7
MIKE COULD TELL Beth hadn’t had a good afternoon from her expression as she got into the car. He congratulated himself on noticing her expression at all considering the fact that for the trip into Tucson she’d changed into a scoop-necked red T-shirt tucked into white shorts. He forced himself not to ogle at the creamy expanse of thigh only inches away from his hand as he fiddled with the radio dial trying to find some tunes to serenade them on the way out of town.
“Forget it until we get closer to Tucson,” she said as they drove up Tombstone Canyon and headed toward the Time Tunnel.
He switched off the radio. “Just thought some music might cheer you up.”
She glanced at him, her eyes hidden behind wireframed sunglasses. “How do you know I’m not cheered up?”
“Your mouth gets all tight when you’re upset.”
“My mouth isn’t tight.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Is not.” She pulled on her lower lip and made a face at him.
He laughed. “Now it’s not.”
“It’s all that damned Colby’s fault. He insisted on eating lunch in my workroom, and after he left I couldn’t cut glass without breaking it.”
Mike’s gut tightened. “He didn’t try anything, did he?”
“Like what?”
“You know what I swear if he ever touches you, I’m going to rearrange his face.”
“Thanks, but I think I can take care of myself in that department.” She paused. “He mentioned meeting you at Café Roca last night.”
He glanced over at her. She was staring straight ahead at the two-lane highway. “Yeah, he slithered over to my table wearing his ever-present sport coat.”
“According to him, you said if he’d do right by me, you’d be happy.”
Mike groaned. Apparently it was his lot in life to be misunderstood, especially when it came to Beth. “That’s not quite how it went.”
“Then how did it go?”
“He claimed I’d fail at this cutter production and leave you with your dreams shattered. He said he’d be on hand to help put your dream back together. I said if I truly believed an association with him would be good for you, I’d be happy for you. I just don’t happen to believe it.”
“So let me get this straight. If the right guy came along, you’d turn me over to him with your blessing? You’d send us postcards from the depths of the jungle, and when you came home for visits you’d bring our kids exotic trinkets from the rain forest and ask them to call you Uncle Mike? Is that what you’re saying?”
His stomach churned at the thought of somebody else marrying Beth and fathering her children. But what else could he expect if he remained committed to his explorations in Brazil? “I want you to be happy.”
“That’s not exactly an answer to the question.”
“Yeah, sure. I’d be thrilled to see you hooked up with a terrific guy,” he lied.
“That’s not true, Mike. That little muscle is jumping in your jaw.”
“So what?”
“So that’s how I always knew when you didn’t really mean what you were saying. You know what I think you’d like?”
“I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.”
“I think you’d like me to be your secret lover with no strings attached on your part, and when you’re off in the jungle somewhere, you’d expect me to be true to you.”
Exactly. He was ashamed of how accurately the description fit his fantasy. “What kind of guy would expect a one-sided deal like that?”
“I’m not saying you’d have the nerve to ask it of me. I’m just saying that’s what you’d like, if you could get away with it.”
He sighed and stretched his arms out against the steering wheel. His shoulders were knotted up from spending long hours at a workbench, and he longed for something that would involve big muscle movement. Making love to Beth would be perfect, but he didn’t anticipate that happening in the near future. “I guess any guy would want a deal like that, if he could get away with it,” he finally admitted.
“Well, here’s a news flash for you, Mike. These are the nineties, and you can’t get away with it.”
He sent her a tired grin. “Can’t blame a man for trying.” He rolled his shoulders a couple of times.
“Pull over for a minute and let me work those kinks out before you get so tight you can’t even drive.”
He didn’t have to be asked twice. He found a wide spot next to the road and parked the sedan, although he left the engine running so they could still have air-conditioning.
Beth unhooked her seat belt. “Take off your seat belt and turn your back toward me.”
He followed her instructions and soon her strong hands began exploring the source of his pain.
“You’re tensed up something awful,” she said, rotating the heel of her hand under his shoulder blade. “You shouldn’t have tried to do so much the first day.”
“I took a look at that list of back orders and decided I couldn’t just ease into it.” He groaned as she pushed her thumb against a particularly tender spot.
“You’ll be no good to me if you’re crippled up.”
“A little more of this and I’ll be fine. But if you’re offering to give me another massage tomorrow night, I accept. You’re wonderful at it.”
“Strong hands come naturally when you cut glass all day.”
He leaned into the massage and sighed with relief as his tortured muscles began to relax. “Mmm. That’s great.”
He noticed she’d stopped talking.
“Yeah, right there,” he murmured, thinking she might need the encouragement Still she made no response, although the massage became more vigorous. She really was good at this, he thought. He could get used to it
“God, that’s good, Beth,” he said on a heartfelt sigh.
