Seaspun Magic (17 page)

"Um-hm?"

"Well, he's new. I don't know what to think. I hardly know him."

'"Hardly know him'? You've been going out with him steadily." At her astonished look, he flashed her a crooked grin and said, "Guys gossip, too, you know. I picked that up at the gas station. He's pretty easy to spot in that bright-red car of his."

Was he jealous? She could only hope so, but if so, then he was good at disguising it.

"Arianne, what did you mean by, 'not me, too'? Has someone been using your sight? Larry?"

"He wanted to go to the races. I didn't."

"Ah. So the romance isn't going smoothly."

Thoroughly aggravated by his cool dissection, she cried, "What do you care?"

"Oh, I don't. I just want him eaten by a lion, that's all! Anything would do!" Rising abruptly, he stalked out of the dining room, his dinner only half-eaten.

Arianne fell back against her chair. Then one great big beatific smile spread from ear to ear. Hurray! He was jealous! She could have danced on the table.

***

That night when he came home, late as usual, she was still up, curled in the armchair by the vast old fireplace. The plump yellow beeswax candle lent a faint honeyed aroma to the air, and down around split logs, flames spat and crackled. Jinx was a fluffy black ball on the hearthstones.

She'd just had a bath and her hair was still piled on top of her head with the silver combs, but by now more curls had escaped, and at the back a black cascade was just beginning to slide away. The ordinary, pink housecoat, swathed around her, was elevated into a sumptuous robe just by the way she wore it. A pink slipper dangled provocatively from one shapely foot.

The wind had been working itself into a storm all day and by this time it had the waves in a froth and fury. It blustered its way in the door with Leo and blew her candle out. She reached to relight it, and by the time she had, her guest had hung up his yellow slicker and was just kicking off his boots. He turned to come into the living room, when he saw her there waiting for him, watching him silently with big dusky black eyes.. .and he hesitated.

Usually she was still dressed when he came home. After the first night that he'd caught her in her robe she'd been careful to keep on the armor that day clothes furnished. Arianne hoped she wasn't being too obvious now. A subtle seduction, after all, was what she had been aiming for.

Pausing, he rubbed a hand over his eyes and over his whole face, as if to rub off a spell. And then she knew he realized she hadn't a thing on under her robe and that that quite innocent fact was having a very uninnocent effect on his mind.

He finally sauntered in, and sitting down on the couch casually, he looked her in the eye and said rather stiffly, "I owe you an apology for the way I walked out on you at dinner. It was rude."

It wasn't every day she had a man storming away from the table, too jealous to eat! It made her feel scrumptious. She wiggled a few toes and said softly, casually, "Oh, that's all right, Leo."

"No, it isn't!" he returned testily. "It's none of my business who comes here... I'm not going to interfere in... my feeling shouldn't intrude on..."

He stared at the pink slipper dangling from her toes, the pretty, painted toes, and his eyes followed the alluring lines flowing into a female ankle and up farther, to the stretch of bare calf visible before the robe cut off the view.

Sighing deeply, he rose again. "Where was I? Would you care for a bit of brandy while I'm up?"

Once they each had a shot of fine old brandy to roll around in a snifter, he paced, too restless to sit down, while Arianne lay back in her chair and simply feasted her eyes on him, relishing every second of his company.

He looked less like someone from the big city today. He looked more relaxed, like any other Olympic Peninsula local at work, perhaps a farmer, fisherman or logger. As Arianne studied him more objectively, she realized he was wearing what practically amounted to the logger's uniform: a plaid shirt, red suspenders, old jeans ripped at midcalf to accommodate high-top boots. He'd kicked the boots off; now he was in stocking feet. His socks were the woolly gray kind with the red stripe around the top, universally recognized. Arianne would have bet anybody fifty bucks right then and there that he'd never felled one of those magnificent Douglas firs in his life. So what was this charade all about?

