LaVyrle Spencer - The hellion

"Yes, I'm back." She propped her chin on her crossed wrists. "You didn't last very long."

"I'm all out of shape."

"You shouldn't be. Not with the lake right here. You should be swimming every day."

"It looks like you do."

"Just about."

"It shows. Rachel, you look great."

The water washed over the surfboard and she swished it lazily with one hand, her chin still propped on the other. "I told you, I'm too thin."

"Not to suit me." His eyes without glasses were extremely sparkly, almost beautiful with a wealth of deep brown lashes shot with droplets of glittering water. With his chin on a fist, he reached out his free hand to swish the water along the surface of the board, missing her fingers by a mere inch. "Do you remember when I used to see if my hands could span your waist?"

She watched his hand brushing near hers. "Mmm… in those days I'd have been ecstatic if they had. But now, when they probably could, it would only point out that I'm shriveling up."

Tommy Lee laughed, his teeth white against his dark-skinned face. "Shriveling up? You're a long way from shriveled up, Rachel. I'd say you're in your prime."

"My prime," she said thoughtfully. "That's a palliative offered to people in their forties who don't want to be. I feel shriveled up, after the last two years."

His hand stilled and his expression turned concerned. "Was it bad, Rachel, going through all that with Owen?"

She shrugged and the motion brought a wave of cool water between her arms and the board. "At the time you don't stop to wonder if it's hard. You just do what you have to do, carry on from day to day. Toward the end, when his pain got worse…" She stopped, mesmerized by the stunning brown eyes studying her across the floatboard. "I didn't come out here to talk about that. I came to forget it."

His cool, wet fingers captured and held hers loosely. "I'm sorry you had to go through that, Rachel. When I heard he had cancer and how bad it got, I wanted to call you a hundred times, just to say I was thinking of you and ask if you needed anything-if I could help you in any way. But I figured your daddy was there with you, and what was there I could do for you anyway?"

Rachel blinked, focusing wide eyes on his. "You did? You really did? It's an odd feeling to think you were following the events of my life all those years."

"But you knew what was going on in mine, too."

"Only what I read in the papers and what people told me. I didn't go driving past your house."

His fingers were warm as he continued holding hers. His thumb moved along her knuckles, then circled her diamond before he went on reflectively. "Funny how people who remember we used to date never missed a chance to tell me what was going on in your life. Sometimes I wanted to tell them to keep their damn mouths shut, keep all their social tidbits to themselves. I didn't want to know how happy and successful you were becoming with Owen. Other times I fed off it. And, naturally, I'd drive past your house and wonder."

Rachel's heart lilted. He was much more honest than she. There were times when she'd experienced some of the same feelings, only she was reluctant to admit it. "Wonder?" she prompted now.

"If he knew about us."

For a moment she didn't answer, thinking of the scar on her stomach that could hardly have been hidden from a husband.

"Did he, Rachel?" Tommy Lee asked softly.

"He knew I'd had the baby, but he didn't know whose it was."

"Wasn't he curious?"

"We made a pact early in our marriage that the issue would never come up again, once we'd talked it out."

"It says a lot about a man that he can live with a question like that unanswered and never let it come between you."

She wasn't about to tell him that it had been between them, always. They might not have talked about it, but there had been hundreds of times when she'd caught Owen studying her across a room, and she'd known instinctively what he was thinking.

Tommy Lee's eyes pierced her across the speckled blue surface dividing them. "If you had been my wife all that time, I'd have gone crazy wondering."

"From the things you told me the night you talked about your wives, I would have said you weren't a jealous man."

His fingers pulled her hand closer to his chin and he said raggedly, "They weren't you, Rachel."

"Don't," she breathed, trying to pull her hand away. But he held it fast.

"Don't? Don't for how long? Until you really are shriveled up? Until your debt to Owen is paid-whatever it might be? Until you decide to take off his rings?" His hand squeezed so hard the rings dug into her skin. "How long do you intend to wear them, Rachel?"

Her heart was racing faster than before. "I don't know. It's… it's too soon."

"Is it? Let's see." Without warning, Tommy Lee gave the float board a push that sent it sideways, and in one swift kick brought himself only inches from Rachel's nose. Her heart hadn't time to crack out a warning before one powerful hand circled her neck and scooped her close. He kissed her once, a hard, impromptu meeting of two water-slicked mouths while the wavelets lapped at their chins, accentuating how warm their lips were. During the brief contact their legs instinctively moved to keep them afloat, and the sleek texture of skin on skin brought shivery sensations.

The kiss ended and somehow they were each hanging onto the float board with one hand. Rachel's surprised lips dropped open as Tommy Lee pulled back, staring into her eyes. Her hair coiled around his fingers like a silken tether while he moved a thumb just behind her ear. Water beaded on his dark, spiky lashes and gleamed on his cheeks. They stared at each other, breathing hard, for several stunned seconds. Then Tommy Lee's hand drifted from her neck down one slick shoulder, and beneath the water his calf slid between her knees, then was gone. "Come on." He smiled. "Let's play." And with a twisting sideways dive, he disappeared beneath the surface.

It had been an elementary kiss. His tongue hadn't even touched her; yet she was trembling inside and felt hot and threatened and enticingly sexual. Needing to cool off, Rachel, too, did a surface dive, then took several enormous breast strokes underwater, hoping to come up a safe distance from him.