Abruptly the massage ended.
He turned to her in surprise. She had her head down and she was fumbling with her seat belt.
“All done?”
“Yep.” She didn’t look at him.
He took note of her rosy cheeks and tilted her chin up. “Beth?”
The look of pure desire in her eyes told him all he needed to know about her state of mind. With a moan he pulled her close and sought the honeyed depths of her mouth. Her response was instantaneous as she clutched the back of his head and urged him deeper. But he couldn’t seem to get enough of her. He kept seeking a different angle for greater penetration as he reveled in her explosion of passion.
The console was a frustrating barrier to the full contact he craved, but the separation of their bodies gave him access to the lush curve of her breast straining against her T-shirt. He cupped the weight of her breast through the soft material, and she moaned, pressing the tight bud of her nipple against his thumb. It was all the encouragement he needed to tug the shirt from the waistband of her shorts and reach underneath to flip the catch on her bra. At last he caressed the silken warmth of her skin, skimming his palm up her rib cage until he cradled her breast. His heartbeat drumming in his ears and his groin aching, he kneaded the soft flesh and rejoiced in her shuddering breath.
A car whizzed past and the wind from its passage rocked the car.
She placed her hands on either side of his jaw and eased away from his mouth. “We...have...to stop,” she whispered raggedly.
He teased her nipple with his thumb as he lifted his head and gazed into her eyes. “Or find a lonelier road.”
She grew still, and the flame of desire in her eyes began to cool. “I guess that’s your style, isn’t it?” She shrugged out of his embrace and pulled her shirt down. “For all I know, we aren’t very far from the back road where you tried to seduce Alana the night before the wedding.”
“Hey.” Frustration fueled his anger. He was very close to telling her that her precious older sister had lied about that. “Don’t get bitchy with me. I didn’t start this.”
“Excuse me, but I don’t believe I was the one who grabbed you.” She reached behind her back with both hands to refasten her bra.
Watching her arch her back to do it, which caused her chest to be thrust in his direction, made him almost crazy. “No, you were the one so turned on by giving me a massage you almost couldn’t stand it! I’d like to meet the man who wouldn’t make a move when you give him a look like the one you gave me a few minutes ago. If you’re really not going to let this go further, then stop looking at me like that.”
She tucked her shirt back into her shorts and took a deep breath. “I shouldn’t have agreed to come on this trip with you.”
“I’d willingly take you back, but that’s going to make me late to see my dad. He’s expecting me at a certain time and it’s important that I be there.”
She stared down at her hands clenched in her lap. “I don’t want to mess that up, either. Let’s go.”
He buckled his seat belt and put the car in gear.
After they’d traveled several more miles down the road, she spoke. “You’re absolutely right. I’m sending you mixed signals, because that’s what I am, mixed-up. I wish I could be more like you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She lifted her head, and her gaze was tortured. “Why do I have to want more than sexual satisfaction? With you it’s simple, just like the natives of the rain forest—make love when we have the opportunity and part with no regrets. Why can’t I look at it that way? And you’re right about something else, too. Alana would never have to know.”
“No, she wouldn’t, but...”
“But what?”
Oh, great, now he was having an attack of conscience, just when she was trying to make his case for him. “But I don’t want you to do anything that would go against your beliefs. If making love to me would gnaw at you for the rest of your life, if you wouldn’t be able to look Alana in the eye again, then you shouldn’t do it, no matter how good it might feel at the time.” And it would feel damned good, he thought, glancing at her sitting there beside him. He must be out of his mind to be shoring up her defenses instead of tearing them down with both hands.
A hint of a smile touched her lips. “Is that some kind of reverse psychology, Mike?”
“God help me, it’s the way I feel. You know how much I want you, and you even have some idea of what it could be like between us. If I really thought you could enjoy making love to me with no regrets, we wouldn’t even bother driving back to Bisbee after seeing my dad. We’d check right into a hotel. But you’re not put together that way, and I’m finally realizing it.”
“A hotel?”
Hearing the breathless note in her voice nearly finished him. “Don’t push it, Beth.” He switched on the radio and found a station he could live with—soft rock and pop.
“Alana’s calling again tomorrow morning to check on Ernie’s progress.”
The statement hung between them for several long seconds. “Are you going to tell her I’m here this time?” he asked finally.
“You said once before that I should tell her and let her decide what she wants to do about it.”
“I didn’t actually say you should tell her. I just think that if you do, she’s the one responsible for her actions if she decides to come back.”
Beth was silent for a while. “If she does come home while you’re here, are you planning to say anything about your feelings for me?”
“That’s up to you.” He looked at her. “But personally I think it’s time we got this all out in the open.”
Her voice was almost too low to hear above the radio. “If she thinks you care for me instead of her, she might hate me.”
