Accompanying Alice Read online

  Mamie came silently out of the bathroom and, following the drift of Alice’s gaze, watched Gabriel, too.

  “Nice,” she observed in her sulky sultry voice.

  Alice jumped guiltily and turned. Mamie’s eyes were slightly glazed and the glass in her hand was empty. She giggled and shook her head, putting a dilatory finger to her lips.

  “I won’t tell,” she whispered, patting Alice’s arm. “Our secret. But you can always recognize the women who live on nothing but fantasies. Mmm-hmm.” Mamie eyed Gabriel again, drew a regretful breath and continued on toward the kitchen. She stopped suddenly in the doorway, swinging back to Alice. “If you want to sneak off with him somewhere for a bit, I’ll cover for you. ‘Course—” she pursed her lips thoughtfully, narrowing her eyes “First time’s better if you let it build—you know, if you’re forced to abstain for a while.” She lifted a confidential brow and shut her eyes, shivering theatrically. “Anticipation, you know? By the time we all leave...” Her lips curved in a secret smile and her eyelids drooped for a moment as she retreated to some fine and clearly, private, place. Then she confided, “Anyway, it works for George and—”

  “Oh God!” Alice yanked the vacuum cleaner plug from the wall, stepped on the retractor that brought it whipping back into the machine and fled in horror. She didn’t want to hear about Mamie and George’s intimacies, didn’t want to dish up girl talk complete with suggested sex. And she didn’t want to be spied on by unwelcome relatives with big eyes and mouths who figured they could say anything because blood ties gave them the right—no matter how thin the blood.

  What she felt about Gabriel was personal, what she wanted or didn’t want from him was private. What she’d done—or not done—was nobody’s business but her own. She was not on display for the kinfolk’s entertainment. What she was, was tired, embarrassed, full of rebellious hormones and... And...

  She felt the moist track of tears down her cheeks and scrubbed at them with an ineffectual wrist. On top of everything else, she was crying in the back hallway. Because she had ninety-five seed pearls left to sew on Grace’s veil in the next three days, a houseful of strange family members who would never leave her alone, and a “thing” the size of Cleveland for a man who was pretending—far too effectively for comfort—that he loved her.

  With a silent “Grow up, Allie,” she shoved the vacuum cleaner into the hall closet and for an instant contemplated climbing into the comforting anonymous darkness after it. Then she resolutely drew herself erect. This was dumb, she advised herself silently. It was stupid. It was stress. That was it! All she needed was to rest and relax—to spend a month out of touch in the Marquesa Islands with nothing but biting flies and soughing winds to distract her. Alone. As far as she was concerned, heaven would be the place without telephones, weddings, relatives or men named Gabriel…

  “Alice, do you have any—” Gabriel asked and stopped, concerned. “Alice?” he said uncertainly.

  With a start, Alice jerked the tail of her shirt from her pants and blotted her eyes gently, mindful of the appearance rubbing them would create. She’d been so busy feeling sorry for herself she hadn’t heard him come in.

  “Do I have any what?” she demanded, trying to keep the sniffle out of her voice.

  He ignored the question, ran a finger down the collar of her shirt. “Are you crying?”

  “No.” The lie was ragged from the clog in her throat.

  She looked guiltily at the floor, trying to swallow the lump of mortification that wanted to raise more tears. She wanted to run, but there was no place to go. She was boxed in by a closed bathroom door with a full length mirror reflecting back at her everything that was going on, a closed closet door, a closed bedroom door and a man who smelled of sunshine and salt, whose arms would probably feel just too damn good and secure if she let him put them around her.

  The tears ran before she could catch them. She was so damn tired of not being in control.

  Gabriel took a step nearer, yesterday’s knowledge that she would pull herself together better if he left her alone forgotten. He didn’t want to leave her alone to handle anything. His fingers closed on her chin, tried to force it up. Alice jerked away, turned away. The mirrored door hid nothing. She averted her face and confronted the closet. Tucking his hands in his back pockets, Gabriel retreated a minute half a step.

