Optical Delusions in Deadwood (24 page)

      “Yes, Violet?” he kissed around his words.

      “I need you to touch me.”

      “Where?”

      “Start here.” I grabbed his hands and planted them on my breasts.

      His groan sounded pain-filled. “I’m trying to take it slow.”

      “There’s no time for that.” I undid his pants, reaching inside.

      At my touch, his control evaporated. His mouth grew rough, devouring. As I hiked the bottom of my dress up, he shoved the top part down, his hands squeezing and tugging and tweaking and massaging.

      A couple of well-placed rubs by me encouraged him to kick off his pants. He gripped my hips, easing me down onto him. I sighed as pleasure spread through my veins. Grazing my nails down his shoulders and triceps, I shifted to allow his mouth more access.

      He didn’t disappoint. His lips trailed down between my breasts, then sought more. His tongue circled, flicking as he tasted. His hips grinding as he pulled me down harder, faster.

      “Damn, Doc.” I gasped, rocking along with him. “I love it when you multi-task.”

      “Violet.” His voice was gruff, strained.

      “Yes?”

      “You’re incredible.”

      His compliment shot me higher, made me want to give even more. I tipped his face to mine. Throwing aside any last inhibitions, I sought his mouth and matched our dance with my tongue. My hands slipped around to his back, where I clawed and marked him as mine. My lips dipped to his earlobe, his neck, his shoulder, my teeth sinking into his flesh. Then I crested, straining against him, shuddering, gasping his name.

      “You are so damned hot, Boots,” he rasped when I finished. He grabbed my hips and pulled me down hard, tight against him as he arched backward, all rigid tension.

      I rode the waves, watching pleasure ripple over him. Then his body sank into the vinyl, visibly relaxing. His breath slowed to match mine.

      His dark gaze drifted down to my bared midriff and back up. He tucked his arms behind his head, reaching for the bottle of wine. “You sure know how to break in a beanbag.”

      I leaned forward, resting my forearms on his chest. “What can I say? When you tease me, I get a little hot and bothered.”

      “When you get a little hot and bothered, I can only think of one thing.” He shifted his pelvis tellingly, and then held out the bottle of wine toward me, his eyebrows raised. 

      I took it and sipped, the fruity blend on my tongue reminding me of Doc’s kisses—warm and wild. In the cozy silence, my phone vibrated in my purse.

      “You need to get that?” he asked.

      I didn’t want to move, break our connection. “They’ll call back if it’s an emergency.” My kids knew better than to call twice in a row if it concerned only chickens or the need for more glue.

      He tucked a curl behind my ear. “Good, because I don’t think we’re done here.”

      I poured a splash of wine on his chest. “Oops, I’d better get that.” I licked it up and felt his instant response.

      “Vixen.” He reached for me. “Come here.”

      Several wine-flavored kisses and a lot more rubbing and touching later, I lounged on my back in the beanbag, satiated for the time being. Doc’s cheek rested on my belly while he traced figure eights on my hipbone.

      I stroked his head, combing his hair with my fingers. A book in the stack next to the beanbag caught my eye:
Haunted Deadwood
.

      “Doc?” Our newfound intimacy emboldened me. “Will you come with me to the Carhart house?”

      His finger stopped. “What for?”

      I didn’t really have an answer. I just wanted him there for some reason. “You’ll see something I haven’t.”
Or can’t.

      “Something dead?”

      “I don’t know. Maybe.”

      “You don’t believe in—”

      “I know. I know.” Truth was, I was starting to be less sure what I believed in when it came to ghosts. Things no longer seemed so black and white. The edges were blurring, turning an ectoplasmic gray. “Just humor me.”

      “I’ll consider it.” He suddenly pushed to his feet, grabbing his jeans from the floor.

      I gawked, as any red-blooded female would, at the sight of Doc’s naked, muscled body.

      “Don’t look at me like that, Violet.” He picked up his T-shirt. “Or we’ll be starting all over again.”

      Watching him step into his pants sobered me, reminding me of the outside world. I didn’t want the lightness of the moment to end, to have to return to the weight of real life.

      “Don’t move,” he told me, heading for the door. “I’ll be right back.” My phone vibrated as he passed. He paused. “You want to get that?” At my nod, he tossed me my purse.

