Tucker smiled at her. “Did anybody ever tell you that you talk funny? Like you should be narrating wildlife films on public television.”
“Or be somebody’s damn butler,” Cal muttered. His pale eyes raked her. “What are you doing here?”
Tucker crossed his arms and leaned back against the doorjamb to watch. Jane had no idea what had transpired between these two men, but she knew they weren’t friends.
“She came here to give you spiritual advice on dealing with the problems of old age, Calvin.”
A small muscle twitched at the corner of Cal’s jaw. “Don’t you have some training films to watch, Tucker?”
“Nope. I already know everything God does about the Colts’ defense.”
“Is that so?” He regarded him with those seasoned campaigner’s eyes. “Did you happen to notice their safety signals whenever they’re about to blitz?”
Tucker stiffened.
“I didn’t think so. Go do your homework, kid. That golden arm of yours ain’t worth a damn ’til you learn how to read a defense.”
Jane wasn’t entirely certain what they were talking about, but she understood that Cal had somehow put Kevin in his place.
Tucker pulled away from the doorjamb and winked at Jane. “You’d better not stay too long. Old guys like Calvin need their beauty sleep. Now you feel free to stop by my room when you’re done. I’m sure he won’t have worn you out.”
Although the young man’s gall was amusing, he still needed to be put in his place. “Do you require spiritual advice, Mr. Tucker?”
“More than you can imagine.”
“Then I’ll pray for you.”
He laughed and took off down the hall, all youthful strut and blatant disrespect. She smiled in spite of herself.
“Why don’t you go right along with him, Rosebud, since you think he’s so damn funny?”
She turned her attention back to Cal. “Were you that cocky when you were young?”
“I wish everybody’d quit talkin’ about me like I’ve got one foot in the damn grave!”
Two women rounded the corner and came to a stop as they caught sight of him. He grabbed her arm and pulled her inside. “Get in here.”
As he shut the door behind her, she glanced around the room. The pillows were bunched up against the headboard of the king-size bed, and the spread was rumpled. Static flickered on the silent screen of the television.
“What are you doin’ in Indianapolis?”
She swallowed. “I think you know the answer to that.” With a boldness she couldn’t believe she possessed, she slid the palm of her hand down over the light switch by the door.
The room plunged into a darkness that was relieved only by the flickering silver light from the television screen.
“You don’t believe in messin’ around, do you, Rosebud?”
Her courage was rapidly flagging. This second time was going to be even more difficult than the first. She dropped her purse to the floor. “What’s the point? We both know where this is headed.”
With a thudding heart, she looped her fingers over the waistband of his slacks and pulled him toward her. As his hips pressed against hers, she felt him grow hard, and it was as if every cell in her body came alive.
For someone who had always been timid with the opposite sex, playing the femme fatale was a powerful experience. She sank her fingers into his buttocks and pressed her breasts to his chest. Running her hands up along his sides, she curled her body against him, moving seductively.
But her sense of power was short-lived. He pinioned her to the wall and caught her chin in a rough grasp. “Is there a Mr. Rosebud?”
“No.”
His grip tightened. “Don’t mess with me, lady. I want the truth.”
She met his eyes without flinching. In this, at least, she didn’t have to lie. “I’m not married. I swear.”
He must have believed her because he released her chin. Before he could question her further, she pushed her hands between them and released the snap on his slacks.
As she struggled with the zipper, she felt his hands on the bodice of her jacket. She opened her mouth to protest just as he pulled it apart.
“No!” She snatched at the gaping silk, ripping a seam in the process as she covered herself.
He immediately stepped away from her. “Get out of here.”
She clutched the jacket together. He looked furious, and she knew she’d made a mistake, but the only way she could keep this from becoming unbearably sordid was to preserve her modesty.
She forced herself to smile. “It’s more exciting this way. Please don’t spoil it.”
“You’re making me feel like a rapist, and I don’t like it. You’re the one who’s after me, lady.”
“It’s my fantasy. I came all the way to Indianapolis so I could feel ravaged. With my clothes on.”
“Ravaged, huh.”
She clutched the jacket tighter over her bare breasts. “With my clothes on.”
He thought for a moment. If only she could read his mind.
“You ever done it against a wall?” he asked.
The prospect excited her, and that was the last thing she wanted. This was about procreation, not lust. Besides, it might be harder to get pregnant that way. “I prefer the bed.”
“I guess the person doing the ravaging gets to decide that, doesn’t he?”
The next thing she knew, he had shoved her against the wall and pushed her skirt up far enough to catch the back of her thighs. He splayed them, lifted her off the floor, and stepped into the nakedness between.
The hard strength of his body should have frightened her, but it didn’t. Instead, she looped her arms around his shoulders and held on.
“Put your legs around me.” His voice was a low, husky command, and she instinctively obeyed.
She felt him free himself, and she expected him to enter her roughly, but he didn’t. Instead, he touched her with one gentle fingertip.
She buried her face in the side of his neck and sank her teeth into her bottom lip to keep from crying out. She concentrated on the intrusion instead of the pleasure, on the embarrassment of opening herself like this to a stranger’s touch. She had made herself his whore. That was all she meant to him, a slut to be used for a few moments of sexual pleasure and then discarded. She nurtured her humiliation so she wouldn’t experience desire.
