Right Brother (18 page)

Her lips parted. A sound came from them. Not a word, just a sound. Then, “Trent.”

For a dozen more torturous beats of their hearts he waited, still connected, still in sync. Reluctant to lose this, yet knowing so much more could come.

A groan wrenched from his throat and he swept her up, an arm under her knees, her arms locked around his neck.

He followed her down to the bed, the need driving now. And hers as demanding as his.

They were united in this, too—a bare restraint, layered over the hunger, which both made the hunger stronger and the feeding of it sweeter.

He refused to tear her blouse, unbuttoning the last few buttons with concentrated caution. She unzipped his jeans with precision. He unhooked her bra and pulled it away from her in measured movements. She slid down the bed to draw his jeans and briefs free, each inch a deliberate decision. He repaid the favor—and the torment—with her panties. She positioned the condom with exquisite care. So exquisite that he had to stop her twice, his hands over hers, while he regained restraint.

Finally, naked, he rose over her, her hands at his ribs.

“Jen?” he asked. Because what he wanted for her was no regrets.

“Yes,” she said.

She skimmed her hands across his ribs, then down, his muscles dancing in teeth-clenching reaction. She guided him to her entrance, opening to him.

Hunger roared hard against the veneer of restraint. He stroked into her, felt her arch under him, against him.

“Jen, are you—?”

“Okay. I'm okay. Don't—” she raised her hips against him “—stop.”

He didn't. He couldn't. Not with her body and her voice surrounding him.

Need and hunger shredded restraint in a stroke.

There was only Jen. Soft. Strong. Yielding. Powerful. Holding. Meeting. Straining.

All that she was swirled around him, in him. Circling him,
twisting him as he tried to stay with it, to hold on to control even with restraint washed away.

He felt the power growing.

The eddy rose, with him, then higher and higher. Over his head, sucking him in, so he spun with it. Faster and harder. Until his lungs burst with the hoarse, harsh cry of it. And he drowned.

In Jen. For Jen.

 

They lay on their sides, facing each other. His bottom arm stretched across the mattress between them, his hand curved around the back of her neck. Her bottom arm crossed over his as she rested the back of her fingers against his jaw.

In her eyes, he saw possibilities. Possibilities he had never imagined for himself.

Possibilities he feared he could never fulfill for her.

“Jen—”

“Shh. Not now, Trent. Not yet.”

Her voice, just her voice, had him hard again.

Maybe it was the memory of how that voice had sounded calling his name as she climaxed.

She took his top arm from where it had rested at her waist, and positioned it so his palm was once more flat against her breastbone, then she put her own palm against his breastbone.

Their heartbeats stuttered, raced, then settled. As they lay there, looking into each other's eyes, they felt the heartbeats come together. Then slowly begin to rise, each beat harder and faster than the one before.

 

Jennifer woke without doubt. Without confusion. Without fuzziness.

Clear and sharp and sure. She knew where she was and why and with whom.

Trent.

That's the way she'd awakened each time they had made love in these three nights before Ashley's return.

During the day, they worked as usual: her, all day at the dealership; him, splitting between coaching and the dealership.

At night they came back to this bed in the guest room of Darcie's house.

He brought her a new rose each night. She didn't know whose garden he was raiding, but they were lovely.

Sitting on the bed, they ate peach pie and cinnamon ice cream from Loris's Café. He talked about coaching, about the individual players and about the team. She talked about the dealership, its progress, the concerns. Stenner Autos remained in the red, but it wasn't bleeding Trent's money as badly after only a few weeks of being open. She was proud of that.

Once, she brought up the sales of the old parts, how the effort was picking up steam, having already paid for the cost of the Web site. She'd said Franklin had done them a favor by accumulating those parts, and he might enjoy hearing that he was contributing to the dealership's revival.

But Trent teased her about bringing the bottom line into the bedroom, and closed the conversation with a kiss.

She would have liked to have talked to him more about his feelings about his family. About his childhood. About what was happening between them. But any time she considered opening one of those doors, she had a vision of Trent opening doors that she'd kept closed.

