Chapter Four

 

 

He shouldn’t have read the teaser on her website. A massage scene involving only neck and shoulders, its sensuality still managed to evoke a purely male reaction. It also impaired his manners. That could be the only excuse for what he’d said. Brax had to admit he’d been imagining ice-cream cones, which was not a bad thing in and of itself. But sex complicated matters, especially when he was in Goldstone for only two weeks. He shouldn’t have given voice to the image.

She smiled that perfect smile of hers, the one that made him weak in the knees. The dazzle smile. “Shall we get started?”

God, yes.

Beautiful eyes wide, she bit her lip. “With the movie, I mean.”

He knew that. “Sure.” It was the slickest dialogue he could muster when he felt as tongue-tied as a teenage boy.

He really shouldn’t have read that teaser. Snippets of it muddled his main goal. Which was...it was...oh yeah, to determine if she could lie without the telling body language that clued a cop into when he was being snookered by a suspect. Yes, that was his goal in coming over tonight.

That and giving Maggie time alone to talk things out with Carl.

He hadn’t picked up the movie because he wanted to watch it with her in a darkened room, sitting close on that big sofa, drinking in the citrus fragrance of her hair and the sweet scent of her skin. Nope, he’d intended to do a little subtle interrogating.

And that’s what he’d do.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said suddenly.

“Like what?”

“Like you can’t decide whether to cart me off to jail for being an axe murderess or...” Her voice trailed off and she bit her lip again. Her nip plumped the flesh to a lush, inviting fullness.

A cop had to be good at schooling his features, keeping his true thoughts off his face and out of his eyes. Brax was usually damn good at it, too, but Simone saw right through him.

Maybe he shouldn’t salivate quite so much when looking at her hair tumbling over her shoulders in artful disarray almost as if she’d been in bed when he’d shown up at her door. But then he’d started remembering that slow sensual massage.

He picked up her hand and placed the DVD in it. “Why don’t you put the movie in?” That should get his mind off creamy shoulders and a bare nape begging to be kissed.

She backed up a step, stopped only by the edge of the coffee table. “Popcorn. I should make some popcorn.”

He pulled a packet from his back pocket and tossed it on the table. “I brought licorice.” Why the hell he’d picked out the candy while waiting in line for the video, he couldn’t say. “Start the movie,” he whispered, as if he were talking about something far different. Her scent teased his nose.

The goal, he repeated to himself as she slipped from between him and the table to kneel in front of the TV.

She fumbled opening the DVD, then again trying to get the disk out. Those damn disks could be tricky. Pushing a button, the player flashed on and a tray slid out. She plopped the disk in, closed the tray, then hopped to her feet and skittered across the living room to the couch. Grabbing a remote, she flopped down on a cushion in the corner and pointed.

Nothing happened.

“Darn it,” she whispered and poked at the remote a couple of times.

He held out his hand. “Here.”

She clutched the gadget to her chest. “I know how to work my own remote.”

He glanced at the blank TV. “I don’t see anything.”

She pursed her lips, narrowed her eyes, and pointed again. Still nothing. She pushed a series of buttons in sequence, with the same result. Nothing.

“You’re a jinx. It always worked before.” She tossed it to him.

He looked at it, pushed one button, and the TV came to life.

“How’d you do that?”

He beamed the way Whitey had last night in the Flood’s End mirror when she told him he should have been a writer. “Remotes are man’s work.”

He pushed a series of buttons and magically the opening credits began to roll.

“Sit.” She gestured to the opposite end of the couch. “Over there.”

He plopped down in the middle, next to her, his knee almost touching hers. “It’s more comfortable here.”

She looked at him, not the screen, where Dorothy was doing...something. In the fading light of the evening sun, Simone’s hazel eyes deepened to a richer shade of green. Her lip biting had transferred a dash of red lipstick to her front tooth. She closed her mouth and licked it off, as if she’d known what fascinated him.

He slid an arm along the back of the sofa until his hand touched the gold of her hair. Soft. Silky. Just as he’d imagined. He took a lock between his thumb and two fingers, stroking it.

“What are you doing?”

Getting lost in the feel of her hair.

