But rational thought had not taken long to return. So, Sam had gone back to his apartment to try and get his head together. Was that any more or less shocking than her retreating to the bathroom and hiding under the shower for half an hour? How long had he hung around for, waiting for her to come out and talk to him? What must he have been thinking when she rolled away from him and hightailed it out of there?
It was hard to admit she’d behaved poorly, but she knew she wasn’t exactly standing on a pedestal in this situation. And that was before she even took in to account the fact that she was the one who’d instigated the whole thing in the first place. Granted, he had put his hand on her breast. And rubbed her nipple with his thumb. But she was the one who’d turned into a tigress and ripped his clothes off. And grabbed his erection like a joystick, refusing to let go. And raced ahead to the finish line thanks to years of pent-up fantasy and anticipation.
So, really, they were kind of at a draw in the self-recrimination and blame stakes.
Which only left the small, insignificant task of how she was supposed to face him again. Because he must know. Her reaction had been such a giveaway. How could he not know?
Forcing herself to get out of her car, Delaney decided to give herself a small break. Probably she wasn’t going to come up with a world-class solution to any of her major problems right now, with her body still humming from Sam’s expert touch. The one really, really important, vital thing that had to happen was that she and Sam talk about what they’d done, get things out in the open and deal with the resulting issues. Even though she was in the process of edging him out of her life, she wasn’t ready to lose him just yet. Not like this. She refused to let a few minutes of sexual heaven destroy a friendship that had survived all other obstacles.
Her heart in her mouth, Delaney pushed open the door to their offices and tried to look normal. Whatever the hell that was anymore.
“Hey, Delaney, you dirty dog,” Debbie said meaningfully as Delaney paused to collect her mail.
A bone-deep heat rushed up Delaney’s chest and shoulders and into her face. Debbie knew. How did she know? Had Sam told her? Why would he do that?
“Wh-what?” Delaney managed to stammer.
“Look at you—I guess Jake must be as good as all the rumors say,” Debbie said, eyebrows wiggling salaciously.
Delaney blinked. What in the hell was the other woman talking about? Jake? Who was Jake?
In a flash, her brain caught up. Debbie was talking about Jake, the printing rep. The man she’d had dinner with last night. The man with the take-no-prisoners tongue. Riiiiiiight.
“So how was it? Did you go somewhere nice?” Debbie asked, all avid interest.
“Um, yes. Dinner was just…. fine,” Delaney said, momentarily stumped for a way to deflect the other woman’s curiosity. But maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing if the office staff thought she had something going on with Jake. It might stop them from taking one look at her and realizing that she’d shagged Sam senseless that very morning.
Summoning a strained little smile, she flicked her eyes across to Sam’s office. To her relief, it was clearly empty. He hadn’t arrived yet. Good. She had some time to get herself together, put her game face on. When he asked her what was going on, why she’d thrown him to the ground and had her way with him, she was going to need all her hard-won sangfroid where he was concerned to convince him that the reason she’d jumped him had been hormonal. Or astrological. Or political—whatever worked, in fact. Anything but that she was in love with him, and had been all her adult life.
Her relief at his absence lasted about an hour. Then she began to feel uneasy. Was he not coming in at all? Had she scared him so much that he was now too terrified to set foot in his own workplace?
Just before lunch time, Sam hobbled in, a graze on his left cheekbone, his knee a bloody mess of scraped skin. Delaney sat in her office, her heart pounding at about a million miles an hour as she watched Debbie cross to the kitchenette to collect the first-aid kit. Taking a deep breath, Delaney pushed herself out of her chair and intercepted the receptionist as she returned to Sam’s side.
“I’ll do it,” she said, relieving Debbie of the kit. She’d cleaned Sam’s cuts and grazes so often that she practically had a medical degree, and it was good to have something to break the ice before they discussed what had happened.
Indicating Sam should head for his office, Delaney followed him in and waited while he propped himself on his desk. Both of them were very careful to avoid eye contact, looking anywhere but at each other.
“What happened?” Delaney asked as she knelt to inspect his knee. It looked a lot worse than it was, she judged.
“Got slammed doing a boardslide grind.” Sam shrugged.
Delaney knew this meant Sam had been trying to slide his skateboard down the handrail on a flight of stairs. It was highly dangerous, but a spectacular stunt if pulled off. Unfortunately, most of the time it ended in a spill.
