Stryker's Wife (Man of the Month) Read online

  What if he was waiting for her when she got home? She had finally learned not to wear her good clothes to work, but today she looked like something left over from a flea market. It had been one of those days. One child had vomited on her, one had tested his crayons on the tail of her skirt while she’d been busy mopping up and another one had spilled chocolate milk on her shoes. Add to that the fact that her favorite African Gray had let her have it, right on the shoulder of her yellow blouse, and it truly had not been one of her better days.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t the UPS man?” she pleaded with the pharmacist. “I ordered some computer paper last week.” Oh, goodness, she would die if it was Kurt!

  She would die if it wasn’t.

  Deke had stopped by the pharmacy for vitamins and aspirin. Ambrose had come around the counter to greet her, obviously bursting with curiosity. “I know every UPS man who delivers within a hundred miles of Church Grove,” he said smugly. “Besides, this fellow wasn’t wearing a uniform. He had on a pair of khaki pants and a leather jacket—sort of streaky blond hair—and he was wearing a black patch over one eye. If you ask me, he looked dangerous. I wasn’t going to tell him anything, but Miss Camilla and Miss Ada were in here—Miss Ada’s still got that fungus under her toenail—and you know how they are. Talk, talk, talk. Debranne?” he called after her.

  But she was gone. Smoothing her hair with one hand, brushing the wrinkles from her stained skirt with the other, Deke hurried out to her car, ground the starter until the engine caught, then headed south on Chesapeake Street. She was half afraid Kurt would find her before she could shower and change into something sexy and wildly flattering and equally afraid he might have grown tired of waiting and left town.

  Streaky blond hair and an eye patch. Obviously a dangerous character. Ambrose couldn’t possibly know just how dangerous.

  She parked, grabbed her purse and hastily scanned the half-empty parking lot before reminding herself that she didn’t even know what kind of a car he drove.

  “Poise and decorum,” she muttered to herself, doing the best she could with her flyaway hair with fingers and no mirror. She’d been drilled on poise and decorum before she could even pronounce the words. For years she had thought her grandmother was saying poison decorum. A lady, according to Anne Kingsly, remained poised, gracious and unfailingly polite no matter how difficult the situation, because good breeding always won out over boorishness.

  But then, Granna Anne had lived in a different world. Ladyhood didn’t cut it these days. Not when all the lady in question could think about was how it had felt to lie in her lover’s arms. How it felt to stand beside a sparkling harbor under a late afternoon sun and allow herself to be kissed silly by a man with the looks of a handsome pirate and the touch of a gentle prince.

  She hadn’t dared say a word of what she was feeling at the time, because anything she might have said could and probably would be used against her.

  Oh, Lord, he was here!

  The lobby looked even more depressing than usual as she shunned the cranky elevator and took the stairs two at a time. Aerobic or not, it was her one concession to fitness training. All she had time for, actually.

  And then there he was. Arms draped over his bent knees, he was sitting on the floor, leaning up against her door, looking tired and beautiful and even thinner than she remembered him.

  “Kurt?” she whispered tentatively.

  “Yeah, what!” Kurt came awake instantly. Years of training. He’d only been dozing, anyway. Not until he’d tracked her to her den had he dared let down his guard, and by then it was too late. Too many days of trying to maintain the boat, run charters, dodge a persistent child welfare worker and oversee the work being done on the house finally caught up with him.

  “Sorry,” he said, struggling to his feet. “Didn’t get much sleep last night.” Or the night before, or the night before that. You’d think a man of his age and experience would know better than to waste so much time dreaming about a woman. “Hey, I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by to say hello.”

  Judas priest, even Frog could do better than that!

  “Come inside, I’ll make us some coffee. You look as if you could use some. Are you hungry? I’ve got bacon and eggs and I can stir up a batch of pancakes. I often have breakfast for supper—usually I don’t have time to eat breakfast, so I…”

  Chatter, chatter, chatter. Lord, woman, you’re worse than a cage full of finches!

