouth and gave it back to her, and then her hungry little cries and deep rasping breaths and thundering heartbeats were blending with his in a duet as old as passion and compelling as drums on a hot and sultry night. She no longer heard the rain…forgot she’d ever been chased through a jungle and shot at in a Mayan ruin. Forgot about the fact that there were men who wanted to kill her, and McCall, too. Only one thing mattered, and that was the man in her arms…and the fact that she was in his arms…and the fact that she loved him.

There was no more talking, no more playing at seduction; the rest of their clothing came off…somehow; neither of them remembered how, exactly, or cared. Then he was bearing her down onto a hasty tumble of bedclothes, and his careless and sensitive fingers were urging her body into quivering compliance, molding it to his wishes like a master sculptor. Sighing, she closed her eyes and let his touch paint her world with the colors of joy…primary colors…sunshine colors…like a child’s box of crayons. Then, with the warmth and generosity of spirit that was her nature, she gave the joy back to him.

Poised on the brink of accepting what she so eagerly offered him, he pulled back, his weight braced on his arms. She gave a soft, inquiring cry; she could feel him trembling, all his muscles taut with self-control. And when he spoke, his voice was guttural with strain.

“It’s Quinn,” he said.

A smile broke like a sunrise across her face. “Quinn…” she softly sighed, and wrapped him in that warmth and brought him home.

Exhausted, McCall lay awake, listening to the rhythms of wind and rain and watching the ceiling fan stir sluggishly in the sultry air. Just below his chin and near enough to brush with his lips if he only tilted his head the slightest bit, Ellie’s cinnamon head rose and fell gently, like a boat riding a swell.

He didn’t wonder about the ache of sadness deep inside his own chest, just beneath that tender weight, when such a short time ago he’d known happiness more intense than anything he’d ever imagined. The course of his life so far had taught him that the flip side of such happiness could only be despair.

What had he been thinking of? How had he fallen so short of his own moral code? Not, “Live and let live,” but the code that had dogged him so quietly and insistently all his life, in spite of all his efforts on certain occasions to drown its implacable voice. He’d never been one to act so precipitously, without considering the far-reaching consequences of his actions.

Very short-term, the woman sleeping in his arms was pleasure, the most incredible pleasure he’d ever known. Long-term, she was pain, pain such as he’d promised himself he’d never allow himself to know again. She was that ultimate cruelty-a glimpse of the heaven he couldn’t have. He thought he knew, now, how Moses must have felt, gazing across at that Promised Land.

Short-term, she was sugar and spice, warmth and generosity and laughter and common sense-all the woman a man could ever dream of, wrapped up in one pert and sexy little package. Long-term…there was no way in hell she’d ever want to stay with him. No way in hell.

His heart gave a lurch as the tender weight on his chest lifted. He propped his head on his uninjured arm so he could meet the eyes that gazed sleepily at him, luminous in the lamplight and wondering as a baby’s.

“Hi,” he said, and waited for the miracle of her smile.

“Hi, yourself.” Her voice was rusty with the aftereffects of sex, stimulating recently awakened responses in him. Pain twisted in his belly as he watched the smile break across her face. It’s beginning, he thought. Already.

“Quinn…” she said, testing its sound like a child learning a new word. “Quinn.” She said it again, liking the crisp, clean sound of it. How like him it is, she thought. A little unusual, but simple…uncomplicated. Honest. She stretched to kiss him. “Nice to know you. Nice to know…who I’m kissing.”

“You don’t know me.” His voice was harsh, and she froze in wary surprise, watching him. “You don’t know anything about me, remember?”

She said nothing for several heartbeats, her gaze relentless, so searching, so intent he couldn’t bear it, finally, and looked away. When he felt her small hands on his jaw, firmly pulling him back to her, his chest contracted with the pain of a strange guilty happiness.

“I know enough,” she said softly…stubbornly. “I know everything I need to know.”

Enough for what? he wanted to know. Enough for this? For a few hours of pleasure snatched from a nightmare day? For a few days or weeks out of the rest of his life? He was dismayed to discover that “this” wasn’t enough for him anymore-if indeed it ever had been. That after tonight the “live and let live” numero uno solamente existance he’d nurtured and guarded so carefully for so many years wasn’t ever going to be enough for him again.