“Hmm,” she said, tipping some antiseptic onto a square of sterile gauze.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam asked.
“Nothing. Except that you could have killed yourself,” she said, pressing the soaked gauze onto his wound.
“Ow!” Sam howled, flinching away.
“Don’t be such a sook. I have to clean it up so I can see where the gravel is,” Delaney said matter-of-factly.
Despite everything that had happened between them, it felt good to wrap her hand around his calf and return his foot to its resting place on her bent thigh. His skin was warm and his muscles firm. She’d wondered for so many years what it would be like to sleep with Sam. She’d imagined his hands on her body, tried to envisage the length and breadth of his erection, what it would feel like inside her. Nothing had prepared her for the reality. He had been…perfect. Everything she’d ever fantasized about and more.
Belatedly she became aware that she was panting. Swallowing loudly, she concentrated on dabbing at the blood on Sam’s knee. She was playing nurse, for Pete’s sake—how could anyone get turned on with a bloodied, dirt-encrusted knee in their face?
Get a grip, Delaney, she told herself. She was supposed to be doing damage control, not revealing even more of the tragic inner workings of her warped mind.
Using the tweezers from the first-aid kit, she began picking small bits of dirt and gravel from the wound.
“Thanks for doing this,” Sam said after the silence had stretched for an uncomfortably long time.
“Part of the deal, isn’t it?” Delaney said. “You bang yourself up, I pick up the pieces.”
The tension in the room stretched even tighter. Why had she said that? It was so loaded! And why use the word bang, of all the possible alternatives available in the English language?
She covered her unease by pouring more antiseptic onto the gauze.
“This is going to sting again,” she said.
Sam flinched as she cleaned the last of the dirt away.
“Why does that stuff have to hurt? Can’t they come up with something that cleans and takes the pain away?” he complained.
“Am I going to have to get you a lollypop?” Delaney asked, and Sam cracked a smile.
For a second their eyes clashed and held.
Here it comes, thought Delaney, taking a deep breath. Brushing her hands down the front of her thighs, she pushed herself to her feet. She wanted to be standing when they had this conversation, for some reason. Perhaps in case she needed to bolt for the door.
“Well,” Sam said, standing also. Then he glanced down at his knee, bending it a few times. “Feels good, thanks.”
He reached out a hand toward her, hesitated a second, then completed the move, patting her on the shoulder in an awkward, avuncular gesture of thanks. Then he walked around his desk, slid into his chair and flicked his computer on.
Delaney stood frozen for a moment, not quite comprehending what had just occurred. One second they’d been on the brink of discussing what had happened that morning in her apartment, and the next Sam was acting as though it was just business as usual.
And perhaps, for him, it was.
She had a sudden out-of-body flash of how they must look, Sam staring determinedly at his computer screen, her standing, stunned, in front of his desk.
We’re never going to talk about it. Delaney suddenly understood. He wants to just pretend it never happened.
Operating on automatic pilot, she gathered the debris from her Florence Nightingale routine and exited his office. Dumping the gauze in the bin and returning the first-aid kit to its place under the kitchen sink, she walked, zombielike, across to her office.
She couldn’t believe they weren’t going to talk about it. They’d been friends for sixteen years, and they’d just had wild, impetuous, animal sex on the floor of her apartment. And apparently that didn’t even rate a mention, not even a few bare words to sign it off or wrap it up or explain it away in some way.
She sank into her office chair and stared at the blank scribble pad on her desk.
For a strange, vertiginous second she wondered if the whole thing had simply been a figment of her crazed imagination. Maybe in her stress and anxiety over separating her life from Sam’s she’d concocted an elaborate delusion that she’d had sex with him, while in the real world, Sam had simply gotten up, eaten his breakfast and gone to the skate ramp.
Yeah, right.
Her body was still tingling from his touch. If she crossed her legs and squeezed her thighs together, she could almost feel him inside her. It had been real. It had been the best damn sex of her life.
But in Sam’s world it didn’t even rate a mention.
IN HIS OFFICE, Sam stopped pretending to read his computer screen and put his head in his hands. He should have said something. The words had been there, right on the tip of his tongue. Sorry, and other humble, peace-making words. But he just hadn’t been able to force himself to the point. He’d given her plenty of opportunity to jump in, though. After all, it had taken two to tango. Delaney could just as well have brought it up. But she hadn’t, and that had to mean that she didn’t want to talk about it, too, right? Because Delaney was pretty up front about most things. She always let him know when there was something on her mind. She’d have said something if she was worried or anything, definitely.
