Sunburst (6 page)

“You know,” he interrupted finally, “I like that blouse.” He fingered the gauzy material between two fingers, studying the fabric intently. “It gives the illusion that you can see it all, and then it doesn’t keep the promise. Even when you were standing full in sunlight, the flesh underneath was just shadowy—you don’t mind if I check it out in a little more detail? Keep talking,” he urged her politely. “I knew damn well you’d have a gift for setting up a classy showroom, lady. You get full applause for every idea so far.”

She tried, but she seemed to be having an increasing difficulty following the thread of her own conversation. He propelled her flat on her back. Her strawberry-blond hair fanned out on the mossy grass behind her, and her golden eyes began to laugh up at his. He was very professorlike, gravely verifying that there were shoulders and breasts and ribs within the gossamer fabric, not just shadowy promises. “I can’t believe how far you’ve progressed on the building in just two days, Kyle. You’re going to be done in another week, aren’t you? Here I’ve been selfishly rambling on, and I never even asked you about things here—”

“I changed my mind,” he said severely. “I don’t like this blouse at all.” He raised her up, ordered her to lift her arms above her head, slipped the creamy summer material over her head, and promptly allowed it to decorate a bush. “Now is there some reason we need this?” He pointed to the lacy bit of bra. “I can’t think of a reason in hell…”

“What if someone comes by?” The demurral was halfhearted, and he knew it.

“I have every intention of keeping you covered, lady…”

His lips were so warm, so soft from the sun, the scent of grass, the ripple of the light breeze, the perfume of the wheat so intoxicating. It seemed to Erica that their loving had never had so much sweetness, so much urgency, so much sheer uninhibited joy.

They were both laughing as they stood up to take off the rest of their clothes, but their exuberant laughter had faded to something soft and secret, like a sound only the two of them could hear. When the clothes were gone, there was a moment when neither made a move to touch the other. Kyle stood, allowing Erica’s eyes to sweep over his tall, bronzed form without shyness, as his own gaze took in, savored, loved her smaller feminine frame.

No man has a more beautiful body than you do. Did you know that? Would you like me to shout it out…?

Every inch, Erica. Lord, I want you. Just as you are, this very instant…

They spoke with their eyes. They spoke in the way their lips joined, the way they both felt an identical sensual rush when their bodies finally touched. His hard thighs were pressed against her softer ones; her breasts swelled and tightened against his warm chest, and his skin…such supple skin beneath her kneading hands, which slid from the breadth of his shoulders to his taut male buttocks. He warmed beneath her hands, responsive to her every touch.

His lips left hers to trail down to her throat, silk-soft kisses that made her heart skip beats, that seemed to drug her into the illusion that she had left the ground. She had. Rather than bending, he lifted her playfully to kiss where he wanted, so that his face was level with her throat and then her breasts as he lifted her high, higher. Her legs wrapped around his waist for balance, and a husky sound escaped from her throat, half joyful laughter and half a helpless little groan as his lips burrowed between her breasts, his strong arms arching her back to offer the full satin flesh to his mouth. He raised her higher yet, pressing a kiss to her navel and then lower, his cheek brushing in that soft, curly triangle as she felt the crazy sensation of being weightless, higher than life, higher than breath.

When her toes touched the mossy earth again, there was still no sensation of reality. The spirit of soaring was intensified by the look in his eyes, by that deep turquoise brightness that came with loving, compelling tenderness. In some vague way, she was aware they were no longer standing but kneeling, then lying together on the soft moss. Her senses inhaled the shudder of need that racked Kyle’s whole body, the husky whispers of loving in her ears, the surge that encompassed both of them as limbs suddenly feverishly tangled with limbs, neither of them wanting to rush and both of them in such a desperate hurry…

“Kyle…”

“How I love to see you happy, Erica. I’m going to take you so high you’ll never come down…” He arched over her supple form, covering her, his kiss drowning the moaning cry in her throat when he joined with her. She felt so much love in his giving…

When the rain started falling, it made no difference at all, the soft, warm drops falling on skin that was already slippery. The scents around them intensified as if to prove that they were in another world. She almost hurt from so much love, a bursting joy within her, so loud that the thunder seemed quiet. She touched the sun and then seemed to explode…

Still he held her, rocking her back and forth until her heart stopped hammering, until they could both breathe normally again.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmured.

