Rags To Riches: A Desire To Serve

She glanced around the dusty parking lot, brought her gaze back to his.

“This is the first time I feel as though it’s all for real.”

“It is real. More than I imagined it could be back there in the judge’s office.”

His hand tightened, crushing hers against the heavy gold band. She glanced down, startled, then met his gaze again.

“Let me take you home and show you just how real it’s become for me.”

* * *

Blake had no doubts. None at all. He made the short drive to the villa on a surge of adrenaline and desire so thick and heavy it clamped his fists on the steering wheel.

Uncertainty didn’t hit until he followed Grace up the stairs and into the cool confines of the Green Suite. When she turned to face him, he half expected her to retreat again, insist they go back to cool and polite.

He’d never wanted a woman the way he wanted this one. Never loved one the way he did his bright, engaging, sun-kissed bride. The fierce acknowledgment rattled him almost as much as the hunger gnawing at his insides. He could slam on the brakes if he had to, though. It would damned near kill him, but he could do it. All she had to do was…

“Lock the door.”

It took a second or two for his brain to process the soft command. Another couple for him to click the old-fashioned latch into place. When he turned back, she reached for the top button on her camisole.

His uncharacteristic doubts went up in a blaze of heat. With a low growl, he brushed her hands aside. “I’ve been fantasizing about popping these buttons since you came downstairs this morning.”

He forced himself to undo them slowly. He wanted the pleasure of baring the slopes of her breasts inch by tantalizing inch. But his greedy pleasure splintered into something close to pain when he peeled back the cottony fabric and revealed the half bra underneath. With a concentration that popped sweat on his brow, he slid the camisole off her shoulders.

Damn! He was as jerky and eager as any of the adolescents they’d encountered this afternoon. Grace was the steady one. She displayed no hint of embarrassment or shyness when the camisole slithered down her arms and dropped to the carpet.

She reached back and unhooked her bra. The movement was so essentially female, so erotic and arousing. Blake ached for the feel of her smooth, firm flesh against his. But when he dragged his shirt free of his slacks, she copied his earlier move and brushed his hands aside.

“My turn.”

Just as he had, she took her time. Her palms edged under the shirt, flattened on his stomach, glided upward. Blake bent so she could get it off over his head. His breath razored in, then out when her hands slid south again. A smile played in her eyes when she found his belt buckle.

“I’ve been fantasizing about this since I came downstairs this morning.”

“Okay, that’s it!”

He had her in his arms in one swoop and marched to the bed.

Ten

The session in the swimming pool had sprung the beast in Blake. This time, he was damned if he would let it slip its leash. He kept every move slow and deliberate as he dragged the brocade coverlet back and stretched Grace out on the soft, satiny sheets.

He took his time removing the rest of her clothes, and his. As he joined her on the cool, satiny sheets, his eyes feasted on her lithe curves. Tan lines made a noticeable demarcation at her shoulders and upper thighs. The skin between was soft and pale and his to explore.

“Too bad Van Gogh isn’t around to paint you.” He stroked the creamy slopes and valleys. “You would have inspired him to even greater genius.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“Well, you certainly inspire me. Like here…”

He brushed a kiss across her mouth.

“And here…”

His lips traced her cheeks and feathered her lids.

“And here…”

Mounding her breast, he teased the nipple with his teeth and tongue until it puckered stiff and tight. Blake gave the other breast equal attention and got a hint of the anguish Van Gogh must have suffered over his masterpieces. He was feeling more than a little tormented himself as he explored the landscape of his wife’s body.

She didn’t lay passive during the investigation. She flung one arm above her head, brought it down again to plane her hand over his shoulder and down his back. Fingers eager, she kneaded his hip and butt.

Blake felt the muscles low in his belly jerk in response but refused to rush the pace. His palm slid over her rib cage, down her belly. Her stomach hollowed under his touch, and a knee came up as he threaded the dark gold hair of her mound. He slid one finger inside the hot, slick lips, then two, and pressed the tight bud between with his thumb.

Her breath was a fast, shallow rasp now. His was almost as harsh. And when she rolled and nudged him onto his back, it shot damned near off the chart.

She went up on an elbow and conducted her own exploration. Just as slowly. Just as thoroughly. His chin and throat got soft kisses, his shoulder a nuzzle and a teasing nip. She followed by lightly scraping a fingertip down his chest and through hair that arrowed toward his groin.

“Now here,” she said with a wicked grin as her fingers closed around him, “we have a real masterpiece.”

“You won’t hear me argue with that,” he returned, his grin matching hers.

She gave a huff of laughter and stroked him, gently at first, then with increasing pressure. The friction coiled him as tight as a centrifuge, but he was confident in his ability to extend this period of mutual discovery awhile longer yet. Right up until she bent down, took him in her mouth and shot his confidence all to hell and back.

