Stranger

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “It just got out of control.”

  “Jared, I can’t have this sort of thing going on. You know that.” I sighed, too. I wanted a cup of coffee. A vodka. A nap.

  “I know. But she told me she broke up with Duane, and I kissed her, and it just went on from there.” He looked up at me. “Were you ever doing something that you knew was going to get you into trouble even when you were doing it, but you couldn’t stop yourself?”

  “Um…yes. I have. But not,” I said sternly, “at work!”

  Jared gave me a small smile. “It won’t happen again.”

  “It better not. And you’re lucky I’m too tired and desperate for help around here, or I’d fire you both.”

  He smiled again as if he knew I didn’t mean it and got up. “Thanks, Grace. I’d better go check on her.”

  “Tell Miss Attitude she’d better get back to work pronto.” I was too tired to put much force behind the threat. “And we need to take care of Mrs. Grenady, so be back in five minutes or I’ll kick your butt.”

  Jared saluted. “Yes, ma’am.”

  God. I was so not a ma’am, but whatever. “Go!”

  We spent the next few hours actually working. Jared was bubbling with enthusiasm about music, about the upcoming weekend, about what he was going to have for dinner. He was so caught up in his own little love bubble he shouldn’t have noticed mine, but he must’ve caught sight of my own secret smiles because he pinned me like a wrestler on the Friday-night smackdown.

  “So, who is he?” Jared ran water in the sink and started tidying the equipment we’d used in Mrs. Grenady’s preparation.

  “Don’t forget we need to order some more of that cleaning fluid.” I wasn’t pretending I didn’t hear him. I was deliberately not answering.

  “Yes, boss. But c’mon. You’ve got a grin on your face and you otherwise look like crap.”

  Jared stepped in front of me so I had to look up at him. “Hey, I don’t think we have any secrets from each other anymore.”

  I raised a brow. “I hardly think what I saw this morning puts you on a ‘need-to-know’

  basis about my private life.”

  Jared grinned. “Come on.”

  I grinned, too, giddy from lack of sleep and the sheer emotional roller-coaster ride I was on. “It’s Sam.”

  It was Jared’s turn to raise a brow. “Sam Stewart? Dude with the earring?”

  “Yes.”

  “The one who brought Chinese?”

  “Same Sam.”

  Jared let out a low whistle. “Same guy whose dad we took care of?”

  “Yes, Jared. Is that a problem?” I glared, again without strength. “I need some coffee.”

  Together we transported Mrs. Grenady up to the chapel to await the service with her family later that afternoon. Jared didn’t continue poking me about Sam, but when I’d poured us both coffee and given him a mug, he grinned again. I ignored him this time and told Shelly to order more cleaning fluid. She, apparently, wasn’t speaking to me, but she sniffed and flipped open the supply catalog.

  “Sam Stewart,” Jared said. “Wow.”

  “What’s wrong with Sam?” I snapped.

  Shelly looked up. “Grace is going out with Sam?”

  “None of your business!”

  “She is,” Jared said.

  “You’d think she’d be a little more understanding then,” Shelly muttered.

  I chose to ignore her. I didn’t really want to fire her. Who’d make me cookies?

  “I think it’s about time.” Jared nodded. Suddenly an expert.

  “Are you two finished with the commentary?” I glared at them both.

  Shelly shrugged and picked up the phone to take an order. Jared laughed and said he had to finish cleaning up the embalming room. I was taking my coffee to sit in my office and maybe steal a power nap, when the back door opened and Hannah came in with the kids in tow.

  Hannah never came here. It was something of a tradition, if not a joke, that my sister never came to the funeral home where she’d lived until she was four. Now she hustled in, a hand wrapped firmly around each of her children’s wrists.

  “I need you to watch the kids for half an hour until Mom can get here to pick them up.”

  Hannah didn’t waste any time.

  Two small bodies buffeted me with jostling hugs.

  “Bother!” Melanie said in a high-pitched voice, imitating an Internet cartoon I’d shown them once while babysitting. “Bother, bother!”

