Private Affairs Read online

  Sweet Jesus, but she was beautiful.

  There was no waxing for her, just a neat trim that perfectly accentuated her silken folds. He was surprised to see his hands trembling slightly as he slid them up from her knees until his thumbs joined between her thighs. He tunneled them into her springy curls until they hit the velvety flesh beneath. She gasped and her hips bucked involuntarily even as he explored the uneven length of her swollen folds before parting them, opening the glistening flesh to his hungry gaze.

  Penelope curved her feet around his hips, pulling him closer.

  “Please,” she whispered restlessly before kissing him, her hands holding his head still.

  It took no time—yet forever—for Palmer to get the condom out of the back pocket of his jeans on the floor and sheath himself. Then, finally, he was back right where he wanted to be, Penelope ready and wet and waiting for him.

  He stared into her heavy-lidded eyes, his own breathing loud in his ears. Sweat trickled down his back and through the valley between her breasts. He bent down to lick the salty trail, his thumbs reclaiming their spot between her legs as he prepared her for him. Then he entered her in one long, soulful stroke…and froze.

  Yes…

  If the anticipation had been torture, the destination was blindingly brilliant.

  Penelope’s mouth stilled in an almost perfect O, and he swore he could feel the beating of her heart in the slick flesh that gripped him. He was afraid that if he breathed, if he moved, it would be all over before he’d even started.

  He’d waited so very long for this moment. Not consciously. But being there now…he knew that she, that Penelope, was the one thing he’d missed most about Earnest. There was something…special about her. Something that inspired sensations that no other woman could come close to achieving. He could spend from now to the end of his days trying to figure out why.

  But he’d much rather revel in feelings that grabbed and twisted and ground through his insides.

  Leaving one of his thumbs resting against her stiff bud, he slid his other hand around her hips, drawing her nearer to the edge of the table. He flicked his thumb against her stiff tissue, taking triumph in the fact that she was as affected as he was when she instantly exploded around his pulsing erection.

  Palmer ground his back teeth to hold off.

  Not yet…not yet…

  It took every lick of self-control he possessed not to empty his hot need into her. It would take very little to push him over the edge, even though he had every intention of enjoying the view for as long as humanly possible.

  Oh, and what a lovely view it was, too. Penelope spilled over the top of the worktable, every inch of her glorious skin glistening, her nipples rigid peaks, her stomach expanding and contracting in time with her breathing. He leaned in and kissed her even as he withdrew and slid in to the hilt again, swallowing her gasp.

  She lifted her knees, pressing them against his side and inviting him in deeper. He was only too happy to oblige as his thrusts increased in intensity, driving the mercury of his desire up and up and up further still. His heartbeat echoed in his ears and the emotions that had been churning through his body coalesced in his aching penis. He reached around her, cupping her supple bottom in his hands, lifting her slightly from the table as he pulled and pushed her in rhythm with his thrusts.

  Then, finally, there was no more control to be had. It vanished in a bright flash of light. His movements ceased, his lungs froze, and his hips bucked. Apparently sensing his crisis, Penelope came again seconds after he did, the tightening of her slick muscles prolonging his orgasm. They clung together, their skin drenched, their bodies fixed.

  Palmer distantly wondered how he’d gone so long without the magnificent woman in his arms…and how he could go about making sure he never went without her again….

  PENELOPE WALKED the few blocks home. The town was quiet on normal nights, but she swore tonight she could hear the trees draw their sap closer and the dew settle onto the grass as she passed. Her entire body hummed and her heartbeat had yet to return to its regular rhythm.

  Her memories were chock-full of making love to Palmer. But somehow her mind had dulled the vibrancy of their coming together.

  That’s why she hadn’t had a serious relationship since then. Because she knew no one else would quite equal what she felt when she was with him. Only he knew exactly where to touch her. Only he knew how to slide his tongue against hers in just that way that made her hungry for more. Only he felt right nestled between her thighs as she held tight, never wanting to let him go.