Which was not the reason he’d sat so close. No, he’d chosen that exact spot because the sun was setting and the room was darkening, and he’d needed to be close to read the expression in her eyes when he questioned her. At least that’s what he’d told himself, so why wasn’t he doing some basic interrogation?

She leaned over and snagged the bag of licorice he’d thrown on the table. “Can I open it?”

“Sure.”

She ripped the package, pulled out a whip, then offered the bag to him. Brax shook his head.

“I logged onto your website.” That wasn’t what he was supposed to say. He was supposed to ask a question he already knew the answer to, a difficult or embarrassing question about which she might feel the need to lie. To gauge her reaction and analyze how her brain functioned. He was supposed to administer a test.

“Oh.” Her gaze flicked to the TV screen. “You’re missing the witch.”

He heard the music and knew the old witch was riding her bicycle with Toto in the basket. “I’ve seen this part.”

She sucked on the end of the licorice, then bit off a small chunk, chewing as she watched him instead of the movie.

He didn’t realize he’d leaned closer until she put the flat of her hand to his chest and pushed. If she’d used her finger, he’d have lost it completely.

“Brax.”

“Hmm.” He loved the way her lips puckered around his name.

“I might write erotica on the Internet, but I’m not going to lick your ice-cream cone.”

His ice-cream cone reacted immediately, as if she’d said the opposite. “Bad choice of words on my part.”

“It was?” Was that disappointment in her voice? She bit off two more pieces of licorice and stared at him thoughtfully.

“Yeah.” She wasn’t an ice-cream-cone-on-the-first-date kind of woman. “I don’t know what came over me.” A lingering heat from reading about sensual massage had come over him.

And the dazzle of her smile that had flitted through his dreams last night.

She stuck the last bit of red licorice between her lips.

He backed off, leaned heavily against the sofa to run both hands through his hair. Where the hell was his perspective? It wasn’t just his life that had turned upside down in Cottonmouth. He, himself, had become topsy-turvy. He was usually rational, analytical, and focused. His reactions to Simone, however, had proved anything but. “I’m exceptionally sorry.”

She hummed beside him.

“I’m usually more circumspect.”

Then she started to sing along with the movie. Slightly off-key, deeper than Judy Garland’s sweet tones, but Simone’s voice burrowed beneath his ribs and shot up to grab hold of his heart. Something glistened in her pretty hazel eyes. The notion gripped him that she wasn’t singing for Dorothy, but for herself, and she had yet to find her way over any rainbows.

Maggie had told him as much.

He stroked the back of her hand with his knuckles. She hugged her knees to her chest, her bare feet flat on the sofa, her toes curled over the edge. Then she blinked away tears.

He thought she might flick off his touch, but instead she said, “I love that song.” She glanced at him, as if to assess his reaction. “I’m a sucker for sappy movies.”

He was a sucker for her. “We should get to know each other better.”

She gave him a where-the-hell-did-that-come-from look.

“I mean, we should get to know each other better before we start thinking about ice-cream cones.” Not that he couldn’t think about them, in the most politically correct fashion, of course. Whatever that was.

She continued to hug her knees. “I bet Maggie already told you everything there is to know about me.”

And, he surmised, Maggie had probably told her everything there was to know about him. “Does that bother you?”

She thought about it, staring at a point on the sofa beyond his head. “No. Everyone knows everything around here. I suppose you want to know about my spectacular failure in the cutthroat world of technical writing.”

His hand trailed down her leg to her feet where she’d now crossed them at the ankles. “If it’s important.”

“Important? Of course it’s important.”

Why? Everyone failed at something or other in their lives. Divorce. Letting your friend get murdered. Countless errors in judgment with eventual disastrous consequences for someone.

He knew Maggie hadn’t told her about his Cottonmouth failure. He hadn’t given Maggie more than the bare facts without the emotion. He certainly hadn’t shared the guilt. He wouldn’t burden Simone with it now. But he would listen to whatever she needed to tell him.

“Tell me.” Tell me everything about yourself.

She rested her chin on her knees and looked at him. “My mother always says I’m like the little squirrel who runs out into the middle of the road in front of a speeding car. I twitch this way and that way, and before I make up my mind which way to run, I get squashed.”