Sam winced at his own willful cowardice and stupidity. Who was he kidding? There was no way Delaney was okay with what had happened between them. They’d had sex. Great, amazing, terrifying sex. It wasn’t something they could brush under the carpet. The earth had practically shifted on its axis.
But she’d walked out of his office without saying anything. So what did that mean? The only conclusion he could draw was that she didn’t want to talk about it. Or that she’d been waiting for him to take the initiative. But Delaney was no shrinking violet—she always said what she was thinking. Which brought him back to square one—she didn’t want to talk about it. Which meant he was off the hook.
He should have been ashamed of the surge of relief he felt at this realization. After years of Oprah and Donahue and Sally Jessie Raphael, he knew he was supposed to want to talk and emote and cry and be sensitive and understanding. It was the modern, reconstructed male thing to do. But, frankly, he’d rather wrestle with a two-hundred-pound alligator than start trying to explain the complex, messed-up stuff that had been going on in his head when he reached for Delaney’s breast. He didn’t understand it himself—how could he expect her to?
The best course was the one they were taking—ignore it, and it would go away. Sure, it would be awkward for a few days, but, after all, it had been a freakish one-off, an aberration. Soon the memories would fade and it would become one of those things that he’d begin to think maybe he’d imagined.
A vision of Delaney’s passion-filled face flashed across his mind. His hands twitched as they remembered the shape of her perfect behind, the smooth curve of her perky breasts.
He was a deluded fool. A desperate, terrified, deluded fool. But it was all he had, and he was clinging to it.
He opened the door to find his mother standing on the doorstep. As he took in her stiffly styled blond hair and her face set in its habitual expression of tense resignation, he decided that the cosmos really was, indeed, out to get him. If there was anyone he didn’t have the energy or inclination to deal with right now, it was his mother. Even having to face the music with Delaney would be better.
“Sam. How are you? I was in the neighborhood, and I thought I should drop by since it’s been so long since you called,” she said. Her eyes were reproachful, a study in suburban martyrdom.
“Nancy. Come in,” he said.
His parents had been Jim and Nancy to him since he was about ten. Around the same time that he’d given up on them ever acting like the moms and dads his friends seemed to have. As an adult, he didn’t have a close relationship with either of them, something that suited him just fine. His mother and father had spent too many years either ignoring him or trying to use him as a weapon to hurt each other for Sam to feel any great sentiment where they were concerned. Sure, they were his folks, his blood. That went without saying. If they needed anything, he’d be there for them. But he didn’t crave their counsel, or think of them in times of crisis. They weren’t his friends. They weren’t anything, really—just two people who had lived in the same house with him when he was a kid.
“You’ve bought new furniture, I see,” his mother said, eyeing his couches.
“No. Same stuff as last time you were here,” Sam said neutrally. That had been over a year ago, when Delaney had helped him cook dinner for his mother’s birthday.
“Something looks different,” she said, frowning.
Sam shrugged, suddenly impatient to have the pretense over and done with. His mother hadn’t just “popped in” to see how he was doing. They didn’t have a pop-in kind of relationship. She had an agenda.
“Anything up?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Why does anything need to be up for me to visit my son?”
Sam bit back a sigh. They were going to do this the long, circuitous way, obviously. “Do you want a drink? I’ve got some wine in the fridge.”
“A chardonnay would be nice if you have one,” Nancy said. She slid her handbag off her shoulder and dropped it on the kitchen counter. Sam resigned himself to a couple of hours of emotional dodgeball as he dragged the fridge door open.
“How is the magazine going?” she asked.
Sam grit his teeth. He wasn’t sure how she did it, but whenever she mentioned X-Pro, his mother managed to imply that the business was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
“The magazine’s doing fine,” he said. He’d long since given up on the need to prove himself to her.
She sniffed. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to take from that, but he let it ride.
“What about you? How’s the garden?” he asked. Nancy had been retired from her job as a secretary for several years now, and the one passion in her life was her garden.
“Oh, fine, I guess. The back fence is practically falling down. The neighbors are being stingy about fixing it.” She took a swallow from her wineglass.