So they didn't talk of important things. They made love. Long and slow, fast and hard. Always good.

And each time she woke to certainty, and to Trent.

Solid and real, he lay on his stomach beside her now. No, half entwined with her. His arm angled across her torso, his face turned on the pillow so each of his breaths breezed her shoulder. And she was half entwined with him. Lying not
quite on her side, with the hand closest to him curled under his side and her opposite leg flung over his.

She listened to his breathing—felt his breathing—and tried to make sense of her own emotions. How could this be? How could she feel so certain?

“What are you thinking?” His voice was as deep as the black of his lashes, as rough as the stubble on his chin.

“I'm—I'm thinking that bodies are weird.”

He chuckled. “There goes my ego.”

“No, I meant mine.”

“Weird is not the word that comes to mind.” He kissed her shoulder. Then skimmed his mouth down to her nipple, circling it with his tongue, drawing on it until she moaned.

She held his head to bring his mouth to hers, kissing him, long and slow.

But when the kiss ended, she came back to the topic. “But I'm serious. Bodies truly are weird.”

“Uh-huh.” He nibbled at her shoulder.

“I was never more comfortable in my skin than when I was pregnant with Ashley. And at the same time it was as if it wasn't my body at all. As if an alien had taken it over and I was just along for the ride. That's sort of how I feel when we make love.”

She expected him to tease that she was likening him to an alien taking over her body. Instead, he propped his head on his hand and watched her, his eyes solemn.

“You feel the most comfortable in your skin when we're making love?”

“Yes…well, no.” She had said that, hadn't she? “I mean, because it's not exactly a comfortable sort of thing. But the most like I belong, like—” Like she was doing something higher, belonged to something bigger than herself. The way she'd felt when she was carrying Ashley. So she forgot herself. Lived
beyond her body, beyond herself. But she couldn't tell him that. It sounded too…too big. “Like I did when I was pregnant.”

She shifted one shoulder, acknowledging her verbal ineptitude.

“Would you like to be pregnant again? Have more kids?”

“You know, I never thought I would ever want to for a long time. But I think it's connecting with Mark, and even some with my parents that has me feeling different. My family isn't perfect, but there's good in them. I think there must be good in every family.”

He said nothing.

“No family's all bad,” she added.

Even if he argued with her, it would mean talking about it. It would open the subject.

“So, now you're thinking you'd like to have more babies.”

“I doubt I'll be in a place in life where it would be right to have another baby, to give a child stability and the kind of home…” She couldn't finish the banalities. “Yes, I'd like to have more babies. But I accepted a long time ago that I won't.”

 

The next two weeks were an exercise in juggling.

She had a daughter and the dealership pulling her away from him. He had the football team and the dealership pulling him away from her. And they both had desire drawing them together.

But there was no time and even less privacy. She couldn't leave Ashley alone at night and they couldn't use Darcie's guest room during the day with the renovators there.

Alone in her windowless office with the door closed, Trent had groaned, but said, “Okay. But I get to hold your hand at dinner.”

“Trent, I don't think that's a good idea.”

“Hey, even the high school kids can hold hands in public.”

“I meant dinner. It's just that everyone would read so much into it. You know what Drago's like.”

“So? Let everyone read. Who cares?” He looked at her. “Uh-huh. You care. You don't want anyone to know.”

“It's not the way you make it sound. But there's the situation here at the dealership—”

“Yeah, I bet there's never been a relationship between people who work together.”

“I have Ashley to consider.”

“Ah.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I understand that you don't want to leave her alone at night. And I understand you wanting to keep our making love private. But at some point, you're going to have to break it to her that I'm in your life, so dinner doesn't seem unreasonable.”

“There's been so much going on this summer, so much has changed, I just… Not yet.”

He'd left then. She'd known he wasn't happy. But she couldn't just breeze into Ashley's room one night and say,
Oh, by the way, I'm involved with Trent, who happens to be both your uncle and the man you seem to like least in the world.