His finger traced the entry to her body. She shuddered and focused on the strain in her splayed thighs, the uncomfortable pull of her muscles, anything except that silken stroking. But it was impossible. The sensations were too sweet, so she dug her fingernails into his back and bucked against him.
“Ravage me, damn it!”
He cursed, and the sound was so savage, she flinched. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Just do it! Now!”
With a low growl, he caught her hips. “Damn you!”
She bit her lip as he thrust inside her, then gripped his shoulders tighter so she wouldn’t lose him. All she had to do was hang on.
The heat from his body burned through his shirt into her breasts. The wall bruised her spine, and he had spread her legs so far apart the muscles ached. She no longer had to worry about suppressing her pleasure. She wanted only for him to finish.
He thrust so deeply inside her that she winced. He would have made love to her if she had given him any sign at all, but she hadn’t wanted that. She had been determined to take no pleasure, and he’d granted her wish.
His shirt grew damp beneath her palms, and he used her so that he made her feel as if he were punishing them both. She barely held on to him through his orgasm. When it happened, she tried to will her body to absorb the essence of his, but her badly bruised soul wanted only to escape.
Seconds ticked by before he finally withdrew. He slowly stepped away from her and lowered her to the floor.
Her legs were so rubbery, she could barely stand. She refused to look at him. She couldn’t bear this thing she had do
ne, not once, but twice.
“Rosebud…”
“I’m sorry.” She bent down to snatch up her purse and grabbed the doorknob. With her jacket clutched together in one hand and her thighs wet, she ran out into the hallway.
He called her name. That silly name she had taken from a beer sign. She couldn’t tolerate his coming after her and watching her fall apart, so she lifted her hand and waved without looking back. It was a jaunty wave, one that said, So long, sucker. Don’t call me. I’ll call you.
The door slammed behind her.
He’d gotten the message.
Chapter Five
T he following evening Cal sat in his accustomed place toward the back of the chartered plane that was returning the Stars to Chicago from Indianapolis. The lights were out in the cabin, and most of the players either slept or listened to music through headsets. Cal brooded.
His ankle ached from an injury he’d received in the fourth quarter. Afterward, Kevin had gone in to replace him, been sacked three times, fumbled twice, and still thrown the ball fifty-three yards for the winning touchdown.
His injuries were coming faster now: a shoulder separation at training camp, a deep thigh bruise last month, and now this. The team physician had diagnosed a high ankle sprain, which meant Cal wouldn’t be able to practice this week. He was thirty-six years old, and he tried not to remember that even Montana had retired at thirty-eight. He also wasn’t dwelling on the fact that he didn’t recover as quickly as he used to. In addition to his ankle injury, his knees throbbed, a couple of his ribs hurt, and his hip felt as if it had a hot poker shoved right through it. He knew he’d spend a good part of the night in his whirlpool.
Between the ankle injury and the disastrous incident with Rosebud, he was more than glad to have this weekend behind him. He still couldn’t believe that he hadn’t used a rubber. Even when he was a teenager, he’d never been that careless. What really galled him was the fact that he hadn’t even thought about it until after she’d left. It was as if the minute he’d set eyes on her, his brain had gone into hibernation, and lust had taken over.
Maybe he’d taken one too many blows to the head because he sure as hell felt like he was losing his mind. If it had been any groupie other than Rosebud, he would never have let her into his room. The first time he’d had an excuse since he’d been half-drunk, but this time there weren’t any excuses. He’d wanted her, and he’d taken her; it had been as simple as that.
He couldn’t even figure out what her appeal was. One of the perks of being an athlete was picking and choosing, and he’d always chosen the youngest and the most beautiful women. Despite what she’d said, she was at least twenty-eight, and he had no interest in women that old. He liked them fresh and dewy, with high, full breasts, pouty mouths, and the smell of newness about them.
Rosebud smelled like old-fashioned vanilla. Then there were those green eyes of hers. Even when she was lying, she’d looked at him dead on. He wasn’t used to that. He liked flirty, fluttery eyes on women, but Rosebud had no-nonsense eyes, which was ironic considering the fact that nothing about her was honest.
He brooded all the way back to Chicago and kept at it right on into the next week. The fact that he was held out from practice made him even more bad-tempered than usual, and it wasn’t until Friday that his rigid self-discipline finally kicked in, and he blocked out everything except the Denver Broncos.
The Stars were playing in the semifinals for the AFC Championship, and despite his sore shoulder, he managed to perform. Injuries, however, hampered their defense, and they weren’t able to stop the Broncos’ passing attack. Denver won, twenty-two to eighteen.
Cal Bonner’s fifteenth season in the NFL came to an end.
* * *
Marie, the secretary Jane shared with two other members of Newberry’s Physics Department, held out several pink message slips as Jane walked into the office. “Dr. Ngyuen at Fermi called; he needs to speak with you before four o’clock, and Dr. Davenport has scheduled a departmental meeting for Wednesday.”
“Thanks, Marie.”
