His lips covered the tight peak, and he drew his tongue over it in tender licks. I squirmed beneath him, unable to hold still. The nipple budded almost painfully, sensation darting to the fork of my body with every stroke and swirl. I moaned and put my arms around his head, my spine dissolving as he moved to the other breast. My fingers tangled in the silk of his hair, shaping to his skull. Blindly I urged his mouth back up to mine, and he took it savagely, as if he couldn’t get deep enough.
The weight of his hand settled low on my stomach, spanning the soft curve. I felt the tip of his little finger resting on the edge of the dark triangle. Whimpering, I nudged upward. His hand slid lower, and as his fingertips played in the springy curls, my insides began to throb and close on the emptiness. Until that moment, I had never felt as if I could die from raw need. I moaned and pulled at his T-shirt. Hardy’s mouth returned to mine, licking at the sounds I made as if he could taste them. “Touch me,” I gasped, my toes curling into the velvet cushions. “Hardy, please—”
“Where?” came a devil-whisper, while he stroked the damp curls between my thighs.
I parted my knees, shaking all over. “There. There.”
He gave a sigh that was almost a purr, his fingers nudging me open, finding heat and syrup, centering on the place that drove me wild. His mouth rubbed over my swollen lips, dragging gently. His hand slid from between my legs, and he gathered me in his arms as if he meant to lift me, but instead he just held me in a bundle of smoothness and trembling bones and gasping dampness. He dipped his head, kissing the arc of a knee, the plush give of a breast, the tight strain of my throat.
“Take me to bed,” I said hoarsely. I caught one of his earlobes between my teeth, drew my tongue over it. “Take me . . .”
Hardy shuddered and released me and turned to sit on the floor facing away from me. He rested his arms on his bent knees and lowered his head, his breath coming in deep, harsh gusts. “I can’t.” His voice was muffled. “Not tonight, Haven.”
I was slow to understand. Trying to think straight was like pushing past layers of filmy curtains. “What is it?” I whispered. “Why not?”
Hardy took an unnervingly long time to answer. He moved to face me, kneeling with his thighs spread. He reached out to cover me with the sides of the robe, the gesture so careful that it seemed even more intimate than what had gone before.
“It’s not right,” he said. “Not after what you’ve just been through. I’d be taking advantage of you.”
I couldn’t believe it. Not when everything had been going so well, when it seemed like all my fear had gone. Not when I needed him so badly. “No you wouldn’t,” I protested. “I’m fine. I want to sleep with you.”
“You’re in no shape to make that decision right now.”
“But . . .” I sat up and rubbed my face. “Hardy, don’t you think you’re being a little high-handed about this? After getting me all worked up, you—” I stopped as an awful thought occurred to me. “This is payback, isn’t it? For last night?”
“No,” he said in annoyance. “I wouldn’t do that. That’s not what this is about. And in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m as worked up as you are.”
“So I’m not part of the decision? I don’t get a vote?”
“Not tonight.”
“Damn it, Hardy . . .” I was aching all over. “You’re going to let me suffer just so you can prove some completely unnecessary point?”
His hand slid over my stomach. “Let me finish you off.”
It was like being offered an extra appetizer when the entrée wasn’t available. “No,” I said, red-faced with frustration. “I don’t want a halfway job, I want a full, start-to-finish sex act. I want to be regarded as an adult woman who has the right to decide what to do with her own body.”
“Honey, I think we just proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that I think of you as an adult woman. But I’m not going to take someone who’s just been through a near-death experience, bring her up to my apartment and give her alcohol, and then take advantage of her while she’s feeling grateful. It’s not happening.”
My eyes widened. “You think I would sleep with you out of gratitude?”
“I don’t know. But I want to give it a day or two to wear off.”
“It’s worn off already, you big jerk!” I knew I wasn’t being fair to him, but I couldn’t help it. I was being left high and dry, just at the point when my body was about to go up in flames.
“I’m trying to be a gentleman, damn it all.”
