Looking for Laura (29 page)

“Thank God I'm not!”

She wanted to argue, but when she slowed down long enough to think, she realized that she agreed with him. Thank God he wasn't a poet. Poets had affairs with other people's husbands and wrote sappy letters. Todd…

Todd was who he was. He wasn't introspective or elegant or sensitive, but he was honest and loyal. And he didn't use the word
hearken
in ordinary conversation, which—if she was going to be as honest as he was—she considered an asset.

She became aware of the silence in the cozy cabin, the warmth of the light emphasizing the dark forest beyond the windows. She became aware of Todd standing before her, just two strides away, staring at her. She became aware of the bed behind him, and the energy inside him, and the fact that she liked the sound of his voice, even when they were arguing, as much as she liked the sound of his laughter.

She wished she could get back to arguing with him. Arguing was safer than thinking about how tall he was, how broad his shoulders were, how long his legs. It was much safer than thinking about the remoteness of their cabin, the icy bite in the air outside, the thick quilt and plump pillows on that damn bed.

“Sally,” he murmured, sounding hoarse.

She had to say something, or do something. “Maybe I ought to give Rosie a call and see how things are going.”

“Things are going fine.” He took a step, halving the distance between them.

“I'm sure they are, but—”

“Sally.” One more step and he blocked the bed completely from her view. Which was good, she told herself. She didn't want to think about the bed, not when Todd was so close to her, when he was sliding his hand under
her hair to her nape and bowing his head, when she felt the heat of his mouth an instant before it captured hers.

They'd kissed before. She knew what to expect. She could handle it.

No. No, she couldn't. Not when they were alone like this, far from home, not when she'd lived so many long, lonely months without sex, not when he stood before her so big and real and male, not when he'd said the most romantic words a man could ever say to a woman:
I'm sorry
.

She couldn't handle it at all. So she went ahead and kissed him back.

His hand fisted in her hair. His other hand swooped around her waist and hugged her tight. She slid her hands inside his jacket so she could cling to his shoulders, and she let herself go. She remembered how powerfully she'd reacted the last time he'd kissed her, but this was different. This was hot and deep and less than three feet from a bed.

Without breaking the kiss, he shoved her cardigan down her arms. She shoved his jacket down his. Still kissing, he tugged at her jumper. She fumbled with his shirt. He stroked her cheeks, her ears, her throat, dug his fingers into her hair and pulled out the barrettes. She nuzzled his chin and felt the scratch of his day-old beard against her lips.

Together they staggered to the bed and tumbled onto it. She kicked off her sandals; he kicked off his loafers. He stopped kissing her and reached down to stroke her bare legs. They'd been cold, but his hands warmed them. Big, blunt, manly hands, tracing the contours of her calves, the creases behind her knees, shoving the jumper up and out of his way so he could caress her thighs.

She made another futile attempt to unbutton his shirt.
If only he'd stop moving, if only
she'd
stop moving. But she couldn't, not when he was running his palms along the fronts of her thighs that way, creating heat and friction that made her want to burst out of her skin. He stopped long enough to tear off the shirt himself, then hauled her jumper over her head. She pulled off her own shirt and he shucked his pants. The faster they finished undressing, the sooner he would put his magical hands back on her, so she scrambled out of her underwear and watched him dispense with his boxers.

Oh, God, he was beautiful. Todd Sloane. She'd glimpsed his bare chest that one time, but she never would have guessed the rest of him would be so divine. Rounded shoulders, taut biceps, an athlete's legs, a navel so deep and narrow she wanted to lick inside it, an erection so full she got other ideas about what to do with her tongue. He turned from her to open his suitcase, and she admired his streamlined back and the knotted muscles of his buttocks.

Why had she never noticed how handsome he was? Probably because she'd been married to his best friend, and he'd despised her for not being the wife he would have liked his best friend to have. And she'd despised him for despising her, and for knowing her husband better than she knew him, being closer to her husband than she could ever hope to be.

But she and Todd didn't despise each other now. She could never despise someone who kissed her the way he did, who touched her the way he did, who knew better than to use the word
hearken
in casual conversation.

Turning from the suitcase, he tossed a condom on the nightstand next to the bed. The sight of that premeditated foil square snapped her out of her sensuous fog. “You planned this,” she accused him.

He sprawled out on the bed next to her, brushed a heavy lock of hair out of her face and then let his hand trail down to her shoulder. “No.”