  I unstuck my niece and nephew and told them to go into my office and find the candy jar, a command they followed willingly and at once. I looked at my sister.

  Hannah wore a pair of neat black slacks and a sky-blue, button-down blouse. She wore makeup and had done her hair. There wasn’t anything showy or flashy about her. There never was. Nevertheless, I could tell she’d made more of an effort than seemed normal.

  “Where are you going?” I asked, suspicious.

  “I have an appointment. Mom will come for them in half an hour. I have to go.”

  “Hannah, wait!”

  She did, just barely. Her shoulders hunched and she turned, every line of her body so tense she appeared to be hovering. “I’m going to be late, Grace! C’mon, can’t you just do this for me?”

  The way she said it, as if I never agreed to watch them, set my teeth on edge. “This isn’t a preschool! It’s my business! I have to work.”

  “The kids don’t mind it here. Let them watch TV or something.” Hannah stared right at me, neither to one side or the other, as if she was afraid she might accidentally catch sight of a corpse. “Half an hour.”

  With that, before I could protest, she ducked out the door, leaving me to stare after her with my mouth open.

  “You catching flies?” Jared had just come up from the basement.

  I closed my mouth and mumbled something as I went to my office to make sure Melanie and Simon hadn’t added it to the path of their worldwide destruction. I could entertain them for half an hour, no problem. I’d stick them in front of the cartoon channel if I had to. The more concerning question in my mind was, what was so important to my sister that she’d come to the funeral home to drop them off? What sort of appointment would be so important?

  It hit me like a snow shovel to the back of the head. So obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. So preposterous it had to be true.

  Hannah was having an affair.

  Chapter 17

  I wasn’t sure what to do about Hannah, so I didn’t do anything. My mom came to pick them up in an hour instead of thirty minutes, but the kids had occupied themselves with cartoons and candy and I wasn’t called away to pick up a body or oversee any burials. I didn’t mention my concern to my mom. After all, what would I have said? I thought about it, though, as the days passed.

  Contrary to what our Puritan heritage teaches us, I’m not convinced monogamy is the natural resting state of human sexuality. I don’t think people are wired to attach themselves to one another forever and ever, amen. I think it can be done successfully, sure, and I understand the appeal of being secure in your emotional connections, knowing your partner isn’t expending his or her emotional limit on someone else. I even think it’s better for most people to convince themselves monogamy is what they prefer, that there’s something to be said about a little self-delusion now and again. But I don’t think monogamy is easy or natural, and I think most people spend too much time worried about their spouse or partner cheating on them.

  I’d sort of always looked at my sister’s life as one more example why I was glad to stay single, but since meeting Sam my mind had begun changing. It seemed like overnight I’d ended up with a guy who wasn’t a hired companion or a one-night stand. A boyfriend. Like a late-night B movie, the thought of Sam Stewart being my boyfriend alternately thrilled and chilled me. One minute I couldn’t stop grinning. The next I broke out in a cold sweat, wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself
into.

  Sam made it so easy. I’d watched my friends and listened to them complain for years about boys who didn’t give a hint about how they felt. I never had to doubt with Sam. Not that he declared his undying love. We didn’t use that word. For months we’d been building a friendship, though, and now we’d added the sex—or returned to the sex, as Sam was sometimes fond of pointing out—Sam wasn’t shy about showing affection. He kissed and hugged me no matter who was around and held my hand whenever it was feasible. He brought me flowers and left me notes on the mornings he spent the night with me and left to go to his teaching.

  Those mornings were becoming more and more frequent. Sleeping over at his place was out of the question. I’d met his mom, a woman so tiny it was hard to believe she’d birthed such a gargantuan son. Dotty Stewart was a sweetheart. She’d embraced Elle as if she were her own daughter, so I wasn’t particularly worried that she didn’t like me. We didn’t see much of her, though. Dotty grieved by keeping herself busy with friends and her sisters. She usually wasn’t home the few times I’d stopped by to see Sam.