She couldn't.

He hadn't said anything more about it. And they'd even found one night last week when they'd worked so late that everyone else had left…. And then her windowless box of an office had become a haven, with the door locked and some creative use of her desk chair.

She had welcomed his kiss, his arms, his body, feeling him slide inside her with a rightness that sang along her skin and deep in her soul.

They would work this out.

It needed time. That was all. Some time.

“H
i, Jonas.”

Trent barely recognized that happy chirp as Ashley's voice.

He held his position bent double in the backseat of the black sedan Jonas had supposedly finished cleaning. Trent had been pressed into service checking used cars because Jennifer was up to her neck in dealing with the new cars that would be coming in. He'd found cigarette butts under the driver's seat and had collected sixty-four cents from the floor under the passenger seat when he heard Ashley's voice.

He raised his head and, with the car door open, he could see her, Jonas and Barry over by the car wash.

She was smiling as if she'd just won the lottery, with her jackpot Jonas's face. Trent happened to know that Jennifer had told her to stay away from the boy.

If Jonas's bored mumble was a greeting, it wasn't much of one.

“I thought I'd come see what you're doing,” she said brightly.

“I'm working. What does it look like? Go away.”

“Oh. I just…” Even from this distance, Trent saw color surging into her face. She leveled her chin the way he'd seen her mother do, and walked away.

Trent came up behind the boys before either knew he was there.

“Jonas,” he barked from just behind the kid's shoulder.

He pitched forward, knocking his head against the car's side panel and swearing.

When he saw who it was, he scrambled up—a task made more difficult because Trent's position crowded him against the car—and muttered an apology for cursing.

“Barry, take a break,” Trent ordered, not taking his gaze off Jonas.

Jonas looked anywhere but at Trent. When his gaze fell on the sedan, he said. “I didn't get all the way finished with that one yet. Barry must have moved it by mistake. I know my initials are on the form, but—”

“What do you think you're doing with my niece, Jonas?” Trent could barely believe the words came out of his own mouth. Where the hell had this surge of protectiveness come from?

“Huh? Your niece? Oh. Ashley? Nothing. I mean, I asked some stuff about you and she talked about her father and now she just keeps bugging me.” The kid came to a full stop. His mouth opened so wide Trent thought he could see his tonsils. “You don't mean— You can't. My God, she's a
kid!
”

Jonas's reaction was unfeigned. A knot eased from Trent's gut.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice so low Jonas had to go still and intent to hear it. “She is a kid. And you stay the hell away from her.”

“I will. I— Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

He was talking to Trent's back.

God, he better be careful or he'd be acting as though Ashley were his kid. He'd be well and truly caught, not just in a family, but in the last family on earth he should be in.

 

“Be careful of this step.”

Trent had her hand gripped in his, and shone the flashlight over the step he was on and she was about to climb.

The deconstruction of Darcie's house was in full swing. “This is crazy,” she muttered as Trent tugged her along the hallway.

“A little chaos is a small price to pay,” Trent said, sweeping aside protective plastic and opening the door to the bedroom that formed an oasis.

An oasis within the construction and an oasis in their lives.

“I know why I'm in this,” Jennifer said, unbuttoning his shirt. “You're kind. You're down-to-earth. You're capable. You're comfortable with who you are and where you are. You're just so
sane.
You're—”

“You are going to get to sexy eventually, aren't you?” he demanded, holding up the sock he'd just shed.

She laughed. “And you're sexy. Incredibly, incredibly sexy.” She kissed his chest, then straightened. “And then there's me. I'm a mess. With a daughter who makes me more of a mess every day. Why would you want to get involved with us? How does it benefit you?”

“You mean besides the obvious?” Having disposed of her blouse, he made a lightning strike to kiss, then suck, then soothe with another kiss the delicate skin where her shoulder met her throat.

She sighed with pleasure. “Yes,” she said. “Besides that.”

