She found it easy to say, "No, Adam. I don't have to rush home. Why?"
"Have you ever seen the penthouse I use when I'm in town?"
She swallowed hard and answered huskily. "No."
"Would you like to?"
Chapter 8
"Thank you again, Adam. I had a wonderful time."
"The pleasure was mine. Good night, Elizabeth. I'll see you soon."
He brushed his lips across her forehead. She gave him one last smile, then slipped through the front door of her house. The living room was dark. She took several groping footsteps toward the nearest lamp, but before she found it, Thad's voice lurched at her from out of the darkness.
"Have a good time?"
"Lord," she exclaimed, "you scared me to death." Switching on the lamp, she found him sprawled in the corner of her sofa. He'd taken off his boots; they were on the floor. The sport coat he'd had on earlier in the evening was lying across the arm of the easy chair. His shirt was still tucked in, but barely, and it was unbuttoned to his waist.
"Have a good time?" he repeated through lips that barely moved.
Idle curiosity hadn't prompted him to ask. Not even polite interest. His voice was only a hair breadth above a growl. In her present mood, Elizabeth took offense. Her ego had been bruised, but she would be damned before she'd let him know it. Not that her personal life was any of his business in the first place.
Flashing him a dazzling smile, she said, "I had a marvelous time." For emphasis, she executed a delightful little shiver which won her his glower. "What are you doing sitting in the dark?"
"What's wrong with the dark?"
"Nothing. But why aren't you in the den watching TV?"
"I didn't feel like it."
At the moment she didn't like him very much. She took exception to his casual slouching on her sofa, and to his open shirt, but especially to what was resting on his flat stomach. A highball glass.
He caught the direction of her gaze and tilted the glass toward her in a mocking salute. "Care to join me in a nightcap?"
"No."
"I hope you don't mind that I helped myself."
She did mind. Not that he had poured himself a drink from her small stock of liquor. What she minded was that he wasn't being his normal, nice self. He was being as surly as a street thug. And why? Was he regretting having baby-sat for her? What she minded most, however, was that he was still attractive in spite of his belligerence. Maybe even more so.
She tossed her purse down on the hassock in front of the chair. "No, I don't mind that you helped yourself to a drink. Did the children give you any trouble?"
"None at all. Did you give Cavanaugh any?"
She glared right back at his censorious blue eyes. "I don't like your tone of voice, Thad."
He rolled off his spine into a sitting position and placed his glass on the coffee table with a solid thud. His shirt fell open, revealing that muscled, hairy chest that she was trying to keep her eyes away from. "Well, that's just too damn bad, Elizabeth. Because this is the tone you're gonna get tonight."
"Wrong. I'm not going to listen to you at all." She drew herself up straight. "I appreciate the favor you did for me tonight. Thank you. Now I think you'd better leave."
Reaching the front door and dismissively holding it open for him was her goal. She never achieved it. No sooner had she given him her back, than he sprang off the couch as lithely as a panther and grabbed her upper arm. He spun her around to face him.
"Do you know what time it is?"
His rough treatment stunned her, so for a moment, the question seemed out of context. But then it dawned on her that it was rife with nasty implications. "Close to one-thirty, I believe," she replied sweetly. "Why? Is your wristwatch broken?"
His jaw knotted with fury and a muscle in his cheek twitched dangerously. "Why are you coming home so late? What were you doing all that time with Cavanaugh?"
"Having dinner."
"For six damn hours?"
"Be quiet. You'll wake up the children."
He lowered his voice, but repeated his words in an accusing hiss. "I never had a meal that took six hours to eat."
"After dinner we went dancing." One dance around a postage-stamp-sized dance floor hardly constituted "dancing," but out of sheer spite, she wanted Thad to think that Adam and she had cut a swath of gaiety through the city's nightclubs.
He sneered. "Dancing?"
"Yes, dancing. Adam likes to dance as much as I do."
"And after that what did you do? Where did you go?" Deliberately she lowered her eyes, trying her best to look discomfited by the question. "You went to his room, didn't you?"
"Room? Ha! That word falls short of describing the penthouse on the top floor of the Hotel Cavanaugh."
The taut skin across his cheekbones stretched even tighter. His eyes were cold with rage, yet hot with jealousy. They narrowed on her face as he said sibilantly, "You slept with him."
She wrested her arm free. "You are my neighbor, Thad, and up until a few minutes ago, I thought you were my friend. You have never been my father confessor." She drew a shaky breath. "Now kindly leave my house."
She didn't even wait to see him out. After picking up her purse, she turned her back on him and marched upstairs. She tiptoed into each child's bedroom and was relieved to see that they had slept through the shouting match.
The instant she entered her bedroom, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and noticed how rosy her cheeks were. Thad's accusation hadn't brought color to her cheeks because it was so close to the truth, but because it was so far from it.
She stepped out of her shoes and took off Lilah's suit. She hung it on its padded hanger, placed it in her closet, and finished undressing. After dropping her nightgown over her head, she moved to her dressing table and gazed at her reflection. She said to it, "You're quite a siren, Elizabeth Burke."
Her nightgown matched her mores; it, too, was from another era. Made of white cotton, it had a wide scooping neckline and sleeves that ended in gathered ruffles at her wrists. There was a deep eyelet flounce on the skirt. Old-fashioned and quaint… just like her, or so everyone apparently thought.
Smiling wryly, she picked up her hairbrush and used it to destroy the thirty-dollar hairdo that was so out of character. As she did so, she began laughing softly to herself, recalling how her feet had floated over the carpeted floor from the private elevator to the etched glass doors of the penthouse.
She had been thinking that at last she was going to live one of her fantasies. She'd been a virgin when she married John Burke. He was the only man she'd ever slept with. Even her own sister would find that hard to believe, but it was true.
Tonight, she had thought, why not join the rest of the human race? Why not take an opportunity when it was offered? No exercising sound judgment. No consideration for the consequences. Just going with the flow. Just enjoying a sexual encounter for no reason beyond the physical pleasure it would bring. "Good-bye to Sandra Dee." Isn't that how the song went?
Sandra Dee was tedious. Elizabeth was ready to be the bad girl for a change. They had all the fun. She was sick of being Miss Goodie Two Shoes because Miss Goodie Two Shoes was dull, dull, dull. Every day she handled merchandise that catered to romance, but it was always for someone else's romance, never her own.
The only time she ever shed her inhibitions and her stifling cloak of morality was in her fantasies. As a result, life was passing her by. The years would slip away. She couldn't think of a more pathetic picture than that of an old lady lost in her fantasy world and having nothing else to sustain her, not even bittersweet memories of actual love affairs.
So when Adam Cavanaugh had opened the doors of the penthouse and ushered her inside, she had virtually drifted in, willing to taste the forbidden fruit of modern sexuality.