Real Men Do It Better Read online

  And untied work boots. She looked down and honked like a goose at the sight of his hairy bare legs in clumpy boots with tongues splayed and laces dragging. “You can take those off if you want,” she said between snorts. “I can give you a pair of socks.”

  His lips twitched. “I didn’t want to strip completely. That would be presumptuous.”

  “Heavens, yes.” Karen’s breath was back. She tossed the towel on the chair. “The bathroom’s upstairs, if you need to clean up. I’ll go make us something to eat. Sandwiches okay with you?”

  “I can help.”

  “Thanks, no.” There were bananas in the fruit bowl. She couldn’t be held accountable. “Tend the fire. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  By the time she returned from the kitchen, he was back in the rearranged toga. A damp towel had been added to the hearth. His hair stood up in tufts, making him look like a hip-hopping skateboarder. “How old are you?” she blurted, setting a tray on the coffee table.

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “I’m thirty-five.” Might as well be upfront. “Divorced.”

  He seemed unbothered. And why not? He was hoping to get lucky, too.

  Ugh. Her arousal cooled a few degrees. This was sleazy.

  So she’d better get to know him first. Turn the one-night stand into a brief encounter of meaningful, heart-rending proportions, that must tragically come to an abrupt end. Heh.

  “You said you’re new in town?” He took the plate she offered. “Whew. Those are some sandwiches.” Between hefty slices of pumpernickel, she’d layered horseradish, Italian beef, tomato, and red onion. Turkey breast, barbecue sauce, hot-and-sweet peppers, and Swiss cheese had gone into an onion roll.

  “I’ve been here since last summer. I’m a sandwich aficionado.” She gestured for him to sit down and dig in. “See, I used to live in New York, then the Jersey suburbs. I was the takeout queen. Never learned how to cook. Now I’m here in the boondocks and there’s no takeout to speak of, so I became a sandwich guru to survive.”

  Gabe was sprawled in the armchair, wolfing the food. “I’d marry you for a sandwich like this.”

  “Damn, and there I go, giving my talents away for free.” Blushing, she busied herself with the pot of soup she’d prepared. “I could have done more with a working toaster oven. Toasted bread, melted cheese, grilled sausage, and peppers.” She opened the fire screen and scraped together a small pile of embers, then set the pot nearby. “We’ll see if that works. It’s only canned soup, but I thought we could use something warm in our bel—uh, you know.”

  Gabe looked broodingly at the bowls and spoons stacked on the tray. “The storm’s giving up.”

  The rain still came down, but the thunder and lightning had abated. “Yes, the power might come on before too long.” She pointed to the telephone on the side table near Gabe’s chair. “Try the phone.”

  Slow to react, he gingerly picked up the receiver of the retro phone she’d bought because it suited the old-timey feel of the farmhouse. She heard the crackling static on the line before he said, “It’s out,” and dropped the receiver into the cradle with a clatter.

  “That’s odd. We usually don’t lose phone service in a storm.”

  “Lightning must have taken it out. Or struck a tree that fell into a line. It happens.”

  She sat on the couch with her legs tucked under her, the hem of the nightshirt pulled down over her thighs. “If you weren’t on vacation, you’d be out working in a storm like this, hmm?”

  “Depends.” He swallowed. “Actually, I’m not on vacation. I’m on leave. Might be permanent.” He stuffed in the last big bite of his sandwich.

  “How come?” Karen tilted forward to slide half of her onion roll onto Gabe’s plate. She’d forgotten how much men eat.

  “I had an accident.” He chomped on a pickle. “How about you? What makes a city girl move all the way out here to Iowa?”

  “Divorce,” she said blackly, even though she’d worked through her gnarled emotions about that situation, for the most part. “I’m not actually a city girl. I was from Iowa originally—Cedar Rapids. I still have family there.”

  He nodded. “You don’t look like a city girl.”

  Girl. Bless his twenty-nine-year-old heart. “Was it the rubber boots that gave me away?”