“Yes you did. You brought that. You planned this.”

“I brought Band-Aids, even though I'm not planning to get cut.”

She tried to find a chink in his logic, but his hand drifted farther down and rational thought became difficult. He fondled her breasts, kissed them, squeezed and kneaded and sucked them, and she realized that whether or not he'd planned to get laid, she was very glad he had come prepared.

And then she stopped thinking altogether, let her hands and mouth and body do the thinking, let her senses guide her. She learned what kind of touch made him gasp, what kind made him moan. She learned what made him arch his back, what made him close his eyes and shudder. She learned that if she shifted her hip he would slide his hand across her belly, if she rolled her head back he would brush his lips feather soft against her throat.

She learned that her imagination wasn't all that great, because she'd never even begun to imagine that Todd Sloane could make her feel so overheated, so restless, so greedy. She'd always enjoyed sex, but she'd never imagined she could be teased into such a state of frustration and need, a yearning so desperate it hurt. When at last he entered her, she'd never imagined she would whisper, “Thank you.”

“The pleasure's all mine,” he whispered back, and then he moved inside her, at first in slow, controlled thrusts but then faster, harder, until she was certain the pleasure was all hers. Her body convulsed, but he kept going, his eyes closed as he propped himself above her,
his hips pumping, his back damp with sweat until another climax beckoned, lured her to the edge and sent her over.

He pressed deep, threw back his head and groaned. It was a sound even more lovely than his laughter. After a moment, he sighed and lowered himself into her arms. He was heavy, his large bones digging into her soft flesh in an uncomfortable way, but she didn't care. She just held on to him, his hair tickling her cheek, his ragged breath sighing into the hollow of her neck.

She just held on and smiled.

F
or the first time in his life, Todd understood what it meant to fuck your brains out. He felt as if he had come in his mind as powerfully as he'd come the usual way.

His head felt as heavy and limp as the rest of him. It would take more energy than he possessed at the moment to roll off her—and more willpower, too, because God, her body felt good under his. Had he actually thought she was chubby? Round, yes—in all the right places. Her breasts were pillows designed to give a man wet dreams, and her bottom filled his hands perfectly. She didn't have a fashionably sleek look, but it appealed to him just fine.

Despite his exhaustion, he forced himself off her, afraid he'd suffocate her if he didn't move. She inched back, giving him enough room so he wouldn't fall off the bed, and he settled on his side facing her.

Her hair. That was another wet-dream feature. Sally was spectacular.

“How many times do you not plan to get cut?” she asked.

The words resembled English, but they made no sense. “Huh?”

“Well…” She traced the veins and bones on the back of his hand. “You said you brought Band-Aids along even though you didn't plan to get cut. I was wondering
how many times you didn't plan to get cut. How many Band-Aids you brought.”

Understanding, he laughed. “I think it was a six-pack.”

“A six-pack. Hmm.” She moved her hand up his arm. He watched her fingers as they traveled over his skin. Her unmanicured nails were short, giving her hand an almost childish appearance. It didn't feel like a child's hand on him, though. It felt magnificently womanly as it reached his shoulder and then wandered down onto his chest. “So you aren't planning to do this five more times?”

He laughed again. Even in the aftermath of glorious sex, Sally could drive him crazy. Not just with her words, either. Her hand, exploring his nipple, was also driving him crazy.

At last he understood how Paul could have wound up in an affair with her, despite the fact that they were all wrong for each other. He'd probably slept with her once and become hopelessly addicted, a risk Todd was facing right now. She stroked up and down his sternum and a circuit closed between the skin beneath her fingertips and the nerves in his groin, which began to stir from its lethargy. What he couldn't understand was how Paul could have had an affair with anyone else when he'd had Sally waiting in his bed at home.

Her hand ventured lower, stroking the fine hairs below his stomach, and his penis twitched. He really didn't have the strength to make love again so soon. But she let her hand scoot lower and all the blood in his body flowed south like a tidal wave.

“Sally,” he sighed, then gave up and covered her hand with his, guiding her onto him, knowing this playful skirting-the-issue stimulation wasn't going to get
them where she obviously wanted to go. He leaned forward to kiss her, and her mouth opened for him. He brought his other hand down and her legs opened for him, too, those warm, smooth thighs spreading to welcome him. He recalled how tightly they'd sandwiched his hips, how they'd flexed when she climaxed, and the memory turned him on so much he began to wonder whether they'd use up the damn six-pack before midnight.