“Well, now’s a fine time to start.”
I couldn’t stay in his apartment another minute—I was afraid I’d do something to embarrass us both. Like throw myself on him and beg. Struggling off the sofa, I retied the belt of the robe around my waist and headed for the door.
Hardy was at my heels immediately. “Where are you going?”
“Down to my apartment.”
“Let me get your clothes first.”
“Don’t bother. People wear robes when they’re coming up from the pool.”
“They’re not naked underneath.”
“So what? Are you afraid someone will be so overcome with lust he’ll pounce on me in the hallway? I should be so lucky.” I charged to the door and went out into the hallway. I was actually grateful for the surge of invigorating rage—it didn’t leave much room for me to worry about the elevator.
Hardy followed, and waited beside me until the elevator doors opened. We went in together, both of us barefoot. “Haven, you know I’m right. Let’s talk about this.”
“If you don’t want to have sex, I don’t want to talk about our feelings.”
He scrubbed his hand through his hair, looking confused. “Well, that’s for damn sure the first time a woman’s ever said that to me.”
“I don’t take rejection well,” I muttered.
“It’s not rejection, it’s a postponement. And if Jack Daniel’s makes you this ornery, I’m never pouring you another shot.”
“It has nothing to do with the whiskey. I’m this ornery all on my own.”
It seemed Hardy realized that no matter what he said, it was only going to aggravate me further. So he remained strategically silent until we reached my door. I entered the combination and stepped over the threshold.
Hardy stood looking down at me. He was disheveled and appetizing and sexy as all get out. But he wasn’t apologetic.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.
“I won’t answer.”
Hardy slid a long, lazy glance over me, the folds of his own robe wrapped around me, the tight clench of my bare toes. A hint of a smile deepened one corner of his mouth. “You’ll answer,” he said.
I closed the door smartly. I didn’t need to see his face to know there was an arrogant grin on it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I SHOWED UP FOR WORK AT EIGHT-THIRTY THE next morning and was immediately surrounded by Kimmie, Samantha, Phil, and Rob. They all expressed relief that I was okay, and asked about the flooding and what it had been like to be trapped in the elevator, and how I’d gotten out.
“I managed to call a friend of mine before my cell phone went out,” I explained. “He showed up and . . . well, everything was fine after that.”
“It was Mr. Cates, wasn’t it?” Rob asked. “David told me.”
“Our tenant Mr. Cates?” Kimmie asked, and grinned at my sheepish nod.
Vanessa came to my cubicle, looking concerned. “Haven, are you all right? Kellie Reinhart called and told me what happened last night.”
“I’m just fine,” I said. “Ready for work as usual.”
She laughed. Maybe I was the only one who heard the condescending edge to it. “You’re a trouper, Haven. Good for you.”
“By the way,” Kimmie told me, “we got a half-dozen calls this morning, asking if you were the woman in the elevator. I think the local media wants to make a deal out of the Travis angle. So I played dumb and said as far as I knew, it wasn’t you.”
&n
bsp; “Thank you,” I said, conscious of the slight narrowing of Vanessa’s eyes. As much as I disliked my being a Travis, she disliked my being a Travis even more.
“All right, everyone,” Vanessa said, “let’s all get back to work.” She waited until the others had left my cubicle before saying pleasantly, “Haven, come to my office and we’ll have coffee while we go over your meeting with Kellie.”
“Vanessa, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to remember everything we went over.”
“It’s on your computer, isn’t it?”
“I don’t have the computer,” I said apologetically. “It drowned.”
Vanessa sighed. “Oh, Haven. I wish you’d be more careful with office property.”
“Sorry, but it just wasn’t possible to save it. The water was coming up and—”
“Look through your notes, then. You did make notes, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but they were in my briefcase . . . and everything in it was trashed. I’ll call Kelly and try to reconstruct the meeting as well as I can, but—”
“Honestly, Haven, couldn’t you have managed to hold on to your briefcase?” She gave me a look of gentle chiding. “Did you have to go into a panic and drop everything?”