Despite the secretary’s sour face, Jane could barely resist giving her a hug. She wanted to dance, sing, jitterbug on the ceiling, then race through the corridors of Stramingler Hall and tell all her colleagues that she was pregnant.
“I need your DOE reports by five.”
“You’ll have them,” Jane replied. The temptation to share the news was nearly irresistible, but she was only a month along, Marie was a judgmental sourpuss, and it was too early to tell anyone.
One person knew, however, and as Jane collected her mail and walked into her office, a nagging worry burrowed through her happiness. Two nights ago Jodie had dropped by the house and spotted the books on pregnancy that Jane had unthinkingly left stacked on the coffee table. Jane could hardly hide her condition from Jodie forever, and she didn’t try to deny it, but she was uneasy about trusting someone so self-centered to keep quiet regarding the circumstances surrounding her child’s conception.
Although Jodie had promised that she’d carry Jane’s secret to the grave, Jane didn’t have quite that much faith in her integrity. Still, she had seemed genuinely happy and sincere in her desire to keep the secret, so, as Jane closed herself in her office and flipped on her computer, she decided not to waste any more energy worrying about it.
She logged on to the electronic preprint library at Los Alamos to see what new papers on string theory and duality had been posted since yesterday. It was an automatic act, the same one performed daily by every top-level physicist in the world. The general public opened a newspaper first thing in the morning. Physicists connected with the library at Los Alamos.
But this morning, instead of concentrating on the list of new papers, she found herself thinking about Cal Bonner. According to Jodie, he was spending most of February traveling around the country fulfilling his commercial endorsement obligations before he left for North Carolina in early March. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about bumping into him at the corner grocery store.
The knowledge should have been comforting, but she couldn’t quite shake off her uneasiness. She determinedly turned her attention back to her computer screen, but the words wouldn’t come into focus. Instead, she found herself envisioning the nursery she wanted to decorate.
She’d already decided it would be yellow, and she would paint a rainbow running up the walls and across the ceiling. Her mouth curved in a dreamy smile. This precious child of hers was going to grow up surrounded by everything beautiful.
Jodie was pissed. The guys had promised her a night with Kevin Tucker if she came up with the Bomber’s birthday present, but it was the end of February, more than three months later, and they still hadn’t delivered. Watching Kevin flirt with one of her girlfriends didn’t sweeten her mood.
Melvin Thompson had rented Zebras for a party, and all the players who were still in town were there. Although Jodie was officially working, she’d been sipping from everybody’s drinks all night so she was finally ready to confront Junior Duncan when she found him in the back room shooting pool with Germaine Clark shortly after midnight.
“I need to talk to you, Junior.”
“Later, Jodie. Can’t you see me and Germaine have a game going?”
She wanted to pull the cue right out of his hands and bash him over the head with it, but she wasn’t quite that drunk. “You guys made me a promise, but I still don’t have number twelve hanging anywhere near my closet. You might have forgot about Kevin, but I sure haven’t.”
“I told you we’re working on it.” He aimed for the center pocket and missed. “Shit.”
“That’s what you’ve been saying for three months, and I’m not buying it anymore. Every time I try to talk to him, he looks at me like I’m invisible.”
Junior stepped aside so Germaine could take his turn, and she was happy to see that he looked a little uncomfortable. “The thing of it is, Jodie, Kevin’s been givin’ us a few problems.”
“Are you sayin’ he doesn’t want to sleep with me?”
“It’s not that. It’s just that he’s been seeing a couple other women, and it’s gotten sort of complicated. Tell you what? How ’bout I fix you up with Roy Rawlins and Matt Truate?”
“Get real. If I’d wanted those two benchwarmers, I could have screwed them months ago.” She crossed her arms. “We had a deal. If I found you a hooker for the Bomber’s birthday present, I got a night with Kevin. I lived up to my part of the bargain.”
“Not exactly.”
The sound of that Carolina drawl coming from directly behind her sent a shiver down her spine, just like somebody’d stomped right over her grave. She turned and looked into the Bomber’s pale gray eyes.
Where had he come from? The last time she’d seen him, a couple of blondes had been trying to make time with him at the bar. What was he doing back here?
“You didn’t come up with a hooker, did you, Jodie?”
She licked her lips. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do.” She jumped as he curled his long fingers around her arm. “Excuse us, guys. Jodie and me are going to step outside and have ourselves a little chat.”
“You’re crazy! It’s freezing out there.”
“We won’t stay long.” Without giving her a chance to argue, he pulled her away from the pool table and toward the back door.
All day the radio had been warning that temperatures would be dipping into the single digits that night, and as they hit the alley, their breath made vapor clouds in the air. Jodie shivered, and Cal regarded her with grim satisfaction. He was finally going to have his questions answered.
Mysteries had always made him edgy, both on the football field and in real life. In his experience a mystery generally meant somebody was getting ready to run a play that wasn’t in the book, and he didn’t like those kinds of surprises.
He knew he could have pressed the guys for some answers, but he didn’t want them to suspect how much time he’d spent thinking about Rosebud. Until he’d overheard Jodie’s conversation with Junior, it hadn’t occurred to him to talk to her.