She already felt that. He’d already told her, in the best way a man can tell a woman. She just looked at him. Rain was streaming down; his face was damp, his hair curling wildly—he was blinking the water from his eyes. There were bits of grass on his neck and shoulders and a near carpet of it on his back.

He helped her up and shook his head at both of them as he took in her own appearance. “How the hell am I going to put you back together so we can be seen in public again?” he growled in mock irritation, almost having to shout above the sound of the storm. He glanced up at the skies. “We have to be crazy!”

He tried to brush the grass off her back but the task was hopeless; the grass stuck to his fingers and her skin. Her bra refused to snap for him; her blouse, now soaked, did not want to go back on. She knew her hair was a wet tangle of grass, yet all she could do was look at him, her laughter part of the joy inside that just would not let her come back down to earth. Her eyes were a rich, dark gold, that certain sheen of color reserved for only one man’s cache of treasures.

Morgan was waiting for them.

The late afternoon remained stormy, and the lights in the house were on. Erica was still laughing, Kyle pushing her ahead of him to hustle both of them out of the rain, although it was obvious there was nothing to hurry for—they were both soaked, cold and grass-stained. Erica was well aware that her hair was irretrievably matted and that her blouse was probably ruined with snags and blotches of green. She couldn’t have cared less…

Morgan was standing rock-still when Kyle closed the door behind them, locking out a distant crash of thunder. The bright lights in the kitchen heralded the fact that it was past their normal dinner hour. Morgan had started the meal for them. So thoughtful of him…but when Erica glanced up, she saw Morgan’s eyes narrowed on both of them, a grim expression on his face, that startled her from their laughter.

It must have been obvious what they had been doing. She shivered unconsciously, feeling the unwanted heat of embarrassment in her cheeks even as she glanced at Kyle. “We didn’t mean to be late,” she said in a rush. “We just went out for a little walk…”

“Yes, Erica,” Morgan said mockingly. He winked lewdly at Kyle, and she felt a wave of sheer distaste. Kyle appeared to ignore the wink as he offered her first crack at the shower and poured himself a glass of brandy.

She took the stairs two at a time. In the bathroom, she quickly discarded her damp clothes and turned on the hot water in the shower until the room was steaming. The pelting hot water soothed away the chill, yet she could not rid herself so easily of the resentment and annoyance she felt toward Morgan. She reminded herself how much help he was giving Kyle as she stepped out of the shower and enfolded herself in a thick, bright towel. She reminded herself, too, how much she cared for him, what a good friend he was…but she so desperately wanted to be alone with Kyle tonight! Since the building project had started, they had had a chance to put things back together, to reestablish communication, but Morgan
always
seemed to be there. They had had to steal away from their own home this afternoon…

By the time Kyle mounted the stairs, Erica had the hair dryer on full blast, a warm terry-cloth jumpsuit covering every inch of her in burnt orange. He said nothing, not that she could have heard anything over the whine of the dryer. Not, for that matter, that she would have said anything about Morgan…

She had never complained about Morgan in the past. These days, she thought fleetingly as she applied blusher and lipstick, Morgan was Mr. Consideration, all warmth and affection. It had not been that way when she first met him, at a time when he and Kyle had shared both a house and a reputation that would have put wolves on the kitty-cat list. The way Morgan used to look at her, the knowing expression that she saw on his face every time Kyle wasn’t looking.

Morgan’s bedroom should have had a revolving door; he certainly had no right to judge anyone else, but actually it wasn’t judgment she saw in his eyes—only a comprehension that had mortified her. He seemed to look at her and speculate about how it was with her and Kyle. She would have felt foolish telling Kyle of her unease around his best friend, and it wasn’t as if she’d felt ashamed.

She wasn’t ashamed. She was in love with Kyle, and if she worried constantly that it had all happened too fast and too powerfully, those thoughts never diminished her love. Kyle wasn’t looking for a child, and she had grown up, learned to look Morgan in the eye, wearing her love like a shield and her pride in that love like a cloak.

With one last flick of the brush, she finished dressing and headed back downstairs determinedly. Morgan had a glass of brandy waiting for her. He was wearing a charcoal short-sleeved shirt and lighter gray pants, the image of a manual laborer instantly dissolved by the skill and costliness of his tailor. Their conversation was stilted as they finished the preparations for dinner and waited for Kyle.

