Part of the Bargain

Libby ceased chewing at her lip and stared at him with wide eyes. Again he saw the shadow of that nameless, shifting ache inside her. “Stop what?” she wanted to know.

Stop making me want to hold you, he thought. Stop making me want to tuck your hair back behind your ears and tell you that everything will be all right. “Stop biting your lip!” he snapped aloud.

“I’m sorry!” Libby snapped back, her eyes shooting indigo sparks.

Jess sighed and again spoke involuntarily. “Why did you leave your husband, Libby?”

The question jarred them both: Libby paled a little and tried to scramble to her feet; Jess caught her elbow in one hand and pulled her down again.

“Was it because of Stacey?”

She was livid. “No!”

“Someone else?”

Tears sprang up in Libby’s dark lashes and made then spiky. She wrenched free of his hand but made no move to rise again and run away. “Sure!” she gasped. “‘If it feels good, do it’—that’s my motto! By God, I live by those words!”

“Shut up,” Jess said in a gentle voice.

Incredibly, she fell against him, wept into the shoulder of his blue cotton workshirt. And it was not a delicate, calculating sort of weeping—it was a noisy grief.

Jess drew her close and held her, broken on the shoals of what she was feeling even though he did not know its name. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely.

Libby trembled beneath his arm and wailed like a wounded calf. The sound solidified into a word usually reserved for stubborn horses and income-tax audits.

Jess laughed and, for a reason he would never understand, kissed her forehead. “I love it when you flatter me,” he teased.

Miraculously, Libby laughed, too. But when she tilted her head back to look up at him, and he saw the tear streaks on her beautiful, defiant face, something within him, something that had always been disjointed, was wrenched painfully back into place.

He bent his head and touched his lips to hers, gently, in question. She stiffened, but then, at the cautious bidding of his tongue, her lips parted slightly and her body relaxed against his.

Jess pressed Libby backward until she lay prone on the shifting dock, the kiss unbroken. As she responded to that kiss, it seemed that the sparkling water-light of the pond danced around them both in huge, shimmering chips, that they were floating inside some cosmic prism.

His hand went to the full roundness of her left breast. Beneath his palm and the thin layer of white eyelet, he felt the nipple grow taut in that singular invitation to passion.

Through the back of his shirt, Jess was warmed by the heat of the spring sun and the tender weight of Libby’s hands. He left her mouth to trail soft kisses over her chin, along the sweet, scented lines of her neck.

All the while, he expected her to stiffen again, to thrust him away with her hands and some indignant—and no doubt colorful—outburst. Instead, she was pliant and yielding beneath him.

Enthralled, he dared more and drew downward on the uppermost ruffle of her suntop. Still she did not protest.

Libby arched her back and a low, whimpering sound came from her throat as Jess bared her to the soft spring breeze and the fire of his gaze.

Her breasts were heavy golden-white globes, and their pale rose crests stiffened as Jess perused them. When he offered a whisper-soft kiss to one, Libby moaned and the other peak pouted prettily at his choice. He went to it, soothed it to fury with his tongue.

Libby gave a soft, lusty cry, shuddered and caught her hands in his hair, drawing him closer. He needed more of her and positioned his body accordingly, careful not to let his full weight come to bear. Then, for a few dizzying moments, he took suckle at the straining fount of her breast.

Recovering himself partially, Jess pulled her hands from his hair, gripped them at the wrists, pressed them down above her head in gentle restraint.

Her succulent breasts bore his assessment proudly, rising and falling with the meter of her breathing.

Jess forced himself to meet Libby’s eyes. “This is me,” he reminded her gruffly. “Jess.”

“I know,” she whispered, making no move to free her imprisoned hands.

Jess lowered his head, tormented one delectable nipple by drawing at it with his lips. “This is real, Libby,” he said, circling the morsel with just the tip of his tongue now. “It’s important that you realize that.”

“I do…oh, God… Jess, Jess.”

Reluctantly he left the feast to search her face with disbelieving eyes. “Don’t you want me to stop?”

A delicate shade of rose sifted over her high cheekbones. Her hands still stretched above her, her eyes closed, she shook her head.

Jess went back to the breasts that so bewitched him, nipped at their peaks with gentle teeth. “Do you…know how many…times I’ve wanted…to do this?”

The answer was a soft, strangled cry.

He limited himself to one nipple, worked its surrendering peak into a sweet fervor with his lips and his tongue. “So…many…times. My God, Libby…you’re so beautiful….”

Her words were as halting as his had been. “What’s happening to us? We h-hate each other.”

Jess laughed and began kissing his way softly down over her rib cage, her smooth, firm stomach. The snap on her jeans gave way easily—and was echoed by the sound of car doors slamming in the area of the house.

Instantly the spell was broken. Color surged into Libby’s face and she bolted upright, nearly thrusting Jess off the end of the dock in her efforts to wrench on the discarded suntop and close the fastening of her jeans.

“Broad daylight…” she muttered distractedly, talking more to herself than to Jess.

“Lib!” yelled a jovial masculine voice, approaching fast. “Libby?”

Stacey. The voice belonged to Stacey.

Sudden fierce anger surged, white-hot, through Jess’s aching, bedazzled system. Standing up, not caring that his thwarted passion still strained against his jeans, visible to anyone who might take the trouble to look, he glared down at Libby and rasped, “I guess reinforcements have arrived.”

She gave a primitive, protesting little cry and shot to her feet, her ink-blue eyes flashing with anger and hurt. Before Jess could brace himself, her hands came to his chest like small battering rams and pushed him easily off the end of the dock.

The jolting cold of that spring-fed pond was welcome balm to Jess’s passion-heated flesh, if not his pride. When he surfaced and grasped the end of the dock in both hands, he knew there would be no physical evidence that he and Libby had been doing anything other than fighting.

Libby ached with embarrassment as Stacey and Senator Barlowe made their way down over the slight hillside that separated the backyard from the pond.

The older man cast one mischievously baleful look at his younger son, who was lifting himself indignantly onto the dock, and chuckled, “I see things are the same as always,” he said.

Libby managed a shaky smile. Not quite, she thought, her body remembering the delicious dance Jess’s hard frame had choreographed for it. “Hello, Senator,” she said, rising on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

“Welcome home,” he replied with gruff affection. Then his wise eyes shifted past her to rest again on Jess. “It’s a little cold yet for a swim, isn’t it, son?”

Jess’s hair hung in dripping ebony strands around his face, and his eyes were jade-green flares, avoiding his father to scald Libby’s lips, her throat, her still-pulsing breasts. “We’ll finish our…discussion later,” he said.

Libby’s blood boiled up over her stomach and her breasts to glow in her face. “I wouldn’t count on that!”