Turn Left at Sanity, page 9
“Emmylou,” he said with a huskiness that sounded incredibly sexy coming from crisp, waste-no-time, businesslike Joe. “We need to get upstairs and get a condom.”
“Mmm.” They needed to get upstairs anyway.
Bingo would be over soon. But this was too incredible, frustrating, amazing, erotic.
“Honey,” he whispered in her ear, kissing the lobe, playing his free hand through her hair.
“You know I’m leaving tomorrow.”
Oh no you’re not. But still his words acted on
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her like an icy shower. What had she been thinking? She couldn’t make love to the man she was manipulating so deceitfully. It wouldn’t be right.
She almost wailed with pent-up frustration.
Maybe this was her punishment for her crimes, to be left with her whole body throbbing with need, so close to orgasm she could tumble into it as fast as she could tumble into Joe’s bed.
But it wouldn’t be fair.
She struggled to get herself under control.
“Right. Of course you are. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.” She tried to shrug her shirt back on, but all she succeeded in doing was gy-rating her breasts in his face like a lap dancer.
He let out a breath that sounded more like a moan. “Maybe we can continue this when I come back.”
“Yes.” She could barely think, barely focus her eyes. She was approaching a bad case of sexual-frustration-induced hysteria and no vibrator was going to cure her. Not when the real thing was so enticingly close.
He cupped both her breasts and kissed each in turn rather sweetly before pulling her bra back in place, getting her shirt back on, and buttoning her with quiet competence.
Frustration thudded through her veins, but she knew he was right. Not because he’d be leaving tomorrow and she didn’t want a one-nighter, but because he wouldn’t be leaving tomorrow and she’d manipulated him into office-chair hanky-panky so he wouldn’t see his car being vandalized. Somehow, such deceit didn’t seem like the basis for a healthy sexual relationship.
Even a short one.
She cast a quick glance outside but Gregory
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was gone, thank goodness, and Joe’s rental car appeared untouched.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said, scrambling off his lap so clumsily he winced.
“Sorry,” she said, mortified, trying not to watch as he tucked everything away and rezipped. She wanted to yell at him to stop. Maybe would have if she hadn’t seen the aunts coming down the garden path toward the front door. She could hear them arguing even through the window.
The front door opened and then banged.
“I did not insult you in front of all your friends. I said I thought a reality show in Beaverton was a stupid idea because it is a stupid idea, not because you thought of it.”
“Yeah. Well, you could star in it. They’d call it The Blair Bitch Project.”
“Ha, ha.”
The two were so busy quarreling they stomped right by the office and disappeared into the kitchen.
“Nice to see the older generation setting such a good example for us young’uns,” Joe said.
“Well,” she said, giving her head a shake and trying to tamp down the lust raging through her body, “I guess the cocoa got a little out of hand.”
Inside her bra, her nipples were still damp from his kisses.
He gazed back at her with a sheepish expression. “Yeah. That stuff should come with a warning label.”
Feeling increasingly foolish about the way she’d attacked her guest—even if it was for the good of the town—she backed out of the room.
“I’ll let you get back to your e-mail, then.”
His eyes widened suddenly. “Right, the e-mail.
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I forgot.” Since he didn’t seem the type to forget about work ever, she let herself feel flattered.
“I’m making an early start in the morning, so I’ll say good-bye, and thanks for everything.”
“It was nice to, ah, meet you.”
He looked as though he’d say something, or maybe try to talk her into bed, and she was half disappointed when he only nodded.
Feeling like a big idiot, she held out her hand.
With a wry grin, he rose and shook it solemnly.
“It’s been a great pleasure meeting you, Emmylou. And it would have been an even greater pleasure to sleep with you.”
“Or not sleep,” she said, remembering his little problem.
“Sleep’s overrated.”
She nodded. “But it’s better this way.”
“Is it? Is it better to walk away because you can only have one night with someone or is it better to have great memories?” His eyes were still dark with passion, his breathing not quite back to normal any more than hers was. She understood what he was saying all too well, but still she had the knowledge he didn’t that their time together extended beyond dawn tomorrow, whatever his plans. There’d be no single perfect night of love followed by him riding off into the sunrise. He’d be back eating her famous carrot-zucchini breakfast muffins and then the awkwardness would begin.
So she gave him the one-raised-eyebrow treatment and said, “That is a great line. Two ships passing in the night and all.”
“It isn’t a line,” he said, stepping forward so he could rest his hands on her hips and look
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down at her. “But I can’t make promises. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Or even if I’ll be back.”
“I understand,” she said. He was here to wreck her town. Why bother returning to chart the destruction? It was like he’d organized the firing squad but wasn’t going to hang around for the actual execution.
“Well,” he said, still not releasing her, “how about a rain check?”
He had no idea how soon he could be collecting, or that his plans for Beaverton’s destruction were about to be derailed, and him along with them. Before she got too carried away in sexual fantasy, she ought to remind herself that the man making her almost pass out with lust must know this fertilizer factory would devastate the community.
