One Sexy Daddy (10 page)

“Hello, Adam?” Amber snapped. “You're losing your mind.”

“Amber, it's just a friendly invitation.”

“How friendly?”

“Not that friendly.”

“Then no way. Are you by any chance in love with a woman?” she demanded. “Because I can hardly see how you'd be talking like this if there wasn't something completely un-Adam-like going on.”

There was a long pause.

“Wow, Adam. I'd never figured you for the type to fall in love.”

“Me neither.”

She hung up and he crossed Amber's name off his list.

The
Bs
, the
Cs
, the
Ds
, the
Es…
all the way to Zelda who owned a coffee- and poetry-reading club in Portland, Oregon.

“I'm married.”

“When did that happen?”

“Three months ago.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. Cross me off your black book, Adam, because you were a wonderful Mr. Right Now, but I've found my Mr. Right.”

“I'm happy for you.”

“Isn't there anybody in that town you can take to this dinner?”

“Yeah, but…” He couldn't really explain that the only woman he would want to ask would say no. “I'll probably just call the mayor and tell him I'll be coming by myself.”

“What!”

“I'm sorry, Stacy,” Adam said. “But when Mayor Pincham suggested that I bring you I knew that he'd suspect something if I said no. Then he'd tell his wife and it would be all over town in an instant that we were trying to hide something.”

He was actually quite pleased with his sophisticated analysis of Deerhorn information transmission.

She wasn't as impressed.

“And taking me to his home for dinner is supposed to make people
not
talk?”

“Absolutely.”

“There isn't anything going on.”

“There was. And that's enough.”

“Help me here because I fail to understand the reasoning.”

Why was she being so difficult? He had it all figured out, every angle accounted for, every possible interpretation of his actions anticipated. She
should be proud. Instead, she was standing on her front porch with her arms crossed over her chest in a decidedly “don't expect any applause” stance.

Boy, her hair was beautiful when the sun caught its light and she let it fall around her shoulders!

And Karen had been invited to a play date with a girl from her class. He didn't have to pick her up for another hour.

A whole hour that they could be using for kissing and touching and a whole lot of—

“It's like this,” he said, putting a toe on the first porch step. She glared but he refused to back off. “Mayor Pincham thinks you're not my type.”

She shrugged.

“Lasser, my boss in the Chicago office, must have told him about some of the women I've kept company with in the past.”

“So?”

“Usually blond. Always curvy. Big hair. Short skirts.”

“Okay.”

“But we've done a couple of suspicious things—gone to Tanglewood, down to Chicago, spent a lot of hours together…with you as a babysitter.”

“Uh-huh.”

He stepped up onto the second porch step, thinking that she looked pretty when she was mad. The freckles on her nose seemed darker, her eyes narrowed so that their amber color glowed, and her
breasts swelled up over her crossed arms as if she were wearing the tightest, randiest corset from the lingerie catalog found in every mailbox across the country.

“The point is that he's asking me to take you as a neighborly act.”

“An act of pity.”

“If you want to put it that way, yes.”

“Charity, in other words.”

“Sure.”

“Go perform charitable acts elsewhere.”

He followed her into the house, slipping into the foyer just before the front door slammed.

“Yeah, but if I don't show up with you, it looks a little strange. And when you add that to the suspicious acts, bingo!”

“Bingo?”

“Lefty also said that his wife didn't like parties with an uneven number of the sexes.”

“What if I said no?”

“Why would you? Can't you see that your saying no is even more suspicious than your saying yes?”

“No, I really can't,” she said drily. “Can't you make a few phone calls? Go through your black book?”

“What do you know about my black book?”

His question gave him away. Her glance was brief and withering.

“Okay, I called a few women. That's when I
came up with a few women who would say no. But if you hadn't told me that I wasn't allowed to go public with this relationship, I would have asked you first. With or without the mayor telling me.”

“No you wouldn't.”

“Yes, I would.”

“I'm not blond.”

“True.”

“I'm not curvy.”

“No. Can't say you are.”

“I haven't got big hair.”

“I'm starting to like natural curls.”

“And I don't have a short skirt.”

“Shame about not showing off your legs.”

“And willing?”

“You were pretty willing.”

“Were.”