“Then the answer is the same to both questions—why I'd want to get involved with you and how it benefits me. It's you.”

“I said besides that.”

“Sex isn't all you are, Jennifer. Being around you—well, let's say I'm a whole lot happier guy than I used to be. I have a life. Look at the way you got me to start coaching. You not only encouraged me to go for what would make me happier, you made it possible.”

“Maybe I just wanted to run the dealership alone.”

He laughed. “Maybe? I
know
you wanted to. But that doesn't mean you didn't have my best interests at heart. Actually you did twice—because you knew I'd be happier not running the dealership and you knew the dealership would be better off without me getting in your hair every five minutes.” He slid his fingers into her hair, pulling free the pins that had held it back. “Though getting in your hair does have its benefits.

“I'll tell you something, Jennifer Truesdale. From the time I was a kid I've done my damnedest to study hard and anticipate what was coming my way so I could handle it. That's how I am. I study, I look ahead, I anticipate.”

“I know. But—”

“But not with you. Because with you I feel things. With you I enjoy now. And with you… Ah, Jen, don't you know? I never could have anticipated you.”

 

At some point after Jennifer collapsed on Trent's chest, she'd shifted, so when she opened her eyes after dozing, she was on her side, one of her legs over his.

“This will be the last time we can be together for a while,” she murmured.

She'd agreed Ashley could attend the summer's final sleepover only after extracting pledges of perfect behavior from her. It was a small gathering—Ashley, Courtney and Sarah at Sarah's house for her birthday and a farewell to summer. At noon the next day, the last Friday of summer, the girls would
go to school for a two-hour session of getting class schedules, locker assignments and books.

Come Monday, the school year began for real.

Back at the beginning of summer, when this was planned. Sarah's mother had talked with Jennifer and Jill, as the other mothers, and they'd all decided that, in addition to falling on Sarah's actual birthday, it was a better plan to give the girls more time between the sleepover and the start of school than a weekend date would.

But first, she and Trent had the whole night to be together.

They'd been so eager to make use of this opportunity that she hadn't taken the time to explain when they'd arrived.

Trent rolled his head on the pillow to look at her.

“Yeah, I heard Quince is going to be in town more often in the fall. I need to get my own place.”

“You probably do, but that wouldn't change that we wouldn't be able to do—” she gestured from him to her “—this.”

“You can't leave Ashley alone,” he said.

“No, I can't.” She levered herself on one elbow. “What?”

“I didn't say a word.”

“You didn't have to. What?”

“You let her manipulate you. You let her—”

“Stop. This is because you think you see Eric in her. I don't—”

He raised one hand, the one not wrapped around her. “Fine. I won't say another word about your perfect daughter. I'll butt out.”

“Oh, I know she's not perfect. And you want to know something else?”

He looked as if he wanted to say no, but wasn't that stupid. “What?”

“I see a lot of someone else in her, too. I see a lot of the Stenner genes that landed in her uncle in her. Stubborn. Proud. Closing out hurt, determined to never let anybody get back
inside if she's been stung once. Refusing to talk about it. What have you got to say to that?”

She thought she'd reached him. She thought she might have gotten through to him. Might have cracked the protective covering he kept around his feelings about family.

“What I've got to say is if this is our last time for a while, we should make good use of it.”

 

Trent heard the phone ringing inside his room as he put his key into the motel door. It wasn't yet seven o'clock. He'd only dropped Jennifer off at her car a short time before.

Could something have happened?

He slammed the door behind him, and in two long strides had the phone. “Yes?”

“Trent? Finally.”

It was Linc.

Worry fell away, only to be replaced by surprise. “What are you doing calling at this hour? It's not even five your time.”

“Don't I know it. I've been calling since last night. Your cell phone's off, too.”

Eventually, both he and Jennifer had slept. Neither had awakened until the light breaking through the window jerked him into alertness later than they'd planned. They'd scrambled up—catching one kiss over the bed as they'd changed the sheets, and another in the car before he backed out of the garage. Because they couldn't—or Jennifer wouldn't—kiss goodbye out in the open where anyone might see them. Where anyone might know they were together.

