Нора Робертс - The Next Always

“Um, Beckett, I’m sorry, and I know it’s silly, but would you mind coming in? Empty house.” She gave a helpless shrug that embarrassed her.

“Sure. I should’ve offered. Spooky bliss,” he added when he stepped inside. “I’ll check the back door.”

She’d manipulated him and she wasn’t sorry. She’d be sorry, she admitted, if she turned out to be wrong and he didn’t want to stay with her. To be with her.

She’d be humiliated.

But if she didn’t find out now, she’d go crazy wondering.

She hated wondering.

“All clear.” He walked back from the kitchen. “Not a bad guy in sight. But you should still get a dog. A house never feels empty with a dog. Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah, thanks. Can I get you a drink?”

“Better not. I should get going.”

“I have to ask you something.”

“What?”

“When you kissed me at the door, was that a let’s-have-dinner-again-sometime kiss, or was it something else? Because it felt like something else to me.”

“Something else?”

She slid her arms up his back, took his mouth as she wanted to.

“It felt like that.”

He dropped his brow to hers. “Clare.”

“Beckett, don’t make me ask you to come upstairs and check in the closets.” She laid her hands on his cheeks. “Just come upstairs.”

She stepped away, offered her hand. He took it, held firm. “I’ve wanted to be with you when I didn’t have the right to.”

“As long as you want to be with me now.”

They started up together.

“I didn’t want to rush you. I figured you’d need time to get used to the idea, to be sure.”

“I tend to make up my mind quickly.” In the bedroom, she turned to face him. “We’ve been friends a long time, but I have a confession to make. You know I can see the inn from my office window.”

“Yeah.”

“When we had that hot spell in the spring, you’d be working outside now and then, up on that scaffolding, on the roof. With your shirt off. I’d watch you.”

She laughed a little, her eyes on his. “And I’d think about you and wonder what it would be like. Now I can find out.”

She laid her hands on his chest. “Here’s something I haven’t done in quite a while.”

“It’ll come back to you.”

She laughed again, relaxed and easy. “That, too, but I meant it’s been a while since I undressed a man. Let’s see if I remember how this part goes.”

She slipped the jacket off his shoulders, eased it down his arms, then tossed it on the little chair beside her closet. “So far, so good,” she decided. She unfastened the first button of his shirt, the second.

And he found himself trapped between pleasure and desperation.

“I thought you’d be shy.”

She opened the shirt. “You did?” She angled her head. “I haven’t been fifteen and innocent for a long time either.”

“It’s not that, or not just.”

“Ah, the mother of three, the young widow.” She drew the shirt off, tossed it over the jacket. “You’ve probably heard how little boys are made.”

“Rumors.”

“I love my boys, so much.” She ran her hands slowly up his bare chest, closing her eyes at the sensation. “I really loved the process of making them.”

She turned, lifted the hair she’d left loose around her shoulders. “Would you mind?”

He drew down the zipper, inch by inch. It was like a dream, he thought, just that filmy and sweet. And like the most intense of realities. Hot and stirring.

She stepped out of the dress when it fell to the floor, turned to him again. And reached out for him.

No dream, no longer, but real and wanting him as he wanted her. No dream when he could, at last, feel that smooth skin, the way her heart beat strong and fast under his hand.

It was she who drew him to the bed. Her fingers combed through his hair, ran down his back while their lips clung. Under him she moved, sexy and sinuous, impossibly seductive. He’d thought he knew her, had been sure of it. But he never knew this open and eager woman lived inside her. That woman caught him by the throat, could have driven him to heaven or hell at her whim.

Alive. Everything in her alive and beating, and hungry. Those rough-palmed hands stroked over her, waking her skin, her pulse, her senses. She couldn’t get enough—the muscles in his arms, the press, the weight, the shape of his body. The way their breath mingled in another drowning kiss before he took his mouth to her breast.

Her breath exploded in a gasp. Delight, desire—she let herself go, fall heedlessly into both.

They stripped each other. Not a word, too frantic for words before they tumbled back down. She wrapped around him; rose to him. An offer. A demand.

When he buried himself in her she cried out, a sound of relief and release. He struggled for control as he felt her shudder, shudder, shudder. But she rose to him again, and in that single, powerful surge, snapped his will.