His heart ached for her. Reaching for the volume knob, he turned down the radio. “I can’t believe that she would,” he said gently. “She might be upset at first, but she loves you, Beth. Ultimately she’d want you to be happy.”
“And would I be happy, Mike?”
The question hit him hard. What did he think he was doing, asking her to risk her heart and her relationship with her sister for some guy who wouldn’t make promises? “Maybe not. Maybe I’d better keep my damn mouth shut, and after my dad’s out of the woods, I’ll just leave town again.”
She didn’t respond to that.
As they reached the outskirts of Benson, he cleared his throat. “Still want that ice cream?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Why not, indeed.”
“I hope they still have butterscotch dipped cones.”
“How long since you’ve been there?”
“Too long.” She moved her seat back and stretched out her legs.
He kept his attention on the road and away from her slender legs with great difficulty.
After a while Beth spoke again. “You know, there was a special feeling in the air during those years when the five of us were always doing things together. Life was just plain fun most of the time.”
“Pete and Ernie were a great combination. What one didn’t come up with, the other one did.”
“I miss the excitement of those times, Mike.” She glanced at him. “I suppose they don’t seem so exciting, considering what you’ve experienced down in South America.”
“My adventures were a different kind of excitement.” He was beginning to think that knocking around the Amazon jungle for eight years had been an effort to replace that sense of excitement and wonder that he’d had growing up with Pete and Ernie and the girls around to make things interesting. Surely not. Life in a small town would be boring to him now, wouldn’t it? So why was he so looking forward to the relatively simple pleasure of a Dairy Queen?
The ice cream shop, located right next to the main road going through Benson, was busy. Mike scored a parking spot by staying alert, and they left the windows down so the car interior wouldn’t heat up while they were buying their cones.
The atmosphere inside the Dairy Queen’s small service area was pure summer, with sunburned people in shorts and flip-flops crowding into the space, debating their choices as they stared up at the array of treats displayed in sun-faded Technicolor on the back wall. Mike thought of all the native children he’d met who had never tasted ice cream. With luck they never would, because that would mean their simple way of life had been destroyed.
But Mike wasn’t truly of their world, and when the freckle-faced kid behind the window handed a butterscotch-dipped cone to Beth and a chocolate-dipped one to him, he experienced a moment of déjà vu, and it felt good. Then another thought came to him, completely unbidden. He wondered what it would feel like to bring his own kid here. Now he’d never considered something like that before. Oddly enough, the idea didn’t panic him the way he might have expected it would.
“Let’s sit out on the picnic table and eat these.” He remembered that’s what Ernie and Pete had always suggested, probably to save the seat covers.
“Do we have time?”
“With the temperature what it is outside, we’ll have to eat these puppies in twenty seconds flat or they’ll be soup. I think we have time.”
When Beth and Mike walked outside, a family with two little children, a boy about four and a girl about three, were just leaving the picnic table in a shady spot next to the ice cream shop. While Mike bit off the top section of his cone he watched the family. The kids skipped around the parents, who were holding hands and laughing as they dodged the children’s game of tag. It was a sweet scene, and Mike watched it with uncharacteristic longing as he took a seat on one side of the old wooden picnic table.
“Mike, you’re dripping.”
He looked at his cone and sure enough, a white river was running from underneath the chocolate layer over the lip of the cone and down between his fingers. He turned the cone sideways and sucked out the melting ice cream before licking the ice cream from his fingers.
“Do you know those people?” Beth asked.
He glanced across the table at her. She was busily attending to her own cone, and the action of her pink tongue and full lips was so unknowingly provocative that the material of his shorts tightened over his straining erection once again. “No, I don’t know them. They just looked like a nice family.”
Beth watched the four people get into a minivan and pull out into traffic. “I wonder what it would have been like to have a mother around.”
“Nice, I guess.” He glanced at her while he continued to eat his cone as quickly as possible. She would make a terrific mother—creative, empathetic, firm without being bossy. Any kid would be lucky to end up with her as a mom. He pictured a couple of little kids sitting beside her, eating their cones and getting the ice cream on their noses and their chins. He smiled.
“What’s that for?” She’d reduced the swirl of ice cream to a cylindrical mound that stuck up over the edge of the cone by about two inches. All the butterscotch was gone.
“Oh, nothing.”
“You’d better watch out. When people start grinning for no reason the guys in white coats come after them with butterfly nets.” Then she took the mound of ice cream in her mouth.
Mike was transfixed by the image. In fact, the image gave him definite pain in the lower reaches of his body. He must have let out a little growl of male anticipation, because she looked up at him, a question in her eyes.
Then she glanced down at his cone. “Flash flood, Mike.”
“Damn.” While he’d been lost in a fantasy orgy with Beth, melted ice cream had covered his hand and dripped all over his shorts.