  The house was blessedly dark. She’d been afraid she’d have to face her grandmother and aunt and had purposely delayed her return home because of that. She couldn’t seem to budge the grin from her face and feared it would be a dead giveaway to the twosome.

  She let herself inside the unlocked front door, hung her purse on the coat tree and then took her shoes off one by one, so as not to make any more noise than she had to when she crept to her bedroom.

  “No use tiptoeing. We know you’re home. So you’d be better off coming in here and telling us what kept you so late.”

  Penelope briefly closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. Damn.

  She dropped her shoes to the floor near the door and walked toward the dark kitchen. Only the light from a flickering red candle in the middle of the table kept her from stubbing a toe against a chair leg.

  “Here,” her great-aunt said, pushing a chair toward her. “Sit down and pour yourself a glass of homemade sangria.”

  Her grandmother had her tarot cards out. Penelope twisted her lips.

  “Who wants what answered?” Agatha asked.

  Normally, the only time the tarot made an appearance was when one or the other of them had a question to which they didn’t know the answer. Or a problem they couldn’t see a way to solve.

  “You’re the one with the question,” her aunt told her, pouring a sizable amount of sangria into a glass.

  Penelope took it and downed a couple of swallows, fortifying herself for what was to come. “I have no questions.”

  Her grandmother looked at her from beneath lowered lids. “So you have it all figured out then?”

  She forced herself to pause and not answer quickly. To do so would only be to encourage them. “As well as anybody,” she said, purposely vague.

  “Hunh,” her aunt disagreed.

  She started to get up. “While this is interesting and all, I’m beat…”

  “Of course, you are. Considering that you’ve been out there having sex.”

  Penelope’s gasp filled the room.

  “Don’t look at me like that, girl. I’ve been having it much longer than you have. I know what it looks like. What it smells like.”

  She smelled?

  “Yup,” Irene said, closing her eyes. “Musk…sweat…latex.”

  Penelope nearly knocked over her glass of sangria. “What?”

  “You don’t think we use condoms?” her grandmother asked. Then she waved her hand. “Oh, not for protection against pregnancy, although I understand if either of us really wanted to have a child or eight, and had enough money to pay a doctor, we could still do it.” She made a face. “Do you realize that our age group is the one with the fastest growing new diagnoses of AIDS?”

  Her great-aunt shook her head. “Seniors with AIDS. What is this world coming to? You suffer PMS and PMDD through your childbearing years. Sweat your way past menopause thinking your reward is—finally!—some sweet, exquisite unprotected sex. Then, bam! Some skank starts spreading disease and you end up stocking Trojans all over again.”

  “Skank?” Penelope leaned her forehand against her hand. Just when she thought her grandmother and great-aunt were incapable of surprising her, they pulled out a doozy like this.

  “Yes, skank. What would you call a woman going around having sex willy-nilly?”

  She stared at her. “Oh, I don’t know? Grandma?”

  Her aunt laughed. “I
think she just called you a skanky ho, Agatha.”

  Penelope’s mouth fell open. Then she held up her hands. “This conversation is beginning to have a decidedly Twilight Zone feel to it. I’m going to bed where I’m assured that my dreams won’t be half as disturbing.”

  “Or half as interesting,” Irene said.

  “Sit down.”

  Penelope blinked as she looked at her grandmother. “What?”

  “You heard me. Sit. I’m not finished with you yet.”

  “That’s funny, because right now I’m more than finished with this conversation.”

  “That’s because you don’t want to tell us who you had sex with.”

  “I haven’t had sex!”

  Both of them stared at her.

  What, was it tattooed on her forehead? Some sort of glowing letters like those on that ring in the hobbit movie that only appeared under intense heat?

  She sighed and sat back down, fearful that they’d only follow her to her bedroom where there’d be no escape from the hell they were creating for her.

