Asking For It (23 page)

"Oh, Lord," Griffith whispered. He clutched Kate close, his body convulsively shivering. What were the words?

Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh
.

Feeling he understood them now, he pressed a kiss against the side of her temple, then touched his forehead to hers.

A mysterious feeling flowed through him as the aftereffects of his physical release shuddered down and Kate's body became a satisfied blanket above him.

It wasn't until Kate stirred some time later, stroking his cheek, a peculiarly tender gesture, that Griffith recognized the emotion still sifting through him.

It was happiness.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"You okay?" Griffith's voice was careful; somewhat at odds, Kate thought, with the playfulness of his fingers in the loose tendrils of her hair.

Draped over him, she burrowed her nose in the space between his arm and his chest. She hoped the squeeze she gave him around the middle was answer enough. She was okay.

Bowled over, flung out of her skin, tossed into chaos, but okay.

"I'm fine," she managed to mutter.

He relaxed beneath her. Kate could feel that. She felt...way too much of what he did, an empathy she hadn't expected.

Nothing had been as she'd expected, not since she'd seen him standing by the tomato field, waiting for her. She'd expected to feel resistance, distance, even annoyance. She
should
have felt all those things. He'd had his arms crossed over his chest, his feet spread. Not supplicant or deferential — but
impatient
.

Instead of reacting with perfectly righteous annoyance, Kate had felt excited, flattered...even tender.

Tender? The mere thought made her tense. No. This was Griffith she was talking about. She couldn't have felt
tender
toward him.

She certainly hadn't acted tender. She'd done her best to make him change his mind about the whole thing.

But he'd persisted. Responding with sugar to her acid. Drawing her back in.

Oh, how he'd drawn her in. Though Kate couldn't entirely blame Griffith. She'd been ripe for the picking, her body humming with want, too long denied. With him tugging, she'd fallen from one level of sensuality to the next, sinking deeper and deeper into stark hunger and forbidden want.

Finally, she'd dropped into another universe, a place of overwhelming sensations, unbelievable pleasure — and taboo emotions.

"Kate." He rubbed the back of her neck.

"Mm." That felt good, his hand rubbing, the concerned tone of his voice. Awfully good... Just before she felt herself sink into this indulgence, too, she popped her eyes wide. "Griffith."

"Yes, Kate?"

She struggled to come back to herself, to her real self, the independent woman who stood alone and didn't need this sort of nonsense: tenderness, concern.
Emotion
. Healthy, shmealthy. She took in a deep breath, pasted on a smug smile, and rose enough to look down at him.

But his face — It looked...different. Softer-edged, more...important. Kate steeled herself against the strange, and rather frightening, effect. Keeping her smug smile, she said, "Hey. I guess we know now why we've been so strangely attracted to each other."

Slowly, his concern transformed into a smug smile of his own. "Saying we're sexually compatible hardly covers the subject, does it?"

Kate shook her head. Inside, she was a mass of conflicting reactions. She was glad he agreed to be flippant. She was also insulted. And he still looked...too different.

She lowered her gaze to his chest. With one finger, she pressed down the silky thicket over his breastbone. "But we really ought to get back to camp." Yes, yes. Escape. She needed to shove this into a storage box. A locked one. Dynamite proof.

"Really? It's time to head back?" Griffith's fingers curved dangerously over her bottom. Beneath his lowered lashes, his eyes gleamed.

Kate felt her viscera jump. "You must be kidding." She meant it to come out scolding. Instead, she sounded breathless.

"I'm not kidding." Griffith's fingers kept on playing.

Kate felt her legs part; she felt her body soften in acceptance. But she couldn't do this
again
, not when she needed to lock all the emotions away. "You don't play fair," she whispered.

"Oh, did you want me to?" His eyes laughed.

Yes
, Kate thought.
Yes, I need fair. I need a break. Time to think
.

Meanwhile, her back arched as he played her with his fingers.

"Kate," he murmured.

"Griffith." The idea of stopping him, the notion of danger, was growing dimmer. His fingers were oh, so clever. And when Griffith turned her and rose over her, parting her knees and lowering his head, when his tongue touched the tip of her dark need, she couldn't remember what she wanted any more. "Griffith," she groaned, and twisted her fingers in his hair.

