comment on her weight.
“I don’t know why you two gals don’t get along better,” he said when she was on her feet. “You two are like oil and water.”
“Baking soda and vinegar is more like it.” She didn’t mention that lately Annie’s attachment to Eve was the last straw. It made Doris feel as if she were in seventh grade again and someone was trying to come between her and her best friend.
“Where are you going tonight?” she asked R.J. as he went to the desk to retrieve some papers.
“I’m meeting some clients at the club. I’ll be late.”
“I’ll wait up.”
“Don’t bother. If it gets too late, I’ll just stay at the club. I don’t like to drink and drive.”
“Then don’t drink.”
He merely snorted while he patted his pockets, locating his keys. He pulled them out and tossed them into the air, then caught them with a boyish flip of his wrist, smiling. Doris narrowed her eyes, noting a flashing on his baby finger; it was a narrow gold-and-black onyx ring with a single diamond in the center that she’d never seen before. It was a handsome ring, discreet, yet her nose crinkled as if she’d suddenly caught a foul scent. She knew R.J. never bought himself jewelry. And her father had always distrusted men who wore pinkie rings.
He bent at the waist to deliver a chaste, dry kiss on the top of her head and an affectionate pat on her shoulder.
“Thanks for dropping that off.”
She held herself erect though her calves were killing her, watching as he strode from the room with a jaunty gait, without so much as a backward glance. R.J. always had such purpose and drive and it was clear he was a man with a mission tonight. Doris slowly replaced the Dr. Seuss book onto the library shelf, patting it into a neat line with the other books. Then she calmly, methodically, held out her left hand and with her right, twiddled the wide band of diamonds on her wedding ring, musing over the fact that in twenty-five years of marriage, she could never once recall R. J. Bridges worrying about drinking and driving.
Annie hung up the phone in her kitchen and smiled with satisfaction.
“You look like the cat that ate the canary.”
She looked up at her husband perched on a ladder across the endless piles of dust, tools and wallboard that littered the floor between them. He wore his white overalls without a shirt underneath, exposing his long, lean, tan torso and sinewy muscles, still those of a man twenty years his junior. John’s blond hair was tied back into a stubby ponytail making his prominent cheekbones all the more pronounced on his narrow face.
My, my, my, he was a handsome man, she thought, feeling a familiar surge. She caught his eye, and by the way his own gaze sparked and his smile widened, she knew he was picking up her thoughts. Or the gist of them, anyway. John had a highly tuned radar for sex. She saw him glance at the clock and chuckle, then turn his head to raise one brow suggestively. It was five o’clock on the button, her favorite time of the day for lovemaking. They called it The Children’s Hour since they’d started trying to make a baby.
“That was Doris,” Annie replied, slipping out of her sandals. “She’s going to stop by later on to drop off some papers for you to look at. Apparently, R.J. is off to a dinner meeting somewhere.”
John began wiping his hands with the towel hanging from the ladder. “That must be about the Delancey building. I thought I was going to be at that dinner. It’s supposed to be very chummy, drinks-and-cigars kind of thing.”
She pulled the elastic out from her hair. “I guess we’re not chums.”
He frowned, rolling up a ball of tape. “Sure we are. We’re both friends with the Bridges.”
“Correction. You work for R.J. and I’m in the Book Club with Doris.” She stopped shaking out her hair and rested her hands on her hips. “We’re neither of us their real friend.”
John scowled. She knew it hurt him to imply that he wasn’t equal to R. J. Bridges and his upper-crust friends. Not financially, certainly, but John considered himself an equal intellectually. That man-to-man kind of thing. And it hurt her that he was either too dumb or too stubborn to see that R.J. would never allow anyone equal footing in business, much less someone he preferred to keep under his foot. She’d known lots of men like that, especially in the legal field. It was as though her—a woman—winning a court case somehow emasculated the male lawyers. When it came to the sexes, Justice still wore a cloth over her eyes.
She’d understood this about R. J. Bridges from the first night she’d met him. From the heat in his palm when he took her hand, to the way he could undress a woman with his eyes and make her feel dirty. But John didn’t. He didn’t have the killer instinct—and she loved him for it. She sighed, seeing the hurt blaze in John’s brilliant blue eyes. Her dear, innocent, trusting John. She’d be there to protect him from predators like R.J.
“I’ll be your best friend,” she said, sidling up to the ladder and tugging at the cuff of his overalls. “Wanna come down and play?”
The sulk vanished instantly as he caught wind of her playful mood. He cocked his head and offered a half smile. “What do you wanna play?”
“Well, I thought we’d take off all our clothes first,” she said while very gently rotating her hips and unbuttoning her white cotton blouse with teasing slowness. “Then take a nice hot shower. Oooh, we’ll let that hard, pulsating water beat down on our backs while we lather up the soap and spread it over every inch of our slicky wet bodies.”
She cast a sloe-eyed glance his way and pursed her lips to disguise her smile of delight, his eyes had already glazed over and he had a stillness about him, like a cat coiling to pounce. Her own heart began to race at the thought of what she knew was coming.
“What then?” His voice was raspy.
She unbuttoned another button with agonizing slowness. She knew it drove him mad with desire when she stripped slowly to build the anticipation. It was a pleasure for both of them, actually—for her to tease and for him to make the final, decisive move. In their lovemaking, John was dominant. In this arena he asserted himself in ways that he did not in their everyday life.
She strolled over to the stereo and turned on blues music, then moved to the refrigerator where she pulled out a bottle of chilled white wine. All the while she played the classic stripper’s game of hide-and-seek, offering him a flash of skin that he never quite saw. All the while, maintaining eye contact with him. Annie poured two glasses of wine, then took a long, slow sip, licking her lips when she was finished.
“I think I’d like a nice, fat, red, juicy strawberry in mine.”
His eyes sparked, transmitting in his glance the message that he vividly recalled what they had done with strawberries a few nights earlier.
Annie slowly wriggled out of her blouse, letting the cotton slide off her arms to the floor. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her small but round, firm breasts were mouthwateringly ripe, exposing rosy taut nipples the color of strawberries.
John licked his lips.
Next she slowly unzipped her jeans, undulating her hips free as she lifted one leg, then the other, and kicked the pants across the floor.
John