But he wasn't telling Linc any of that. At least not now.

“What's up, Linc?”

“A buddy of mine called me last night. Strictly on the Q.T. He saw my name connected to yours, and figured I'd be interested. Do you trust all those people you've got working for you at that dealership?”

“What's this about, Linc?”

“First, tell me who's running the accounts?”

“Anne Hooper does the books—she's the one you said was top-notch after I sent you the first month's worth.”

“Just you and Jennifer can write checks off the accounts? Not this Anne Hooper?”

“Right.”

Linc hissed a breath out through his teeth. “There's no easy way of saying this, Trent. Somebody's set up a side account. Separate from the ones you sent me papers on. Money's going into this account from the dealership, and then it's going out.”

“Where?” Trent asked, his chest suddenly tight.

“It's not clear where—not yet. I'm working on that. But if it's just you and Jennifer who can—”

“Don't say it, Linc. Don't say something I won't be able to forgive you for.”

Silence hummed over the phone line.

Linc expelled a breath of exhaustion. “Okay, I won't say anything unless I know for sure. But if I do, Trent, I'm going to say it whether you want to hear it or not. Because if I didn't, I'd never forgive myself—not as a professional, not as your friend.”

“It won't be an issue,” Trent said.

“I hope not. I sure as hell hope not. Will you dig around there? See what you can find out?”

“Yeah.” It might have come a beat slow—would a man who was sure be reluctant to put it to the test?—but it came. “Yeah, I will.”

So, after he took a shower and dressed, he returned to Drago, opened the dealership and went directly to Jennifer's office.

He hesitated a moment, then tried the door. It was unlocked. He went in.

 

Jennifer had her key in the apartment door lock when she heard a sound from inside.

She knew all the advice said to leave, to run down the stairs and call the police. But a stronger instinct shoved that good advice aside.

She swung open the door and heard her daughter's sobs.

Racing through the apartment, she found Ashley curled on her bed, clutching a pillow to her middle the way she used to as a child.

“Ashley! Are you hurt?”

Her mind cataloged the facts. No blood, no sign of injury, disheveled hair, tearstains down her face, wearing the clothes she'd taken with her to the sleepover for this morning, her cries sounding more of fear and anger than of pain.

She gripped her daughter's shoulders. “Ashley Elizabeth. Tell me right now—are you hurt?”

“Noooo,” she wailed.

“Are you sick?”

This response was less distinct, but Jennifer recognized it as negative.

Okay, not the worst. She could deal with this then. She could.

“Ashley, tell me what's happened. Why are you here?” She was supposed to have stayed at Sarah's until they all biked to the school. “How did you get home? What's wrong?”

“Everything's wrong!”

“Ashley. You have to tell me what's happened.”

Her daughter jolted upright, wrenching out of her hold. “Everyone knows.
Everyone.
They said they had to tell me because they're my best friends and everybody's been talking about it for weeks and they all say you're in love with that man.”

I am.

The recognition came so fast, so hard, that Jennifer gasped at it.

Oh, God. She loved Trent.

He was the one. The one Darcie had told her was all she needed.
And then it makes no difference if it's never lasted before.

The one who didn't believe in family. The one who didn't get along with her daughter. The one who would complicate her life beyond belief.

The one who made her so happy.

“I said they were crazy. You'd never do that. But they said you're going to marry him. That you chose him!” her daughter wailed. “You let him come between us!”

 

Jennifer made it past the smiling good-mornings of the dealership staff, none of whom seemed to be concerned that she had come in at nearly noon instead of being here before anyone else.

She wasn't sure she'd done the right thing sending Ashley out to keep her date with her friends. But she'd seemed calmer after they'd talked. Even though Jennifer had refused to make any promises.

She saw motion in Trent's office, and felt as if a vise inside her—one that had been twisting tighter and tighter since she'd put her key in the apartment door lock five hours ago—had just clamped down to the max.