  Kurt followed her inside, yawning, begging her pardon and taking stock of her living quarters all at the same time.

  “What in God’s name is that thing?” he asked, halting to stare at a piece of furniture that was fully six feet tall, decorated with mirrors, curlicues and half a dozen small balconies, each one sporting at least one framed photograph.

  “What? Oh. That’s my organ. I told you about it, didn’t I? It belonged to my grandmother, and she left it to me when she died. It has real ivory keys, which I think are probably against the law now, but the elephant’s already dead, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it, because—”

  Kurt caught her to him and said, “Hush up, honey, you’re babbling.” And then he kissed her. Right there between her organ, her computer and her yard-sale sofa, where she had spent countless hours daydreaming about him, he kissed her until she went limp in his arms.

  She reached up and captured his ears with her hands, because she needed something to hang on to, and when his tongue caressed hers, and when one of his hands moved up to cover her breast, just below the greenish stain on her shirt, she moaned and sagged all over again.

  “I think we’d better sit down,” Kurt said hoarsely against the left side of her throat. A flock of goose bumps immediately sprouted along her left flank.

  “What about supper?” she asked, more than a hint of desperation in her voice. She was doing it again. Allowing herself to be swept along by the tide. If ever she stood a chance of asserting herself, she was going to have to stop hanging all over him. Men like Kurt Stryker weren’t designed to support clinging vines.

  Reluctantly, she backed away. “If you’d like to wash up first, it’s right through there,” she said, trying to remember whether she’d left anything embarrassingly personal lying around.

  He got that warm, crinkly look that always made her want to curl up in his lap and hibernate. “I’m okay, but if you want to change into something more comfortable before we talk, feel free.”

  Talk? Who needed to talk? She could talk when she was by herself—and frequently did. What she wanted to do now involved two people, one bed, and a night that went on forever.

  Brilliant. When it comes to learning life’s important lessons, woman, you’re a dropout.

  Deke left him examining her monstrous parlor organ. In her wildest dreams—and she’d had plenty of those—she had never quite been able to picture him in her cluttered living room. In her bed, yes, because a bed was a bed was a bed. Even in her bathtub, because she had a newly discovered kinky turn of mind.

  She thought about the small organ stool, and then she thought about those narrow, lumpy bunks aboard the R&R, and then she twisted the faucets and waited for the squeaking, gurgling, rumbling to stop and the water to start.

  It was just her luck to have him show up on a day when she’d been dowsed in chocolate milk, thrown up upon, scribbled upon, doodooed upon.

  Did-did upon?

  Whatever.

  With a dreamy look on her face, Deke took off her clothes, waited five minutes or so for the water to make its way from the basement up to her antiquated bathroom. The smile—actually, it was more of a smirk—never once left her face.

  Kurt took the liberty of washing up in her kitchen sink. Surprisingly, now that he’d seen her he no longer felt tired. He felt energized. And hungry. Not to mention randy as a bull in a pasture full of heifers.

  He was staring out the window at the top of a mulberry tree when he heard the bathroom door open and close. He went
on staring, bracing himself to act sensibly and say what needed saying before things got too far out of hand.

  He had a feeling they were headed that way.

  When Deke came out of the bathroom she was wearing what looked like some sort of flowered tent. Her smile was the kind that could melt a glacier. “Hi,” she said softly. “Sorry to be so long. It takes a while for the hot water to make it all the way to the second floor. Sometimes it doesn’t. In my next apartment, I’m going to try the hot water before I ever sign anything. Fried or scrambled? I can boil them, too, but I never get the timing quite right.”

  Kurt tried not to stare at her as hungrily as Frog stared at the girl in the tight jeans and the pink Jeep. “Fried. Scrambled. However you want ’em, as long as they’re not powdered.”

  “Scrambled, then. Um…crisp or soggy?”

  “Are we talking bacon or toast? Because I’m not particular about that, either. Deke….come here, will you? There’s something that needs doing, and I don’t think it can wait much longer.”