Her mother. He really did not like the woman without even having met her. “But you’re doing fine now.”

He no longer questioned that she’d thrived in Goldstone. He had the feeling that Simone would thrive wherever life dumped her. After all, she’d always have that smile.

 

* * * * *

 

Simone tipped her head to one side. “Yeah. I feel safe and secure here in Goldstone. This is my home.” Putting her foot down, she tapped against the carpet and floor of her trailer. “It’s got a foundation, you know. Most trailers sit on cinder blocks, but this one’s got a real foundation.”

“It’s a very nice trailer.”

She laughed. Brax couldn’t know how many times she’d heard similar platitudes. “You sound like my mother. She chokes every time she has to say the word trailer so she avoids it like the plague.”

“I mean it. You seem...” He paused. Probably searching for the right word again so he wouldn’t offend her. “Settled.”

It was a good description. Most people never found that settled place. They were always looking for more, needing more, never content with what they had. Simone savored the peace Goldstone had brought her. “I’m doing great. Never better.”

“So, what else do you want?”

“It’s your turn. I answered, now I get to ask.”

He considered her a moment, putting his hand on her foot. Only once he was touching her again did he say, “Okay, shoot your question.”

She read his face like a map. He thought she’d ask about his divorce. Most women wanted to know about a man’s failures in love. Not Simone. She’d had too many failures at love herself.

Like Andrew, her ex-fiancé. Putting it mildly, they hadn’t been compatible in the bedroom. She knew it was all her fault. But sometimes, well, she got carried away. Loudly. Once Andrew even covered her mouth with his hand. It would have been okay, maybe, if he’d kissed her instead, but he’d used his hand to muffle her cries. No, her screams. She was a screamer. Oh my God. Her mother would have been appalled at her lack of control. Excess and exuberance were dirty words in the Chandler household. After that, Andrew simply took care of the problem by not touching her in certain spots.

So no, Simone would not ask about Brax’s divorce. “Did Maggie really beat you up when you were kids?”

He laughed, half relief, half openmouthed wonder, she was sure. “Yeah. All the time.”

“And you never hit her back?”

“She was a girl.”

“But she tortured you mercilessly.”

He shook his head. “Never hit her.”

“But you did retaliate in some way, didn’t you?”

He gave her a crooked smile. “It took years of planning.”

“What did you do?”

“Timing was everything.”

“But what’d you do?” She waited, feeling breathless and wide-eyed.

“Well...”

“Come on, come on.” She twitched her toes under his palm.

The sun had fallen completely behind the hills. The room was dark and intimate. Dorothy was skipping down the Yellow Brick Road. Simone wanted more than Brax’s hand on her foot.

The warmth of his skin heated her on the inside. Too much. He chose that moment to withdraw his light touch, as if he, too, felt the sudden intimacy. And needed to break it. She should have been glad. She’d been rushing toward something she feared she couldn’t handle.

Instead, she mourned the loss. Jeez, she wanted him to touch her. Badly. Three long years badly.

“In the tenth grade, Maggie had a huge crush on Ricky Meyers. So I invited him over to go swimming because we were the only ones in the neighborhood with a pool, one of those big Doughboy things. I told Maggie he was upstairs in my room and wanted to see her.”

She gasped. “You didn’t let her walk in on him naked?”

He nodded. “I was only twelve, and I figured she’d get the shock of her life when she saw him changing into his swimsuit.”

“You were so bad.” But terribly cute.

“Only thing was, Ricky wasn’t just changing into his swimsuit.”

She cocked her head. “What was he doing?”

“Then, I wasn’t sure. She screamed, and he ran out. For weeks afterward, I thought he had sunburn because his face was red whenever I saw him. Beet red.”

“Beet red.”

“Yeah. Beat red.” This time he stressed the word.

Oh my God. She covered her mouth. Her face turned beet red, she was sure. And it made her think of her afternoon fantasies about Brax all over again. “He wasn’t...”

“Yeah. He was,” Brax said gravely.