The phone rang. It sat on the nightstand right next to his head, and its bell was so shrill he flinched. Sally's eyes flew open and she bolted upright.

It rang again. Todd ran through a few expletives, then reached for the receiver. “Yeah?”

“Hello! It's Claude!” The guy's voice vibrated with exclamation points.

“Yeah.” Todd cleared his throat. “Hi.”

“I thought you'd want to know—Laura has emerged.”

“Oh. Okay.” He pushed himself up to sit and rubbed his forehead between his eyebrows. The blurriest part of his brain seemed to be located somewhere around there.

“I didn't tell her you were here. I didn't want to spoil the surprise.”

“Okay, well, great. Thanks. So, she's in that big building?”

“She's in the kitchen right now. Once she's done there, she'll probably go to the game room to watch the twins play backgammon. She doesn't play it herself, but she loves to watch the twins.”

Todd bet she did. Now that Paul wasn't around, maybe she liked to make a threesome with Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Watching them play backgammon
might be her idea of foreplay. “We'll find her,” he assured Claude. “Thanks.”

He set the receiver back in its cradle and gazed at Sally. Her hair looked too inviting spilling down her back. Her breasts looked larger when she was sitting up. Her thighs…He'd never been a thigh man before he'd met her. But hers were amazing.

Sally Driver. Hard to believe she could have such an effect on him, but she did. His groin clenched when he remembered the feel of her hand on him just moments ago, as he remembered the feel of her all snug and wet around him a few minutes before that. Hard to believe—but the truth was in his body, in his nerves, in the blood pumping through his veins. He wanted her again. And again. He couldn't imagine ever having enough of her.

If they confronted Laura now, they probably wouldn't get to spend the rest of the night in this little love nest tucked in among the trees. They'd meet the woman, say their piece, get Sally's pocketknife, and then take off before Laura and her colleagues could engage them in a new Battle of Mondaga Lake.

Maybe he and Sally could spend the night in that motel an hour away, the infested place. Not a big fan of rats and roaches, he nixed that idea. They'd drive to Lake George—which was a tourist mecca, which meant all the hotel rooms would probably be booked. So they'd continue to Albany…and then Sally would say,
We're only a couple of hours from home. Let's just go
. And they'd drive through the night back to Winfield, and they'd never get to use the other five condoms he'd brought with him.

Shit.

Sighing, he turned from her and swung his legs over
the side of the bed. “Time to have it out with Laura,” he said.

 

Heading back to the main building, Todd forced himself to expel from his mind all thoughts of making love with Sally. He refused to acknowledge how much different her shapeless denim jumper looked now that he knew what was underneath it, how resplendent her hair was. She hadn't been able to find her barrette, which he'd dropped on the floor, so her long auburn mane hung loose around her face and down her back, and seeing it reminded him of its herbal smell and its crinkly texture. He refused to remember how heavenly her arms, now swinging at her sides, had felt circled around him, holding him to her. He erased it all from his gray matter so he could concentrate on the task at hand.

Whoever Laura Ryershank was, he thought, she'd have to have been pretty damn spectacular for Paul to have risked what he had with Sally.

Of course, no matter how great Sally was in bed, she could be a pain in the ass. Paul had always been cerebral; maybe Sally's lack of college degree had turned him off, and he'd needed an erudite poetess to turn him back on. Maybe that cloying claptrap Laura had written him had flicked his switch in a way lusty kisses and silky skin and exuberant passion couldn't.

Maybe Todd would never understand what Paul had been up to. Maybe he had never really understood Paul at all. His best friend had kept so many secrets from him. He'd never even hinted at how sensual Sally could be. All he'd ever done was complain about her.

Todd felt cheated. He'd wasted his best-friendship on a deceitful prick.

He tried to remember his part in this mission: not to
avenge Sally's betrayal but to find out why Paul had been a deceitful prick, why he'd denied his alleged best friend access to the truth about himself. When Todd had started the search for Laura, he'd hoped that meeting her would exonerate Paul, that she would assure him Paul had loved him and never intended to shut him out from this part of his life.

Everything was different now, though. Todd had made love to Paul's wife. Maybe
he
was the deceitful prick. Paul had been deceitful first, but still…Todd couldn't shake the twinge of guilt nipping at his conscience.