He took her, riding on that hot, rising wave of need until his own release ripped through him, emptied him.

She couldn’t get her breath, and wasn’t sure—if she ever did—if she’d let it out with weeping or cheering. She felt foolishly like doing both.

“I can do better,” he mumbled with his face buried in her hair.

“Hmm?”

“I can do better. I kind of rushed that.”

“No, I rushed it, and thanks very much for keeping up the pace. Oh my God, Beckett.” Ah, she realized, she let it out on a long purr. Even better. “Please don’t move yet. Stay.” She wrapped her arms around him to make sure he did.

He stayed—happy to—but rose up to his elbows. “Look at you, Clare Murphy—sorry, Brewster—all mussed and flushed. You’re so damn pretty.”

“I like feeling mussed and flushed and damn pretty. And look at you, Beckett Montgomery, all smug and pleased with yourself.”

“Sure. I just nailed the neighborhood bookseller and town sweetheart.”

She choked out a laugh, pinched his butt. “You’d better not go bragging to the crew.”

“I was going to take out an ad in the Citizen.”

She liked looking into his face, so relaxed now, into his eyes, so deep and blue. “Make sure you say I was amazing.”

“Nothing but the truth.” He bent down to kiss her. “You destroyed me.”

“It’s good to know I haven’t lost my touch.”

He pressed a kiss to the side of her neck, to give himself a moment. He didn’t want to think of her with someone else, not even the man she’d married. Stupid of him, maybe; selfish, certainly. But right then and there, he just didn’t.

He lay quietly awhile until the feeling passed. “I want to see you tomorrow.”

“Oh, Beckett, I can’t go out again tomorrow. The boys.”

“We don’t have to go out. Or we can take them somewhere.”

“They have a birthday party to go to tomorrow afternoon. That’s something that starts now and goes on forever on Saturdays. You could come to dinner on Sunday. It has to be a little early because it’s a school night.”

“What time?”

“Five thirty?”

“I’ll be here.”

He rolled off, took her hand as he sat up. “I should go.”

She wrapped her arms around herself, faked a little shudder. “And leave me in this empty house all alone—without a dog.”

He grinned. “You’re not afraid.”

“No, I tricked you, but I had to get you in bed somehow.”

“And thanks.”

“And now you’re going to make me work to keep you here?”

“The car’s outside in the drive. You know people are going to see it, especially if it’s still there in the morning.”

Amused he’d be concerned for her reputation, she sat up with him. “Beckett?”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s give them something to talk about.”

Monday morning, well shy of opening, clare used her key to get into Vesta. She heard the enormous mixer chugging along, and went straight back where she knew Avery would be making dough.

“Hi! I wanted to talk to you before—” She stopped dead, stared as Avery rolled already mixed and cut dough into balls. “Your hair! It’s . . . Is that magenta? You dyed your hair.”

“You had sex.”

“I—You dyed your hair because I had sex?”

“No. I dyed it because I didn’t have sex. Okay, not really.” She huffed out a breath as she rolled. “Maybe a little. Mostly I just wanted a change. Something to stir things up.”

“You definitely stirred.”

Avery looked down at her far from spotless baker’s apron all the way to her Old Navy sneakers with their gel inserts. “I’m in a rut, Clare. No, I am the rut.”

“You’re not the rut. I like it. It’s . . . fun.”

“I think I like it. Sort of.” Her hands coated with flour and dough, Avery rubbed an itch on her chin with her shoulder. “I scared myself this morning when I looked in the bathroom mirror. I forgot about it, then it was like eek, who the hell is that! Anyway, it’s just one of those wash-in-and-out rinses. I’ll live with it awhile and see.”

Privately, Clare thought: Thank God.

Movements practiced and quick, Avery began placing the rolled dough in rising pans. “Now, about that sex. You had sex Friday night and—”

“And into Saturday morning.”

“Bragging is the tool of the small and the petty. Am I or am I not your best friend?”

“BFF.” Clare tapped a finger on her heart.

“And what do I get, a measly little text message. Spent night with B. Fabulous.”

“Didn’t I leave that bit of Shania Twain on your answering machine, the ‘I Feel Like a Woman’ cut?”

“Okay, that made me laugh, but these are not the details given to the BFF.”