As she sipped at the brandy, Erica noticed hollows of weariness beneath Morgan’s eyes, and felt foolish for her uneasiness.
Stop this,
she scolded herself finally.
Stop being so…silly.
She found a smile for him, her real one, and the social graces to put him at ease. It occurred to her that he might not be comfortable in his position, as a third wheel. She did not have to remind herself again how hard he had been working—and only because he cared about her and Kyle.

Yet her nerves prickled uneasily once more when Kyle came back down, his damp hair curling at the edges of his collar, his pale blue shirt heightening the color of his eyes. He refilled his brandy glass before he sat down at the table, and for a moment Erica was afraid the easy laughter was gone; there was a hint of brooding stillness in him when he glanced at Morgan.

Then it was gone, just that quickly. Morgan brought platters to the table with a flourish that announced a gourmet delight. It was impossible to tell what he would come up with when he was given free rein in the kitchen. Tonight the menu was Chinese—chicken, pea pods and peppers in a tangy-sweet sauce, rice and a salad she could guess Kyle’s reaction to, with sprouts, fresh mushrooms, some sort of raw fish.

“It looks delicious,” Erica hurriedly assured Morgan.

“When are you going home so I can have my cook back, Morgan?” Kyle questioned blandly.

Morgan only chuckled. “Listen, McCrery, you can’t survive exclusively on meat and potatoes. I’ve been trying to expand your tastes ever since we were in school together.”

“Don’t buy that,” Kyle told Erica. “When we roomed together, he volunteered to do the cooking if I’d do the general cleanup. If I’d known I was going to end up the sacrificial lamb as a result of that arrangement…” He shook his head. “I can remember the first ‘flaming’ dish he put on. Or put out, to be more accurate. The effect was wasted on his redhead of the moment. We ate smoke for a week.”

Erica chuckled.

“You’re out of your mind,” Morgan informed him. “I get sole credit for the fact that you’re alive today, McCrery. You were trying to survive on four hours’ sleep and potato chips.”

“The only time I was sick in four years was the day you tried out that Indian curry. You’d have thought we’d been drinking contaminated water.”

“It wasn’t
that
bad—”

“
You
were sicker than
I
was.”

Erica relaxed, familiar with their baiting of each other. Thunder crashed outside, lightning streaked a flight of stairs in the sky. She got up to close the long curtains at the front windows. When she returned to the table, she picked up her fork again, only to hear an insistent scratching at the back door. She did her best to ignore it. Blessedly, neither of the men seemed to hear anything. She was relieved to hear them bickering normally; at times lately, they seemed to have less and less in common with each other…

When her plate was empty, Erica got up as if her sole purpose were to set it on the counter. The counter, of course, was a stone’s throw from the back door. The cat was inside before anyone could notice—if the creature had only had the sense
not
to leap directly for Kyle. Morgan burst out laughing.

Nuisance, she had named the animal, and truthfully the feline looked as good as she was ever going to look after all Erica’s care. The cat was much fatter, her coat almost healthy-looking… But not now. Drenched, Nuisance resembled an oversized rat. Kyle glared down beneath the table, as the cat promptly wound itself damply around his legs.

“She likes you,” Erica said lamely. “Kyle, I couldn’t just leave her out in the rain.”

She quickly set down a saucer of milk to divert the cat, but Nuisance was already roaring a thunderous purr on Kyle’s now–damp stockinged feet. He glanced again under the table and gave a mock shudder of disgust for Morgan’s benefit.

“Cheer up,” Morgan advised. “They say you can at least temporarily ward off a woman’s maternal urges if you get her a pet. I have a feeling you two wouldn’t exactly appreciate a baby right now. A cat’s a hell of a lot cheaper.”

Something changed; Erica couldn’t define it. Kyle leaned back lazily in his chair, eyes riveted on Morgan. “Why on earth would you have the feeling we wouldn’t welcome a baby right now?”

Morgan shrugged. “Well, obviously, financially…”

Kyle shoved his half-full plate away from him, shaking his head mockingly at Morgan. “Sorry, Shane, but
one
baby wouldn’t be any more problem than
one
cat, financially or in any other way,” he said shortly, and gave another wry shake of his head at Nuisance, who was staring up at him adoringly. “Though Erica
would
have to find the mangiest feline in the whole country to take on. I
had
hoped she could keep her secret a little longer. I have a continual nightmare that, given the least encouragement, she’d have a dozen cats wandering all over the place.”

“Of all the unjustified, exaggerated…” Erica sputtered indignantly.