  “Allie, let me help. Tell me what I can do.”

  Alice shook her head. “Go away,” she mumbled miserably. “Don’t touch me. Don’t be nice to me. And don’t call me Allie. People I like call me Allie, and I don’t want to like you.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “I am.” She tried not to make the tears worse by being too adamant; they got worse anyway. “You’re the one who doesn’t make sense.” It was hard to whisper through a sob. “You touch me and kiss me and it’s all pretend. They all know that, and we know they know, but we pretend, anyway, and I feel like such a virgin, which is stupid when you think about it and—” Her forehead bumped the closet door. “Why am I telling you this? I didn’t even know you yesterday morning and when you get down to it—”

  “Alice.”

  “—it’s really no better now, we just look at each other and know things and, really, doesn’t that frighten you just a little bit—”

  “Alice.”

  “—and I know I’m babbling, but you make me nervous because I never know what you’re going to do, except that I suspect things, and then you do them and I don’t know if they’re real or part of an act—”

  “Alice.” Her distrust tore at him. More than anything in the world, he wanted her trust, needed it. She had to know. He had to show her—

  He caught her wrist and hauled her to him, sliding one hand down her back to anchor her hips to his, twisting the other in her hair. Frightened silent, Alice stared up at him.

  “I don’t do theater for just anyone,” he whispered savagely. “Certainly not for you, not this...” He rubbed himself against her, offering the painful hardness in his jeans as a graphic illustration of her effect on him. “If you can’t believe anything else, believe this. I want you, I want to be inside you, no one else, and I haven’t for a long, long time. I look at you and this is what I feel. I want you hot and wet and melting around me. I want to fill you with me. I want

  to lose myself with you.”

  He shut his eyes, stopped to collect himself, the breath shuddering through him. There would be no calmness while he held her; he wouldn’t let her go. Something irrevocable had happened to him today, something wisdom dictated he avoid. But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

  He didn’t want to.

  He opened his eyes. ‘‘I’ve never wanted to lose control before, Alice, never thought I might. There’s more to it than this, but even this is more than I can afford to offer you right now.” He took her unresisting hand, guided it down between them so that she cupped him, held him. His groin tightened, and he pressed himself up into her palm with a stifled curse. “You do this to me whenever I look at you, think of you.” He swallowed. “Believe it. And be careful.”

  Then he let her go. Alice staggered back, shocked by his intensity, her sudden freedom, and reached for his arms to support herself. Gabriel’s hands locked beneath her elbows. Breath fluttered in her lungs, knots of expectation formed in her stomach; she couldn’t take her eyes from him. If was no longer the question; might no possibility; only when maintained the distance between them.

  This was not Matt in the back seat of his father’s Ford fumbling to unfasten her bra and get inside her pants. This was a man, adult and dangerous, issuing her an invitation while at the same time warning her to be wary with her RSVP.

  And her confusion.

  There was a whirring from somewhere in the house—the blender in the kitchen. Outside, boys screamed and hollered, the hood of Uncle Delbert’s car thunked shut. Through the bathroom door behind them, they could hear the slippery squeak of Aunt Kate rising from the tub, the sound of wa
ter gurgling down the drain. The hallway was dusky and intimate, airless and warm. The skin over Gabriel’s biceps was smooth and sweaty, slippery; the muscles beneath it hard. The skin over Alice’s elbows was soft, sensitive over the inside of her arms. The texture of Gabriel’s fingers was rough by comparison, eliciting skittish leaps from Alice’s pulse when his hands stroked up then down her arms. He lifted a hand to brush her mouth with his thumb.

  “Whatever comes between us, we started with the truth. Wherever this goes, I won’t play make believe with you, Alice,” he promised softly. “I don’t think I can.” His knuckles caressed her cheek. “I don’t think I want to.”

  “Gabriel, please, I don’t think I’m ready to handle—”

  The screened front door whined open, banged closed.

  “Alice,” Meg singsonged from the middle of the living room. “We’re he-ere....”