  Though Sam had met Jared and Shelly and a few of my friends whom we’d bumped into at the movies or restaurants, he hadn’t met my family. Not that he was a secret. A town like Annville doesn’t really allow them. Not when Mrs. Zook who lives next door notices the same

  “strange” car parked overnight in the lot more than once or twice a week. The days of the party line are gone, but now we have e-mail and instant messaging, and people still gossip when they meet up with each other at the grocery store.

  I wasn’t quite creating a scandal, but Sam was definitely not a secret.

  I’m sure it bugged the hell out of my dad that I didn’t talk about it, but he’d stopped just

  “dropping by” the funeral home to check up on me. That was fine with me. I missed the way he sometimes took me to lunch unexpectedly and always treated, but I didn’t miss his constant poking into my business, both personal and professional. And I won’t deny that I was a bit miffed at the fact that for the first time since I’d taken over full-time from my dad, despite the recent spate of hard luck, the business was growing faster than ever and I couldn’t even brag about it to him.

  I was going to be able to hire Jared full-time when his internship ended, if I wanted to. I could even afford to take on another intern. Hell, I could have afforded to pay for dates every week instead of once or twice a month, if I wasn’t getting all the hot monkey sex I wanted for free.

  It was great that business was good, that my marketing efforts were paying off, that the town had started accepting me in my dad’s place. It was good to know I was providing a necessary and vital service to people who needed it, and that I was more than decent at it. I was good.

  Everything, in fact, was good.

  I had a great job, good friends. And finally, surprisingly, a boyfriend who brought me flowers and played love songs for me on his guitar. With the money I was saving by not paying Mrs. Smith’s gentlemen, I was even starting to think about finishing the renovations on my apartment.

  “But I like it this way,” Sam said when I told him. “It’s got a certain lackluster chic.”

  I smacked his arm and reached for the bowl of popcorn he’d been hoarding. With my feet propped comfortably on his lap and my head on the pillows, I had the best of both worlds—a great view of the television and a free foot massage.

  “Need I point out to you that at least I have my own place? And my own sheets?” It was sort of a running joke between us. Sam had made no plans to move from his mother’s house. He said it was because she needed him there, now that his dad was gone, but I suspected laziness on his part.

  “Hey. I had my own place. And I still have my own sheets. They’re in storage in New York, that’s all.”

  “For what you’re paying to store them in New York, Sammy, you could rent an entire house in Annville.”

  Sam curled his lip. “I’ve had my own place, Gracie. Let me tell you how much nicer it is living with my mom.”

  “Why?” I tossed a kernel of popcorn at him. “Because she cooks and cleans up after you?”

  He caught the popcorn in his mouth. Talented boy. “You got it.”

  I liked most everything about Sam except that attitude. I didn’t know if he was serious about his reasons for still living with his mother. Maybe he was afraid to leave her alone, despite how well she seemed to have adjusted. Or maybe he couldn’t afford to live on his own and was too embarrassed to admit it. It just seemed so at odds with the rest of him, the man I’d come to know who didn’t have to be told to wash a dish or put the seat down or even to make the bed; the same one who treated me to dinner without making me feel as if he were buying my company and yet had no problem with me picking up the tab when I offered. It seemed hard for me to believe that he was still squatting in his childhood home because he didn’t want to live on his own.

  So, typically, I pried.

  “Didn’t your mom say she was thinking of going on a cruise with your aunt?”

  “Yep.” Sam crunched more popcorn, his eyes glued to the TV. “Next month.”

  “How will you manage?” I teased. “Who will do your laundry and pack your lunches?”

  The corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Someone who loves me?”

  I nudged him with my foot to cover up my reaction. “Your brother?”

  Sam looked at me with big puppy-dog eyes. He even fluttered his eyelashes. He pouted, too.

  “Don’t look at me,” I said. “I don’t pack lunches.”

  The lower lip pooched out farther as he leaned over to tickle me. “No? Not even for me?”