  “Was it with that perfectly yummy Sheriff Barnaby?” her great-aunt asked. “What am I saying? Of course, it was. Who else is there?”

  Her grandmother’s gaze seemed to bore a hole right through her. “Who else, indeed?”

  She glanced at the tarot cards she’d laid out before her and then tapped one. Penelope and her great-aunt leaned forward for a peek.

  “The Hierophant!” her aunt said. Then she frowned. “But I thought the card for Barnaby was that mailman guy. The Page of Pentacles?”

  “What else do you see?” her grandmother asked.

  Penelope looked the standard full spread over. All the cards were in the major arcana. “Impossible,” she whispered.

  Never, in all the years since the two women had been reading tarot, had she seen only major arcana pop up.

  “You rigged it,” she accused.

  “I did no such thing.”

  “So who’s the Hierophant?” Irene wanted to know.

  Both women looked at her.

  She didn’t appear to have a clue.

  “I think we need to increase your blueberry intake,” her grandmother said. “It’s that Palmer DeVoe.”

  “Palmer DeVoe…but isn’t he…?” Her aunt’s eyes widened. “Oh, my.”

  “Mmm,” her grandmother said, looking back down at the cards. “I see here that the two of them met earlier today…perhaps over a meal…”

  “You do not.” Penelope leaned forward.

  “No, I don’t. But I did hear about it.”

  Penelope sat back heavily in her chair and crossed her arms. “It’s none of your business.”

  “Isn’t it? Funny, but I think it’s very much our business.”

  She got up from her chair, put her barely touched sangria glass in the sink and then stepped toward the hall. “That’s my cue to leave.”

  “Have you told him yet, Penelope?”

  If any words were capable of stopping her in her tracks, it was those.

  11

  PALMER READJUSTED HIS GRIP on the two reusable grocery bags he held and opened the front gate. The grass needed to be cut, the bushes were overgrown and the stench of what smelled like a dead animal assaulted his nose. He could only hope that it was a squirrel or another small animal that had perhaps gotten hit by a car and crawled into his father’s yard to die instead of a forgotten pet.

  Thankfully, the front door to the house was unlocked. Now he had but to hope that the same would apply to the screen door. It did.

  Without knocking, he walked straight inside. “Pops? It’s Palmer.”

  He hadn’t known his father to own a gun, so he didn’t believe he was in danger there. Although, as he’d seen firsthand, an awful lot could change in fifteen years.

  “I brought you a few groceries. Thought you could use them.” He walked through the living room. He’d been so fixated on the old man last night when he’d stood watching him through the front window that he hadn’t take much note of anything else. Now, he noticed that everything in the room was as he remembered. Exactly as he remembered. Including the fake sprays of flowers his mother had liked to decorate the place with. Framed old school photos of him still dotted the walls, and needlepoint pillows still sat on the pale blue velvet sofa and chairs. What was different was that everything was faded and covered in years’ worth of dust, as if the place had been deserted right after her death.

  He cleared his throat of unexpected emotion and continued his monologue to let his father know he was there. “I’m just going to put the groceries in the kitchen…”

  He drifted off as he came to a stop just outside the room in question. His father sat hunched over the narrow kitchen table that had been pushed up against the wall, dunking a jelly-topped cracker into a mug. He’d stopped eating at the sight of Palmer. Half the cracker fell into the mug and what looked like plain water splashed out.

  “Good morning, Pops,” he said, lifting the bags. “I brought you a few things I thought you might need.”

  Thomas snapped out of his momentary shock. He picked up the dish towel at his elbow and wiped his hands jerkily with it. “What in the hell are you doing here, boy?” He moved the mug out of the way along with a few crackers and a nearly empty jar of preserves. “I thought I made it clear that I wanted nothing to do with you.”

  The words didn’t sting any less, but Palmer was prepared, unlike the first time around. Essentially, he’d decided to ignore the old man. Or at least any snide remarks he made. Lord knew he’d done it before. It shouldn’t be too difficult to pick that skill back up again now.