“I'm willing enough for both of us,” he said, pulling her straight off her trajectory in the direction of the kitchen and right into his arms. “I've got an hour. You do, too.”

“I thought you said that making love once would get me out of your system.”

“I was wrong. How 'bout you?”

“I'm just fine, thank you.”

“Sure you are. Come on, Stacy, come upstairs with me.”

She opened her mouth to protest. He knew what a woman of her kind should say. And he deserved
every word. Of all the nerve! Outrageous! Taking advantage! Not treating this matter with due seriousness! And in the afternoon!

Her shell-pink lips worked themselves around indignation and condemnation for a good minute without a sound. And then her twin front teeth bit down hard on her lower lip.

“I'm learning that a woman's breasts should fit right in my palm,” he said, slipping his hand up her cashmere-soft T-shirt.

Her head dropped forward onto his chest and he felt the thunderous heartbeat.

“Really?” she asked at his collarbone.

“Really,” he said.

 

I
T WASN'T FAIR
.

It absolutely wasn't fair what he could do to her.

With just a caress and a word, a suggestion and a kiss—a fire started in her belly, one that couldn't be quenched unless he was inside her.

Although she led him up the steps to her bedroom, it was clear he was in charge. Shamefaced to be so compliant, she could hardly meet his eye when he kicked the door shut behind him. And yet, when he undid the top two buttons of his jeans, she couldn't raise her eyes. But the sight of his manhood straining against denim declared he was as much under her spell as she under his.

Armed with all her womanly power, she dawdled. Fingered a dusty crystal perfume bottle that
had been a Christmas present from her sister several years past. Brought a brush up to her hair and put it back on the dresser. Tugged her T-shirt up over her shoulders and tossed her hair with something approaching insouciance. Let one bra strap drop and then another.

He stared, slack-jawed in his admiration.

She reached back and undid a trio of hooks that kept her bra in place. Her breasts, small though they were, swelled with longing, their pink nipples taut and aching. She splayed her hands across her stomach and undid the top button of her jeans.

He'd had enough.

In two quick strides, he took her, zealously claiming her mouth with his. Possessing her breasts with his large, callused hands. Grinding his hips into hers until he found the shallow space between her legs and there he planted his knee, spreading her thighs. She was wet, she was aching, she was ready for him.

She strained against him, and they both lost their balance, tumbling onto the bed with its cheery quilt and its warren of lace and linen-covered pillows.

He eased her out of her jeans and, so that he wouldn't waste a moment, pushed his down far enough so that she could sit astride him. At first, she felt uncomfortable—her wetness, his hardness seemed not to match.

But he grabbed her firmly at her buttocks and guided her body so that he entered her.

And then he did not move.

She was grateful when her hair fell across her face so that he could not see her uncertainty.

Uncertainty gave way to movement. First forward and then so subtly back. Each time she moved against him, she felt a rewarding pleasure. Again and then again—when at last she lost self-consciousness and moved for her pleasure and only that, he lifted up the veil of copper curls. She sighed and then, as though from a far distance, heard her own cry of pleasure as he surrendered to her.

 

“W
EAR WHAT YOU HAVE ON
,” Adam suggested.

She glowered at the naked man lounging like a sated tiger on her bed.

“I don't have anything on under this sheet.”

“The sheet doesn't flatter. Go without the sheet.”

Shaking her head, she looked back into the far reaches of a closet that was not built for socializing. Jeans, overalls, work shirts, sweatshirts—all the things a woman needed to be a nurse to her father and an occasional gardener.

“Everyone's used to seeing me in jeans,” she said, pulling out a clean, pressed pair that did not have bleach-stubborn grass stains or paper-thin knees.

“Yeah, but if you wear jeans, everyone's going to get the wrong idea.”

“What idea?”

“They'll think you'd get dressed up if you weren't involved with me but wanted to be. If you don't dress up it means you're already involved with me and you're trying to fool them.”

“Oh, really?”

“Deerhorn logic,” he said brightly. “I'm becoming a master of it.”

She pulled out a blue cotton dress with a Peter Pan collar that had taken her to church many Sundays. Rising from the bed, utterly unselfconscious about his nakedness, Adam took the hanger from her hand.

“No way,” he said. “This looks like you're trying too hard to prove that you're not being casual because you're involved with me but—”

“Enough!”

