Conquer the Memories

Chapter 6

“Come on, Charlie. You know you’ll have a good time if you come with us,” Sonia coaxed. As additional bribery, she handed him a lemon meringue pie to hold, then turned to wrap the bowl of potato salad with plastic wrap. Neither the huge bowl nor the single pie would even dent the hunger of the billions of people she knew her mother had invited for the barbecue-but then, everyone would bring similar offerings. June Rawlings believed in annually celebrating the first of July, for no good reason that anyone worried about.

“I’ll just take this out to the car for you,” Charlie said gruffly. “But I got too much to do to go anywhere.”

She trailed him out to the back of the SUV, which was already loaded with swimming suits, two root-wrapped rosebushes as presents for her mother, a long skirt to wear later, and some tools Craig was lending her father. She stood back up from the truck and blew a wisp of curl from her cheeks. “You’re going,” she told Charlie with an affectionate and most determined gleam in her eyes. “No more nonsense about being too busy. It’s too hot to work, you know my mother will kill you if you don’t show up, and you’re too darned old to be shy. Furthermore, you’re going swimming when you get there.”

Charlie gave her a disgusted look and hitched up his jeans. “I’ll go swimming when hell freezes over.”

“It just did.”

“You’ll have a fine time without me,” Charlie said stubbornly.

“But I won’t have to have a fine time without you.”

Charlie sighed. “You used to be agreeable when you first married him, you know. Now suddenly it’s all Miss Bossy and Sure of Herself-”

“Oh, hush.”

“Now what are you two arguing about?” Craig demanded from behind her.

“The same thing we’ve been arguing about all morning.” Sonia turned with a sneaky wink for her husband. “If we don’t get going, the lemon pie’s going to melt. We’re not leaving until Charlie gets in the car. The pie’s going to be ruined, I’m going to cry-”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Charlie said disgustedly, and headed for the passenger door. “She could wear down a rock,” he mentioned to thin air.

“He probably won’t talk to me for the rest of the day-dammit, wait a minute! I’ll be right back.” Sonia’s long legs took her flying back to the house. Her mother had given her an article on rose care that she’d promised to return today.

In Craig’s study, she rapidly sifted through the papers on the desk, knowing she’d seen the article there last. Her fingers found the four-page essay, but as she snatched it up, a file folder slid to the floor, spewing papers out.

“Only when I’m in a hurry,” she muttered as she bent over. Her hurried movements stilled when her eyes unintentionally caught the few lines of writing on the page. It was a receipt for services rendered-by a man in Chicago.

A faint frown furrowed her brow. The man was an investigator, according to his letterhead. And the money Craig had paid him was not insignificant.

Craig had never mentioned the investigator to her. Actually, in the past few weeks he hadn’t said anything at all about the incident in Chicago; she was so sure he had finally put it out of his mind. But this…

“Honey?” Craig called from outside.

An odd chill whispered down her spine. Quickly, she shoved the papers back into the file and returned it to the desk, racing with her mother’s article back to a pair of impatient men.

“It’s perfectly okay that you wanted to take the entire day getting ready,” Charlie told her. “I’m holding the melting pie you were so worried about.”

“Thank you, Charlie,” Sonia said solemnly, and slid into the backseat as Craig started the engine.

“How long are you two going to keep this up?” Craig wondered aloud. His eyes flickered back in the rearview mirror, settling on Sonia’s orange camisole with the white satin ribbons that looked precariously tied. Then up, to where her sassy lips curved in a delighted grin.

“It’s pinned very securely underneath,” she assured him.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing, Charlie.”

Sonia leaned back for the ride, stretching out her legs, closing her eyes like a sleepy cat in the sun. Heat seemed to have lethargically replaced blood in her veins. The men maintained a steady conversation in the front seat, but she was only quasi-listening, and her relaxed smile was only partly sincere.

Craig had hired an investigator to find their assailants? She didn’t understand. The Chicago police were undoubtedly doing everything they could to find the muggers, and regardless, emotionally and perhaps irrationally Sonia wasn’t certain she wanted the culprits found, if it meant she and Craig had to be involved again. The incident was done, over with, and nothing could undo it. Dwelling on it accomplished nothing; the image of the blond man with the strange light eyes only raised nausea in her when she did so-nausea and the sick memory of horror, of feeling so vulnerable and fragile…

Unconsciously, her fingertips rose to her throat. An opal rested in the hollow there, an opal in an onyx setting with a chain so delicate the gold rested like a whisper on her skin. Craig had replaced the original one more than two weeks ago. She hadn’t taken it off since.