“Wait until you come back and we’ll see.”
“Emmylou?” Lydia’s voice floated down the hall. She pulled out of Joe’s arms, not because the aunts would mind—they’d be delighted—
but because she didn’t want anyone thinking she’d seduced Joe to keep him here.
Especially not Joe.
She decided to make a very special breakfast—maybe she’d add French toast to her world famous muffins, or something else with a lot of sweetness in it—since she anticipated one very grumpy guest.
Chapter 9
In the darkest-before-dawn blackness, Joe pulled out his keypad and flipped the locks on the rental car. As he hoisted his meager bag-gage into the trunk, he wished he were also bringing along better memories of last night than Mae West’s tuna breath and the way she kept hogging his pillow.
A picture flashed through his mind of Emmylou with her head thrown back while he feasted on her breasts. Maybe he’d come back this way to see that wild attraction to its logical conclusion, but even as he had the thought he knew he wouldn’t. There’d be other jobs, other women.
He couldn’t waste time on lost causes.
Five minutes later he realized he was doing exactly that. If the engine wouldn’t turn over on the first or second or third try, the chances weren’t good for the fifty-second. Cursing the car, the car maker, the rental company, this town, and the guys who’d hired him and sent
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him here, Joe finally gave up and hauled himself back out of the car.
The inside car lights came on fine, so he didn’t think it was a dead battery. By holding the door open and squinting at a lot of buttons with ridiculous kid’s stick figure drawings on them, he finally found the one that opened the hood of the car.
Back outside. He yanked up the hood and found the pole thing that would anchor it. The light from the security beam cast a vague glow in his direction, enough to see that his engine looked pretty much like every other car engine he’d ever seen. No obviously broken or loose hoses or wires sprang out at him. Not that his hopes had been high.
Since he’d taken advanced calculus in the same time block that automotive maintenance was offered in high school, and he’d never had the sort of home where a junker sat parked in the driveway and a teenaged Joe could pull it apart and tinker, he knew piss-all about cars except who to call if there was a problem.
But in Beaverton at 4:45 in the morning, he didn’t have the faintest idea who to call.
He leaned under the hood and turned every thing that looked like it could be tightened, wiggled a couple of hoses on the premise that it could be some kind of loose connection, then stared at the engine hard for a minute.
Back in the driver’s seat. “Come on,” he whispered under his breath, and tried again. The engine made a brave attempt at a roar but once again it didn’t catch.
Flipping open the glove compartment, he
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hauled out the rental paperwork and called the number on his cell phone. A chirpy recorded voice told him the rental desk at the airport would be open at nine A.M. and if his flight left before that, he could leave the keys in a drop box.
He responded savagely to the sweet-voiced message, even after the system booted him off and there was nothing but a dull buzzing in his ear. The rental company was too Podunk to have an 800 number.
Getting seriously pissed now, he glanced at his watch and contemplated his options.
They weren’t attractive.
His flight left at seven-thirty and if he didn’t get on the road now, he was going to miss that plane. Beaverton didn’t look like it boasted a rental car agency or so much as a single taxi.
But what the hell did people do here if they needed a ride? Jump on the back of Napoleon’s horse?
If he waited around to get the car fixed, he was going to miss his plane. Could he wake Emmylou and ask to borrow her car? Her old Ford didn’t look great and he hated the thought of waking her so early, but he really didn’t have a choice.
Slipping back into the Shady Lady as quietly as he’d slipped out, he ran up the stairs and headed for her room. He hesitated outside, then knocked. He had to knock a second time before he heard a sleepy, “Just a second.”
It was, in fact, not many seconds at all before Emmylou opened the door and blinked at him.
She wore a robe of pale blue cotton that she hadn’t bothered to belt; she hugged it around
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herself, and the way it clung to her body, he had the sudden conviction that his landlady slept in the nude.
All his circuits jumbled and all he could do was stare into her heavy-lidded, somnolent eyes, and want her.
“What is it?” she asked at last.
“Sorry to bother you. My car won’t start.
Could I borrow yours to get to the airport? I’ll arrange to have yours returned and the rental picked up. The fools at the rental place are going to pay for this.”
She blinked a few times and lifted a hand as though to push it through her tousled hair. The robe slipped and she hastily resumed her previ-ous pose. “I don’t have enough gas.”
“I could get some.”
“Not before the pumps open at nine,” she explained.
“You mean there’s nowhere to get gas between here and the airport?”
“Not for fifty miles. Didn’t you read the highway signs?”
Of course he hadn’t. When he’d arrived in this place it hadn’t occurred to him he could end up stranded.
“Is there a taxi?”
She shook her head.
“A bus?”
Another head shake.
“Is there any person in this town I could pay to drive me to the airport?” His whisper took on a frantic note.