His breath left on a hiss. Everything below his waist went on red alert. He managed to hang on for a few moments longer but knew his control was about to blow.

“Grace…”

The low warning brought her head up. Her lips were wet and glistening, her eyes cloudy with desire. When he would have reversed positions, she preempted him by hooking a leg over his thighs. She guided him into her, gasping when he thrust upward, and dropped forward to plant her hands on his chest. The skin over her cheeks was stretched tight. Her hair formed a tangled curtain. Blake had never seen anything more beautiful or seductive in his life.

“Forget Van Gogh,” he said gruffly. “Not even he could do you justice.”

He shoved his hands through her hair and brought her down for a kiss that was as fierce as it was possessive.

* * *

Grace came awake with a twitch. Something rasped like fine sandpaper against her temple. Blake’s chin, she decided after a hazy moment. Unshaven and bristly. Deciding to ignore the movement, she burrowed her nose deeper into the warm crevice between his neck and shoulder.

“Grace?”

“Mmmm.”

“You awake?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“No?”

He shifted, and the chin made another scrape. Grace raised her head and squinted at the dim shadows wreathing the room.

“Whatimeizzit?”

“Close to six, I think.”

“Jeez!”

Her head dropped. Her cheek thumped his chest. She tried to drift back into sleep but laughter rumbled annoyingly under her ear.

“Not a morning person, I take it.”

“Not a 6:00 a.m. person,” she mumbled, sounding sulky even to herself.

“I’ll keep that in mind for future reference.”

It took a few moments for that to penetrate her sleepy fog. When it did, she pushed up on an elbow and shoved her hair out of her eyes. She wasn’t awake enough to address the subject of the future head-on. Or maybe she just didn’t have the nerve. Still a little grumpy, she went at it sideways.

“Are you? A morning person, I mean?”

“Pretty much.” An apologetic smile creased his whiskery cheeks. “I’ve been awake for an hour or so.”

She groaned and would have made a dive for the pillows, but he shifted again. She ended up lying on her side, facing him, with her head propped on a hand and her thoughts hijacked by a worry about morning breath. She ran a quick tongue over her teeth. They didn’t feel too fuzzy. And her lips weren’t caked with drool, thank God! She refused to think about her uncombed hair and unwashed face. Or how much she needed to pee.

Blake, of course, looked totally gorgeous in the dim light. A lazy smile lit his wide-awake blue eyes, and he was tantalizingly naked above the rumpled sheets. He even smelled good. Sort of musky and masculine and warm.

When she finished inspecting the little swirl of dark gold hair around his navel and brought her gaze back to his face, she saw his smile had taken on a different slant. Less lazy. More serious.

“I did some thinking while I was lying here waiting for you to rejoin the living.”

She guessed from his expression what he’d been cogitating over but asked anyway. “About?”

“Us.”

The arm propping her up suddenly felt shaky. Did he want to alter their still-evolving relationship? Renegotiate the contract? After last night, she was certainly open to different terms and conditions. Still, she had to work to keep her voice steady.

“And what did you conclude, counselor?”

“I want to make this work, Grace. You, me, our marriage.”

“I thought we were making it work.”

“Bad word choice. I meant make it real.”

He reached over to tuck a tangled strand behind her ear. She held her breath until he’d positioned it to his satisfaction.

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you. You and Molly and the children we might have together.”

Oh, God! Were they really having this discussion with her teeth unbrushed and her face crumpled into sleep lines? She couldn’t fall on his chest again, lock her mouth on his and show him how much she wanted the exact same things.

“Hold on.”

Surprise blanked his face at the terse order. A swift frown followed almost instantly as she threw off the sheet.

“I’ll be right back.”

She spent all of three minutes in the bathroom. When she emerged, he was sitting with his back against the padded silk headboard. The scowl remained, but the fact that she was still naked seemed to reassure him. That, and the joy she didn’t try to disguise when she scrambled onto the bed and knelt facing him.

“Okay, I can respond properly now. Repeat what you said, word for word.”

He hooked a brow and repeated obediently, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

“Me and…” she prompted.

“You and Molly and the children we might have together.”

A giddy happiness gathered in her throat, but she had to make sure. “And you can live with the fact that I won’t…can’t tell you Anne’s secrets?”

“I don’t like it,” he admitted honestly, “but I can live with it.”

“Then I say we go for it. Molly, more babies, the whole deal.”

The laughter came back, and with it a tenderness that made her heart hurt.

“Whew! You had me worried there for a moment.”

“Yes, well, for future reference, you probably want to wait until I’ve brushed my teeth to spring something like that on me.”

