What a Woman Wants Read online

  Slowly, she drifted back to the couch and the mesmerizing man gazing at her. There lurked a dark intense shadow in his eyes. He moved his hips slightly, then slid back into her flesh, the sweet friction moving the heat in her abdomen up to her chest and back again. His strokes were controlled, measured…and made her want to make him lose control.

  “John,” she whispered harshly. “Please.”

  “Shh,” he said, running a palm down her sweat-coated belly. “This time we do it my way.”

  Then he thrust hard and deep, filling her to over-flowing, picking up his pace, driving into her flesh again and again and again, until the world shattered a second and then a third time, thrusting Darby into a world full of sensation, of desire, so unfamiliar that she was almost scared, but naughtily curious of it all the same. She clutched him, needing to feel him deeper, wanting him with an urgency that transcended anything she’d felt before.

  Finally he tensed, his fingers biting into her hips, her name ripping from his throat as he drove all the way home and tilted her hips upward to allow him deeper access, taking her with him yet again.

  Chapter Seven

  Darby lay on the couch in the cradle of John’s arms, flesh on flesh, the spring night air on her skin chilly, but she was too drained, too sated to do much but vaguely wonder at it as John rained his fingertips up and down her bare back, eliciting a shiver.

  She didn’t quite know where they went from there. Didn’t know if there was a “there” to work from. All she knew was that she’d needed this…closeness. This intimacy. And that John had given it to her. And right now that was all that mattered. She’d spent so much time over the past year looking at life from a wide angle. Trying so hard to find puzzle pieces she was beginning to suspect never existed or were gone forever, that somehow she’d forgotten how to just be. To enjoy each moment for all it was worth.

  And John had brought that into focus with a few wonderful caresses and passion enough for the both of them.

  “Well,” she said quietly, rubbing her nose against his hairless chest, “I’d say you’ve gotten over the surprise of my news quickly enough.”

  He remained silent, his fingers continuing their aimless movements on her back.

  Darby cleared her throat and looked up at him. Mere moments ago, they’d been as one, sharing intimate secrets with each other’s bodies. Now, as John stared at the ceiling, he couldn’t have seemed farther away.

  “John?” she whispered, trying to ignore the heat collecting in her belly yet again, despite his emotional distance.

  John’s hazel eyes shifted to her, and the somberness in them caused a shiver of a different sort to ripple over her skin. “I want you to promise me something, Darby.”

  So serious. Her throat tightened with the fear that he intended to propose to her again. A prospect that was part of that bigger picture she didn’t want to have to deal with right then. She shifted to move away, but he only held her more tightly, his hands branding her bare skin.

  His gaze moved from one of her eyes to the other, and she watched his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. “No matter how it happened, where we go from here, I want you to promise me that you’ll never make our baby feel like he or she was a mistake.”

  Darby’s breath caught painfully. She lay her cheek back against his chest and closed her eyes, her arms around him, squeezing harder, listening to the cadence of his heartbeat beneath her ear. Never in a thousand years would she have imagined him saying anything of that nature, presenting her with that type of a request. “Of course I won’t,” she said quietly, wondering why he would think differently.

  He gripped her arm, coaxing her to look at him again, his expression intense. “Promise me.”

  Darby swallowed hard, realizing how much this meant to him. “I promise,” she whispered.

  He seemed to measure her response, search her face for some sort of truth. Then he pulled her to him again, resting his chin on top of her head as she pondered the source of his request.

  “Thank you.”

  Darby took a deep breath, then pressed a kiss to his warm skin and nestled closer.

  She realized then that she knew precious little about John, about his upbringing, the obstacles, the inspirations that had turned him into the man he was. Yes, she knew he was from a large family. Everyone in Old Orchard was familiar with the Sparks family. It was hard to go anywhere without running into one of them. Especially now that the siblings had gone on and married, creating even more Sparkses. The only one left unmarried was John. And only now did that fact strike Darby as odd.

  He was thirty years old to her twenty-eight. But where she’d already been married and had two children, she couldn’t recall John ever having been serious with anyone.

  “Erick was my best friend,” he whispered so quietly Darby had to wonder whether he’d said the words or she’d imagined them.

  She snuggled still closer. “Erick was my husband,” she whispered back.

  He shifted until he’d rolled her over, his eyes dark and weighty with feeling as he gazed at her. She gazed back, her own emotions running high. She could see the struggle raging within him. His need to be true to his best friend and his need for her at odds with the other.

  She smiled softly and raised her hand to his face, wanting to tell him that it was okay. That what had begun three months ago hadn’t been planned. Neither one of them had set out to betray anyone. Rather, they’d responded to a fundamental desire that still existed between them.

  “It’s important you know that,” he said raggedly. “It’s important to me that I remember that.”

  She nodded, speechless as he gently nudged her thighs open with his knee. He fit his arousal against flesh still slick and hot from their lovemaking. Her body strained upward as if to invite him inside. At the same time, she realized that she was responding to him as much on an emotional level as physical. And despite her fear of what opening her heart to him might lead to, she couldn’t stop herself from doing so.

  John drew his tongue slowly over her right nipple, then kissed his way up to her mouth.