“Sheriff Braxton, that is the worst prank I’ve ever heard.” She wanted to let go with an exuberant laugh her mother would have disapproved of, while the heat in her cheeks reached deep inside, warming those certain spots of hers to conflagration stage.

Brax raised a brow. “Well, I didn’t know he was going to do that. I didn’t even know what that was. At the time.” He spread the fingers of one hand, keeping the other in contact with her skin, her arm, her elbow, her calf, the back of her ankle, driving her crazy. “I led a very sheltered life.”

“Poor Maggie.” She smiled behind her hand.

“I wasn’t sure she’d recover. My dad grounded me for a month and told me if she was scarred irreparably by the incident, it would be a weight I’d carry on my shoulders the rest of my life.”

“You deserved the worry.” The grin on her lips belied the solemn words, but she couldn’t help it. Nor could she help her quickened breath and racing heart. “But Maggie must have gotten over it by the time she married Carl.”

He laughed then. “All those years of agonizing guilt I suffered, then, when we were drinking champagne after her wedding, she told me she hadn’t been screaming at all. She’d been laughing hysterically.”

“Laughing?”

“Yeah. Ricky Meyers was a tad on the small side. I never knew it, but she was the one who started calling him Tiny Tim.”

“Guess she got you in the end, huh?”

“I learned one of life’s great lessons very early.”

“What’s that?”

“Revenge backfires.”

She laughed, but when she lifted her eyes to his, the smile died away. His blue eyes were suddenly so hot. Burning, blazing. For her. She hadn’t been wanted in such a way in a long, long time. And he did want her. She knew.

He robbed her of her breath. He stole her power of speech. He warmed her skin and peppered it with goose bumps all at once.

Dropping her gaze, she played absently with her toes. He stroked her forearm. Ooh. He was big-time getting to her.

“I want to kiss you, Simone.”

Oh my. The things this man made her feel. He was adorable, like a big huggable grizzly bear with a heart of gold. Did grizzlies have hearts of gold? Well, he did. For the first time in a while, she wanted more than the fantasy on her computer. She wanted to close her eyes and lose herself in his hot touch. As scary as that was.

Very scary. Too scary. She was a baby-step kind of girl. The thought of baring anything, everything—physically or metaphorically—terrified her. What if she got too exuberant? What if he covered her mouth?

But, oh my, she wanted more. Not all-the-way more, just a tiny bit more. Something nonthreatening, but very sexy, very erotic. Something to tease herself with.

He smelled so good. Purely soap and shaving cream laced with the subtle hint of hot hard male. She’d forgotten what an aroused male smelled like. She’d missed that, too.

Simone raised her gaze to his, the light of the TV flickering across his cheek. Then she tucked her feet beneath her and rolled to her knees, putting her hand on the back of the sofa next to his shoulder, her lips inches from his.

“You know, Brax, I’d like to kiss you. But there’s something I’d like even more.”

 

* * * * *

 

God help him, he was about to complicate things. Against his better judgment. But right now, Brax would give her anything. Everything. He couldn’t help himself.

“What do you want?” His voice almost cracked like an adolescent.

He wasn’t a man who usually asked permission. A woman gave signals. A man learned to read them. He didn’t think he was wrong about hers. The quickened rise and fall of her chest, the flush tingeing her flawless skin above the neckline of her T-shirt, and her concentration with her toes. Yet something made him hold back, some indefinable sense that he wanted her sanction. Her unqualified consent to full participation in the sweetest kiss his mind had ever conjured. He anticipated her taste with an intensity so great his hands shook.

He scanned her features, her eyes, her slightly parted lips, and drank in the citrus scent of her hair. He wanted the touch of her crimson lipstick and the lingering taste of licorice.

“I want the fantasy,” she fairly purred.

“The fantasy?” Which fantasy? His? Hers? He’d die to know what they were.

“Yeah, you know, that whole building-tension thing, where you want and you anticipate and you’re pretty sure you’re going crazy, because it’s all you can think about, every moment, sleeping or waking.”

Her words were so damn close to the way he was feeling. “And?”

“Don’t you remember how it was when you were sixteen? You wanted to touch that girl, whoever she was, so badly, your fingers itched and your whole body felt like it was going to explode.”

