When they went on again, she saw that Matthew had put his head in his hands. Johnny looked only at Matthew. “I’m not going to say I told you so because you’re a grown-up,” Johnny informed Matthew. “I have better manners than that.”
“Let’s take her home,” Matthew suggested.
“Couldn’t you just send her back upstairs again? She can talk to Mr. Whitaker.”
Matthew stole another glance at Lorna. She thought she’d had him fooled, because she knew her own laughter had been real in those few short minutes. There had been honest pleasure just in being with both of them. Yet Matthew continued to stare intently at her, and seemed to see beyond her smile and the banter with her son. “It’s getting late,” he insisted quietly to Johnny. “I guarantee you can come back and see this another day.”
By the time they got home, Johnny and Matthew were hungry again. It was dark, and Lorna put out some of the feast she’d intended to serve for Christmas dinner for herself and her son. Lopsided Christmas cookies, gaily decorated; a green molded salad with cherries and tiny candies inside; dips with crackers and fresh vegetables… It was not exactly a nutritious snack. Certainly not served with sparkling Burgundy and Johnny’s Boston Cooler.
Her towheaded urchin, never one to let a subject die a natural death, brought the two Zoids to the kitchen table. His own lurched and threatened in terrible menace from its four-inch height, while hers fell over with every third step. Matthew just looked at her.
“There are many, many men who aren’t in the least mechanical,” she informed both of them.
“He’s only nine years old,” Matthew reminded her.
Johnny had a few more choice bits of information to impart before Lorna finally got him to bed, kissed him seven times, hugged him for a while and left him to his almost-ten male-chauvinist solitude.
By the time she returned to the living room, Matthew had lit a fire in the fireplace, pushed most of the debris behind a chair and removed his sweater; he was reclining, shoes off, on the couch. “Come over here,” he suggested, patting the inch and a half of empty space next to him.
She smiled, curling at the bottom of the couch instead with her feet tucked up under her. “For some unknown reason, I’m so tired I can hardly move,” she admitted.
He nudged her calf with his foot, and when she failed to respond simply sat up and took her back down with him, not content until her head was tucked into the crook of his shoulder and her legs were captured beneath one of his. She couldn’t move. She had the feeling that was exactly what Matthew had intended, that he had watched her exhibition of restless energy since they had come back from his father’s and correctly interpreted all of it.
With his hand on her hip, he kissed the crown of her chestnut hair. “I think you’re wine-tired,” he whispered teasingly. “Two glasses, Misha. You’re quite a drinker.”
“Don’t you start.”
“Johnny tells me that you can swear in several languages. Can you?”
“I have never sworn in front of that child in my entire life.”
“Except in German. And Russian.”
Lorna sighed, curling closer to him, rubbing her cheek against the soft white shirt fabric near his shoulder. “What else did the little monster tell you?” she murmured dryly.
“We don’t much like men who touch our mother, now, do we? And we’re more than capable of taking care of you all on our own. We like friends to take us both out on outings. For example, hockey games. Seeing toy trains. Maybe tobogganing…” Matthew sighed. “I didn’t touch you throughout dinner, did I? Not even when we were downstairs together. I can’t imagine why I like the little imp. I know darn well he’s waging war.” A wry smile touched Matthew’s features, but his eyes told her he was serious. “It is a war, Misha, but not to worry. It will just take some time to convince him he can’t lose for winning. I’ll be patient.”
She thought fleetingly how typical that was of Matthew, to let her know he understood Johnny’s possessive instincts, and by treating the subject lightly to also let her know that she could trust his handling of it.
He seemed to handle a great many things well. Her temples, for instance, where a headache raged tense and tight; his thumb rubbed caressingly back and forth, soothing away the pain she had never even mentioned to him. And her lips, for another. When his mouth sank deliciously on hers, she felt something give inside her that had been knotted up for hours. Feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, a residue from the past she thought she’d managed to get rid of; the wounds that had seared open again after her encounter with his father.
Her hands rippled through his hair, and her aching breasts nuzzled deliberately against his chest as she curled closer to him. He tasted so sweet; she wanted to lose herself in that sweetness. Before, she had forgotten everything else when he touched her; she courted that kind of explosive passion now, her hands rippling down his shoulders and arms, then to the front of his shirt, suddenly in a desperate hurry to get past buttons.
Buttons? To get past pain, past thought, past this strange aching ball of hurt inside her that refused to ease. She wanted to love Matthew, to promise him that she would never make him suffer, to wrap him up in silk arms and satin smoothness. She could feel his dark, soft eyes watching her, and paid no attention. Her already turbulent emotions had been set on a roller coaster. There was no getting off. She felt panic at the thought of getting off. She needed Matthew so badly, now, this minute, instantly, an hour ago…
Her lips pressed fierce kisses on his throat, down into the furred mat on his bare chest. Her leg curled between both of his, firing his arousal. In some other world she felt his hands smoothing back her silky hair, his feather-light kisses trying to soothe. She didn’t want to be soothed. She kneaded the flesh of his back, willing every other thought to fade in her head, willing that drumbeat of desire to flood her ears, block out everything but Matthew. It could happen; she knew it could. She felt his body respond to her, his muscles tightening in promise, his skin taking on warmth, his breath shortening. Yet when her hands reached for his belt buckle, she found her fingers stolen by his, her arms placed around his neck.
His mouth reached for hers, in a single dominating kiss meant to stop her frantic movements. It did. He cradled her head in his palms to touch her lips again, his dark eyes gentle on hers. “Stop crying,” he whispered. His thumbs lightly brushed away the moisture beneath her eyes that she hadn’t even known was there.
“I want you to make love to me,” she whispered back fiercely.
“Do you?” He pulled her close, once more raining kisses on her closed eyes, on her cheeks, on her temples. For no reason at all, she was suddenly trembling all over, gasping to keep from crying. “Dammit. Tell me, Misha.”
She shook her head.
“Tell me,” he insisted beseechingly.
She closed her eyes painfully, feeling more vulnerable than spun glass. “I’m sorry. I…”
“Just tell me.”
With her head still cradled in the crook of his shoulder, Matthew shifted both of them, so that by the time she’d brushed away those few mortifying tears she was cradled on his lap and held in a protective cocoon. Or were those arms steel bars? Because he was not letting her get away.