“Vanessa,” I said cautiously, “the leak in the elevator was more than just a puddle on the floor.” Clearly she didn’t understand what had happened, but the last thing you could tell Vanessa was that she didn’t understand something.
She rolled her eyes and smiled as if I were a child telling stories. “With your flair for drama, there’s no telling what really happened.”
“Hey.” A rich, easy voice interrupted us. Jack. He came to the cubicle, and Vanessa turned to face him. Her slim fingers gracefully tucked a lock of pale, perfect hair behind her ear. “Hello, Jack.”
“Hello, yourself.” He came in, surveyed me thoroughly, and reached out to pull me against his chest in a brief hug. I stiffened a little. “Yeah, I don’t give a shit that you don’t like to be touched,” Jack said, continuing to hug me. “You scared the life out of me last night. I stopped by your apartment a couple of minutes ago, and there was no answer. What are you doing here?”
“I work here,” I said with a crooked grin.
“Not today. You’re taking the day off.”
“I don’t need to do that,” I protested, conscious of Vanessa’s stony gaze.
Jack finally let go of me. “Yes you do. Relax. Take a nap. And make sure to call Gage, Joe, Dad, and Todd . . . they all want to talk to you. No one called you at home in case you were sleeping.”
I made a face. “Am I going to have to repeat the whole story four times?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
“Jack,” Vanessa broke in sweetly, “I don’t think it’s necessary to make Haven take a day off. We’ll take good care of her. And it might help to take her mind off the trauma of getting stuck on that elevator.”
Jack gave her a strange look. “It was more than being stuck on an elevator,” he told her. “My sister was trapped like a minnow in a bait bucket. I talked to the guy who pulled her out last night. He said the elevator cab was nearly full of water, and completely dark. And he didn’t know any other woman who would have handled it as well as Haven did.”
Hardy had said that about me? I was pleased and flattered . . . and I was also fascinated by the quick, subtle contortions that worked across Vanessa’s face.
“Well, of course you should take the day off,” she exclaimed, startling me by putting an arm around my shoulders. “I had no idea it was that bad, Haven. You should have told me.” She gave me an affectionate squeeze. The dry, expensive scent of her perfume, and the feel of her arm around me, caused my skin to crawl. “You poor thing. Go home and rest. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Thanks, but no,” I said, inching away from her. “Really, I’m okay. And I want to stay.”
Jack looked down at me fondly. “Get going, sweetheart. You’re taking the day off.”
“I have a ton of stuff to do,” I told him.
“I don’t give a crap. It’ll all be here tomorrow. Right, Vanessa?”
“Right,” she said cheerfully. “Believe me, it will be no problem to cover for Haven.” She patted my back. “Take care, sweetie. Call me if you need anything.”
Her high heels left deep, pointy gouges in the office carpeting as she left.
“I really should stay,” I told Jack.
His expression was intractable. “Go visit Dad,” he said. “He wants to see you. And it wouldn’t hurt either of you to try to talk like a couple of civilized people for a change.”
I heaved a sigh and picked up my purse. “Sure. I haven’t had enough excitement in the past couple of days.”
Sliding his hands in his pockets, Jack watched me with a narrowed gaze. His voice lowered. “Hey . . . Did Cates make a move on you last night?”
“Are you asking as a brother or a friend?”
He had to think about that. “Friend, I guess.”
“All right.” I continued in the softest possible whisper. “I made a move on him, and he turned me down. He said he didn’t want to take advantage of me.”
Jack blinked. “What do you know.”
“He was really high-handed about it,” I said, turning grumpy. “And that whole ‘I’m the man, I get to decide’ attitude doesn’t play with me.”
“Haven, he’s a Texan. We’re not generally known for our sensitivity and tact. You want a guy like that, go find yourself a metrosexual. I hear there’s a lot of ’em in Austin.”