She opened her eyes slightly, focusing on Craig in the driver’s seat. Love was in her eyes-eyes that were blue-green like the soft shimmer of water at dawn. Love for the man who had clasped that necklace around her throat in the middle of the night without saying a single word. She’d bring up the private investigator’s receipt with him sometime, but not now. The last thing she wanted on her mind today was the mugging.

Craig’s hair was getting a little shaggy in back, she judged critically. His shirt was white, a short-sleeved knit like a golfer’s shirt; her eyes traveled over his shoulders, muscular and taut, sun-bronzed and strong. As he turned to Charlie, Craig was squinting in the bright afternoon sun; she caught his profile, from the smoky gray eyelashes to the slight bump in his nose to the look of his smooth lips. That chin of his jutted out. Not an easy-to-manage chin.

The chin needed kissing. So did the mouth. So did the eyes, the shoulders. All of him, actually. What he needed, Sonia considered gravely, was to be brutally wrestled to the ground, his clothes ripped from him and very, very soft kisses forced on him, inch by inch.

“Sonia? You remembered the potato salad?”

Her face flushed with color. “It’s right here.” As they turned into her parents’ driveway, she found herself staring at Craig for one more instant. Vitality was beginning to radiate from him again; he exuded energy. And virility. And purpose. His stride was swift and free, no longer inhibited by pain with every movement; the worst of the bruises were gone. His headaches had lasted the longest and still happened sporadically-normal, the doctor had said. But Craig hadn’t had a headache in days, not even a twinge. He’d never admitted to having them anyway, but she’d become an expert at knowing the signs.

They still hadn’t made love. Sonia had simply dropped all sexual thoughts from her mind. To encourage that kind of action when he might be hurting again-no. Craig would have to be the judge of when. So it had been a few weeks, she acknowledged. So? Sonia well knew that Craig liked his loving long and lazy. Very long. Very lazy. Very slow, and on occasion terribly, terribly wild…

“Are you sleeping back there?” Craig opened her door, peering in with an amused grin.

Embarrassed, she bolted up and out of the wagon, rapidly snatching up the potato salad as she did. Charlie had already disappeared. Sounds of laughter and conversation rippled toward her from the side of the ranch house, by the pool. The yard was crowded with little people, big ones, old folk and young…and the smell of roasting pig filled the air. Sonia knew her parents must have started the barbecue at daybreak.

The sun filtered down in long yellow waves, dancing on the pool waters, catching the bright colors of the children’s bathing suits. Laughter resounded in the air; it was a glorious day for a barbecue.

“I didn’t think you were ever going to get here!” June Rawlings descended on them, in white shorts and long legs not unlike her daughter’s, her dark hair pulled back with a cheerful red scarf. She swooped down to kiss Craig, then Sonia, then helped them carry their stuff in from the station wagon. “Where’s Charlie?” she asked with surprise.

“Mike Henning caught sight of him the moment we drove in. They’re already over by the pool,” Craig told her.

“That man,” Sonia huffed. “Getting him off the ranch takes a bulldozer, and you know darn well we’ll have to pry him loose to get him to come home.”

“You don’t think by any chance think Charlie thrives on all the attention you give him, do you?” Craig asked wryly.

“Nonsense.” When Sonia bent over to reach for their swimming gear, her shorts rode up on her bottom, and then slid down respectably when she straightened.

Craig’s eyes darkened. The tightening in his loins was familiar. A certain loneliness ached inside him for the intimate touch of her, yet an unfathomable bleakness etched sudden tension on his features. Thankfully, neither his wife nor his mother-in-law noticed.

“Have we got it all?” June asked. “Sonia, you sweetheart, you didn’t have to bring a pie.” She gave her daughter an impish grin. “And now we’ll have to hide it. If your father catches even a whiff of lemon meringue, you know there won’t be a bite left by dinnertime.”

“I almost made two.” Sonia let out a delighted burst of laughter as two small children came barreling toward her from the long slope of the yard. Rapidly she filled her mother’s hands, freeing her own just in time to catch two curly towheads, neither much bigger than knee-high.

“Sonie, go swim! Sonie, go swim!”

“They’ve been driving Arlene nuts, waiting for you two to get here,” June said dryly.

“Do my sister good,” Sonia announced. “Where’s Uncle Craig?” she asked the youngsters. “Are we going to give him a good dunking in the water?”

Her niece and nephew launched themselves at Craig then, and he carried one child under each of his arms toward the house, both giggling and menacing him with dire threats as soon as they got him in the pool. He threatened them right back, which only made them giggle harder.

