Jennifer Greene - Silver and Spice

Well. As it happened, her legs were a little cramped. That was the problem with sports cars. Her sleek, elegant calves emerged, followed by the crimson dress from Saks and the pale gold jacket, and last the regally coiled champagne hair. Her eyes were pure emerald. “You think you’re very good at intimidation-”

“And you damn well have to be retaught honesty every time we’re together.” She had her chin stiffly in the air about the same time her toes were. Jake must have suddenly decided she wanted to sit on the hood of his Morgan. Anne was not going to be reduced to making a fuss. If he wanted to argue in the middle of absolutely nowhere, sitting on the hood of a car, on a tree-lined lane in a thick mist… She shivered when his arms suddenly closed on both sides of her hips, deliberately forcing her to face him. “Honesty, Anne? You remember it?” he snapped.

“You’re not angry-you’re scared. You think I don’t know you? I know you shave your legs on Sundays and you turn into a moody little minx right before a storm. I know you, Anne, just as I knew you three years ago, and three years before that, and another three years earlier, too, and back when you were a prim little virgin-”

“Jake.” He had never, that she could remember, hit below the belt. A flush climbed her cheeks. Jake’s thumb, curled under her chin, forcing her head up.

“Don’t you Jake me. You’re not shook up because I told Gramps I loved you but because you know that this round is for keeps. So put an end to it, Anne, if that’s what you really want to do. Say ‘Goodbye, Jake,’ as if you mean it.”

A most unreasonable thing to ask. Her heart was beating out triple time in dismay. Unwillingly, her eyes lifted to his, as vulnerable as a green leaf in the wind. “You want honesty, Jake?” she asked in a low voice. “We have sex between us. That isn’t love. You want more honesty? You never talked me into doing anything I didn’t want to do. I wanted you. I want you now. I will always want you…the whole conjugation of the verb. Anything else between us…would never work.”

She hated Jake, had always hated Jake for making her say things she never wanted to say. His arms suddenly wrapped her up, hugging her close, as he would a child. “That’s what you think? That the only thing we ever had was sex?” She heard the note of shock in his voice. Or was it hurt? Whatever the emotion, it disappeared almost instantly. “You’re joking, honey. When you were eighteen, you weren’t much more than a beanpole with huge green eyes, an orphan who’d been kicked around the block just a few too many times. I suppose you think I found you beautiful even then?”

“Yes.” In spite of herself, a small smile curled on her lips.

“You actually think I wanted you?”

“You couldn’t keep your hands off me,” she whispered.

“True.” He hesitated, his smile dying. “But dammit, Anne, you really don’t believe that sex was my only motivation…”

Her eyes half closed in sudden total weariness, her cheek snuggled against the soft red flannel of his shirt. He could tease all he wanted to; she knew the truth. So did he. And part of that truth was that just being held by him, as he was holding her now, evoked the most special kind of peace. “We make good lovers,” she murmured tentatively. “We would make a terribly unhappy married pair. I don’t know why you can’t leave the subject alone. Don’t you think we make good lovers?” Her fears and frustrations faded as she sank into the warmth and security his arms offered. A spark of Anne’s coaxing humor shone in her eyes, a desire to tease Jake away from his line of questioning. She didn’t want to hurt him.

Jake seemed willing to take her up on the change of subject, a devilish gleam in his eyes. “We make very good lovers,” he growled softly, his large hands framing her face. “Which is one very small reason why I want an arrangement for life.”

“I’d rather take cyanide now. It would be much less painful in the long run.”

A chuckle rumbled in his throat. “You’re so convinced we have a problem with different lifestyles?”

“I know we do.”

“That we don’t share a single value that matters?”

“We don’t.”

“But how else are we going to get children for you, Anne? Who else would take you on but me?”

“Do you want a list of the offers I’ve had?” she demanded. But she was suddenly not feeling quite so lighthearted. Her perch on the car turned precarious when Jake leaned forward and buried his lips in her neck. The tickle of his breath made her shiver restlessly, like the leaves trembling in the night’s whispering wind. She tried to restrain his arms, but didn’t have any effect.

“So you’ve had offers,” he murmured. “But you’ve failed to make a commitment to a man in a gray flannel suit, Anne. You’ve run out of time. And I’m tired of talking.”

Obviously. Now he was into necking on deserted roads like two teenagers with no place to go. He slid his hands inside her jacket and around to the supple slope of her spine. Her troubled jade eyes met his silver ones as his came closer, suddenly holding no more humor than her own. “Jake, I’m not going to marry you,” she whispered desperately.

“We’re not going to talk any more about marriage,” he agreed. “Just violets, Anne. You smell exactly like violets…”

Anne was unwilling to discuss violets. She was unwilling to sit there on top of a car in the middle of nowhere on a night turned cold. His lips coaxed, trailing sweet, persuasive kisses along the line of her stubborn jaw, up to the furrowed frown on her forehead, down over her unhappy eyes. His mouth settled finally on the most difficult obstacle, her two lips pressed firmly together, at the same time that his hands were staging a subtle guerrilla war on her back.

Suddenly, she was sliding off the hood of the car. Her toes touched the gravel roadside; Jake cradled her legs between his. The assault of length to length was not one her heart had been expecting. Their shapes fit together with exquisite puzzlelike perfection. She needed air suddenly, a chance to regroup her scattered objections. “Jake…”

His mouth, hovering, sank down on her parted lips and wouldn’t let go. His tongue whispered over the back of her teeth, stole deeper into her warmth, a lonely tongue seeking company. His hand went to work, rearranging the crushed folds of his corduroy jacket and her velvet one; then he molded her soft, swelling breasts into the muscles of his chest.

He was so warm, so impossibly warm. When he raised his head, his eyes met hers, pure pewter. “All I had to do was see you again,” he murmured gruffly. “That was all, Anne. I didn’t even have to touch you. You, looking so proper at Link’s party, the respect you inspire in other people, your pride in the way you walk and move, all grace, all supple femininity…” A slash of a crooked smile touched his mouth. His hand brushed back a single lock of her ash-blond hair that had stolen loose. “Not always a lady, though.”

Never a “lady” for him… A wanton heart gave in, returning pressure for pressure of soft kisses turned fierce and hungry. She threaded her fingers through his hair, loving the feel of the thick mat curling around her fingers, her palms urging him closer. He smelled like the woods. His breathing grew huskier as his hands roamed with growing insistence over territory they had no business touching, not here, not in the open countryside on a lush, dark velvet night.

“Come with me,” he whispered. “Please come with me, Anne. Just for two short weeks.”

His lips caught hers again, not giving her a chance to answer. Devil hands splayed on her hips and then cupped their slim softness, driving her pelvis into the cradle of his thighs, burying his arousal between them like some sweet private secret. A moan escaped from her soul and echoed out into the night’s silence. “Come with me,” he whispered, a sorcerer’s call.