“If you need help, I’m happy to come over and take a shot at it. Or if you need help getting someone out to fix it…?” he offered.
His mother’s lips tightened briefly; he’d touched a raw nerve.
“I don’t need your money, Sam. I’m not your responsibility. You’ve got enough on your plate, funding this lifestyle of yours.” She cast a disapproving look around the apartment. “We both know that any financial problems I experience can only be laid at one person’s door.”
Sam stared at the floor for a beat. He didn’t have to be a Mensa candidate to guess where this was going. His parents’ bone-of-contention du jour was a parcel of shares his father had received in the divorce settlement nearly fifteen years ago. They’d been valued as worthless at the time, and to Sam’s knowledge, nothing had changed over the years. Only in his mother’s mind had the shares suddenly become hot property.
“My lawyer has drawn up some papers,” Nancy said, rustling around in her handbag until she’d extracted an official-looking envelope.
“What sort of papers?” he asked warily.
“I need to get a court order to force your father to hand his financial records over,” his mother said. “This just says that he’s talked to you about getting dividends from the shares.”
“You want me to sign a statutory declaration so you can take my father to court?” Sam asked flatly.
He felt the familiar weight of anger and helplessness descend on him. No matter what he did, he could never stem the tide of his parents’ mutual acrimony. As a kid, he’d tried everything, from keeping his room superneat to getting perfect marks at school, to simply not being there. Nothing had ever stopped them from wanting to hurt each other. Just the memory of their furious slinging matches was enough to make his belly tense. It had been years, and still they persisted in taking shots at each other through him.
“Nancy, I’ve told you a million times. I am not getting involved between the two of you,” he said as calmly as possible.
His mother puffed her cheeks out, the picture of outrage. “Jim has stolen from me, Sam. He declared those shares valueless at our divorce, but I know he’s been receiving dividends. That money is half mine. I deserve it, after all the years of misery I put up with.”
“We’re talking a few bucks here. Your handbag cost more, for Pete’s sake,” he said, trying the rational approach.
He should have known better.
“It’s the principal of the thing, and if you don’t understand that, you’re more your father’s son than I knew,” she said angrily.
Words crowded his throat. He wanted to tell her to shut up, to leave, to never come near him again if the only thing she was going to bring to his door was more unhappiness and anger. But he’d heard his parents yelling at one another too many times to give in to his temper. It wasn’t the way he chose to solve his problems or live his life.
“You need to talk to Jim about this, not me,” he said firmly instead.
“I will not let you wash your hands of this the way he has,” his mother said shrilly.
Sam reached for his beer, his hand clenching around the cool glass. He would not lose it with his mother. If it killed him, he wouldn’t.
But it was going to be a very long night.
WHEN DELANEY HEARD the woman’s voice filtering down from Sam’s apartment, her mouth filled with bile. He had one of his women up there. Just hours after he’d driven her mad with desire, he was wining and dining some other stupid, self-destructive woman.
She glared down at the vegetables she’d been chopping for a stir-fry. She’d always known it would be like this, hadn’t she? If by some miracle Sam had actually found her attractive and taken her to bed, she’d known she wouldn’t stand a chance against his determination to remain single. There was absolutely no reason under the sun for her to expect him to treat her any differently than he’d ever treated one of his other easy lays. No reason at all.
Crossing to the stereo, she intended to crank up the volume, resolutely ignoring the acid burning in her stomach. This is your just desserts for your moment of weakness, she told herself.
Before she could hit the volume, however, she recognized the shrill, throbbing note of his mother’s voice in high-drama mode. She stared up at the ceiling, listening to the ebb and flow of Nancy Kirk’s voice as she harangued her son. He didn’t have another of his women up there, after all. The knot in her belly eased. So. He wasn’t that much of an asshole. She felt inordinately relieved, and she shook her head at her own foolishness. It didn’t mean anything. If not tonight, then tomorrow night, or the next night, there would be a perky blonde or brunette warming his bed. It was inevitable.
Upstairs, Nancy’s voice shrilled into a crescendo of nagging acrimony. Delaney shot another look at the ceiling. It reminded her of all the times she’d heard the muffled sounds of his parents fighting when she was a kid. Every evening, like clockwork, the Kirks’ misery had leaked over the fence in fits of raised voices and crashes of furniture as they gave vent to their unhappiness and anger. Her parents had made a habit of playing music to try to drown out their fighting, especially if Sam was over to visit.