  He looked at her, the teasing back in his eyes. “By the way, I don’t want you to think that I’ve forgotten.”

  She wriggled, trying to coax him into her hungry, waiting flesh. She restlessly licked her lips. “Forgotten what?”

  “That I’ve yet to convince you to marry me.”

  Darby opened her mouth to protest and he entered her, sliding in to the hilt. Whatever response she might have made exited as a long moan.

  The following day John looked at his watch for the third time in as many minutes. Never during his four years on the job had he wished for the time to pass. When he was on the job, he was on the job, no two ways about it. Outside concerns were kept outside. His mind was always firmly on what needed to be done.

  Now, however, all he could think about was Darby, her sweet smile and her even sweeter flesh.

  He dry-washed his face with his hands, then sat back in his chair, the squeak of the springs filling his empty office. God, but the woman was incredible. Sharp-tongued. Witty. And sexy as all get-out. He’d always known that, but after last night, knowing she was pregnant with his child, somehow made it all right to think of her in romantic terms. To envision her arching against him, his name on her lips. The images made him want to groan for completely different reasons.

  He looked at his watch again. Not even lunchtime. He was going to go insane.

  He sat up again and scanned his desktop. The ever-changing roster for the coming week begged for his attention. Old Mrs. Noonan’s request for some uniformed men at next weekend’s Easter-egg hunt all but leaped out at him. And the paperwork on the two fugitives in the holding cell waited for that call-back from the U.S. Marshal’s office.

  He frowned and flipped open the file. One Lyle Smythe, a twenty-nine-year-old Caucasian male, and Ted, his twenty-three-year-old brother, escaped from an Indiana high-security prison two months ago while tending to snow
removal. Why both of them had been assigned to snow removal on the same day at the same time didn’t make much sense. John rubbed the back of his neck and turned the page. The next one catalogued all the tattoos on the brothers’ bodies. Quite a collection. Made them very easy to catch. A snake slithering up the neck of one was pretty hard to hide. He checked the information. Lyle was the snake guy.

  Truth was, he didn’t much like having those two stinking up his holding cell. That they were career criminals was evident. That they didn’t like being in jail even more so.

  If the U.S. Marshal Service was going to take long to pick the two up, he should consider separating them, perhaps moving the older one to the city police lockup just to be on the safe side.

  John leaned forward, eyeballing Ed, who was chowing down on something or other for lunch. “Ed, did you get a chance to run that background check on the guys in the back?”

  The older man sucked what looked like a piece of lettuce into his mouth and continued chewing. “Yeah. Ran it while you were out documenting that accident out on Route 108.”

  John sighed. “Where is it?”

  “I put it on your desk.”

  John rifled through the papers littering the top. No printout.

  “Oh, wait a minute.” Ed got up from the counter, his sandwich in one hand, papers in the other. “I have them here.” He slapped the printouts down on top of the desk, smearing mayonnaise all over the top page. “Sorry,” he said, swiping at the mess with a napkin.

  John waved him away. “I got it. Go back to the front before I catch you trying to lick it off.”

  Ed grinned and took another bite of his sandwich. “You sure you don’t want some of this?”

  “No, I think I’ll pass,” John said, envisioning the desk sergeant breaking off a piece of the slobbered-on sandwich and handing it to him.

  Ed shrugged, then returned to the front.

  Shaking his head at the tall, skinny man who ate enough to put a horse to shame but never gained a pound, John wiped off the mayo with a paper towel he took from a roll in a desk drawer. Then, tossing the towel into the wastebasket, he leaned back in his chair again and took the papers with him. His eyebrows rose as he read down the long list of convictions. Robbery. Armed robbery. Forgery. Breaking and entering. Resisting arrest. Car theft. Name any crime short of assault and murder, these two had done it.

  He was reaching for the sheet outlining the unsolved felonies in the county, then for the log of unsolved felonies statewide, when the phone rang. He set the papers down and picked up the receiver on the third ring.

  “Sparks here.”

  “Well, hello there, Sheriff. Which uniform are you wearing today? The gray-and-black one or the black-and-gray one?” Darby’s voice filtered across the line. “My mother always said there’s something about a guy in uniform.”

  John snapped upright so fast the springs in the chair nearly catapulted him across the desk. He smoothed his tie as if she could see him through the telephone line. “I think she was talking about the military,” he managed, although his pulse had kicked up.

  Her answering laugh made him grin. She had the kind of infectious laugh that could make a funeral wake seem like an occasion to celebrate. Movement in the other room caught his attention. He looked up to find Ed craning his neck to ferret out whom he was talking to.

  John cleared his throat and giveaway expression. “Something I can do for you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It all depends on how long you can get away from the office.”

  John nearly choked. “You’re one dangerous woman, do you know that?”

  “Hmm, I’ve never thought about it before, but I think I may be a bit dangerous. In fact, maybe you should pull me in off the streets. I’ve never worn handcuffs before.”

  The thought of handcuffs and a naughtily naked Darby nearly sent John into cardiac arrest.

  There was a muffled sound, then he heard Darby say, “Erin, I don’t think Spot wants to wear makeup.”

