She pressed her arms against her sides and kept her tank top up around her armpits. Then she placed her palms on the outsides of his hands and moved them to cover her breasts. He gently squeezed and a hot flush spread across her flesh. She tried to turn, but his grasp tightened. “If you move, we’re goners,” he said.
“I want to touch you, Dylan.”
“Tonight, I touch you.”
Her eyes closed and her lips parted. It had been a long time since she’d felt so good. Her back arched and her hands fell to her sides.
“Hope, open your eyes. Look at me. Look at me touching you.”
She did. She saw her shirt pulled up, the right straps of her bra and tank top shoved to her elbow. Dylan’s palms cupped the weight of her breasts from behind, the dark pink tips poking out between his widespread fingers. She looked at her reflection, at the desire shining from her eyes.
Dylan squeezed his fingers together and pinched her nipples between them. Her knees buckled and he held her tight against his chest. “If we were alone in the house,” he said in a whisper, “I’d put my mouth right here.” He kissed the top of her head and the side of her face. “Then I’d work my way down.” He reached for the bottom of her shirt and pulled it back down to her waist. “But we’re not alone, and leaving you isn’t going to get any easier.”
He was right. Of course he was right. They couldn’t make love while two little boys slept downstairs. That would be wrong. She supposed locking the bedroom door would be wrong, too.
He took a step back and placed his hands on her shoulders.
“Do you need help with Adam and Wally?” she asked.
“Honey, do us both a favor and stay up here until you see my taillights heading toward town.” His hands dropped from her shoulders and he backed away toward the bed. “I’m afraid I used up all my willpower pulling that tank top down over your breasts. Leaving that see-through bra on you was just about the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t take much more.” He picked up Wally’s and Adam’s shoes and looked at her one last time before he left the room.
Hope moved to her bedroom in the front of the house, and from the window she watched him start the sheriff’s Blazer. He came back into the house and made two trips, carrying each boy one at a time. When he pulled out of her driveway, she thought she saw him glance up at her. But it was dark and she wasn’t sure.
She looked at her refection in the glass. At her weighted lids and puffy lips. She wasn’t really sure who was looking back. The woman looked like her, but she wasn’t behaving like Hope Spencer.
She walked from her bedroom and headed downstairs. She knew better than to want the sheriff the way she did. She didn’t believe in meaningless sex. She knew better… but she just seemed to forget or not to care. When Dylan was around, she just didn’t feel so lonely anymore.
Dylan Taber made her feel like a desirable woman again. The sound of his deep voice and the touch of his strong hands twisted her insides into hot little knots, and she liked the feeling. She liked it a lot. No man since her divorce had looked at her and made her feel like that. Like a whole woman. She supposed it was because she hadn’t given any man a chance, but it wasn’t as if she were consciously giving Dylan the chance now. She just didn’t have any control. The combination of Dylan’s easy charm and hot touches was very hard to resist.
She wondered if she should even try.
Chapter Nine
MAN SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTS
The next morning, Hope sipped coffee and stared blurry-eyed at her monitor. She scrolled through her e-mail and opened a letter from her editor, Walter. He loved the alien story and wanted more, which was perfect, since she already had an idea for an article on alien wilderness guides. At the end of the e-mail, he warned her that Myron Lambardo had contacted the paper and wanted to know where she was living. He’d obviously discovered she wasn’t living in her condo, which also meant that he’d violated the restraining order.
Hope decided to do nothing about it for now. She wasn’t worried. No way could Myron find her. He wouldn’t even think to look in the wilderness of Idaho.
She set her cup on the table and got busy. Her fingers tapped furiously for half a page, then stilled. The image of Dylan standing behind her, his hands cupping her breasts, entered into her head and stopped her cold. She tried to push aside the memory and get her mind back to work, but she couldn’t. He was there and he was staying, blocking her creative flow.
There was only one thing to do. Wait it out. She opened a small vanity case and reached for a bottle of fingernail polish remover and a bag of cotton balls. She conditioned and cut her cuticles and painted her nails mauve because she was in a mauve mood. Not really bright and cheery, but not dark, either. In between and kind of uncertain. Like her life.
While she painted, she carefully looked over the information she’d gathered on Hiram Donnelly. As far as she could tell, the old sheriff had been into dominance and submission. During the day he’d been a control freak, but at night he’d liked to be dominated. From the information she’d read, outside of what was considered normal sexual behavior, D and S wasn’t all that unusual a fetish. In fact, powerful men and women were the staple crop behind every successful dominatrix.
She also read reports and academic theories on why certain men were attracted to being dominated, but writing an article on the psychology and pathology of fetishes wasn’t what she wanted. She was much more interested in the man who’d managed to get himself elected sheriff of a conservative town for over twenty years, while secretly fantasizing about sexual deviance that finally consumed him.
When Hope’s nails were dry, she called across the street and checked up on Shelly. Paul told her Shelly was asleep but that she might be awake in a few hours, so to come over around noon. Since it was only ten Hope had hours to kill and painted her toenails, too. She thought about the aliens in her feature and the many possibilities for future stories. She thought about whether she should query magazines before she wrote her piece on Hiram Donnelly or just write it first. But mostly she thought about Dylan and what he’d said about living like a priest. She just couldn’t imagine a guy like him on the wagon.
She thought about how he looked at her, the desire in his eyes and in the rough texture of his voice that wrapped her up and warmed her all over. She’d tried to attach meaning to every smile, every word, every touch. She liked to think he cared about her a little, but she didn’t know. And the fact was, except for liking him personally and craving him physically, she didn’t know how she felt. Beyond loneliness and their undeniable attraction to one another, she couldn’t say they had anything in common. She didn’t even know if she would see him today or tomorrow or not again until next week.
Did she want more? Did he?
She thought about Dylan’s ex-wife, too. If the woman was really a waitress, she wondered why Adam couldn’t talk about what she did for a living.
Except maybe… she was a topless waitress. One of those women who worked in gentlemen’s clubs. That would explain why Dylan might not want his son mentioning his mother’s profession to anyone. Small towns could be closed-minded about that sort of thing.
At noon, Hope knocked on her neighbor’s door, and Paul showed her into the living room, where Shelly sat in a recliner wearing her blue chintz robe.