      I dug my cell out, my gut panging at the sight of Natalie’s name on the screen. I let it go to voicemail. Then I checked who’d called earlier and saw her number again.

      “Shit.” Taking a deep breath, I called her back.

      She answered on the first ring. “Violet, where are you?”

      There was no way in hell I could answer that truthfully. “Leaving the store. What’s going on?”

      “I’m heading to Doc’s.”

     
What?
“Wait!” Oops, wrong word. “I mean, why?”

      “I realized tonight as I was watching Bogart that I’ve been going about this wooing business all wrong.”

      I scrambled to my feet, snatching my dress from the box it had landed on after Doc had peeled it off me with his teeth and flung it behind him. “All wrong?”

      “I’ve been trying to win him with Betty Crocker, which is so not the real me.”

      “The real you?” Where were my underpants? I lifted the beanbag and found them, a bit dusty.

      “You know me. I don’t win men by feeding them. I win them with sex.”

      “Sex?” I stepped into my undies while searching the room for my bra.

      “Yeah, sex. You do remember what sex is, right? It’s that thing you do when you’re naked with a man.”

      “Sex, right.” I found my bra on the floor behind some stacked boxes. “I vaguely remember it.”

      Natalie chuckled. “Someday, we’ll find a man to give you a refresher course.”

      “I’ll pass. Sex is overrated.” A voice in my head guffawed at that doozy of a lie.

      Doc rounded the doorway as I struggled to clasp my bra, bent over with my ear to my cell, which I’d set on top of a box. I silently shushed him before he had a chance to laugh out loud at me.

      He set the glass of water and can of Diet Coke he’d been holding on a nearby box and came to my rescue.

      I lifted the phone to my ear in time to hear, “We need to find you a man who will ravish you, take his Playboy fantasies out on you.”

      Doc’s hands didn’t stop at the clasp. His palms slipped around and covered my breasts, stroking. His lips brushed my bare shoulder, then his teeth nipped my skin.

      “That isn’t necessary,” I told Natalie, closing my eyes as Doc’s hands ventured south.

      “Whatever. We can talk about this later. I’m almost there.”

      My eyelids sprang wide. “Almost where?”

      “At Doc’s office. I have a gut feeling he’s working late tonight. And when I get there, no more Betty Crocker. I’m back to being Catwoman from now on. I’m wearing my lucky Cookie Monster panties.”

      “He’s not there.” I grabbed Doc’s hand, stopping him from slipping further inside my underwear.

      “How do you know?”

      “I ...” I stepped away from Doc, pointing at the phone and mouthing Natalie’s name. “I stopped by my office earlier to grab a file. His car was gone, and his windows were dark.”

      “I’m gonna check anyway.”

      “No!”

      “What is your problem? You’re acting all weird. Have you been drinking tequila again?”

      “No, no.” I ran a hand through my hair, searching frantically for an explanation Natalie would buy. “I’m just frustrated with this whole Carhart deal.”

      “You really need to stop thinking about dead men. It’s unhealthy. The live ones are much less stressful.”

      I didn’t remind her about how upset she’d been earlier at the thought of Doc sleeping with another woman. Partly because I’m a nice friend, but mostly because I was the other woman. Ah, the twisted lives we lived.

      “Listen, Nat. I think it’s a bad idea for you to stop at Doc’s place.”

      That snared Doc’s attention. He crossed his arms, watching me with raised brows.

      “You think it’s a waste of time, huh?”

      “Yes, I do.”

      She sighed. “You’re right. Do you know which hotel he’s staying at?”

      Christ, she was relentless. One of her finer qualities, usually. “No. I think you should sleep on this.”

      “I’d rather sleep on him.”

      I ignored that. “Why don’t you meet me for a drink over at the Purple Door Saloon in ten minutes? Let’s come up with another plan.” I’d rather poke myself in the eye repeatedly with an icicle, but those were hard to come by in the summer.

      “All right. I’ll see you there.”

      I hung up and frowned at Doc. “I have to go.”

      “So I hear.” He nodded at my phone. “You need to take care of that.”

