The Baby Made at Christmas. Lilian Darcy
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hair hung down around her face in a mess, and she could see it in the corner of her vision, like ropes of caramel taffy. Her mouth still tasted too strongly of mint toothpaste, and of the sweet grapes she’d eaten to mask the mint. When she’d come down to answer the knocking at the office door, she’d expected a delivery of clean linen or liquor supplies or bulk groceries, all of which were due sometime over the next couple of weeks.
Spruce Bay Resort was currently closed, in preparation for the coming spring and summer seasons. It was Monday, but the landscaping crew wasn’t here today, thank goodness. Mom and Dad were on the way back to their new home in South Carolina, her sister Daisy and new husband, Tucker, had left for their honeymoon after Saturday’s small wedding, and her other sister, Mary Jane, the eldest, had gone away yesterday afternoon for three days of indulgence at a spa in Vermont.
“You’d better come inside,” Lee said. Mac was wearing jeans and a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled, comfortable for driving, but not warm enough in the open air chill.
“So angry!” he repeated. “Do you not understand that?”
She forced herself to speak calmly, trying to hose down the mood as best she could. “Well, yes, I do, but we did talk about it. It’s not as if I hid anything, or lied to you.”
“You talked. I was too stunned to react. I had things to think about, too, remember? And by the time I reacted, you’d just...gone.”
Because we never once said it was serious, so why should that change now?
“Want some coffee?” she asked.
“That’s what you have to offer?”
“It’s a start, isn’t it?” It had been a start for them, before. “We obviously need to talk. About why you’re here. And how long you’re staying. And it’s cold. So you should come inside, and we should have coffee. We both like coffee.”
“You drive me crazy.”
“I know.”
“You are nothing like my sister.”
“I know that, too.”
“Or my mother.”
“So you tell me.”
“Or any woman I’ve ever known.” She was like a cat, he’d told her the day after they’d met, and since then she’d embraced the idea. She was good with being a cat. The independence, the pleasing herself, the appreciation for comfort and warmth, but quite a taste for curiosity and adventure, as well.
“Isn’t that what you like about me?” She ventured a grin, but he wasn’t to be softened so easily.
Because it is serious.
“I don’t know if I like anything about you right now, Lee Cherry,” Mac said. He stepped onto the porch, crossed it in two strides, pushed past her as she pressed her back against the open door. Then he turned around. “What is this? The office? Why are we in here?”
“Yes, it’s the office. But there are stairs in back, up to the apartment.”
“You’re living above the resort office? On your own?” He was looming over her, seeming like too much big, strong, healthy beautiful man for the rather dark and confined space.
He was glaring at her with those dark eyes of his, but then they flicked down. To her lips. Which were suddenly hot and dry. The impenetrable gaze flicked back up before she could even swallow. It almost felt as if he’d kissed her, even though his mouth hadn’t come anywhere near hers. She loved the way he kissed.
“With my sister, Mary Jane, at the moment,” she answered him, incredibly annoyed to discover that her voice wasn’t quite steady. “Except that she’s away.”
They had talked. She hadn’t just run out on him. She’d presented him with the whole situation, her decisions and her plan, assuming he’d feel the same way she did, and he had.
He had! He hadn’t given her any kind of argument, hadn’t said a word about wanting to stay together.
“It’s bigger than it looks,” she went on, knowing she was giving unnecessary detail about the Cherry family apartment. “It’s a real home, Mac, not just ‘living above the office.’” She wanted to fill the space with talk, instead of this hyperawareness of his body...of his whole presence. His anger. His attitude. The creeping possibility that she might be in the wrong. “Four bedrooms, kitchen, living room, two bathrooms, above this lower level, which has the office and three storerooms and the double garage. We all lived here, growing up.”
“That’s your parents and your two sisters, running the resort. And you’re the eldest?”
“Middle.”
See? How could it have been serious, if you don’t even know where I fit in my family?
He ignored her correction. “So coffee is upstairs?”
“Yes.” She turned and led the way, relieved that he was the one focusing on mundane detail now.
He followed her. If he’d brought any bags, he’d left them in the pickup. He had his hands free as he came up the stairs behind her, and she remembered all the times he’d followed her up flights of stairs in Colorado and cupped a hand on her butt or wrapped his arms around her and stopped them both in their tracks.
Turned her around.
Kissed her.
More.
It was good to see him. It made her feel like crying, and she didn’t want that, not at all. She’d steeled herself to never see him again, to cut off clean from the very nice fling thing they’d had, because wasn’t it better that way? She didn’t want something that turned messy or ugly or complicated. She didn’t want something that dragged itself out for all the wrong reasons.
Better the clean break.
But now he was here, and her body said she was happy about it, despite everything.
They weren’t talking. Upstairs, he followed her into the kitchen and she did a wobbly job of getting out coffee and milk and operating the state-of-the-art espresso machine she’d brought with her from Colorado, all of it in a silence he didn’t attempt to break. She was aware of his presence with every fiber of her being. The machine began to bubble and hiss, the only thing in the room making any noise.
She turned away from it and there he was, and if the office had seemed too small for his powerful form, the kitchen was even worse. He leaned his hard, jeans-clad butt against the edge of the sink and folded his muscled arms like a nightclub bouncer, and in Colorado she would have gone right up to him and hung off him until he kissed her.
Which would have taken about half a second, and would have been great.
And then one thing would have led to another, because that was what their entire relationship had been about.
Don’t you remember that, Mac?
If he didn’t, she could remind him.
She should remind him.
Because the fact that their relationship had mainly been based on sex was important.
She’d closed the space between them before the plan was even a plan. It really wasn’t conscious or deliberate, it just happened, habit more than anything—the habit of wanting him, and of glorying in the delicious confidence that he wanted her and that they fit together in all the best ways. She slid her fingers past those folded arms, slid and sneaked and burrowed until the arms loosened and dropped, letting her reach all the way around his back.
She didn’t go for his mouth, just stood there with her hips pressed against his hardening groin, and looked up at him, looked into the gorgeous, familiar pools of dark that were his eyes. It was quite simple, the way it had always been. They wanted each other and enjoyed each other, and there was nothing wrong with that. There was this electric thing...feeling,