“I’ll add that to the list,” he said as she framed his face with both hands.

She reveled in the scrape of his whiskery cheeks, amazed and humbled at the prospect of sharing the months and years ahead with this smart, handsome, incredible man. Every tumultuous hope for their future filled her heart as she leaned in and sealed their new contract.

* * *

Given the rocky start to her marriage, Grace would never have believed her honeymoon would turn into the stuff that dreams are made of.

Last-minute negotiations averted the threatened strike, so no further business issues intruded and Grace had her husband’s undivided attention. As she’d already discovered, he woke early and disgustingly energized. She wasn’t exactly a sloth, but she did prefer to open her eyes to sunshine versus a dark, shadowy dawn. They compromised by making love late into the night, every night, and in the morning only after she’d come fully alert. Afternoons and early evenings were up for grabs.

They also spent long hours learning about the person they’d married. Grace already knew Blake liked to read but until now had only seen him buried behind The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or the latest nonfiction bestseller. She raided the library on one of Provence’s rare rainy afternoons and wooed him away from the real world by curling up with a copy of one of her all-time favorites. He didn’t exactly go into raptures over Jane Eyre but agreed the heroine did develop some backbone toward the end of the story.

Grace returned the favor by digging into the bestseller he’d picked up at a store in town that stocked books in English as well as French. Although she had a good grasp of American history, she never expected to lose herself in a biography of James Garfield. But historian Candace Millard packed high drama and nail-biting suspense into her riveting Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President.

Aside from that one rainy afternoon, they spent most of the daylight hours outside in the pool or in town or exploring Provence. The Roman ruins of Glanum had fired Grace’s interest in the area’s other sights. The coliseum at Arles and arch of ramparts in Orange more than lived up to her expectations. The undisputed highlight of their journey into the far-distant past, however, was the gastronomical masterpiece of a picnic Auguste had prepared for their jaunt to the three-tiered Pont du Gard aqueduct. They consumed truffle-stuffed breast of capon and julienne carrots with baby pearl onions in great style on the pebbly banks of the river meandering under the ancient aqueduct.

They jumped more than a dozen centuries when they toured the popes’ palace at Avignon. Constructed when a feud between Rome and the French King Philip IV resulted in two competing papacies, the palace was a sprawling city of stone battlements and turrets that dominated a rocky outcropping overlooking the Rhône. From there the natural next step was a visit to Châteauneuf du Pape, another palace erected by the wine-loving French popes to promote the area’s viticulture. It was set on a hilltop surrounded by vineyards and olive groves and offered a private, prearranged tasting of rich red blends made from grenache, counoise, Syrah and muscadine grapes.

Each day brought a new experience. And each day Grace fell a little more in love with her husband. The nights only added to the intensity of her feelings. The unabashed romantic in her wanted to spin out indefinitely this time when she had Blake all to herself. Her more practical self kept interrupting that idyllic daydream with questions. Like where they would live. And whether she would transfer her teaching certificate from Texas to Oklahoma. And how Delilah would react to the altered relationship between her son and Grace.

Her two sides came into direct conflict the bright, sunny morning they drove to the open-air market in a small town some twenty miles away. L’Isle sur la Sorgue’s market was much larger than Saint-Rémy’s and jam-packed with tourists in addition to serious shoppers laying in the day’s provisions, but the exuberant atmosphere and lovely old town bisected by the Sorgue River made browsing the colorful stalls a delight.

For a late breakfast they shared a cup of cappuccino and a waffle cone of succulent strawberries capped with real whipped cream. They followed that with samples of countless varieties of cheese and sausage and fresh-baked pastries. So many that when Blake suggested lunch at one of the little bistros lining the town’s main street, Grace shook her head and held up the paper bag containing the wrapped leek-and-goat-cheese tarts they’d just purchased.

“One of these is enough for me. All I need is something to wash it down with.”

He pointed her to the benches set amid the weeping willows gracing the riverbank. The trees’ leafy ribbons trailed in the gently flowing water and threw a welcome blanket of shade over the grassy bank.

“Sit tight,” Blake instructed. “We passed a fresh-fruit stand a few stalls back. They mix up smoothies like you wouldn’t believe. Any flavor favorites?”

“I’m good for anything except kiwi. I can’t stand the hairy little things.”

“No kiwi in yours. Got it. One more item to add to our future reference list.”