They fled into the main building, escaping the cold mountain air, and Sally started toward the dining room. Todd let her lead; he figured that as a woman she would have special radar directing her to the kitchen. She halted at the dining room doorway, tilted her head and then shook it. “There's no one there,” she guessed, just from listening. “Where do you think they'd be playing backgammon?”

From the far wing of the building came faint laughter. “That sounds promising,” he said.

Nodding, Sally swiveled on a sandaled foot—she'd donned blue-and-white striped socks, which looked strange with her sandals—and marched across the great room in the direction the laughter had come from. Her back was straight, her chin high, her gait purposeful. She'd walked the same way the morning she'd stormed into his office with the letters and demanded an explanation from him. It was her angry-woman-on-a-mission strut. She seemed to be suffering no aftereffects from their little romp at the cabin. That she could put that interlude out of her mind more easily than he unsettled him.

The laughter grew louder as they entered a hall, and
louder yet as they neared a doorway. On the threshold Sally froze. Unable to stop so quickly, Todd bumped into her.

The doorway opened into a cozy lounge. The twins hunched over a table with a backgammon board inlaid in its surface. Each was armed with a leather dice cup. Nose to nose, their posture and attire identical, they reminded him of a Rorschach test.

But they weren't the reason Sally had screeched to such an abrupt halt. She'd obviously reacted to the woman with them. She was slim and petite, clad in a purple tunic, black trousers and tooled white cowboy boots. Her hair dropped down her back in a long silver braid. When one of the twins glanced toward the door, so did she.

She had to be seventy years old at least, maybe older. Her face was a mesh of deep creases and fine lines. The skin beneath her chin pulled taut over the tendons on either side of her neck and her hands were as gnarled as some of the roots he'd driven over coming up the driveway to this building. Her pale gray eyes glinted with curiosity as she took them in. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“Surprise!” Claude hollered, launching himself out of a chair at the far end of the room and clapping his hands. “They're from Winfield, Laura!”

“Yes,” Sally managed to say. “We're from Winfield. We came to see you.”

“How lovely,” the woman said, her wizened face breaking into a smile.

This was the goddess? The beautiful, charismatic poet? She was old enough to be Paul's grandmother!

“Can we go somewhere and talk?” Sally asked.

“If you'd like. Perhaps we could have some tea.” She
patted one of the twins on the shoulder and crossed to the doorway.

In the hall, he sized up the woman. Could Paul have possibly—? No way. Even though she had a pretty decent figure for a senior citizen…and maybe she'd qualify as charismatic. Beautiful, even, in a septuagenarian kind of way. Sexy enough to be elected prom queen at the Senior Center ball.

But Paul and her together? Merely picturing his young, healthy buddy with Granny Yokum made his eggplant lasagna do gymnastics in his digestive tract.

They returned to the dining room, strolled through it and entered a kitchen equipped with professional appliances—six-burner stove, aluminum-doored refrigerator, stainless-steel counters and large cast-iron pots hanging from racks along the walls. It seemed like much too elaborate a room to boil water in, but the slender silver-haired woman filled a kettle with water, set it on the oversize range and turned on the gas. Then she plucked some tea bags from a canister and dropped them into three mugs pulled from a cabinet.

Todd hated tea, but he was too stunned to say so.

None of them spoke while they waited for the water to boil. The old saying about watched pots floated through Todd's mind as the minutes ticked by. He sneaked furtive glimpses at Laura Ryershank, taking in the slight droop of her eyelids and the pleats of skin around her eyes, the fine frizz of hair framing her heart-shaped face, the sagging flesh beneath her chin. No matter how deceitful a prick Paul was, Todd just couldn't see it. Nope. Laura Hawkes he would have believed, but not this one.

As she steeped the tea in the mugs, he contemplated a way to get out of this, to say there must be a mistake,
thank the woman for her time and leave. He wanted to go back to the cabin, to that big, solid bed, and resume what he and Sally had been doing before Claude had to spoil everything by phoning them. But he wasn't even in the mood for that. He was pretty sure he could get back into the mood with a little help from Sally, but right now…

He realized he wasn't even all that eager to return to the bed in the cabin. He just wanted to grab their bags, toss them in the car and get the hell out of here.

Sally clearly had other ideas. As soon as the three of them had carried their cups to the dining room and taken seats at one end of the long table, she started talking. Just like when they'd visited Laura Hawkes, Sally decided to turn this error into an interesting adventure. “You have such a splendid reputation at Winfield College,” she began. “We just had to come and meet you in person.”