He'd said Larry was easy to spot... it appeared he didn't want to be. She had no idea buying a piece of real estate entailed so much intrigue. There must be a great deal of money involved. Conglomerates, perhaps, vying for the same acres? With the admiral being wooed by either side? If something like that was going on, what she had divulged at dinner about the admiral's predilection for cinnamon and red carnations could, possibly, be of the utmost importance to Leo's scheme. Inside information such as that could open doors…

If she had come to that conclusion, she figured he had, too. Digesting this bit of woe, Arianne grew paler, and her eyes bigger and blacker. Perhaps he had come back to see her, after all.... And since he planned on using her, he didn't want to complicate the whole business by having an affair? Well, it did make a sort of crude sense. But there was no real evidence, and Arianne prayed none would come up. If all he wanted was the use of her clairvoyance then she would curl up and die.

ESP. As her mother had warned, men either wanted her for it or in spite of it, and neither reason made for a healthy marriage—or anything else. Sadly she wished Leo had never found out.

The arrangement in front of the fire consisted of the couch, a matching chair and the easy chair in which Arianne sat, all grouped on a big, braided oval rug. It made a cozy island adrift on a sea of gleaming oak parquet. It was around this grouping that Leo paced, his hands in his pockets, his brandy left on the mantelpiece above the cloisonne candlestick.

Arianne didn't want him disappearing up the stairs as soon as his snifter was empty. If he could make conversation, so could she.

"Do you have any sisters, Leo? Brothers? Is your father like you? I can't imagine an older Mr. Donev. What's your mother like?"

When he looked at her in astonishment she merely smiled.

"I have two sisters and two brothers. They're all married. I'm the youngest and I'm not married. My father thinks I'm... 'a few bricks short a load,' is how he puts it. He wanted me to join the family business like the rest—it's a restaurant, a big one."

Arianne was more interested than she had thought she would be. She couldn't imagine Leo in the setting he painted. "What kind of food?"

"Hungarian. My grandfather opened it twenty years before I was born. His father owned an inn in the old country. It's tradition, you see, and I—"

"Didn't want to be a restaurateur?"

Leo shook his head and smiled back, his eyes caressing her for a second before he looked away. He continued with his restless pacing. "No, I haven't the patience. And I prefer to work on my own."

"Do you still go back home? Brooklyn, isn't it?"

"Yes, a lot, although L.A. feels more like home now,"

Still pacing, he came up around the back of her chair. Stretching to look at him, she unknowingly dipped her foot, and the slipper fell off, right at his feet.

As she moved to retrieve it he stopped her. "No, I'll get it."

He bent to pick up the delicate pink shoe, which looked tiny in his hands and more like jewelry than footwear. He stared down at it for a moment, then at the bare foot in front of his nose. His other hand rose to slide around her heel, but, then, before he fitted the slipper on he paused and, as if in a dream, kissed the inside curve of arch between toe and heel.

The light warm touch of his lips in such a sensitive spot was incredibly erotic. Arianne gasped with the sensual shock that flamed through her body. Carefully he adjusted the slipper over her toes, while Arianne sat absolutely still, unable to move or stop gazing at him in wide-eyed surprise. Then, stretching her slender limbs and so removing her foot from his clasp, she murmured into the intensity, "Yes, Mikey gave me the slippers, but, no, he never did that!"

"You read my mind!" he accused, getting up. He couldn't seem to take his eyes off her.

"You asked me!" she shot back.

At the side of his throat a vein throbbed, and Arianne's one thought was to press her lips there. She could feel his hunger, his need of her; to be in the midst of such rich feeling was sweet heaven... but she did nothing about it. Nothing except lay in her chair, with the pink robe outlining each voluptuous curve. Nothing but follow him with a smoky gaze, lids half-closed to veil the poignant desire that seethed in her blood.

He finished his brandy in one quick toss. "I've sure been doing a lot of apologizing lately. I don't think I can apologize for Mikey, too. I'll let that ride. Good night, Arianne." Her eyes followed him up the stairs. "I'll see you in the morning—"

It felt like years and years since Arianne had deliberately set out to entice a male within kissing range. So long, in fact, that the plot felt new, entirely new, a deliriously frightening and deliriously exciting jungle game. And the short time span—one week, two weeks, three at the most—heightened the whole effect of the game.

