Susan Donovan - Take a Chance On Me

Emma walked Leelee up the stairs, letting her arm slip around the girl's thin shoulders, feeling the brush of curls against her wrist.

Leelee looked so much like her mother-lean, long, and lovely. She had Becca's soft brown eyes, too. She also had her mother's biting intelligence and husky laugh.

They reached the top landing and Emma hugged Leelee tight against her, thinking that it was now her job to make sure the daughter didn't make the same mistakes the mother was famous for. Her best friend had certainly left her with a big challenge when she'd left her this twelve-year-old girl.

Emma led Leelee to her room, tucked the lightweight blanket under her chin, and smoothed back a pale curl from her brow. Under Leelee's watchful gaze, Emma leaned down and pressed her lips softly to her forehead.

"Sleep tight."

"I'll try."

"Are you nervous about tomorrow? Is that what's keeping you up?"

Leelee rolled her eyes. "Not hardly. It's all kind of anticlimactic, really."

Emma crossed her arms over her chest and looked down on Leelee's face. "You don't have to compete in the geography bee, you know."

"I said I would. So I will." The girl shrugged. "It's no big deal. I'll be the star of their geek and freak show if they want me to."

Emma sat on the edge of the bed and reached for one of Leelee's narrow hands. The girl was the oddest combination of innocent child and world-weary adult, and Emma knew she had Becca to thank for that. What she didn't know were the details-Leelee didn't want to talk about her life in Los Angeles, leaving Emma to wonder if it was not as bad as she feared or worse than she ever imagined.

"Is there something else on your mind, then?"

Leelee shook her head on the pillow.

"I'm proud of you, sweetie. And I love you. I've loved you since the day you were born-the minute you were born."

Leelee studied Emma from half-closed eyes. "Was it gross-being Mom's coach?"

Emma chuckled. "No, it was beautiful. It was magic. Not gross at all."

"That's because you're used to blood and guts." Leelee's nose scrunched up. "I bet my mom screamed like a maniac-total NC-17 kind of stuff."

"True. But it was still the most wonderful thing I'd ever seen." Emma patted her hand and stood up, stretching.

"Hey, Em?"

"Mmm?"

"I… nothing."

Emma felt the corner of her mouth hitch up. "Sounds like something to me."

"Just good night."

"Good night, Elizabeth Weaverton, girl wonder."

After one more touch of her hand to Leelee's head, Emma closed the heavy oak door and stood a moment alone in the upstairs hallway. To her left she could see her father sprawled across his bed, snoring happily, his body lit by the flickering blue light of the TV screen.

At the other end of the hall was her bedroom. She could see in through the open door to the big double bed of her girlhood and the familiar wallpaper of tiny yellow flowers. Emma remembered the summer she and her mother picked out the wallpaper pattern. She'd been thirteen, just a little older than Leelee was now.

Emma's mother had been dead by the spring.

She gripped her elbows and hugged herself tight, thinking that life had a habit of sneaking up on you. Here she was, back in that old bed surrounded by that old wallpaper, a divorced thirty-something raising her friend's child in her dad's house.

Never in a million years could she have predicted this.

She felt Ray nudge the back of her knee.

"All right, old boy."

Emma turned off her father's television, kissed his cheek, then headed down the back stairway to the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of iced tea before returning to the porch rocker.

Ray bumped her leg again, looking for attention, and she laughed. For a woman without a love life, she certainly felt needed in this world.

Emma let her gaze travel about two hundred yards over to the Weaverton place-now the residence of a nice young couple and their little boy-a small white clapboard farmhouse partially hidden by a line of windblown pines. How many nights just like this one had she and Becca met in those trees to plot out their lives?

They hadn't been too good at predicting the future.

Emma pushed against the railing with her big toe and started the rocker moving again, and Ray let his three-legged, blind carcass fold onto the pine-board floor with a heavy sigh. He had the right idea-it was late.

The groan of the rocker sounded like breathing. In accompaniment, she filled her lungs with warm, wet air and let it out slowly. She put down her iced tea and let her hands stroke the soft skin of her upper arms. She let her fingers brush up her neck and across her shoulders and down the front of her loose, thin cotton gown.

She had a perfectly normal body. A strong body. A bit on the ample side-just like her mother and exactly the opposite of Becca-but what else was new? Emma had never been sleek enough or tall enough or thin enough to be considered chic, as Aaron often pointed out.

Her fingers roamed down her softly rounded belly to her thighs and back up along her sides.

Many women her age had already had a kid or two, their bodies stretched by babies that had grown inside them. What did she have? No stretch marks and a career she loved.

Her touch moved to her breasts.

Many women her age had nursed a baby. They knew what it was like to bring life into the world and sustain it with the magic of their own flesh. What was her contribution? Emma had thought about this often enough, and she always came back to this truth: When a pet became a behavior problem, it was often a death sentence, and she used her heart and mind to give living creatures another chance.

That was her gift to the world.

She laid her head against the rocker and sighed, as her hair swept down around her shoulders and brushed against bare skin. She felt the tips of her breasts rise to hard little peaks beneath her light touch, just as nature intended, the flesh blissfully unaware that it was her own lonely hand that strayed there and not the soft, seeking mouth of an infant.

Or the hot, demanding mouth of a lover.

She moved her hands to the softness of her thighs and pushed the nightgown up and away, letting her thoughts stray to the way Aaron once touched her-but a lethal stab of sorrow and anger came with the remembered pleasure.

So as she allowed her left hand to roam up her thigh, she let her imagination veer off toward Thomas Tobin. She remembered the heat of his skin under the cuff of his dress shirt, the flash of longing in his eyes, the way he almost smiled at her, maybe even almost kissed her…

God, how she'd lied to Velvet! Of course she was attracted to him-what woman with a pulse wouldn't be? His eyes were electric. His mouth was stern but sensuous and bracketed by impossibly sexy dimples. He was built out of solid rock.

In Emma's rational mind, she knew Thomas Tobin was too perfect a physical specimen for a woman like her, but this was her fantasy, and by God she was allowed to go ahead and remember how he'd intrigued her, revved her up, how he'd given her goosebumps.

She wondered what made him so damn grumpy. She wondered what he looked like naked.

The thought startled her, but she forged ahead, giggling quietly, trying to imagine what all that hot muscle would feel like under the flat of her palms, what it would feel like to have a man his size press his hard weight into her, wrap his arms around her waist, take her.

She breathed deep, then exhaled slowly.

Her reaction to Thomas Tobin was perfectly understandable-he was just different, that was all. Aaron was slim and wiry and dark and for most of her adult life that's what Emma equated with sex-Aaron's whipcord body, his efficient, medium-sized package of maleness, his quick, light movements and charming smile.