They took care of the food, changed into their bathing suits and greeted the other guests. Arlene fussed for a minute over whether the little ones should be forced to take naps and was hooted down. In the melee of noise and confusion, Sonia found her father. Stephen Rawlings was standing on the front porch with a group of ranchers, holding a glass of lemonade, his weathered face squinting in the sun. He was tall, and his hair was gray these days; a paunch was developing around his middle. And Sonia probably loved him more than life. She collected a kiss and quick squeeze before her husband yelled for her.

“What are we going to do with these urchins now?” he demanded ominously, referring to the one towhead draped over his shoulders and the other hanging upside down in his arms.

For an instant, she wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to do with the children, but knew precisely what she wanted to do to her husband of the bare brown chest and frayed swimming trunks. Stop that, Sonia. “First, we’re going to throw them in the pool,” she announced, and grabbed one warm, wiggling body away from him. The upside-down one. “And then, you little troublemakers…”

The July sun beat down in increasingly sultry waves; a horse neighed somewhere in the distance; the smells from the barbecue wafted toward them; the pool waters felt like slinky, cool silk on overheated flesh. It was just that kind of day when all the senses were alive and bursting; Sonia started smiling and didn’t stop. First little Johnny swam between her parted legs, then Susie. Sonia’s father dropped pennies into the pool bottom for the children to claim. The children bullied Craig into doing a somersault underwater, and then they played keep-away with a beach ball. Sonia, laughing, loved the feel of the warm, wriggling bodies and quickly snatched hugs from her niece and nephew. She adored them. The little devils both knew it.

When at last Arlene showed up at the side of the pool, Sonia was gasping, shaking her head free of water as she handed over her niece and nephew. “Nap,” she mouthed to her older sister.

“I actually think they will, now,” Arlene whispered back.

“Not them, you fool. Me,” Sonia complained feelingly.

“Want Sonie,” Susie told her mother belligerently, the sound muffled as a towel buried her head. “Want Uncle Craig.”

“You only want them because they spoil you to absolute bits,” her mother informed her and, with an affectionate grin for Sonia, carried off the two protesting youngsters.

Craig surged up from the water behind her, his arms sliding around her waist as he pulled her back against him. Water suddenly trembled on her skin in the sunlight. She leaned back, eyes closed. Sensuality seemed to be stalking her like a thief in the night. The hardness of his thighs against the backs of hers; the cool, bare skin of his chest rubbing against her spine; the feel of his hands on her flat stomach, barely covered by the simple red maillot…His cheek nuzzled against hers. “I think you want one of those,” he mentioned idly.

She glanced up at the children before they disappeared into the house with her sister. “I do,” she agreed. They hadn’t talked about babies before, not seriously. She had wanted Craig to herself the first years, and then they’d been busy, gallivanting across the country, building their house…She still wanted Craig to herself, but the urge for babies was growing, the need for their own personal exhausting little Hamiltons to worry over and fret about the way Arlene did about her kids.

Sonia turned in Craig’s arms, her eyes level with the column of his throat. Water droplets curled in the damp mat of hair on his chest like diamonds in the sun; his skin was cool and wet, his hair slicked back. The urge to touch him, to rub her breasts against him until they ached and tightened…No one would see, she told herself. And knew darn well that everyone would see.

“Sonia?”

He had beautiful eyes. Sexy eyes, deep and tender and sweet. His finger curled under her chin, lifting it; she could feel the sudden tautness in his body, a kind of waiting silence as his head bent lower, blocking the sun, coming closer…

A neighbor suddenly pitched a ball into the pool, splashing both of them. “Hey, you two! How about a game of volleyball?”

Dinner was absolute chaos, with adults running helter-skelter, kids dropping their plates on the grass, dogs cavorting in search of scraps. Sunburned faces grinned while butter dripped down chins from the roasted sweet corn.

After dinner, the children did their usual vanishing act, undoubtedly to prevent their parents from whisking them home before they’d finished playing. The grownups changed into grown-up clothes and settled on the chaise longues around the pool with glasses of June’s lethal punch. Sonia was stretched out between her mother and sister, holding her second glass of punch, her other hand shielding her eyes against that last brightness of daylight. Craig was standing with a group of ranchers that included her dad.

The sky was filled with puffy clouds, slowly moving across the horizon. Listening absently to her sister’s gossip, Sonia kept seeing whimsical pictures in puffs. One looked like the trunk of an elephant, another distinctly like the face of a man. Another, if she observed it just so, looked exactly like a man and a woman in an embrace…

“Where’d you get your skirt, Sonie?”

Sonia glanced at her sister, then down to her white cotton ankle-length skirt with its hem of embroidered orange flowers. The orange matched her camisole, both whimsical purchases for a summer evening a long time ago. “Marina’s, I think,” she said. “You haven’t said how Matt’s doing.”