  She glanced down and blinked, seeing that he still hadn’t taken off his own boots. They were planted far apart on her braided rag rug, his knees akimbo with the toile throw drooping between them. Her tongue moved in her mouth. She wondered if he’d removed his shorts.

  A glance at the hearth told her no. Too bad.

  “You don’t seem like the city type,” he said. Then he squinted. “Except when you were standing out in the middle of a raging thunderstorm, about to get your sweet ass zapped from here to China.”

  “Hey, there, Captain Howdy. You’re the one who was wandering around in the storm, flirting with electrocution.”

  “I told you. I had to ditch my bike and look for shelter. That’s why I came up your drive. What were you doing?”

  “I’d gone out to the barn to shut the horses in their stalls. I thought I could make it back to the house. And I would have, until you showed up.” She raised her brows. “The lightning came with you. For a few seconds there, I thought you were Zeus in disguise, throwing thunderbolts at me.”

  He shifted. “No harm done.”

  “Except to my tree.” She handed him a beer, then went to check the vegetable soup. “It’s kinda hot. Want some?”

  He made a noncommittal sound. She filled his bowl anyway, laying a spoon on the folded paper napkin, then catching her tongue when she started to urge him to eat. Enough with the nurturing, or he’d start thinking of her as a mother. She might be six years older, but she wasn’t a mother. Especially his mother.

  Now that the worst of the storm had passed, the sound of the rain and the coziness of the candlelit room were a comfort. She curled up in a corner of the couch and relaxed, eating, drinking, and chatting with Gabe, keeping the sexual possibilities on slow burn. She couldn’t quite push them to the back of her mind, though. They remained at the forefront, underlining every word she said, giving her a pleasant buzz that one beer couldn’t touch.

  Gabe was funny and interesting. Interested, too. He asked as much as he answered. When she couldn’t help herself and prodded him about the soup, he ignored the spoon to pick up the bowl and slurp it straight down. She teased him about being a savage. He thumped his chest and made a rough, grunting sound that was so viscerally male she felt it pulse in her womb.

  They talked about growing up in the Midwest. He was from a blue-collar family with three rowdy, outdoorsy brothers. He’d tried college and a desk job before realizing that what he preferred was work that didn’t take over his off-hours. He was a hiker, a biker, and a kayaker. An athlete. That led to the typical comparison of sports rivalries. He was Cardinals and Mizzou Tigers, she was Cubs and Hawkeyes, or had been, before she’d moved away and forgotten that loyalty meant something to her, even if it didn’t to dickhead ex-husbands.

  She told him about getting married too fast, and how eventually the ambition to be an artist had seeped out of her, especially after she’d given up her best contact with the art world—working in a gallery, where she’d once met Richard Serra—to take an office job that paid better, so they could handle a mortgage and children. “I thought I’d get back to art in a few years,” she said, “but that was naive. If we’d had that baby—” Her throat clenched hard because no matter what, she’d wanted the baby she’d lost. “—I’d have been in an even deeper hole.”

  “What happened?”

  That was when she looked up at Gabe and felt her mind click into the same place her body had gone, as smooth as a bolt sliding into place. Somehow, he’d understood. There was more awareness in his gentle question than Chad had ever offered. Which was sad, really. She hadn’t known it at the time of her miscarriage, but her husband had already been gone.


  Karen stretched out her legs. “We had a divorce instead of a baby. I tried the city for a while longer, before I figured out that what mattered to me was having the proverbial ‘room of her own.’ So I put all my savings and the money from the settlement into buying this place.”

  “You’re an artist then?”

  “Trying to be.” She toyed with her hair, which had dried into the bouncy waves and ringlets she usually tamed with a blow dryer. “I do other work to make ends meet.”

  She looked up and Gabe was staring at her legs. She pointed her toes, tightened her calves. “I’m a smooth operator.”

  He lifted his head off the back of the chair. “What?”

  She smiled. “I’m a VSR, virtual service rep, which is basically a telephone operator. I answer one-eight-hundred calls and take down orders for merchandise. You know, the stuff you see in late-night infomercials.”

