Almost Perfect Read online

  “I think you’d better bring the horse trailer around,” she called. “We can load stuff into that.”

  He lifted a hand in agreement. And the corners of his mouth in a smile. Yes, Carolyn was one in a million.

  Every muscle in her body seemed to be holding a separate and furious protest of the day’s activities. And her house was a chaotic jumble of boxes, disarranged furniture... and booby traps.

  Together, she and Pete had positioned chairs with casters beneath the windows in the living room; anyone attempting entry through those portals would slip, slide and crash upon first touch. They’d laughingly hung a string of empty cans over the front door no one ever used.

  Carolyn had never dreamed she could be up to her neck in sheer danger and be enjoying every moment.

  “I must be sick,” she unwittingly said aloud.

  Pete looked up from his concentrated attention on a wiring project. He’d tried explaining it to her, but he’d also been absently rubbing his leg while speaking. She wasn’t stupid, not even close to uneducated. But she was human.

  “We’ll keep the guns upstairs,” Pete had told her, unaware he was letting her know far more than the arrangement of their weapons.

  She’d worked beside him all day, hefting boxes out to the horse trailer. That the boxes were mostly empty made little difference, for between sliding through the slowly drying driveway and going up and down steps, the awkwardly sized boxes felt as heavy as if she were hauling books back and forth. And yet, each time she passed him, he’d had a small smile for her or a look that allowed her to regain her flagging energy.

  In the past hour, as dusk fell and the temperature had dropped some forty degrees to a shivering cold subfreezing, she’d abandoned the pretense of moving and, after a quick personal cleanup, had gone to the kitchen to stare stupidly at the contents of her pantry and refrigerator. Nothing appealed, and her brain felt too slow to conjure something out of thin air.

  Pete passed through the kitchen several times during her silent contemplation, but didn’t say anything to her. When she heard his soft, slightly limping footfalls on the stairs, and his progression into the living room, she turned back to the opened refrigerator and inwardly begged it to suggest something to her.

  “Carolyn.”

  She half started. Hadn’t he gone elsewhere in the house? How long had he been standing there watching her?

  “Sit down.”

  When she didn’t move, he stepped forward and took her shoulders in his hands and turned her to the table. “Sit.”

  She did as he commanded.

  He crossed to take her place at the icebox door. After a couple of seconds’ intent study, he withdrew a container of cottage cheese and two apples. He withdrew a couple of spoons from the silverware drawer and a paring knife. He deposited one apple in front of her and the other at his place. He wrested the lid from the cottage cheese and stuck the spoons into the containers.

  “Dinner,” he said, grinning at her.

  She had to chuckle. “That’s horrible.”

  “Horrible? The first sit-down dinner I ever prepare for you and you cast aspersions on it before even trying it?”

  He took the paring knife and sliced into his apple, neatly excising a perfect wedge. He tilted the knife, dropping the wedge neatly onto the slender blade, and held it out to her, lifting his hand in a take-it motion. She did so with a shaking hand. How could such an innocent, nearly banal gesture make her feel giddy and liquid?

  She bit into the apple slice and looked at him at the same time. His eyes were on her mouth, his lips slightly parted. Whatever he did to her, she realized she did something equally unnerving to him. And the realization gave her a jolt of adrenaline, a fresh flare of energy.

  “Better?” he asked..

  She remembered a package of thawed chicken in the meat drawer of the refrigerator. She remembered she hadn’t packed the girls’ latest reading material. She remembered the night before, the feel of his battered hands on her skin.

  She nodded.

  He held out another perfect slice, again letting it rest on the blade of the knife. Here, he seemed to be saying, I cut this just for you. I fought for it, I won it. I prized it out of this complex universe and brought it to you.

  She took it with the reverence a treasure and gift deserved, but held it out to his lips instead, giving it back to him, sharing it with him. His eyes flashed with an unreadable acknowledgment, a hot, silver blue hunger that made her fingers tremble and her loins ache with sudden longing.