Once more she shook her head. She didn’t even have to stop and think first.
“Well, shit. The rental agency doesn’t open un-
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til nine. And there probably isn’t another plane out until tomorrow.” He felt furious and stupid and helpless, all of which he hated. “Now what am I supposed to do?”
“Put the coffee on?” she suggested. “I’ll get dressed and then I’ll make you some breakfast.”
He jingled the thoroughly useless rental car keys in his pocket. “Who runs the local garage?
Or do you have a mechanic in Beaverton?”
“We do. His name is Gregory Randolph.”
“Where does he live?”
“You can’t wake him up at this hour,” she said, aghast. Her sleep-befuddled brain hadn’t caught on to the fact that he’d already woken her, proving it could be done.
“I’ll make it worth his while,” he said.
She shook her head at him as though he were missing something important. Well, she was right. If he couldn’t get the bloody car on the road, he was missing his plane out of here.
He made her give him the directions he needed, then headed back down the stairs for a dawn-streaked plod downtown.
Emmylou made her special French toast. It was important to prepare a breakfast that was going to help calm an irate man, while at the same time not raise his suspicions that she’d known all along he’d be joining them for breakfast.
While she was cutting thick slices of her homemade cinnamon raisin bread, the phone rang and she picked it up.
“The Shady Lady,” she said, having learned at a tourism seminar that she should always answer
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the phone as though a valuable customer was on the line, even when she knew that it was Greg Randolph calling.
“He just left,” said Gregory, not bothering to identify himself. “I feel almost bad taking his money to fix a problem I caused myself.”
“I saw you tow his car away. Did he try to get you to drive him to the airport?”
“Yeah. I told him I’ve got too many jobs today, and that no one else in town could drive him either.”
“I know how you feel; I hate to charge him for another night’s accommodation.”
“We’ll live with ourselves somehow.”
She laughed. “I guess. Is he on his way back here?” She glanced out the window in case Joe should appear walking down her front path.
“No. After I told him I had to order in the part and it would take at least a week, he went off to see if he could hire a plane.”
“Oh no.” It hadn’t occurred to her that he wouldn’t wait for the next commercial flight out, which was tomorrow. “What did you do?
Send him to Al Roper?”
“What would I do that for? Al’s got the air ambulance. That’s a good plane. I sent him over to Jem Bradley.”
Her nerveless hands dropped a piece of bread into the egg mixture so it splashed over the side of the green pottery mixing bowl. She barely noticed. “You told Joe he’d have to ride in a crop duster?”
“Frankly, I think he’s ready to rent a pogo stick to get out of here.”
“I’ve got to get hold of Jem and make sure he thinks of an excuse not to take Joe up.”
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“Already taken care of. Jem got a bad case of the flu right after I called.”
“Oh, here comes Joe now. I’ll talk to you later.”
Joe strode toward the B&B in the purposeful, straight-on way he did everything. If he was irate, he wasn’t showing it in his outward demeanor; he seemed the same as always. Focused, efficient. Sexy as hell. She wasn’t thrilled at the way all her female bits stood up and cheered at the sight of him. She understood perfectly, of course, the complex chemical and physiological patterns of attraction and arousal, but she did not love that they were happening around this man who’d gone from being the most interesting man she’d met in years to her adversary.
She’d have to have a talk with her girls.
Chapter 10
Joe walked into the Shady Lady and his jangling irritation eased. It was so quiet here, so peaceful. He breathed old house smells with an odd sense of nostalgia, since he’d believed he’d never again smell the unique combination of aged wood, beeswax furniture polish, the faded rose fragrance of potpourri.
As he walked down the hall in search of Emmylou, he welcomed the much fresher and extremely enticing smell of breakfast coming from the kitchen.
He put down his bag and headed for the kitchen. He paused at the swing door and listened. She was singing along to the radio. And if he wasn’t mistaken, that was a Beach Boys song. For some reason, his sour mood lifted even more. He knocked and, hearing a “Come on in,”
pushed through. And there she was.
He shouldn’t be glad to see her. He didn’t want to be glad to see her. She’d thrown herself at him last night and then refused to see their
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attraction through to its logical conclusion. She was a sexually exciting woman who had, for some reason he couldn’t figure out, denied them both one of life’s great pleasures. If he were on his way to New York right now it wouldn’t matter, but he was back here in her kitchen and about to spend another night under her roof. Was he in for more frustration or the promise of pleasure that hummed between them every time they came near each other?
She wore another grandmother apron today, and under it were pastel cotton shorts and a yellow and green sleeveless blouse. Her hair was tied back with a yellow scarf. She looked as cheerful as a spring flower and her smile was as warm as a June afternoon.
“Hi. I hope you like French toast. It’s my special recipe.”
He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. “How did you know I’d be back?”
“Gregory Randolph called. He said he’d call later when he knows for sure what’s wrong.”
Joe felt his frown settle. “The rental company should take care of it.”
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