  Deke didn’t even ask what it was, which was a sign of something or other, only she wasn’t sure just what. Certainly not poison decorum. With a feeling of inevitability, she crossed the room, her eyes never leaving his face. It seemed to take forever, but it was only a few steps.

  Kurt stood and waited, and when she came close enough, he placed both hands on her shoulders and sighed. “I’ve gone over and over this in my mind, and there’s just no easy way to say it.”

  “To say what?” she breathed. He was leaving the country. He was married and had a slew of children. He had some terrible, terminal disease.

  “Look, we both know I’m not a romantic type of guy.”

  He was a romantic type of guy. He might not think so, but he was. Standing in the doorway, gazing at his back as he stared out her window, she had admired the tilt of his head, the width of his shoulders and his long, lean flanks. Even on dry land, he had the look of a man who’d spent a lot of time on a rolling deck.

  He was wildly romantic, and she could only wonder what on earth he saw in her, if he saw anything at all.

  She continued to stare at him, forgetting what she’d been about to say. Forgetting to breathe. For all she knew, her heart had forgotten to beat.

  “I mean, jeeze—I’ll be forty in a couple of years. I just blew practically my whole savings account on a—”

  “Kurt.”

  “I’ve got a kid I’m hoping to hang on to—at least, I don’t own him, but I’d like to keep him around for a while.”

  “Kurt?”

  “And I—yeah, what?”

  “Hush,” she whispered. He was so close she could see her own reflection in his eye. Without even thinking, she reached up and slid the patch higher on his brow.

  Kurt caught his breath. “Ah, God, don’t—”

  “Let me. I don’t want any part of you hidden away. You’re so beautiful…even this.” Lightly, she touched the flat eyelid that covered the empty socket. There was nothing ugly about it. There could never be anything ugly about him, because whatever he was, he was Kurt. She had seen the scar on his thigh, and hurt because it had hurt him, but she hadn’t considered it ugly. It was a part of him, and that was that.

  Kurt tilted his head and stared at her water-stained ceiling. And then he lowered his face until his mouth hovered over hers and said, “I want to make love to you, Deke. I don’t think I can wait much longer. I did a lot of thinking these past few weeks, but now it’s all screwed up in my mind again, and all I can think about is getting you out of that tent and making love to you until I run flat out of steam. Then maybe I can get my head to working again.”

  He was holding her so close she could feel every muscle, bone and sinew in his body. She could even feel his belt buckle and the buttons on his shirt, which was a pretty good indication of just how sensitive she was to everything about him. “So who’s arguing?”

  All the air in the room suddenly disappeared. She felt his body stiffen, heard him catch his breath, and then he was rocking her against him until she thought she might go up in flames.

  Instead, she stood on tiptoe until her lips brushed his. And then she gave herself up to the sweet, intoxicating spell of desire. Fierce, urgent, honey-sweet desire. It had been weeks since she had felt anything like this.

  The first time they had made love, it had been a journey of discovery. Nothing in her brief marriage had prepared her for the way Kurt had made her feel. The second time had been even more special, but in a different way. Before that night in a motel somewhere in a town whose name she couldn’t remember, she hadn’t known such ecstasy existed.

  Now she did. And she felt an irresistible urge to throw caution to the winds and follow her instincts wherever they led, knowing even as she did that she was burning her bridges behind her.

  “Give me your lips, Debranne,” Kurt whispered, and without waiting, he took them.

  They made it to her bed, just barely. Eagerly Deke shed her muumuu while Kurt struggled to free himself of his clothing.

  And this time he had protection. Because he had dared hope, not because he had expected. He lowered her onto the bed and came down beside her, acutely aware of the currents and crosscurrents that swirled around them. Aware of the dangers. Aware that not all the dangers were marked on any chart.

  “If I start talking too much, will you kindly hush me up?” she pleaded, and he chuckled, but it was a rusty sound.