  Without saying a word, he rose to his feet and moved to the back door. He locked it carefully, throwing the dead bolt with a loud, definitive clack. He whirled a chair to a safeguard position beneath the knob. He pulled his own 45 from its temporary resting place on top of the refrigerator and tucked it into his pants. He picked up both apples, the knife, and took the pitcher of sun tea from the countertop. When he’d juggled all these items safely into the crook of his left arm, he held out his free hand to her.

  She felt as if she floated up from the chair and had to close her eyes against the shock of his touch. Just the barest brush of his fingertips against hers made her weak with yearning, turned her body into a thrumming want.

  She followed him up the stairs, knowing where they were going, needing to be there with him. They didn’t hesitate on the threshold this time, they had already crossed it, having passed through the storm the night before.

  And yet she felt slightly apprehensive. The night before, even with him battered and bruised, chemistry and electricity had taken over, had swept her over a precipice where rational thought had no meaning and desire reigned wholly supreme.

  Tonight, after a day’s long, hard work, after sending her daughters away with her sister-in-law, after confessing her doubts of him and announcing her willing denial of them, chemistry was forced to take a back seat to emotion.

  He set the foodstuff on her nightstand and the gun beside them. Apples and guns. She was aware of the strange contrast the items and of a certain appropriateness about the picture, that they created a still life as old as time itself.

  “Am I taking things for granted, Carolyn?” he asked finally, when she hadn’t moved.

  “No,” she said honestly, and honestly surprised at his question.

  “I want you to,” he said.

  She lifted her eyes to his, puzzled. He looked terrified.

  And she realized that he was more stunned by his utterance than she, as if it had come from deep within, a place he hadn’t known existed until the words spilled free.

  “I don’t understand,” she said gently. Encouragingly.

  He gave a low rasping sound, as if she were dragging something terrible from within him. “I want you to take me for granted. I want you to know I’m here with you. Really here. I want you to believe in that so strongly, so thoroughly, that you can’t imagine questioning it.”

  His words ran over her body like his caresses had done the night before, and deeper, penetrating her fully. But he didn’t lift his hands to touch her.

  Oh, and they were such sweet words, important words. And as heady as forty-year-old cognac. How she wanted to believe them. How she ached to do as he asked, to simply, easily take him for granted. That was a level of intimacy like none she’d ever dreamed of. But she couldn’t say anything yet. She’d already said so much. It was too soon. Everything about him, about them was tenuous, too new, too uncertain.

  “I want to,” she said, compromising between uttering a lie and blurting out every vestige of the truth.

  He closed his eyes and reached out for her then, drawing her tenderly, gently to his chest. He enfolded her in a reverent embrace, a caress made all the more entrancing because she knew that some part of him understood that like her, he couldn’t speak the words to encompass the depths of what he felt for her.

  And perhaps he never would be able to. The notion made her feel slightly sad and yet deeply sympathetic. Words were vitally important, but as she
knew all too well, they could mask actions. Like, “don’t worry, honey, I’ve got it all under control,” then years later seeing Craig’s name on the back of checks she’d never seen before nor heard anything about.

  Pete’s not wanting her to know about them, in a possible attempt to spare her discomfort or pain, spoke louder than words of how much he could care about her. But his action wasn’t masking words, it was masking causing her pain.

  “In prison, I had ten years to think about the future,” he said softly, letting her know more about him in that single phrase than anything heretofore. “But I didn’t think about it. I let days and nights, whole years, go by without any sense of wonder, any feeling that the future could be a viable entity with a reality of its own.”

  That he was talking about her was obvious, especially when his hands pulled her even closer, pressing her tightly against him. Tears stung at her eyes to realize he saw her as a sense of wonder. A poverty-stricken mother of two, widowed and essentially abandoned...and he saw wonder?