      “It’s not that easy.” I zipped up my dress with a little help from him. “She’s been my best friend since we were kids. I don’t want to break her heart.”

      “You already have. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

      That stung. I lashed back. “Maybe you should make it a little more clear to her that you’re not interested. Quit stringing her along.” Unfortunately, placing some of the blame on him didn’t lessen the sting; it just made me feel like I was something I’d find stuck in the tread of my boot.

      Doc frowned at me. “I’ve told her repeatedly that our relationship is and will remain strictly business. I reiterated that fact Saturday night after dinner with you and your
date
.”

      “That was a blind date. A debt payback to Natalie.”

      “A date nonetheless.” He jammed his hands in his pocket. “I don’t know how to make it any clearer to your friend than I already have. Now it’s up to you to quit encouraging her.”

      “By telling her about us?”

      “Exactly.”

      “You make it sound so simple.” He didn’t understand Natalie. He didn’t know about the claim she’d staked on him, one that meant I was supposed to keep my hands off. It wasn’t as simple as just announcing to her that I was having sex with her supposed “one,” about whom she had spun wedding dreams already. Not if I ever wanted her to talk to me again.

      I grabbed my purse. Taking the can of soda pop Doc held out for me, I hesitated in front of him. I didn’t know what to say to a guy who’d taken me to the moon and back. I was new to this dating business, if that’s what you called what we’d had tonight. “I’ll see you around.”

      “Violet.” Doc grabbed me, kissing me until my knees wobbled. “Tell her.”

     
Chapter Fourteen

     
Tuesday, August 7th

      A mourning dove cooed outside my open window. If I’d had Harvey’s shotgun, I would have blown the noisy ball of feathers to smithereens.

      Beams of sunlight stabbed between the curtains and poked me awake, seeming a lot brighter than they should have for seven in the morning. I blinked at the clock and let out a
yip
when I read the numbers on it.

      I was babysitting the office while Ray and Mona visited actual paying clients, so being late was not an acceptable option.

      I crashed into the bathroom, trying to take the doorframe with me. My shoulder throbbing, I stepped under cool jets of water and shivered, with no time to wait for the water heater to kick in.

      That’s what I got for drinking tequila shots. Just thinking about last night at the Purple Door Saloon made my tongue recoil. I never did get around to telling Natalie about Doc. I just couldn’t do it, not with her waxing on about him and his qualities as a potential husband and me fresh from having sex with him, his musky scent still on my skin.

      Instead, I drank and listened. And listened. And drank. And listened some more, nodding at the appropriate times. But my head was still in Doc’s back room, full of guilt-ridden thoughts about his naked body. As best friends go, I was one of the shittiest around.

      It took Natalie two hours to finish lamenting. The tequila kept me nice and numb through the thick of it.

      Pounding on the bathroom door jarred me back to the present.

      “Mom!” Layne yelled. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

      I pulled my head out from under the shower nozzle. “Go downstairs!”

      “I can’t! Aunt Zoe is making Addy wash her chicken in the sink.”

      Wash her ... What? Why? I probably didn’t want to know.

      “Hold on a second,” I yelled, rinsed the last of the shampoo from my hair, and shut off the water. Not using conditioner meant my curls would riot, but Layne’s bladder trumped.

      A towel wrapped around me, a minty squirt of toothpaste in my mouth, I raced past Layne and zipped into my bedroom to dress with superhero speed. Fifteen minutes later, I stumbled out the front door as I slipped into my beaded mule sandals, my keys in hand.

      The sight of the empty driveway stopped me cold.

      What the hell? Where was my Bronco?

      Oh, right. Tequila. Natalie had driven me home. My Bronco was still parked at work, since I’d walked the four blocks to the bar from Doc’s last night.

      Lucky for me, old man Harvey’s pickup sat across the street in Ms. Geary’s drive.

      The mouth-watering smell of bacon greeted me when Harvey opened the door. The cantankerous old man standing in the doorway in his red satin boxers didn’t take kindly to my interrupting his breakfast, especially since I insisted he put on his pants before driving me down to work.

      “You could have just let me borrow your keys.” I told Harvey a few minutes later as he backed out of Ms. Geary’s drive. “I’d be back at noon to pick you up.”