Even the memory of it made her feel a little sick. She could just imagine how Sam was handling his mother’s current attack. She’d seen him around his parents enough over the years to know exactly how he would be. Even though Jim’s and Nancy’s determination to drag their son into their unhappiness was enough to try the patience of a saint, Sam never raised his voice or laid down the law. In all other areas of his life he was assertive, even aggressive. But when it came to his parents, he refused to become part of the family act. And if that meant simply enduring one of their diatribes without saying a word, he’d do it. She’d seen him do it a number of times, too, and afterward she’d invariably urge him to just let rip and give his father or mother both barrels when they next came calling, trying to make trouble. But Sam wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. The lessons of his childhood were burned too deeply into his psyche.
She didn’t have to work hard to picture the withdrawn, distant look Sam would have on his face. She’d seen it so often through their teen years. He’d be there, but not there, his feelings locked away as he retreated inside himself.
She was moving before she’d consciously decided what she was doing. She was angry with Sam, yes. Confused, hurt, bewildered. But she would not let that hyena of a woman feed off him. She had to go protect him.
Swiftly she crossed to the bathroom, swiping some mascara on and following up with lipstick. As soon as she was satisfied that she looked suitably professional, she grabbed her new denim jacket and her purse and house keys and headed for the door.
Sam answered the door on her second knock, and her heart wrung in her chest as she saw the frozen expression in his eyes.
“Hi,” she said brightly. “You ready to go?”
Sam stared at her blankly, and Delaney widened her eyes at him meaningfully.
Play along, idiot, she semaphored with her eyebrows.
“Laney,” he said, the single word sounding flat and forced.
“You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?” she said, shaking her head. Breezing past him, she pretended surprise at seeing Nancy Kirk propped at the kitchen counter, a glass of wine clenched in her hand.
“Oh, Mrs. Kirk. I didn’t realize you were here,” she said cheerily. Striding forward, she planted a dutiful kiss on the older woman’s cheek, even though she really wanted to grab her by the ear and demand to know why she persisted in inflicting her miserable life outlook on her son.
“I just popped in to see Sam,” Nancy said.
Delaney marveled at the way the woman could get a whiny note into such an innocuous phrase.
“Well, I’m afraid I’m going to have to steal him off you,” Delaney said. She turned to Sam. “We’ve got that trade night with triple-fin surfboards, remember?”
Sam had had more than enough time to put his game face on.
“Man, I’m sorry. I completely forgot. Give me five minutes to change my shirt,” he said. He looked as though he were about to rush off and do just that, but he hesitated, then turned back to his mother.
“Sorry about this, Nancy,” he said. He didn’t sound that sorry, but Delaney didn’t think any less of him for being a bad liar.
Nancy Kirk nudged her half-finished wine aside and picked up her handbag.
“I didn’t realize I was intruding. I suppose I should have called ahead to let you know, since you’re so busy,” she said.
Delaney ground her teeth together. Could the woman be any more passive-aggressive?
She channeled her anger into looking at her watch and tapping it pointedly.
“Better shake a leg, Sam. Sorry, Mrs. Kirk,” she said. She guessed she probably sounded about as sincere as Sam had, but she didn’t care.
“I’ll just leave these papers here for you, Sam,” Nancy said, placing an envelope on the countertop.
Delaney saw a muscle flex in Sam’s jaw. “They’ll go straight in the bin, but it’s your call,” he said.
Nancy looked as though she was about to burst into speech again, but her eyes shot to Delaney and she bit her tongue.
Good, Delaney thought. Nancy had never liked the idea of having a public audience, despite the fact that the whole neighborhood could hear her and Jim screaming at each other day and night. As long as the curtains were closed, it was private business in her book.
Lips pinched, Nancy slid the contentious envelope into her handbag. Within moments, she’d kissed Sam goodbye, and the door was closing behind her.
Sam instantly let out a gusting sigh and ran a hand across his head.
“Jesus. Thank you, Laney. I was seriously afraid I was going to lose it when she dragged out that envelope,” he said.
Delaney ached to soothe the lines from his face, to hold him until the desolate look had faded from his eyes. “Maybe I should have waited a little longer then. She needs a comeuppance, in my humble opinion,” she said instead.
“There’s nothing humble about your opinion,” Sam said wryly.