  She raised her head, surprised anew at his height, at how right she felt against him. She pressed a kiss to one of the few places on his face that didn’t sport a bruise. She felt his response shudder through him. Against her.

  “Maybe someday...” she said, not even sure what she was suggesting, not sure exactly what she’d intimated that morning.

  “I hope so, Carolyn. You have no idea how much I hope so,” he said, before lowering his lips to her in a nearly devout kiss, as if sealing a promise or making a vow.

  And yet she had the odd notion that what they were sealing was the moment at hand, that tomorrow was only a dream and, therefore, impossible to reach.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “I’m here,” he answered.

  And without rationality, without thinking about it, his words were enough, his meaning clear. Carolyn knew that the time would come that she would have to consider the empty spaces after his words, the unmade promises.

  But tonight...

  They stripped each other of clothing that night, a slow, thoughtful shedding. She relished the heat of his bare skin against her knuckles as he unthreaded each button, and the way his roughened, scarred hands brushed against her own inflamed and sensitive body.

  As if by mutual agreement, they folded each article of clothing, setting them carefully, solicitously, on either her vanity dresser or draped across the straight-backed chair in the corner of her room.

  Undressing seemed to take forever, a slow, unsmiling ceremony that took on the nuances of a ritual or rite. Like dancers in a graceful, mutual parade, they bared their bodies and therefore their very souls to each other. Touching, yet not, seeing clearly what passion and demand had hidden from them the night before.

  And when they were both naked, he didn’t turn from her to don the latex cloak of protection. He unwrapped it and she sheathed him in it, kneeling before him like a supplicant, a devotee of his sheer masculine beauty, adoring him for thinking of her safety, aching to beg him to disregard the need.

  He drew her up and into his arms, pressing against her, not letting her know how much he wanted her, she thought, but rather, to allow himself the opportunity of savoring her wanting of him.

  The passion that flared so effortlessly between them rose again, but neither of them stirred. The image of the dancers swept through her mind a second time, but this time it comprised those still moments when dancers suddenly restrain all movement on stage, limbs frozen as if caught in an endless moment of time, hands touching, bodies together, passion forever trapped in a frieze of undiluted human emotion.

  She ached to tell him that she loved him, but she couldn’t say the words, afraid they would startle him, make him pull. away from that crevasse that surely could be bridged between them. And by the manner in which he cradled her against his body, she knew he was aching, too. For words, perhaps for futures and certainties. And she empathetically understood neither of them would articulate the nebulous, desperate and complex emotions roiling within them.

  For Pete it seemed a lifetime had passed since their kiss beside the corral the day before. And it seemed a second lifetime passed in the moment between coming upstairs and now, feeling her satin body pressed to his.

  The night before, he’d been caught in a maelstrom of passion, still reeling from the effects of a bashing, afraid for her, and somewhat, of her. Tonight he didn’t feel any fears, any uncertainties, except those which were overt... the future, her safety, his unspoken, highly demanding, unvoiced love of her.

  Strangely, though his body reacted to her in the purest of animal responses, the lack of tension between them, though fraught with lack of definition, flayed him raw and made him want to bury his face in the soft hollows of her neck and hold her forever.

  He’d heard of psychic healers, faith healers, and he’d scoffed at them from the safety of his ringside television seat. He knew now there was something to those seeming charlatans. With one touch, Carolyn had reached inside him to some deeply hidden, darkly buried part of him and, as if by magic, she’d known exactly where to brush a kiss, where to lay a cool, healing hand.

  “Come,” she said, leaning back, drawing him down to the bed. “Just come to me.”

  Aroused though he might have been, her request galvanized him, made him utter her name as a groan, an imprecation. Perhaps a plea. He let her guide him and, as much as he might have wanted to create a perfect, lingering impression on her, some rare moment that would last forever in her memory, on her body, he slid into her as if coming home.