“Besides, it doesn't look like it'd be very flattering. Too long.”

She picked out a denim dress.

“Covers too much of your body,” Adam warned, pulling on his jeans. “Oh, by the way, don't do a thing to your hair.”

She hadn't actually planned on doing anything, mostly because she had only two arms—from what she could tell by watching Marion's routine, it took a minimum of four to use a blow-dryer.

“Why not?”

“You have very ‘I'm having an affair' hair,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Very sexy. I don't
know how I'll ever manage to live with Vegas blow-out hair after meeting you.”

“‘I'm having an affair' hair?”

He wagged his finger. “If you fix it up, everyone will know that you're trying too hard to make it seem as if we're not…”

“Get out,” she said. “You're not any help at all.”

He shrugged. “I'll go pick up Karen. Be ready in an hour. Why don't you wear that black number you bought in Chicago? On second thought, don't. It's a terrible thing to see grown men drool.”

Stacy stared in the mirror for several minutes after he left.

“‘I'm having an affair' hair?” she asked, piling her curls atop her head.

Too sexy, now that she thought about it. Then, pulling tightly back from her forehead until her eyes narrowed and her head hurt—provocative as a music video vamp—although that's not how she had ever regarded herself when she pulled her hair off her face when she gardened.

Then, letting go of the curls, but that only made her sigh.

“I'm having an affair” hair
.

Seemed impossible that the town of Deerhorn wouldn't catch on.

She picked out a blue sundress, rejected it as being too fancy with its froth of lace at the bodice, and then decided it would be the sort of thing she'd
wear to the Pinchams if she had been invited on her own.

Or would it?

She looked at the black strapless dress and shook her head. Too shocking. And then they'd know that the trip to Chicago hadn't been strictly business.

She couldn't understand Deerhorn logic—and she had lived here all her life!

 

“Y
OU'VE DONE
something with your hair,” the mayor's wife trilled after she had accepted Stacy's garden-fresh sunflower bouquet as a hostess gift and had shooed Karen upstairs to where the children of the house were playing video games. She eyed Stacy speculatively. “Did you blow-dry it?”

“No,” Stacy said firmly. “I just brushed it like usual.”

“Seems different somehow,” Mrs. Pincham opined, leaning closer. “You aren't dying your hair, are you now?”

“No,” Stacy ducked her head. “
Having an affair” hair, huh?

“Because I just started—just to cover the gray,” the mayor's wife confided, although Nancy Tigerman let everyone know that Mrs. Pincham had been getting highlights for the past seven years. “Maybe it's your lipstick. That's the first time I've seen you in makeup. Pink's very flattering.”

“I think she looks quite pretty,” Adam declared.

Both women stared at him.

“Hmm,” Mrs. Pincham said.

“And you look quite pretty this evening, too,” Adam added.

“Well, thank you, and it's very nice of you to bring Stacy.”

“My pleasure.”

Mrs. Pincham showed them into the living room where the Deerhorn police chief, the school superintendent of the county, Deerhorn Union's minister and their wives were being served cocktails by the mayor. Flattering anecdotes were offered up about Stacy's father and grief was expressed at his passing. Stacy carefully chose a seat by the window which did not allow for sharing.

Adam accepted a glass from Lefty Pincham and sat on the couch between two Deerhorn matrons.

Talk turned to the draft choices for the Green Bay Packers, but as soon as Betty Carbol and her husband, Fire Chief Carbol, joined the gathering, the conversation turned serious.

“Do you think you'll have the school ready for September opening?” Mr. Pincham asked. “'Cause many Deerhorn families are having to make choices about whether to bus their children to the next county or register with our district.”

“I'm sure it'll be done.”

“It's already June. School was out a week ago. You haven't come up with a plan we like.”

“I know,” Adam said. “I've had to hire the best baby-sitter in town so that I can work full days.”

All eyes turned to Stacy.

“Baby-sitting,” the police chief said, in the same tone he used with youths who might know a little something about graffiti on the back of the drugstore or a bike gone missing in the library parking lot.

“Eight bucks an hour,” Adam said.

“My son Bob could do it for five dollars an hour,” Mrs. Pincham sniffed, passing a plate of appetizers. “And besides, I've heard Stacy's moving into Marion's house to give her a little help with the boys.”