She was tossed into chaos again.

~~~

"This is it." Kate shuffled to a stop at the foot of a steep set of stairs leading up to a tiny cabin. Griffith already knew the place was hers. He'd seen her coming in and out of the white-trimmed, yellow house several times. Besides — the potted flowers in front, the macramé doohickeys hanging from inside the windows — who else could be living there?

She sighed and started up the stairs. "This is really unnecessary. I walk around the camp at night by myself on a regular basis."

Yes, but you don't wander around by yourself after you've recently made me your sexual slave — twice
. Wisely, Griffith held the comment back. Instead, he ascended the steps behind Kate in silence.

"I suppose you feel..." Coming to a stop by her front door, Kate appeared to search for a word.

"Chivalrous," Griffith supplied.

She shot him a dubious look.

Griffith smiled.

"All right, then." Kate looked torn between annoyance and amusement. "Mr. Chivalrous. You've returned me."

And this is as far as you go, boy
. Her body language spoke for her as she stood blocking the door, unwilling even to crack it open while he was standing there.

He felt annoyed and amused, himself. He didn't need to go inside to know what Kate's place would look like: warm and feminine. Cozy rather than tasteful. Welcoming. Nor could he have accepted an invitation should she have offered one. He'd already left his kids alone with Orlando in charge longer than he should have.

But it would have been nice to get invited. It would have been...the expected thing. Particularly after he'd made her come that last time with just his mouth. Yes, a man expected an invitation inside a woman's front door after a service like that.

But Kate stood at the top of her porch and actually stuck out her hand. Her hand!

"Good night, Griffith," she said.

Griffith felt like howling, but he took her offered hand. "Good night, Kate."

He held on when she tried to take her hand back. "One thing," he said.

She sighed.

"When we see each other tomorrow morning at breakfast," Griffith told her, "this is what you do. You give me a sugar-sweet smile and say, 'Why, aren't you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning, Griffith.' And what I'll do is smile sugar-sweet back and say, 'And a good morning to you too, Miss Kate.' Okay? You got that?"

Kate frowned. "Why would we do that?"

"Well, it's a script."

"Yeah, I get that, but what for?"

"Oh. See, you're all cool and collected tonight, but I anticipate that by tomorrow morning you'll be embarrassed and shy. So I'm giving you a script, something to fall back on if you can't think of what to say to me."

As he'd hoped, her amusement won out. A delightful laugh escaped her. With their joined hands, she poked him in the stomach. "I think that script is for
you
. So you'll know what to expect from me tomorrow morning."

"There is that."

Kate laughed again. "So, all right. A sugar-sweet smile and 'lookin' bushy-tailed this morning, Griffith.' No worries."

"No, no. It's, 'Why, aren't you looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning, Griffith.'"

"Don't push your luck, mister."

Too late for that
. Griffith was already pushing it, drawing her toward him and lowering his head. It was Pavlovian response, maybe, but Kate raised her chin. Their mouths met somewhere in the middle.

It shot through him again, immediate and fierce: emotions, sensations, desires — everything that had occurred beneath the spreading oak tree. He wanted to wrap Kate in his arms and melt into her, just be one.

But his brain was in enough control to pull him out of it. She wasn't even inviting him through the front door of her house. They weren't about to become one.

Carefully, he drew his lips from hers. "Good night, Kate."

"Good night, Griffith." The words were followed by a long-suffering sigh.

Griffith got a glimpse of the inside of her house — a rag rug by the front door, an antique mirror on the wall, and a spray of dried flowers — before, quick and efficient, she was closing her door in his face.

Good night
.

Griffith performed his own sigh then. Good night. Goodbye. Time to go back to his own bed.

He turned and stepped down Kate's stairs. That kiss — all of it — was still zinging around inside of him as he walked down the dirt path toward Bunkhouse Three. He felt like he was walking over marshmallows. It was a strange and novel sensation. Not even the best sex Griffith could remember having — with a female steel subcontractor on the sofa in her job trailer — had made him feel...bouncy. Humming with excitement, nearly
skipping
.

Was he in love?

Griffith immediately stubbed his toe in the hard-packed dirt of the bunkhouse quad. His heart did a backwards somersault as he stumbled to a halt.

No. He drew in a hard breath and willed his heart to go back to a steady rhythm. He wasn't in love. Couldn't be. For one thing, Kate had made her feelings quite clear.

This was only physical.

That's what she'd decided and Griffith...agreed. Of course he agreed. They were too different. Look at the woman's house, how she lived. With the bare necessities. She didn't care about investment portfolios or bottom lines. She lived out here in the middle of nowhere, indifferent to the latest styles or restaurants or investment opportunities.

Griffith took another hard, deliberate breath and started up the stairs of Bunkhouse Three. This was just physical. And barely that, even. Kate had given him her
hand
at her front door. He'd had to
take
that kiss.

Not to mention there was the little issue of Wildwood, and Kate's water. Yup, there was that.

At the top of the steps, Griffith opened the door of the bunkhouse. The porch light illuminated nine boys' bodies, quietly slumbering.

He stood there for a long minute, his hand on the doorknob, his lips curled in, looking.

Yup, there was still the issue of Wildwood.

~~~

Deirdre was having lunch with the arch-enemy. She sat in an expensive restaurant at a marble-topped table under a high skylight with fake palms waving overhead. Across from her sat Simon Grolier, owner of Today Houses, and Blaine Development's biggest competitor.

She felt professional and cool now, though she hadn't felt that way earlier, when Mr. Grolier had called to ask for this lunch date. It had occurred to her then that if Griffith had been kidnapped, Grolier made a good suspect for the crime. But now she sat in her tailored navy suit, calmly waiting for Grolier to make the first move.

"Would you like a piece of bread?" Grolier lifted the basket with a pudgy, well-manicured hand.

"Yes, thank you." Deirdre took one of the feather-light French rolls.

Grolier looked every inch a successful businessman. In his late fifties, he wore an expensive European suit, tailored to complement his heavy-set build.
I'm powerful
, said his grooming, his keen blue eyes, and even his jowls.

Griffith gave off the same vibe of power, Deirdre thought, but without the subtle under-current of malice. Mr. Grolier seemed fully capable of kidnapping a rival.

"I realize you don't have much time today," Grolier now said to Deirdre. "Neither do I, so I'll get right to business."

Deirdre inclined her head, as if she did business with cutthroat competitors who might also be kidnappers every day of the week.

"I want the loan from GoldFed Financial," Grolier told Deirdre. He dropped the leg he had draped over one knee. "With that loan I can build three hundred and fifty units. At a profit of a hundred grand per, I can afford to cut you in for a very nice deal."

Deirdre continued the motion she'd started, cutting her butter knife into the ice-cold, star-shaped pat of butter set on a white, porcelain plate. She felt as if she were watching herself from the outside. Blaine Development's biggest competitor had just offered her a bribe. In the bluntest possible way. And she was continuing to butter her bread.