When she nosed into the daylight again he was trying to get to his feet on the surfboard-with little success. From behind, she watched him battle it, wondering how many women he'd kissed in all these years, and if his reputation had women chasing him, or if he did all the chasing. In particular, she wondered about the woman to whom he'd given the red earrings.

"What did you do that for?" she shouted, treading water.

"What'd I do?" The surfboard rocked and bucked him off. Immediately he began trying to master it again, giving it all his attention.

"You kissed me, Gentry, and you know it!"

"You call that a kiss? Hell, that was barely a nibble. I've learned a little more than that since we were teenagers."

"I'll just bet you have. And with how many different women?"

"I lost count years ago."

"And you have no compunction about admitting it, do you?"

"None whatsoever, because you could become my last if you wanted to."

He had one knee on the board, his backside pointing her way as he struggled to make it to his feet. With several deft strokes she swam up behind him, hollered, "Not on your life, you no-account Lothario!" and gaily tipped him over.

Instead of bobbing up, he caught her ankles and hauled her under. She grabbed enough air to survive, but felt as if her lungs would explode as they struggled. His teeth nibbled the arch of one foot and his chin tickled it while she writhed and fought, needing to laugh. Their antics stirred up a froth of bubbles in the silent blue depths until at last she coiled around and pinched his nipple hard. He released her and they shot to the surface like geysers, both of them gasping and laughing, hair slicked down and gleaming.

"Ouch, damn you!" he scolded, rubbing the wounded spot.

"Good enough for you! You nearly drowned me, pulling me under like that."

"I just wanted to find out if you were still ticklish."

"Now you know, so leave me alone," she spouted in mock indignation, striking out for the ladder with him right behind her.

"In all the same old spots?" he teased as she lunged up onto the first rung, streaming water into his face. He caught her around the waist and hauled her back down with an enormous splash. Again they became a tangle of arms and legs and slithery skin as his hands snaked along her ribs and his arms circled her playfully. But in the midst of the skirmish they suddenly fell still, staring at each other with a gripping sense of rediscovery while the only sound was that of water lapping against the boat. One of Tommy Lee's hands held a ladder rung, the other arm circled her waist, and her hands quite naturally had fallen against his chest where the wet hair felt as elusive as mercury. Their eyes remained fixed upon each other, taking in gleaming skin, tangled hair, dripping faces, and rapt expressions. Their drifting thighs brushed. A drop of water slipped down Rachel's cheek and his eyes followed till it fell over her lip and the pink tip of her tongue curled up to sip it away. "Oh, Rachel," he breathed softly, spreading his palm wide and warm on her cool, sleek back, drawing her infinitesimally closer… closer…

But she pressed a palm to his chest and turned aside. "Please," she begged breathlessly, "don't kiss me again, Tommy Lee. Please."

Beneath the water their limbs brushed again, washed by the current they'd stirred up. His thighs were silicon-sleek and distractingly inviting. His gaze covered her face and she knew it beseeched her for more than she'd come here to give. At the small of her back his hand caressed the bare skin, then slid up between her shoulderblades.

"Are you sure you mean that?"

"Be sensible, Tommy Lee."

"I've never been sensible in forty-one years. Why should I start now?"

And though she, too, would have welcomed an excuse to toss sense aside for a brief time with him, she realized she had the power to wound him terribly. "Listen, I came out here today because I was very lonely and I… I needed someone. But I never meant for this to happen. Honestly I didn't, Tommy Lee."

His eyes traveled across her face, as if memorizing each feature. "If you needed me, only to make you laugh for one afternoon, that's a start."

A start of what? she wondered, but realized if she continued seeing him the answer would be understood.

Yet he had made her laugh, for the first time in months. And in the end, he'd made her forget Owen and the cares that had besieged her for so long. And though his kiss had been startling, and not unwelcome, much of the excitement had been generated by nostalgia and by the fact that he was socially off limits to a woman like her.

"I'm starved," he said, with an abrupt swing of mood and a crooked smile. "What do you say to some catfish and hush puppies?"

"You still go wild for catfish and hush puppies?"

He grinned, squeezed her waist once, and answered in one of his favorite catchphrases from long ago, "You betchum, Red Ryder." And once again Rachel was laughing, charmed by the Tommy Lee she'd known so long ago. And, oh, he could be so charming. It was no wonder the ladies like him.

They went to Catfish Corner, a tin-roofed shanty out in the country at the intersection of two county roads off the Huntsville Highway. They took his car, and he drove it exactly the way they all said he did-too fast, too carelessly, and always with that everlasting cigarette crooked through one finger. Yet Rachel felt safe with him.

At Catfish Corner the crowd was mostly black, friendly, and vocal. "Hey, Tommy Lee!" someone shouted as soon as they entered the smoky, low-ceilinged room. "Been wonderin' when we'd see y'all around these parts again. C'mon over, boy, and bring yer lady with ya!"

Tommy Lee waved at the gregarious black man whose backside was twice as wide as the red plastic seat of the bar stool, but he took Rachel's elbow and guided her to a table instead. "If it's all the same to you, Eugene, I'm gonna keep my lady away from a sweet talker like you. No sense takin' chances."