The list was getting longer, Grace thought with a smile as she sat on the grass and stretched out her legs. Other people were scattered along the bank. Mothers and fathers and grandparents lounged at ease, with each generation keeping a vigilant eye on the youngsters tempting fate at the river’s edge. A little farther away one young couple had gone horizontal, so caught up in the throes of youthful passion that they appeared in imminent danger of locking nose rings. Their moves started slow but soon gathered enough steam to earn a gentle rebuke from two nuns walking by on the sidewalk above and a not-so-gentle admonition from a father entertaining two lively daughters while his wife nursed a third. His words were low and in French, but Grace caught the drift. So did the lovers. Shrugging, they rolled onto their stomachs and confined their erotic exchange to whispers and Eskimo nose rubs.

Grace’s glance drifted from them to the mother nursing her child. As serene as a Madonna in a painting by a grand master, she held the baby in the crook of her elbow and gently eased the nipple between the gummy lips. She didn’t bother with a drape or cover over her shoulder, but performed the most natural task in the world oblivious to passersby. Men quickly averted their eyes. Some women smiled, some looked as though they were recounting memories of performing this same act, and one or two showed an expression of envy.

The scene stirred a welter of emotions in Grace she’d thought long buried. She’d prayed during Anne’s troubled marriage that her cousin wouldn’t get pregnant and produce a child to tie her even more to Jack Petrie. So what did Anne do after escaping the nightmare of her marriage and slowly, agonizingly regaining her self-respect? She fell for a high-powered attorney, turned up pregnant, panicked and ran again. Only this time she didn’t run far or fast enough to escape her fear. Anne landed in a hospital in San Diego, and her baby landed in Grace’s arms.

Grace had done her damndest not to let Molly wrap her soft, chubby arms wrap around her heart. It had been a losing battle right from the start. Almost the first moment she held Anne’s daughter in her arms, she’d started working a contingency plan in her mind. She would keep Molly under wraps while she let it leak to friends that she was pregnant. Once she was sure word had gotten back to Anne’s sadistic husband, she would take a leave of absence from her job and play out a fake pregnancy somewhere where no one knew her. Then she’d raise Molly as her own.

Instead, her dying cousin had begged Grace to deliver the baby to her father. Grace had conceded. Reluctantly. She understood the rationale, accepted that the child belonged with her father. The weeks Grace had spent with the Daltons as Molly’s temporary nanny had only reinforced that inescapable fact. But the bond between her and Molly had become a chain around her heart. She’d dreaded with every ounce of her soul breaking that chain and walking away from both the child and the dynamic, charismatic Daltons. Now the chain remained intact.

Drawing up her legs, Grace rested her chin on her knees. She still needed to put a contingency plan into operation. She couldn’t take the chance that Anne’s sadistic husband might discover Grace had married a man with a young baby. Petrie would check Blake out, discover he wasn’t a widower, wonder how he’d acquired an infant daughter just about the same time Grace came into his life.

She would contact a few of her friends in San Antonio, she decided grimly. Imply she’d met someone late last year, maybe during the Christmas break, and had spent the spring semester and summer vacation adjusting to the unexpected result. Then Blake Dalton had swooped in and convinced her to marry him.

Those deliberately vague seeds would sprout and spread to other coworkers. Eventually some version of the story might reach Jack Petrie. It should be enough to throw him off Molly’s scent. It had to be!

Lost in her contingency planning, she didn’t hear Blake’s return until he came up beside her.

“One strawberry-peach-mango combo for you. One blueberry-banana for me.”

She moved the sack with the tarts to make room for him on the patch of grass. Legs folded, he sank down with a loose-limbed athletic grace and passed her a plastic cup heaped with whipped cream and a dark red cherry. They ate in companionable silence, enjoying the scene.

The Sorgue River flowed smooth and green just yards away. The young lovers were still stretched out nose-to-nose. The father was hunkered down at the river’s bank within arm’s reach of his two laughing, wading daughters. His wife held the baby against her shoulder now and was patting up a burp.

Grace let a spoonful of her smoothie slide down a throat that suddenly felt raw and tight. This baby looked nothing like Molly. Her eyes were nowhere near as bright a blue, and instead of Mol’s golden curls, she had feathery, flyaway black hair her mother had obviously tried to tame with a jaunty pink bow. Yet when she waved tiny, dimpled fists and gummed a smile, Grace laughed and returned it.

Blake caught the sound and followed her line of sight. Hooking an elbow on his knee, he watched the baby’s antics until she let loose with a burp that carried clearly across the grass. After another, quieter encore, her mother slid her down into nursing position.

When Grace gave a small sigh, Blake studied her profile. He wasn’t surprised by what he saw there, or by the plea in her eyes when she turned to him.

“I’ve had an incredible time in Provence,” she said slowly. “Every day, every night with you has been a fantasy come true.”

She threw another look at the baby, and he read her thoughts.

“I miss Molly, too,” he admitted with a wry grin. “Let’s go home.”

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