  *

  Chatter and laughter assaulted the house at every turn.

  “So, what, do you think Jack’s going to do it?” Meg blotted the lettuce she’d just shredded between two paper towels, then dumped it into the available salad bowl. “We need the kitchen done, and I’ve got to tell Tim something so he doesn’t go out and hire somebody else—which I don’t want because Jack’ll get what I want done right the first time.”

  Sam shrugged and crumbled a lump of Danish blue cheese over the lettuce. “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask him. If I try to talk to him about it he thinks I’ve been out digging up charity for him. It drives me up the wall. He’s out of work two months and already his pregnant working

  wife has emasculated him. Never mind he’s the best fool carpenter in six states—‘fool’ being the operative word. I mean really. I knew the guy could be Mr. Sensitive when I married him, but—”

  “—no, no, no!” Helen exclaimed into the phone. “I said eight large pizzas, one with everything but anchovies, one with everything but hot peppers, one with half black olives and half green peppers with Italian sausage over the whole thing, one—”

  “—oh, yes.” Aunt Kate nodded violently at Twink as she took another long sip of a tall rum-and-something. “She said it was a dreadful trip. Dysentery, spitting camels, sometimes bombs—horrible! Never go to that country in the summer—”

  “—no, Uncle Del,” Edith shouted down the basement stairs. “Mom said to bring Mamie, George and the boys when you meet her for dinner. She said she doesn’t want to meet you alone. Oh, no, that’s not what I mean—”

  Thoughts in an uproar, Alice bent over the dining room table slicing oranges for a fruit tray, trying to close her ears to the hubbub around her. She rolled her eyes heavenward to beg the ceiling for five minutes peace. That’s all, please? Just enough to collect myself—

  “Do you have family, Gabriel?” Edith asked.

  Guiltily, Alice’s eyes detoured toward the sound of her sister’s voice, found Gabriel where he hadn’t been a second before—slouched against the kitchen doorjamb studying her. The orange she was about to slice spit juice into her face when she jammed the knife into it with more force than intended. Gabriel’s lips twitched. He winked wickedly at Alice. Alice dropped her gaze, embarrassed, then her natural ability to laugh at herself took control and she shrugged and grinned wryly back.

  Gabriel lazily picked a paper napkin out of the holder on the table and blotted at the orange juice on Alice’s face. “I don’t have a family like this,” he told Edith.

  “Nobody has a family like this.” Helen laughed. “It’s inflicted on you at birth.”

  “Or by marriage,” George mumbled darkly, passing through.

  Alice’s sisters sent one another secret grins and giggled. “Blame that on Grandma,” Twink called after him. She turned to Gabriel. “Ma always said Gram couldn’t abide children who were unChristian, unprincipled or boring.”

  “Don’t you mean “or barren”?” Sam asked dryly.

  “Sam!” Edith exclaimed in feigned shock.

  “Edith!” Sam mimicked back.

  “Don’t worry, Sam.” Helen slipped a theatrically comforting arm about Sam’s shoulders, then patted her sister’s still-flat belly. “Pregnant ladies are allowed aberrant comments and behavior. You’ll understand if we just ignore you for the next year or two, won’t you?”

  “In a pig’s eye,” Sam stated flatly.

  “Bravo!” Twink cheered and added most of a can of black olives to the salad.

  Gabriel’s hands were warm on Alice’s hips when he tossed the napkin down and eased himself around her. His breath was a moist tickle in her ear. “Hi,” he whispered. “Long time no touch. How you doin’?”

  “Mmm.” Caught off guard, Alice smiled and instinctively arched her neck and sank back into his arms as though they’d never had the conversation in the hall. He made it easy, within the security and presence of all this family, to forget who she was and how scattered she felt—or that, when she was alone with him, her involuntary naturalness with him frightened her to death.