  John hiked a brow.

  “Anyway,” she said, talking to him again, “I just called, you know, to see how you’re doing.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “And you?”

  “More than fine.”

  He swiveled his chair away from Ed and grinned again. “Yeah, me, too.”

  “I was talking about your eye.”

  “Oh.” He lifted a hand and probed the area in question. The pain had passed, but it would take a good week for the bruise to fade to nothing. “I think I’ll live.”

  “If you didn’t, it would probably be the first documented case of a man perishing from a black eye.”

  “Very funny.”

  Her laugh made heat snake through his body. “Look, John, I also called to ask what you’re doing for dinner tonight.”

  “I thought I’d nuke the frozen chicken nuggets I have in the freezer, you know, before they go bad. Can you come up with something to top that?”

  “How’s lasagna sound?”

  “Better than frozen chicken nuggets.” He knew a moment of hesitation as memories of the other night drifted through his mind. His grin vanished. “Are you sure the twins want me there?”

  “I’m sure I want you here,” she said quietly. “There’s something I think we need to talk about.”

  This was it. She was going to say yes to his proposal.

  John’s heart banged against his ribs so hard he could almost see it. “Oh.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I mean yes.”

  He imagined her thousand-watt smile. “Good. I’ll see you around six, then?”

  “Yes. Wearing full body armor.”

  “Ha ha.”

  John slowly replaced the receiver. Dear Lord, he was going to be a married man.

  “I don’t like ’sagna.”

  Darby blew out a long, patient breath as she considered Erin’s stubborn face. She glanced at Lindy, standing slightly behind her sister and to the side, then back again. “Don’t be silly. Lasagna is one of your favorites.”

  “Well, I decided I don’t like it anymore.”

  O-okay, Darby thought.

  Her first mistake had been telling Erin and Lindy their uncle Sparky was coming over for dinner. Constantly underfoot, the twins with their sulky expressions found ways to trip her up at every turn. From placing an in-line skate in her path to spilling watercolor paint all over the kitchen table, they seemed to have declared some sort of war on her. A war she was afraid she was losing.

  “Tell you what,” she said with dwindling patience. “If, when we sit down to eat in a little while, you no longer want lasagna, I’ll make you something else, okay?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” Darby said, shrugging. “Cereal.”

  “But that’s breakfast food.”

  “It’s still food.”

  Erin made an unhappy face and turned around, no doubt intending to regroup and plan her next attack. Darby met Lindy’s eyes, wondering what was going on in her other daughter’s head. She’d been awfully quiet lately. Which was a good thing, she supposed, considering how much talking Erin had been doing.

  Darby smiled. “Would you like to help me set the table, Lin?”

  The six-year-old blinked, then headed for the side door. “I think I forgot to feed Billy his dinner.”

  Darby blew her bangs from out of her eyes, wondering where the two little cherubs from the other day had gone and just what she had to do to get them back. Something that didn’t include indulging their new, hostile feelings for John.

  She remembered his comment about wearing full body armor for dinner. She hoped he hadn’t been joking.

  Darby glanced at the clock, disappointed to find that she wouldn’t have time to change into the pink dress she’d laid out on her bed earlier. She took a moment to tuck a few stray strands of hair back into her French braid, which was all the time she could spare for her appearance as she
closed the foil around the fresh garlic bread and put the loaf in next to the lasagna in the oven.

  “Hello.”

  Darby’s every nerve ending hummed to life at the sound of John’s quiet voice directly behind her. She glanced to where Lindy must have left the door open on her way outside, then turned to face the man who had occupied so much of her thoughts all day long.

  “Hello, yourself,” she said.

  She allowed her gaze to leisurely rake him from the tip of his scuffed cowboy boots, up his faded jeans, over his soft-purple chambray shirt, then up to where his hair was still slightly wet from a shower. She breathed in the tangy scent of soap and shaving cream.

  He looked good. Damn good. And made her feel even better just standing there looking at him.

  Something hit the back of her legs, jarring her from her thoughts and nearly off her feet. Stifling a vocal exclamation, she turned to find Erin had just plowed into her with one of the four chairs. She caught it with both hands. “Where do you think you’re going with that?”

  “Lindy needs help with Billy.”

  Darby refused to relinquish her hold even as her daughter pushed. She realized Erin was trying to get rid of the chair John was to use. “And you need the chair to do that?”

  “The fence is high.”

  “The fence has a gate, which you know how to open.”

  Erin rolled her eyes and finally let go of the chair, although she was none too happy about it. “I’m going outside.”

  “Good,” Darby said, then bit her tongue.

  Erin glared at John and the flowers in his hands, then stomped toward the door.

  The kitchen loomed large and silent for a full minute after she slammed the door.

  Darby rubbed her forehead and gave a small laugh. “Sorry about that. I still haven’t figured out what’s going on.”

  John grimaced, watching through the open door as Erin trudged toward the barn. “I think I know.”

  Darby glanced at him.

  “They don’t want me to marry you.”

  She smiled at him even though her heart had leaped to her throat. “Well, then, we don’t have anything to worry about there, do we? Because I’m not going to marry you.”