  “Oh. Like Ginsu knives and food dehydrators.”

  “Right.” She studied him for a minute. His eyes were soft and lazy. There was stubble on his jaw. The upper half of the toga had slipped, displaying more of his sculpted chest. In a pumped-up state, his muscles would be rock hard. Right now, they were relaxed, still firm, of course, but rounder, softer, warmer … or so she imagined when she pictured herself cuddled in his lap like a purring cat, her cheek pressed close against his chest.

  Yellow flames flickered. The air had become thick and hot.

  So had Karen’s blood. Her skin was flushed, her armpits were damp.

  Her panties, too. She should have gone truly bottomless.

  She itched with wanting him. That restlessness made her wiggle and flex, until finally she sat up and tucked her knees beneath her chin, wrapping her arms around her legs to keep the rampaging desire inside.

  She cleared her throat. “I tried phone sex, too, but…”

  Gabe jackknifed forward from his lolling position. His hands dangled between his knees. “Phone sex.”

  “Uh-huh. And even though I got to hate it, I was very good at it.”

  Idly, she stroked her bare leg, letting more and more thigh show while poor Gabe struggled to find his voice.

  A naughty little smile crept across her face. “Want me to show you?”

  3

  “Please.” Gabe dropped to one knee. He leaned across the coffee table, scrabbling desperate hands in parody of a parched castaway who’d been offered a drink of water. “Yes, please. I’ll do anything you want, if you’ll please show me your phone-sex secrets.”

  She poked at him with her foot. “Stop it.”

  He settled back in the chair, the blanket clutched at one hip. “You’re teasing me, right?”

  “Nope.” He might have thought he’d disguised it, but he hadn’t. A hard-on had sprung up in his lap. “I was a phone sex operator for a very long three months.” She eyed him. “Have you ever tried it?”

  “Yeah, sure.” The smile that testified to his cocky confidence reappeared. “When I was young and plagued by a perpetual erection.”

  “You’re still young.” She left the rest unsaid.

  He laced his fingers over the bump in his lap. “Phone sex operators aren’t supposed to look like you.”

  She blinked. “Sorry to disappoint. Naturally, I always put on fishnets and a bustier to get in the mood.”

  He shook his head. “I meant legend has it that they’re all hags in reality. Toothless, or overweight, or cross-eyed, or eighty. You’re … not.”

  “Oh.” She flicked her chin. “I may not be a fat, toothless, cockeyed senior citizen, but I am thirty-five.”

  “You told me that already. Was I supposed to be put off?”

  “I wasn’t sure if you were on.”

  His hands came up. His hips rocked in the depths of the armchair. He wasn’t trying to hide anything any longer. “My switch has been flipped since the first time I touched you.”

  Then why the hesitation? she wondered.

  Let it go. Tonight’s about fantasy.

  Gabe was studying her. “You said you hated it, the phone sex.”

  There had been several variables to her feelings about the work. She’d been a woman alone in the countryside, talking to strangers on the phone, treating sex like a business except for every now and then, when there was a tentative human connection, even a genuine spark of arousal, only to be killed by the guttural cry of a climax—followed by the click of an abrupt hang-up.

  “It got to be weird,” she said. “I began to feel so cold and distant about sex, but I was also…”

  “Turned on?”

  She shrugged. “What can I say? There was no one in my life at the time, and, frankly, with all that sex talk in the air, I needed to get laid.”

  “I’m sure you could have been, easily enough.”

  She thought regretfully of the fling with Officer Dan O’Shanahan, which never should have been flung, unless it was into the trash. Not that he wasn’t a nice guy. He was—too nice, too concerned, too claustrophobic.

  “I don’t ‘do’ just anyone,” she said, with a lofty air that didn’t suit her at all. “I have standards.”

  “Lucky for me I’m a prime specimen,” Gabe said. There was the cocky smile again. “So you quit the job? Did that help?”

  She laughed. “A little. I don’t have sex on my brain all the time.”

  “Until tonight.”

  “That’s presumptuous.” But correct.