  “No fair!” I tried to get away, but my desire for the arches of my feet to be rubbed was my downfall. He’d trapped me effectively with one arm while the other hand meandered around my most sensitive spots and sent me into breathless hysterics. The popcorn was the victim of our wrestling, the bowl tipping off Sam’s lap and overturning onto the floor as he pinned me.

  God, he was huge.

  One hand easily gripped both my wrists above my head as he straddled me, the cushions of my battered couch sinking under our combined weight and his knees trapping my thighs. He played a chord on my ribs and the insanely ticklish spot just above my hipbone, and no matter how wildly I tried to buck him off, I couldn’t.

  He was breathing hard and I was sipping in gasp after gasp of giggle-infused air. Sam leaned down to put his mouth a breath from mine. Salt and butter painted his lips. It took me a minute to notice he’d stopped tickling, because his kiss left me just as breathless.

  Sam was big, but he knew how to cover me without crushing me. How to move down my body with his as he held his weight on an elbow, a knee, a palm. Now he let go of my wrists and tipped my head back with his nose so he could get at my throat and neck. His mouth skimmed the scooped neck of my T-shirt. When his tongue darted out to lick the hollow of my throat, my back arched all on its own. My nipples hardened at once. The spot between my legs began its subtle, familiar pulse.

  He returned to my mouth. Sam’s kisses were like his songs, different every time he sang them even though the words and the melodies were the same. He had a certain trick he did with his tongue and teeth, a sort of nibbling lick. He used it only once in a while, and each time it was an unexpected change of key in a song you thought you knew. Like John Mayer covering Marilyn Manson. It drove me crazy.

  He did it then, and my hips pumped up. My crotch connected with his belt buckle, and I wasn’t going to turn that down. I grabbed his ass with both hands and tucked my heels around the backs of his thighs to hold him in place. He only had to move a little bit to give me the delicious pressure I craved.

  He knew what I was doing, and smiled through his kisses. He pushed forward, giving me what I wanted though the position had to feel awkward for him. Sam slid his hand beneath my shirt and deftly unhooked my bra. He covered my breast immediately, kneading gently before lightly pinching my nipple to its peak. He
did the same to the other, then pushed up on his hand and tugged my T-shirt to my waistband. The thin fabric pulled tight over my breasts and outlined my upright nipples.

  “God, I love it when you look like that. I wish you never wore a bra.”

  The visible evidence of my own arousal turned me on more, too. “I’m sure that would go over well. Here, let me give you a remembrance card and oh, while I’m at it, let me poke out your eyes.”

  Sam rubbed his hand over the curves and bumps outlined by my shirt. With the fabric barrier, his muffled touch became a tease. “I’d love it. At least don’t wear one when we’re alone.

  Wear tight T-shirts and no bra, just for me.”

  “For you?” I pretended to think, though with his mouth and hands and belt pressing against me in all sorts of delicious places, my mind had become nothing but a swirl of pleasure.

  “You might be able to convince me.”

  “Yeah? How?” Sam’s lips tugged a cloth-covered nipple.

  I reached between us to cup him through his jeans. “Give me this whenever I want it.”

  Heat hit my fingers even through the denim. Sam pushed his erection into my palm. “Deal.

  What do I have to do to get you to pack my lunch?”

  I laughed. “Forget it.”

  “How about one day for every orgasm?”

  “Orgasms are not bargaining chips, Sam.” Yet I was smiling as I said it, because he’d begun working his way down my body to the hem of my shirt and pulling it up with his teeth to get to the soft flesh beneath.

  “What’s the most number of times you’ve ever come?”

  “With someone else?”

  He stopped and got up on his hands to look at me. “You’re killing me, here. Yes, with someone else. I know you can go off like a rocket ship a hundred times in a row when it’s you and your bullet. Stop giving me a complex.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You don’t sound sorry. You sound smug.”

  I’m sure I meant to protest, but just then Sam unbuttoned my jeans with his teeth and I lost my train of thought. He slid his hands under my ass to lift me up enough that he could slide off my jeans. My panties came down, too, everything tangling with my socks around my ankles. I helped him tug them off and laughed at the face he made as he tried to figure out the tangle of material.