A reluctant grin broke through my indignation. “I’m not sure you even know what a metrosexual is, Jack.”
“I know I’m not one of ’em.” He smiled and sat on the corner of my desk. “Haven, everyone knows I got no love lost for Hardy Cates. But I have to take up for him on this one. He did the right thing.”
“How can you defend him?”
His black eyes sparkled. “Women,” he said. “You get mad when a man makes a move on you, and you get even madder when he doesn’t. I swear, there’s no winning.”
SOME MEN WERE partial to their daughters. My dad wasn’t one of them. Maybe if we’d spent more time together, Dad and I could have found common ground, but he’d always been too busy, too driven. Dad had yielded the responsibility of daughter-raising to Mother’s exclusive control, and no matter how she whittled and chipped, she had never been able to make a square peg fit into a round hole.
My attitude had worsened the harder Mother tried to make me into the right kind of daughter. The possessions that had been deemed unfeminine—my slingshot, my cap pistol, my plastic cowboy-and-Indian set, the Rangers hat Joe had given me—had either disappeared or were given away. “You don’t want those,” she had said when I complained. “Those things aren’t appropriate for little girls.”
Mother’s two sisters had been sympathetic to her plight, since it was obvious nothing could be done with me. But I thought they had taken some secret satisfaction in the situation. Even though their husbands hadn’t been able to afford to buy them a mansion in River Oaks, they had managed to produce my cousins Karina and Jaci and Susan, all perfect little ladies. But Mother, who’d had everything in the world she wanted, had gotten stuck with me.
I’d always known that I’d never have gone to Wellesley if my mother were still living. She had been a staunch antifeminist, although I wasn’t sure if she even knew why. Maybe because the system had always worked well for her, a rich man’s wife. Or possibly because she believed you could never change the order of things, men’s natures being what they were, and she hadn’t been one to knock her head against the wall. And many women of her generation had believed there was virtue in tolerating discrimination.
Whatever the reason, Mother and I had certainly had our differences. I felt guilty because her death had allowed me to have my own beliefs and go to the college I wanted. Dad hadn’t been happy about it, of course, but he’d been too grief-stricken to argue about
it. And it had probably been a relief for him to get me out of Texas.
I called Dad on my way to River Oaks to make sure he was at home. Since my car had been totaled by the garage flooding, I was driving a rental car. I was greeted at the front door by the housekeeper, Cecily. She had worked for the Travises for as long as I could remember. She’d been old even when I was a child, her face lined with grooves you could wedge a dime in.
While Cecily headed off to the kitchen, I went to Dad, who was relaxing in the family room. The room was flanked by walk-in fireplaces on each side, and was big enough that you could park a personnel carrier in it. My father was at one end of the room, relaxing on a living room sofa with his feet propped up.
Dad and I hadn’t spent any real time together since my divorce. We had seen each other only for short visits, with other people present. It seemed we both felt that getting through a private conversation was more trouble than it was worth.
As I looked at my father, I realized he was getting old. His hair had gotten more white than gray, and his tobacco tan had faded, evidence that he was spending less time outdoors. And he had a sort of settled-in air, the look of a man who had stopped straining and hurrying to reach the next thing around the corner.
“Hey, Dad.” I leaned down to kiss his cheek, and sat next to him.
His dark eyes inspected me carefully. “None the worse for wear, looks like.”
“Nope.” I grinned at him. “Thanks to Hardy Cates.”
“You called him, did you?”
I knew where that was leading. “Yeah. Lucky I had my cell phone.” Before he could pursue the line of questioning, I tried to divert him. “I guess I’ll have a good story to tell my therapist when she gets back from vacation.”
Dad frowned in disapproval, as I knew he would. “You’re going to a head doctor?”
“Don’t say ‘head doctor,’ Dad. I know it’s what people used to call mental health professionals, but now it has a different meaning.”
“Like what?”
“It’s slang for a woman who’s good at . . . a certain bedroom activity.”