It was okay to set traps and use devices since it was not real life; real life would start again once he had disappeared into the mist of another winter's day... but for now, for the next few happy enchanted days, anything could happen.

She had to admire Leo's willpower. He had promised he wouldn't make love to her, and he damned well didn't. She discovered his exquisite manners were real—they precluded what he thought of as taking advantage. And his captivating, outdated sense of chivalry, while utterly charming on the one hand, kept him at arm's length on the other. Her situation as a mother and child alone aroused his protective instincts, and he wasn't going to do anything that might possibly cause harm.

For whatever reason he had returned, now that he had he was glad, and she knew it. His manners might keep his desires in check, but they didn't dampen the sparkle in the light-jade eyes. There was an eagerness, an air of anticipation about him when he stepped in the kitchen door in the mornings to join her and Rae for breakfast. And late at night, when he returned from the fort, he bounded up the front stairs as if he couldn't get into the house fast enough.

In the mornings Rae kept Arianne and Leo from being alone, and during dinner in the evenings, the width of a table separated them—just barely. But those late nights when he came home and there was nothing to keep them apart but his eroding willpower, that was when the sweet excitement between them spiraled into urgency. That was when the erotic tension threatened to explode all trace of civilized manners sky-high, because there was really only the two of them in the whole wide world, and a week seemed like a year.

Tuesday and Wednesday, nevertheless, sped by all too quickly; Thursday night Arianne played a trick on Leo and was upstairs in her bedroom with the door shut when he came home. Just so he would know what it felt like to be faced with a closed door.

Friday morning at breakfast, she picked up on his unspoken queries as to why she'd made herself unavailable last night even for conversation. She smiled faintly at him, but gave him no reply.

His eyes burned on her, caressing and possessive. She could have purred with the feeling he inspired, just like Jinx was purring on his lap. Thudding with suspense, her heart was convinced it was no longer a question of if; now it was when. When would he make love to her? It had to be soon…

It would probably be sooner than she expected, she quickly realized, for as she turned away to put their plates in the sink, he came up behind her and lightly settled his hands on her narrow waist. He began to pull her back against him, when Rae picked up his bowl of hot cereal and dumped it off his high chair. That he didn't want cereal was the angry message he was trying to relate.

Surveying the mess, Arianne sighed. "It's going to be one of those cranky days."

Laughing, Leo murmured, "I know the feeling...

Tipping her head back to meet his eyes, she blinked slowly, suddenly remembering just how he'd made love the first time... and as the moment spun on for a few shining seconds, it seemed they shared the poignant memory.

When Arianne came down to planet earth again, she was all shaken up, and a hot flush suffused her from head to toe. Thrusting a hand in her hair, she turned to attend to Rae, who was deciding to try a temper tantrum on for size.

The rest of the day was interwoven with the insistent demands of the world and the same insidious day-dream. Every time she thought of Leo she paused and gazed off into space, and more often than not, a shadow of a smile shaped her mouth.

Dinner, however, was nothing like what she had envisioned. Rae had not been having a good day, and by nine o'clock, far from being tucked in bed asleep, he was grouchy, tired and generally not pleased about anything. Arianne's understanding had lasted all day but by this time, was wearing a little thin. As far as she could determine, there was nothing the matter with him other than a bad mood.

Trying to eat with a baby screaming from his bed upstairs proved to be impossible. So instead, he joined them at dinner in his high chair and raised hell right in front of them. When she put him in his swing so that she could do the dishes, he sobbed as if she'd broken his little heart.

With a whimper of her own she lifted him back out of the swing and set him down on the floor. She would let him run even though it would take her three times as long to do the dishes. Watching him totter off, content all of a sudden, happy to be free of all restrictions such as high chairs, playpens and swings, she identified his malaise as growing pains.

As she raced through the cleanup and the preparations for tomorrow Arianne tried to keep Rae within sight. Toward the end of her chores he wandered off down the hall for the umpteenth time, and this time Arianne let him continue out of sight. She could hear him talking to his toy phone, dragging it along behind as he went.