He’d been seventeen, and the girl was Mary Alice Turner.

“You ached for the touch of her breast through her blouse, wanted the feel of its peak in your palm. You were on the edge, dying, needing.”

Simone’s voice took him back to that time, that place, the backseat of his dad’s Chrysler, sweet, pure, innocent desire consuming him.

“You wanted to get to first or second base, maybe even third so bad you thought you’d die. It was so intense you almost lost it with the thought of touching her most private, intimate spot.”

Her voice and his memories seduced him.

“That’s eroticism,” she whispered. “Wanting but not being able to have. It made you feel so alive, so aware, breathless with desire. And when you finally got what you wanted, if you ever got it, you’ll never forget that moment.” She licked her lips. “Do you remember what that was like, Brax?”

God, yes. He’d wanted Mary Alice with the fervor of teenage hormone overload. He remembered the depths of despair, then the glory of that first kiss and, yes, Mary Alice Turner’s nipple against his palm. He never made love to Mary Alice, but he’d wanted to with every fiber of his being. He couldn’t remember a time that was more intense or made him feel more alive.

Simone was right. Kissing her right now would be great, having sex with her even better, but if he let the need, anticipation, and desire build, he might recapture that feeling of aliveness he hadn’t experienced in a long, long time.

Maybe that was another thing that had been filling him with this sense of restlessness, not only the murder, but also the feeling that life was passing him by without him even noticing. Maybe his memory of Mary Alice had been piqued by the recent goings-on in Cottonmouth, but he’d wondered a couple of times what had happened to her after she left town. Old hurts, past mistakes, previous errors in judgment. They’d consumed him in recent weeks. His dead friend, his dead marriage, his ex-wife. Maybe he’d never shown her the passion she needed to make her feel alive. He knew he’d never truly felt alive in the marriage.

Brax touched Simone’s cheek, then trailed a finger down to her jaw, farther still to the hollow above her collarbone. Again, he trembled with the warmth of her skin. His breath came fast, his gut clenched, and his groin tightened.

He wanted that kiss. He wanted her breast in his palm, his hand in her panties, and his body buried deep inside her. But more, he wanted this, the wild need clutching his chest, the sense that he couldn’t take his next breath without mingling it with hers. The fear that he’d come without a touch, with nothing more than the sound of her voice so damn close to his ear.

She made him feel the blood pounding through his veins, the pulse at his temple, his throat, and his fingertips, the rush of heat across his skin. She made him feel fiercely alive.

“I remember,” he murmured, his gaze holding hers. “And I want that feeling. With you.”

She leaned in, closing the small distance between them, and licked his lower lip with her tongue.

He damn near exploded in his pants.

She did the one thing he couldn’t do for himself. She made him forget his guilt. Even if only for a short time.

 

* * * * *

 

The witch cackled, Dorothy fell asleep in the field of poppies, and the Tin Man cried.

Simone realized they’d missed more than half the movie.

Brax watched her with...intensity. His gaze traveled over her face, coming to rest on her lips. Her skin felt flushed, her body more than aroused, her nipples hard and achy. Her stomach fluttered like one of the heroines in her stories.

“We missed the part where we would have found out if they were sisters.”

His eyes didn’t even flick to the screen. “Yeah, we did.”

“Then I guess we’re both losers.”

He picked up a lock of her hair that rested against her chest, the back of his hand brushing across a nipple for the tiniest moment. A flame sparked inside her.

An answering blaze lit his eyes to a deep blue. “I don’t see any losers around here.”

“I think you’re a nice man.”

He grinned. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that calling a man nice is the kiss of death?”

“Men don’t like to be told they’re nice?” She knew that. They wanted to be told they were hot or macho or hunky or virile or big where it counted. But nice? Not.

“There’s always a but that comes after nice.”

“Not this time. This time it’s the highest of compliments. The last nice man I met, I almost married.” Oops darn. She shouldn’t have said that.

“But you didn’t marry him. Nice wasn’t so nice after all.”

Andrew had been nice. “He just had a little phobia about catastrophic failure.” As if it rubbed off on those closest to the ruined individual.