  He placed the bags on the chipped yellow linoleum counter and lifted the lids on the ceramic storage jars. The ones for coffee, sugar, tea and flour were all empty. And he doubted that any of the staples could be found in the small pantry or cupboards. He took the fresh supplies from the bags he’d brought and filled the jars and then opened the refrigerator. He picked up a quart of milk, sniffed the top and then dropped it into the nearby garbage bin, stocking fresh milk, eggs, butter and cheese inside before closing the door.

  Turning, he placed a loaf of bread on the table in front of his father, then took his mug. As he suspected, water. He emptied the contents into the sink and then filled the teakettle and put it on a lit burner.

  “Who do you think you are?” his father fairly sputtered, struggling to get to his feet. “No one asked you to bring this…stuff. No one invited you.”

  Palmer folded the bags.

  “You don’t belong here. You never belonged here.”

  He winced at the bitter words, but kept his council as he placed a tea bag in the cup and waited for the water to boil.

  “I’m talking to you, boy!”

  His father grasped his arm. Palmer swung around to face him, staring squarely into an angry face he remembered all too well.

  Thomas’s DeVoe’s milky-blue eyes bulged, but that’s where the facial similarities ended. His father’s unshaven jaw, the dark circles under his eyes, the unkempt, longish gray hair…they were all unfamiliar.

  And if he wasn’t mistaken, his father had shrunk a good five inches. Either that, or he only remembered him being taller.

  Now the top of his head came to about Palmer’s eyebrows.

  “I heard you,” he said evenly.

  His father seemed to be registering the same changes in him. It hit Palmer like a fist to the gut to realize how he now resembled the man before him. He looked very much like his father at around the same age.

  Thomas opened his mouth, presumably to say something else insulting. But instead of words, coughs wracked his thin body. He lifted a closed hand to his face and backed up until he could lean against the rickety table. Palmer reached out to steady him, but his father shook his hand off and then sat back down.

  Palmer filled a glass with water and put it in front of him. The old man didn’t touch it.

  He turned back toward the counter and took a calming
breath. This was far more difficult than he would have imagined. His overwhelming desire was to make a beeline for the door. But he didn’t dare. For reasons he couldn’t identify, it was important that he try to mend the crumbled bridges between him and his old man.

  So he went about making tea and toast in silence and put both in front of his father on the table.

  “Enjoy your breakfast,” he said, gathering the bags and putting them under the sink where his mother had always kept them. “I’ll be back for dinner.”

  “I don’t want you anywhere near this place.”

  “Yes, well, I wanted a father who would be happy to see me. So it looks like neither one of us is getting what we want.”

  He left the house, trying to convince himself that he was doing this for the greater good.

  “I’M SORRY I DIDN’T CALL LAST NIGHT,” Barnaby sounded as apologetic as his words. “We had a three-car pile up over on Route 6 involving a fuel tanker. It was a mess.”

  Penelope bit her bottom lip and crossed the kitchen floor to the microwave where popcorn was popping, nearly getting knocked over by Thor in the process. It seemed odd somehow that Barnaby should be apologizing, considering what she’d been doing while he’d been busy seeing to an emergency.

  Images of sweat-coated skin and soft gasps swept through her mind and re-ignited the longing that seemed fused with her DNA.

  She cleared her throat. “I hope everyone was okay.”

  “One of the victims had to be airlifted to Seattle, and oversight of the cleanup from the fuel spill took hours, but thankfully everything’s back up and running this morning.”

  Penelope frowned at the dog running circles around her ankles. “Good. Good.”

  Tonight was reality show night with her grandmother and aunt. It’s when they settled in front of the TV together, the snack food spread out on the coffee table in front of them. Penelope had just ducked into the kitchen to stick another bag of kettle popcorn into the microwave when the telephone had rung.

  Now, Barnaby said, “You’re not upset with me, you know, for not calling, are you?”