Lawless

She took a step forward. “I can rush right to town and buy a red negligee,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll borrow one. Steal one. There’s a bed only ten feet away...!”

“I told you that we were never going to have any sort of physical relationship,” he said with ice dripping from every syllable.

“You started it,” she reminded him glibly.

“I did it deliberately. I know Grier. You haven’t dated,” he said through his teeth. “You know nothing about men, and that’s my fault. You can’t go out with a man like Grier without knowing the dangers. It was a lesson, Christabel. Just a lesson!”

She was staring at him. Just staring, as all her dreams of belonging and being loved in return went up in smoke. She’d always thought of Judd as being very fastidious about women. But innocence could recognize experience, and she knew at once that she was completely out of his league. She didn’t do a thing for him. He’d only been showing her what a trap passion could be. But it felt different now when she looked at him.

“Have you heard a word I’ve said?” he asked, exasperated.

“A few, here and there,” she said, but she was looking at his mouth. “I’m not sure I understand the lesson completely. Could you do that again...?”

He took an angry breath and his lips flattened. He could taste her on them. That irritated him even more.

“No, I couldn’t do it again!” he raged, furious. “Listen to me, damn it! We are getting an annulment in November, period! I don’t want marriage and a family. I love my job, and my freedom, and I’m not giving up either one. Is that clear?”

Breaking out of her trance, she moved away from him. Yes, it was painfully clear. But she smiled deliberately, anyway. Her voice, like her breathing, was jerky. “Okay. It’s a great loss to my education, but if you feel that way, just don’t expect me to offer to take my clothes off for you ever again. I’ll fix some coffee if you’d like some,” she added. “Cash isn’t due for thirty minutes.”

“Fine.”

She went to the kitchen and made coffee. It calmed her. By the time she put a cup and saucer on the table, along with the condiments, her hands had stopped shaking.

“Do you want it in the study?” she called.

“No. I’ll drink it in here.” He moved into the room and sat down at the small kitchen table. He’d removed his hat and rolled up his sleeves. His hair was still mussed from her restless, hungry fingers, and his mouth, like hers, had a slight swell from the urgency of the kisses they’d shared.

Grier was going to notice that, he mused. Perhaps it would make him hesitate. He wondered why he felt so arrogant when he looked at her now. It felt almost like possession. He clamped down hard on those thoughts. He didn’t want to be married. He wasn’t ready for family life. Infrequent liaisons were enough for him. Love was dangerous, and he wanted no part of it. He’d seen it destroy his father, and he knew that women had no staying power. His mother had left his father. Judd’s one serious love interest had walked out on him ten years ago when he refused to give up his hazardous job for her. It was just as well to avoid tangles. Christabel was very young...

“You’re very solemn,” she pointed out.

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about what just happened,” he said, pinning her with his eyes.

“I’m not dim,” she told him. She avoided looking directly at him. She was too shaken to hide her emotions. “You said it was only a lesson. I hadn’t planned to jump into the back seat with Grier and have my way with him, you know.”

He cleared his throat. “He drives a pickup. There is no back seat.”

She glared at him. “You know what I mean!”

“And it’s not you jumping on him that worries me.”

She lifted both eyebrows. “Why not? Do you think I wouldn’t know how? I do know what goes on between men and women, even if I’m not the voice of experience!”

“I know,” he murmured dryly.

“Excuse me?”

He cleared his throat again. “I pay the satellite bill.”

She was very still. That had never occurred to her before.

He cocked his head. “The titles are self-explanatory. Passionate Partners, Lust in the Sand, The Curious Virgin...shall I go on?”

She groaned and put her face in her hands.

“Just remember that what you’re watching is staged and pure fantasy,” he pointed out. “It’s not like that in real life.”

She moved two of her fingers and looked at him through them, curiously.

He leaned back, feeling his experience keenly as he met that glance. “Two kisses and a pat, and they go at it endlessly with accompanying groans and tormented expressions, in positions that even the Kama Sutra hasn’t listed,” he explained.

She was still watching, listening, waiting.

He let out a long sigh. “Christabel, a woman doesn’t accept a man’s body that quickly, or that easily, without a lot of foreplay. And most men can’t last long enough to go through the whole catalog of outrageous positions. One usually suffices.”

She was fiery red, but paying complete attention while trying not to look as if she was. And he was aching to show her, rather than tell her, how satisfying a physical coming-together could be. All at once, he felt things he didn’t want to feel. And for the one woman on earth who was off limits to him, even if she was the only wife he’d ever had.

He finished his coffee and glared at her. “I don’t mind if you go out with Grier, as long as you’re discreet,” he said, hating the words even as he spoke them with deliberate carelessness. His black eyes pinned hers. “But you don’t cross the line with him.”

She knew exactly what he meant and she was insulted. “As if I would, Judd!”

“Until it’s annulled, it’s still a marriage,” he continued. “And a few people around town know about it.”

“I understand why you’re so worried about gossip...” she began, and then bit her tongue, because it was a subject he hated.

His chin lifted and his eyes narrowed dangerously. “My father was a minister,” he said roughly. “Can you imagine how it was for him, and for me, to have all of Jacobsville talking about my mother and her blatant affair with the vice president of the local manufacturing company? They didn’t even try to hide it. She moved in with him and lived with him openly while she was still married to my father. Everybody knew. His whole congregation knew, and he had to preach every Sunday. When her lover dropped her for someone younger, after he’d had his fill of the affair, she begged to come home again and pretend that it never happened. My father even tried to let her.”

He averted his eyes to the table, cold with the memory of how those days had been for him. He’d loved his mother. But his father, despite his faith, had been unable to forget what she’d done. In his world, as in Judd’s, vows were sacred. “In the end, it was the gossip that made it impossible for him to forget. It didn’t stop, even after she left her lover. Some of his congregation refused to speak to her. It affected him, even though he tried not to let it. In the end, he asked her to leave, and she went, without an argument.”

“You were only twelve when that happened, weren’t you?” she asked gently, trying to get him to talk about it. He never had.

He nodded. “I loved her. He did, too, but he couldn’t get over what she did. It was too public for either of them to get past it, in a small town.”

Her hand itched to slide across the table to his, but she knew he’d sling it off. He was unapproachable when he talked about the past.

“Did she write to you?”

He shook his head. “He told her that she could, but she moved to Kansas where she had a cousin, and apparently never looked back.” He toyed with the handle of his coffee cup. “We heard that she married again and had a child before she died. All we had was a card announcing the funeral and a dog-eared photograph of Dad and me that she kept in her wallet.” His voice became tight and he sat up straighter.

“Was the child a boy or a girl?” she asked.

He was staring into space with blank eyes. “A girl. She died of spinal meningitis when she was six, and my mother died in a car crash a few months later.” His teeth clenched. “She was a good mother,” he added absently. “Even if she was a lousy wife.”

She studied him quietly. “Sometimes people fall in love with the wrong people,” she began. “I don’t think they can help it.”

His black eyes bore into hers. “In my book, if you make a vow before God, you keep it. Period.”

She sighed, thinking that it was highly unlikely that he’d kept the wedding vow he made to her when she was sixteen, but she didn’t say it. “I expect she was sorry for what she did to your father.”