  Her warmth encased him and her arms slid around him, drawing him closer. Her legs slipped behind his, pressing tightly, pulling him deeper and then deeper still. He plunged his arms beneath her, holding her up from the bed, against his chest, gripping her shoulders with his hands, holding her there, keeping her against him, murmuring her name, forcing her, pleading with her, to feel every nuance of his driving need of her.

  The incredible level of emotional intensity thrust him deeper into her, as if by reaching the core of her he would find the core that held her heart, as well. The depth of her. The soul of her. She’d said she’d trust him. She’d said she could live with knowing he’d killed someone in his past.

  As he arched into her, dipping into that well of molten heat, he prayed that was true. And then thought if that kind of blind, unconditional trust wasn’t love, he didn’t know another name for it.

  As unfair as he’d been to her, in not telling her the truth, or his secondary reasons for hiding out in the desert, he’d clung to her words from the morning like a burn victim would ache for a soothing balm.

  And he was burning now. For her.

  Only for her.

  As her legs hitched higher and her hands lowered to the small of his back, pulling him against her, again and again, deeper and deeper still, he found he could only think of one thing: Carolyn. Loving Carolyn.

  Taking Carolyn... to places...neither of them... had known... before.

  Faster and harder he plunged into her. Drowning in her. Dying for want of her. No storm raged outside. But inside a conflagration ignited. Building. Amassing.

  “Carolyn...”

  Enduring. Rising to fever pitch.

  “Carolyn...”

  Inflaming him.

  And too soon...oh perfect...but too soon, he thought, pleading for more time...he plummeted into her, shuddering, yelling her name, he thought but wasn’t sure, digging his hands into her shoulders, dragging her tightly against him to capture him.

  To free him.

  “Carolyn!” he called again, and she clutched him even more strongly, swallowing his cry with her mouth, taking his oath into her, taking him in an impassioned kiss.

  And then her dewy body arched sharply and her head snapped to the right, releasing him, abandoning him, but her fingers pulled him and pulled again. Her hips arced against him and her body heaved in a series of convulsive, shuddering waves. Her teeth were clenched together as if she
were in abject pain and he felt her drawing the last of him within her tight embrace.

  He felt a near sob of release ripped from him and shuddered as he watched her react to it, a buckling, moaned acceptance. Her breathing was beyond ragged, it was tangled and lost. Her eyes were mere slits, glazed and caught in some other dimension of time and space.

  He pressed his lips to her temple and slowly, slowly eased the grip on her shoulders. He bent his head to kiss what surely would be bruised and felt her instinctively tighten around him.

  “Don’t leave,” she said. And though he knew what she meant, he murmured a negative.

  Her body continued to spasm around him, but her breathing began to steady, and her heart beneath his own gained a more even rhythm. As she had the night before, her eyes teared and a few rolled free.

  “Why tears?” he asked, kissing them away, telling himself he wasn’t worried this time, merely curious. And profoundly moved. One day, he vowed, she would laugh instead of cry.

  And then he realized what he was thinking...how far his thinking had come.

  She didn’t answer, merely lifted her arms to enfold him; flexing her elbows at his, jabbing at his muscles, forcing him to press his full weight down upon her.

  “I’ll hurt you,” he murmured, but reveled in the feel of her beneath him absorbing his weight, in the sheer fact that she seemed to relish it.

  “Never,” she said, echoing his own phrases to her.

  God, let her be right, he prayed.

  But he knew she was wrong. She might be granting every gift known to humankind...trust, blind faith, acceptance... but she didn’t know what kind of man he really was. She didn’t know anything at all about him.

  Chapter 12

  Thunk.

  Carolyn sat up. Pete’s arm slid down to her thighs.

  Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

  She cocked her head as if radar equipment had been secretly installed in her body and would allow her to pinpoint the source of the strange-yet-familiar sound.

  Thunk.

  She didn’t live in the part of the country where shutters could come loose and bang against the clapboards. Her blood pressure dropped in sheer recognition of not knowing exactly what could make that particular sound. She shivered.