“I’m sorry.”

She smiled brightly, though her face felt like cracking. “I’m so over it now.” Not. Especially not Andrew’s disgusted whispers in the dark. That was the worst part. Simone, the neighbors will hear you.

Which was why it was much better not to let Brax touch her on any of those certain spots that would make her lose control completely. Now, she wrote about sex without actually experiencing the act. Much safer that way.

“Glad you’re over it.” Brax wrapped her hair around his finger, let it pull loose, then tucked the lock behind her ear. His touch lingered. He traced the shell of her ear, a barely there caress that sent chills and thrills down her spine.

This was what she’d meant about building the need and heightening the senses with anticipation. He’d understood completely. A kindred spirit, looking for something more than the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am of a short vacation fling. When he left Goldstone, they’d both have wild memories, even if this moment was all they had. And there would be no embarrassing hand-over-the-mouth episodes or appalled looks in the aftermath.

She trailed the tip of her finger from his Adam’s apple to the center of his chest. A light stroke, a subtle caress.

He growled low in his throat. “Say it.”

“Say what?” She’d say anything he wanted her to.

“The bumper sticker thing.”

She understood. “Don’t make me bring out the flying monkeys.”

He closed his eyes and murmured, “Say it like you mean it.”

She did, gritting her teeth and infusing emotion into the words. “Don’t make me bring out the flying monkeys.”

He captured her finger and drew it to his lips, then kissed the pad. “Christ, that makes me hot.”

She laughed. “I’m pretty sure it’s never made anyone hot before.”

Warm and wet. Gentle suction and the caress of his tongue. She was suddenly a mass of jangling nerve endings. Her panties dampened. “I really think you better stop that.”

“Does it make you want to go to first base?”

She tilted her head. “What exactly is first base? French-kissing?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding. It’s getting my hand in your bra.”

“No way. That’s second base.”

“Guys don’t care about kissing. They want flesh.”

“But that wouldn’t make sense. Because if putting your hand on my breast—”

“On your nipple.”

“—is first base, then that means second base is getting your hand down my pants. But a home run is going all the way. So what’s third base?”

He put his forehead to hers and laughed, the vibration streaking all the way down through her chest to her legs and even her toes. “Is this like that old Abbott and Costello routine, who’s on first and what’s on second?”

“Actually, we were talking about third.”

He rolled his head to the side and nipped her ear. “Third is using my tongue on you.”

Oh. Ooh. Ahh. She closed her eyes and savored the delicious warmth that spread through her. “I don’t think teenage boys think about that. I don’t think they even know about that.”

He chuckled. “Believe me, they know exactly what it is, and they’ve got some very colorful names to describe it.”

She knew what Andrew had called it, and it wasn’t polite. He hadn’t liked it because Simone got downright embarrassing with her exuberance. “What do they call it?”

This time, Brax laughed outright. “I can’t tell you.”

“I might have to use the terminology in one of my stories.”

“It’s a guy code of honor. I can’t tell.”

“Spoilsport.” She pouted. But he’d made her laugh inside and forget about the mutant ache brought on by too much Andrew-thinking. Andrew-thinking was wrong-thinking at a time like this.

Brax tugged on a lock of her hair. “It’s an advanced technique best left to experts rather than teenagers. So I guess third is getting you to put your hand in my pants.”

She considered his logic. “Maybe.”

“I’m right. I was a teenage boy. Kissing is unimportant. Touching is everything.”

“So you don’t want to kiss me?”

“Kissing is another advanced technique employed by experts designed to make your defenses tumble.”

“Hmm. That sounds like seduction. Maybe you’re not such a nice guy after all.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you.” Then he put his hand on her throat and his fingers on her chin and tipped her chin up. “I want to kiss you. I want to touch you. I want to taste you. I want to be inside you.” His lips brushed hers as he spoke. “But for now, I’ll only do it in my dreams. Until I think I’m gonna die. Until I beg you to put me out of my misery.”

Ooh, she was in trouble. Very big trouble. He made her tingle. He made her want to scream exuberantly, and the consequences be damned.

“I don’t know, Brax,” she whispered, “I might beg you first.”