“Now you
have
been known to go overboard when you get started on a cause,” Kyle chided teasingly. “Particularly a lost cause…”

But she was watching, mesmerized, as his long arm reached down and his fingers lazily scratched the cat’s neck. When she bent down for a better look, his hand whipped back up to the table, but she wasn’t fooled. “
You’ve
been feeding her, too,” she accused.

“Never!
A cat?
”

“I thought we were going through an awful lot of milk.”

“Erica. I
hate
cats.” But his hand was sneaking down again and Erica smiled broadly at her big, tough, brooding Irishman.

“So
that’s
why you haven’t produced a little McCrery,” Morgan interjected harshly. “You think she wouldn’t want to stop at one.”

Erica’s head whipped around at his strangely abrasive tone. A tone that Kyle suddenly matched. “Still worrying about it, Morgan? You’ll be a godfather, all in good time. You’re the only one we know with enough money to be godfather to the brood Erica and I want.”

“And I’m sure they’ll all be black-haired, blue-eyed little Irishmen,” Morgan said sarcastically.

“You can bet on it.” Kyle smiled.

Erica could have turned water to ice cubes with her smile. The brood of children she wanted was news to her. The subject of a family seemed to have come out of nowhere, along with Morgan’s hostility and Kyle’s matching antagonism. Kyle had wanted her to himself in the beginning. He had made no secret of that, and it was exactly what she had wanted as well. He’d been a busy man, and she’d wanted every free minute she could have with him. Only for the past year and a half or so had her maternal urges become more insistent yearnings…but then his father had become ill. Children
were
important to her, but never as important as Kyle.

The men moved away from the table, went down to the living room, and Erica hurried to take care of the dishes. Morgan was as uneasy as a prowling cougar. Restlessly, he paced to the drapes and back to his chair; then he was up again to pour drinks for both men. Though they were talking about the progress of the building, Erica noted again a charged tension between the two men that never used to be there. She didn’t know what to make of it, but she had the curious feeling that if she didn’t get away from them, the whole brilliant happiness of the earlier afternoon was going to splinter like shattered glass.

She finished the last of the dishes, switched off the counter lights and scooped up the cat as she paused by the stairs. “Excuse me, will you two?” They were oblivious to her. Nuisance curled to her neck, encouraged by the rain-silken curtain of her hair. Upstairs, Erica sank into the chair in her own special corner of the room, feeling a sudden weariness as she reached for the basket of crewel beside her. As she worked with her hands, she felt the tension inside her evaporate. The lamp made a soft halo all around her in the peaceful room. The cat nestled at her side, batting interestedly at the bright yarn as she worked.

The men’s voices carried upstairs, but she paid no attention. Absently, she noticed that there were two packages still to be put away. She folded the negligee with care and shook out the dress before hanging it up, admiring both garments silently, crumpling the wrappings and tossing them in the wastebasket. The little noises blurred the sound of voices from below, until she sat down with her embroidery again.

“We’ve known each other a long time, yet only once, Kyle, did you ever
really
talk about your father,” Morgan was saying. “We were both drunk out of our minds, we had just sent a pair of twin blondes home. Do you remember?”

The cat’s claws instinctively tightened on Erica’s thigh when she stiffened. Kyle’s quiet voice had the kind of timbre that carried.

“I remember our sophomore year as a time when we took on everything in three-month binges, from philosophy to social causes to drinking. Hardly a time to put much stock in anything either of us said.”

“You said he was a failure. You were scared as hell of following in his footsteps. You washed floors to put yourself through school, waited tables,
anything,
McCrery, to make sure you had what you needed to get to the top—”

“My father wasn’t a failure,” Kyle replied curtly. “I thought that, yes. I thought a lot of asinine things when I was twenty. He refused to do what he didn’t want to do, and he lived as he chose to live. I no longer call that being a failure; I respect him for it. Rising to the top to meet someone else’s standards doesn’t build self-respect, Morgan. You should know that. You’ve played the game on your father’s heels; I played the game to get out from under
my
father’s. The end is the same. What exactly do you think you have if you don’t live by your own rules? What do you think of yourself when you look in the mirror in the morning?”

There was a tense silence. Unease settled like a hard lump in Erica’s throat as the voices wafted to her with undercurrents she had never heard before. As she glanced at the embroidery frame in her lap, she saw that the stitches were haphazard, awry. She dropped it, unconsciously putting the cool fingers of one hand to her forehead and stroking the cat with the other hand.