  “I can be presumptuous. You’re not wearing a bra.”

  “Is that the signal?”

  “It’s a pretty good indicator, especially with a woman like you.”

  “This is fascinating.” She curled onto her side so she could face him. Kong rose from the hearth and bounded up beside her, kneading the cushions before he settled into the nook at the back of her knees. “Tell me. What kind of woman am I?”

  “Sharp. Wise. Direct. Friendly. Skeptical.” Gabe lifted his arm to rub a hand over his scalp. The sinew and muscle in his arm pulled taut in an intriguing way. “And sexy as all get out.”

  “I thought men like you only look for big boobs and blonde hair.”

  “Like me?”

  “Young. Fit. Vigorous. Outdoorsy.”

  “Maybe when I was twenty and calling phone sex operators. Now I know better.”

  “Stop there before you say something about desperate divorced housewives who are grateful for the attention.” She smiled with wry self-awareness. “Even if that’s kinda sorta true.”

  His brow furrowed. “I don’t believe you fit that mold. But you are … waiting.”

  “Waiting, huh? Waiting for what?” Her stomach flip-flopped. She managed to keep her voice light and breezy. “I can hear the beginning of the story now: It was a dark and stormy night when the thunder god arrived to pleasure the lady in waiting.” Her mouth puckered. “This may turn into an X-rated fantasy yet.”

  Gabe proffered a lazy smile. “I’m hoping.”

  Karen looked into the fire, which had died down to hissing flames that licked across charred black hunks of logs. Several of the candles had guttered out. At most, it had been two hours since he’d picked her out of the mud. She checked her watch, then held it to her ear. No ticking. The time read 7:48 P.M., which was just about the time she’d gone out to the barn.

  She snapped the metal band open and tossed the watch onto the table. “My watch stopped. Do you have the time?”

  “I don’t wear a watch.”

  She realized that the mantel clock had also stopped. Odd. No power, no phone, no working batteries. They were in a Twilight Zone episode where time had stopped and the outside world had ceased to exist.

  When better to indulge in a one-night stand? She wouldn’t even have to feel guilty, because when the real world started up again, all this would be like a dream. A beautiful, steamy, sexy dream.

  Karen closed one eye, squinted through the other, and said, “Brring, brring.”

  Gabe’s face sparked. He sat up a little straighter.

&nb
sp; “Brring, brring.”

  He snatched up the phone, but held it loosely against his palm. “I’m supposed to call you.”

  “This is a special case.”

  He put the receiver to his ear. “Hello.”

  She made a phone shape with her hand and spoke into it, using the throaty voice she’d adopted back in the day. “Well, hello there, honey. This is Miss Velveteen of Talk Dirty. What should I call you?”

  He smirked. “Thor, the thunder god.”

  “Not Zeus?”

  “He only has lightning bolts. I’m the one with the hammer. The really big hammer.”

  “My goodness. You must be very well endowed to sound so confident.”

  “Endowed, sure. Or suffering from delusions of grandeur.”

  “Oh, there’s no need to be embarrassed. I specialize in delusions of grandeur.” She draped her left arm over the sofa and leaned her head against it. Twirled a corkscrew of hair. One knee bent, caressing her thighs together. “Why don’t you tell me what you like, Thor?”

  Gabe had pulled the phone away from his mouth, but he put it back to speak in a deep, thickened, growly voice. “I like women with short, curly, brown hair and mischievous mouths. I like curvy bare legs in white socks and long nightshirts that cling to naked thighs. I like full tits that sway back and forth without a bra. And I especially like women who talk dirty to me.”

  He stopped, breathing hard. During his speech, the room had become tight, black, dense—coal bursting into diamond.

  Karen squinted against the blinding brilliance of their daring. She felt her heartbeat in her ears. In her fingers and toes. Her pussy. “That’s very specific.”

  “Yeah. I know what I like.” He let out a soft grrr. “What I want.”

  “I can give it to you.”

  “How?” His voice was so low he was almost whispering. “I can’t touch you.”