  Safety came in numbers for Gabriel, too. In front of all these people he was merely a performer doing a role he’d been born to play, opposite the costar he’d been born to play it with. And never mind what this particular costar did to his pulse. His hands grazed lightly up and down Alice’s sides. “I stuck the board under the mattress and changed the sheets for Kate and Delbert,” he murmured, nuzzling her neck. “Hospital comers and everything. Want to check

  it out?”

  “No.” Alice grinned at him. “I think I can trust you to do that on your own.”

  “Less fun that way.”

  “Safer, too.”

  “You could be right.” The skin of her neck invited his inspection. His lips teased the column beneath her ear deliberately when he reached around her to swipe a piece of orange. “But I thrive on the danger.”

  Alice’s breath stopped, sighed gently between her lips.

  Don’t think, she urged herself silently. You’re safe here, so enjoy it. It’s a game, just a play, an act. “You would...”

  The buzz went on around them.

  “Don’t they look cute together?” Aunt Kate gushed.

  “He does sort of fit her, doesn’t he?” Meg agreed.

  “When do you think the wedding will be?” Mamie asked. “I’ll need to schedule the time off work.”

  “Should they be doing that in front of the kids?” Uncle Delbert’s arthritic hands knotted worriedly. “Kind of suggestive, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, Uncle Del, he’s only biting her neck—”

  “Hickey bait, hickey bait,” Mamie’s boys hooted....

  “Ignore them,” Gabriel suggested when Alice stiffened and started to pull away. “Grin and enjoy it.”

  “I am enjoying it,” Alice hissed back, blushing furiously. “Sort of.”

  “Anything I can do to make it better?”

  “No! Stop that!” Alice slapped at the hands that slipped around her waist and held her hostage. “Let me go. I hate being on display.” Face flaming, she ducked out of Gabriel’s grasp and around the table.

  Helen lightly socked his arm. “Leave my sister alone, hey?” she ordered, grinning. “You’re makin’ her all blotchy.”

  “I think she looks great blotchy,” Gabriel returned lightly, but his eyes on Alice were thoughtful and apologetic.

  “So, Gabriel,” Twink said, changing the subject abruptly, “how long have you been in town?”

  “How much family do you have?” Meg asked.

  “And where are you from?” Edith added.

  Ignoring the first question, Gabriel answered the second.

  “Parents, maybe a couple of distant aunts, two or three cousins.” It was easier to tell them about himself than it was to tell Alice. He didn’t feel quite the same compunction to be as brutally honest with either them or himself. He could shave the finer points, couch them in terms that suited his needs without quite lying. Without quite facing himself the way he was compelled to do with Alice. What was it Churchill had s
aid about war and truth? In war the truth is so precious she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. He swiveled to Edith. “New York by way of Iowa and the South Pacific.”

  “Oooh! Really?” The interest hummed from Alice’s sisters in unison. “Tell us...”

  Still red, Alice whisked the fruit tray into the kitchen to finish filling it, thankful for, and jealous of, her sisters’ innate curiosity. God, they hadn’t had him cornered for ten minutes and already they knew as much about him as she’d learned in two intense days. Envy struck her an unexpected blow. How did they do it? And why couldn’t she?

  She settled sliced orange on a plate and peeled a banana, studying her sisters. It was easier for them to ask Gabriel for information about himself than it was for her to do it—despite what she’d shared with him. It had always been like that where boys were concerned. Where they were loquacious, vivacious, flirtatious, Alice was ever tongue-tied, ever fourteen. How she and Matthew had ever managed to get together...

  She swallowed and dropped her gaze from the sudden all-seeing glance Gabriel sent her that took her breath and made her senses buzz. She wasn’t in eighth grade anymore, dammit, and didn’t want to be. It was okay, even nice, to feel gawky and awkward, inexperienced and undeniably feminine, uncomfortably and completely adult. Electrified. To feel, period. Why couldn’t she seem to grasp that? And deal with it?

  But then she supposed men were very much like pregnancy that way. There was never really a perfect time to experience either, but only, if you were lucky, a better time. And sweet St. Christopher, wasn’t that cynical!

  “Got it figured out yet?” Gabriel asked.