  “That I can promise you, darling.” Lying on his side, Kurt gazed at her slight body, at the surprisingly lush curves where her hips flared from a tiny waist. At the delicate, pink-crowned breasts that invited his touch, invited his lips.

  Fleetingly, he pictured her belly swollen with his child and knew a moment of disappointment that he hadn’t made her pregnant.

  He took one earlobe between his teeth and suckled. His mouth moved down her throat, and his hand moved south and homed in on its target. When he felt her stiffen, heard the soft intake of her breath, he nearly went over the edge.

  “Come to me, sweetheart,” he whispered.

  He’d promised himself that this time—if there was a this time—he would take it slow and easy. Using sex as bait to get what he wanted wasn’t fair, and he was determined to be fair. But it wasn’t easy. Not when sex was all he could think of. When had he built up this conditioned reflex? One look, one touch, and he was hard as a crankshaft.

  A man his age—you’d think he would have built up a little natural resistance.

  She was toying with the hair on his chest. He thought fleetingly that they really should have talked first, because whatever the outcome, he didn’t want any misunderstandings between them.

  But then, there was that conditioned reflex. He hadn’t counted on that. Should have, but hadn’t.

  She was breathing shallowly, her lips parted. Her eyes were closed, and it occurred to him that his patch was somewhere in the other room. He hadn’t even noticed when he’d lost it.

  His fingers brushed through the small dense thicket of golden brown curls. She was hot and damp, and the sweet spicy scent of her desire cut though the last thread of resistance.

  Shaking all over, he reached behind him and managed to pull his wallet from his pants pocket. “Wait a minute,” he gasped when he felt her small hand surround his throbbing shaft. “Sweetheart, just let me—”

  His hands were unsteady. He fumbled and swore and then fumbled again.

  “Let me help you,” she offered, and then nearly succeeded in driving him out of his mind when her fingers joined his in the task.

  By the time he mounted her, trembling with urgency, he was beyond rational thought, beyond all but the desperate drive to assuage the fierce hunger that drove him.

  The same hunger—admit it, Stryker!—that had driven him all the way to this little nowhere place to find her.

  He felt her slender thighs wrap around his waist, felt her hands slide over his sweat-damp back, urging him on and on and on. Taking care to
spare her his weight—which meant he would probably suffer for it later, but that was the least of his worries—he began to move. Slowly, slowly at first, because she was small and delicately made, and because he would die rather than hurt her.

  And then faster as the exquisite tension rose to unbearable heights.

  When the moment came, she didn’t shout his name. But the softly voiced, “Yes. Oh, yes…” cut clean through him to a place he hadn’t known existed.

  Kurt closed his eye. He had a feeling it was already far too late for talking.

  Ten

  Outside, through the thin walls, Kurt could hear the sounds of late afternoon traffic. Rush hour in Church Grove, Virginia. Two cars…and then another one. A truck with a gutted muffler, and after a while, another car. A dog barked, and then damned if he didn’t hear a cow. It had been years since he’d heard a cow.

  He stared at a row of what looked like framed illustrations from a children’s book on one wall, and it occurred to him that they probably were illustrations from a children’s book.

  She was a writer, after all.

  With her hot little bottom shoved up against his side, Deke slept on. She’d been sleeping for nearly forty-five minutes. Kurt sighed heavily, glanced at a grouping of framed photographs on the other wall and wondered if putting the cart before the horse was considered an art.

  If so, he was getting to be a world-class artist.

  “Deke,” he murmured. “Honey, we need to talk.”

  “Uh-huh.” She made a puffy little sound with her lips, and he refrained from leaning over and kissing her…just barely.

  “This would be a lot simpler,” he told the sleeping woman beside him, “if I could just file a personnel requisition. Fill in the blanks, detail the specs and whammo. One wife transferred to Stryker headquarters.”

  Kurt had a feeling he might be getting in over his head.

  He also had a feeling it was far too late to do much about it.