“Terrific. I thought at first we’d never get used to living in town, but it’s nice. Having neighbors and stores so close…I miss my morning rides, though.”

Sonia loved her older sister; she really did. Both her mother and sister filled a very special niche in her life. Craig had become her world with their marriage; her priorities had changed, but there was still occasionally the urge to indulge in simple gossip and chitchat, and her sister was an expert at both. At the moment, though, Sonia couldn’t seem to concentrate. She found herself staring at the tiny cubes of ice in her punch glass. Ordinary ice cubes. Two clung together and they looked remarkably like an upturned bottom, naked and smooth.

Good Lord! Would you stop this? Restlessly, Sonia stood up, feeling her breasts pushing against the soft camisole material. She was sex-obsessed this evening. “Anyone want some more punch?”

An unfortunate question. Everyone wanted more punch, and they were all too lazy to get up and fetch it themselves. Smiling, Sonia started serving. The problem, she told herself silently and severely, is that out of nowhere you suddenly don’t have enough to do. Since they’d been home, Craig had shielded her from his work instead of involving her in it. She didn’t mind. Marina had been calling consistently, enticing her with a job she really wanted to do…only the next minute all she could think of was how much she wanted a child. It was a perfect time; they were finally settled…Except in the meantime, she seemed to have little to do but think too much. She wasn’t used to inactivity.

She finished serving punch, refilled her own glass and carried it back with her to the kitchen. Her mother hired help to clean up after the barbecue every year, but the total chaos of the kitchen reached out to Sonia like salvation. Just get busy, she told herself.

In a restless spurt of energy, she tossed out napkins and paper plates and cups, filled the sink with soapy water, washed the empty serving dishes and started covering what food remained uneaten. People would still come by to pick and nibble, but covering things would at least prevent the food from drying out. See? All better, she told herself as her hands moved with the speed of blades on a fan, picking up, cleaning up, sorting through, covering.

Her lemon meringue pie was gone; she washed the pie pan, then searched for her potato-salad dish. The potato salad, too, had been all but devoured. Just a tiny smidgen was left, a little hump in the corner that remarkably resembled a certain portion of the male anatomy…

She dropped the bowl and wearily brushed her fingertips against her temples. Phallic symbols in potato salad, Sonia. How nice. The men in the white coats are going to come to put you away.

Craig scanned the cluster of women by the pool, his eyes resting idly on the empty chaise longue when he failed to find Sonia. Some inner network inevitably broadcast an announcement when she wasn’t close by.

He hadn’t been able to keep his eyes off her all day. A dozen things had captivated him. First, the look of her long legs swinging around the poolside, then her laughter as she talked with people, and last the loving softness in her eyes as she played with the children.

He’d watched her moving through the pool, a graceful darting fish in the red maillot bathing suit, her hair sleek against her scalp, her face turned up to the sun. Later, in that quiet time after dinner, she’d moved ever so softly in the long skirt that swayed around her legs. She was always his softer, quieter Sonia when she dressed that way…

He was going to have to get over his habit of falling in love with his wife over and over again on a daily basis. In the meantime, he missed her. Excusing himself from the other ranchers, he wandered toward the house. The sun had just set, and a glow of scarlet and violet bathed the ranch yard and pool in a sensual glow.

He knew all about sensual glows. Sonia had been radiating them all day with that certain look in her eyes-like Eve, pelting him with apples. Like Adam, he could only be so strong.

Desire had been tearing through him for more than a month. He couldn’t think of a time in their marriage that they’d gone more than a few days without making love.

He was the reason for their abstinence; his physical health, Sonia believed. Only that wasn’t the reason at all.

Silently, he pulled open the screen door and let it close quietly behind him. No one was in the old ranch house; he wandered through the living room and hall, pausing only when he reached the doorway to the kitchen.

Her skin was slightly damp, glowing and golden from the heat; her camisole was molded to her high, firm breasts. The white skirt swayed around her hips as she fussed around the kitchen, her face still turned away from him. She’d lost her shoes somewhere, and her bare toes peeked out from beneath the skirt hem. She looked sensual and sexual and beautiful and totally touchable, every texture that was Sonia soft and vibrantly warm and all woman.

“Craig!” She flushed still deeper at the sight of him and then quickly turned her eyes away, as if embarrassed, as if afraid he might guess what she’d been thinking.

“Ready to go home?” he asked her. He knew exactly what she’d been thinking. And it was past time to go home and take care of his wife, in the way he knew she needed taking care of.