“Looks like I can’t take you anywhere,” she said, grinning. “Better go over to the drinking fountain and see if you can clean yourself up.”
He did, tossing the cone in the trash can on his way. He had to wait for a couple of boys who were drinking from the old porcelain fountain as if they’d just crossed the Sahara on their hands and knees. The fountain had also been the cleanup spot when he was a kid, he remembered as he finally got his turn and ran his sticky hand under the stream of water. Then he took the bandanna from his pocket, wet it down and began dabbing at the front of his shorts.
Beth came over to watch. “You’re a mess. I don’t remember you dripping all over yourself like that when you were ten.”
Mike kept working away at the spots as the front of his shorts got wetter and wetter. “That’s because at ten I had absolutely no imagination.”
“No imagination? You were the one who convinced me the drainage ditch near your house had.crocodiles in it.”
“I mean no imagination about more adult things.” He glanced around and lowered his voice. “Like how a cylinder of ice cream could stand for something else, especially when a certain woman you’re highly attracted to takes it into her mouth with such skill.”
Beth’s hoot of laughter bounced off the whitewashed block wall of the Dairy Queen. “You truly are obsessed. That’s how I always eat my ice cream cones, and it has no subliminal meaning whatsoever,” she said, still chuckling.
“Good practice,” he muttered.
“And what makes you think I’d want to practice?”
He stopped dabbing and balled the damp bandanna in one hand as he straightened to look at her. “Because you’re one of the sexiest women I’ve ever known.”
“I find that difficult to believe.”
“So do I. It’s been a revelation to me that little Beth, the girl I spent all those clueless years goofing around with, would turn out to be the one woman who can sexually wrap me around her little finger.”
“Could always be the forbidden fruit syndrome.”
“I’ve thought of that. But the way things are going, I’ll probably never know.”
“And how are things going?”
“You’re ready to give in and enjoy the moment just when I’m having a huge attack of conscience about ruining your life forever with my base and greedy nature.”
“So that’s your evaluation?”
“Am I wrong?”
She adjusted her sunglasses. “I think that huge attack of conscience might have something to do with being scared.”
“Scared? Of what?”
“Finding out that you need a woman for more than just sex.”
He stared at her in silence while he tried to come up with a convincing denial of that statement. Trouble was, his gut was telling him she could, just possibly, be right.
“Come on.” She started for the car. “We’d better get moving if we want to catch Ernie before his sleep medication kicks in.”
The radio filled in the lack of conversation between them during the rest of the trip. Mike was busy thinking, and he figured Beth must be, too. Every time he glanced over at her she looked as if she was a million miles away. The twist she’d put on his motives didn’t make him seem like quite the nice guy he’d been telling himself he was.
All this time the emphasis had been on how a physical relationship between them would affect Beth, with the assumption being it wouldn’t affect Mike at all. Maybe he’d begun to realize that wasn’t true. If it turned out he couldn’t live without Beth around, he’d be in a world of hurt. Right now he hadn’t established any connections that demanding, so he was free to pursue his life in any way he chose.
What had begun as a simple need to make love to her had become much more complicated. It was quite possible that she possessed the power to completely upend his life as he knew it. He remembered Pete used to say Be careful what you wish for. Mike hadn’t understood the wisdom in that warning until now.
He found a space in the TMC parking lot and they walked together, not touching, into the building.
As they headed for Ernie’s room, Beth spoke for the first time since they’d left Benson. “I didn’t bring him anything. I’d meant to get him something to make him laugh, and I—forgot.”
“I didn’t bring him anything, either,” Mike said. “But as far as making him laugh, the ice cream splotches on my shorts should do the trick, don’t you think?”
Beth smiled. “Are you planning to tell him how you got in that condition?”
“No, and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that part of the story to yourself, if you don’t mind. We can just say it was very hot and I couldn’t eat fast enough.”
“What was very hot?” she asked, a mischievous gleam in her eye.
“You’re turning out to be a lot of trouble, you know.”
“Oh, I do know.” Her knowing gaze met his.
“After we see Ernie, we’ll talk.”
“Okay.”
They were only a few yards from Ernie’s room when activity erupted from it. A gurney was shoved out and attendants pushed it at a rapid clip down the hall away from them while a physician running behind barked orders.
Mike glanced at Beth in horror and without speaking they took off at a run down the hallway after the gurney. Mike arrived at the hurried procession first.
“That’s my dad!” he cried, grabbing the physician by the arm as he reached him. “What’s happened?”
“We’re taking him to ICU,” the doctor said. “Could be a pulmonary embolism.”
“You mean a blood clot?”
“That’s right.”
“Is it serious?”
The doctor glanced at him. “Let’s hope not.”