She gloried in his big body, at the way his skin felt under her hands. She loved the strength of him, how his thighs felt between hers.
It was an hour later that they rolled apart, both sweaty and sated.
"Just so you"ll know," Gemma managed to say, "that was my favorite dessert."
"But you haven"t tasted Rachel"s blackberry cobbler," he said as he got up and went to the kitchen.
Gemma put a pillow under her head and thoroughly enjoyed watching him walk in and out of the room naked. He returned with the cobbler and a big kitchen spoon and sat down beside her.
He took a bite, chewed, swallowed. "Fabulous." Bending, he kissed Gemma, his lips firm against hers. When she reached out her arms for him, he pulled away.
"No, no, not yet. I"m still comparing." He took another bite of cobbler. "Good. Yes, very good. I can see merits in both of them. I can"t quite decide between the two of you."
"Oh yeah?" she said as she took the full spoon from him. She started toward her mouth as though she were going to eat it, but she didn"t make it. Instead, she let the warm, thick, sweet pie drop down onto her bare breast. "Uh oh," she said. "How will I ever get that off?"
Colin set the dish of cobbler on the bedside table, then turned to her. "It would be a real shame to let that go to waste."
"Wouldn"t it?" Gemma said.
In the next second they were entangled again, a ma.s.s of arms and legs, mouths and necks.
Thirty minutes later, Colin rolled away. "You win," he managed to say.
"I didn"t hear you."
"You taste the best. Better than all the cobblers ever made." He pulled her to him, snuggling her like a child"s toy. "I think-" he murmured, but said no more.
Gemma lifted on her elbow and saw that he was asleep. She"d never been a person who could nap, so she quietly got out of bed and went to the shower. She"d never been so happy in her life.
21.
BY THE END of the week, Gemma felt that she was becoming the kind of woman she used to detest. Over the years, she"d had to sit by and watch good friends transform from I into we. And no matter how many times it happened, it always startled her-especially the abruptness of it. She and her friends all dated and they loved to get together afterward to talk about how good or how awful the date had been.
But what always happened was that one day a friend would start saying we. It started out innocently enough. Gemma would ask her friend if she"d like to go somewhere on Sat.u.r.day and her friend would say, "I"ll have to check what we"re doing this weekend."
The first time it happened, Gemma hadn"t noticed, and she"d been unprepared for the we that soon escalated into our, as in "our" cla.s.ses, "our" books and lastly, "our" time.
Before Gemma knew it had even begun, her friend had left the group and she rarely ever saw her alone again. There was no more of their being just the girls. Her friend had become an us and to be with her meant that she brought with her a male who was pretty much always bored and yearning to be somewhere else.
The first time one of her friends showed up wearing an engagement ring, Gemma had naively said, "Promise that we"ll always be friends."
By the time her third friend flashed a diamond ring, Gemma wanted to say, "Let"s. .h.i.t it with a hammer and see if it"s real."
But now, she at last understood. She and Colin had spent every minute possible of the last week together.
When the furniture arrived, she and Colin directed the placing of it. It had been fun to argue about whether the blue rug went in "their" bedroom or the guestroom. Colin said the bedside table on "his" side of "their" bed was too small, so they"d switched it with one meant for the guest bedroom.
When one of the delivery men had trouble lifting Colin"s big leather chair, Gemma sighed loudly and said, "It"s too bad Lanny and Pere aren"t here to help carry it in."
As Colin walked past her, he picked her up by the waist, carried her outside, set her in the chair, then carried them both inside.
The delivery man looked at Gemma"s wide eyes and said to Colin, "I see what you"re gettin" tonight."
And of course he was right.
That night they"d finally opened the champagne from Tess and they drank to their house and their furniture.
The next morning Colin had driven Gemma back to the guesthouse and for a moment he"d sat behind the wheel, not moving. "You like this place a lot, don"t you?"
"Do you mean your parents" estate or the guesthouse?"
"Either. Both," he said.
"I love the guesthouse library. It"s the most beautiful place I"ve ever worked."
He didn"t say any more, just walked her inside, kissed her goodbye, and went to work.
Gemma spent the day reading the old Frazier doc.u.ments and making notes. She was beginning to piece together a more complete story of the first Frazier who came to America. She was intrigued by him and wondered how he got an earl"s daughter to fall in love with him. Maybe Shamus was so handsome-no, she thought. He was a Frazier, so it was probably his strength that won the lady.
Gemma entertained herself with a story of great pa.s.sion, of a beautiful countess trapped under a yellow carriage, and along comes a man of extraordinary strength who lifts the vehicle and frees her. Of course she fell in love with him.
"Not scientific," she said aloud. "And certainly not dissertation material."
By four she found herself looking at her watch and wondering when Colin would show up.
At five he sent her a text.
Ellie gave me something to cook for dinner. Can you come over and play? How about a sleepover?
Gemma threw clean clothes into a duffle, and put her computer and notes into another bag. She was at Colin"s house, "their" house, fifteen minutes after he texted.
They made love as though they hadn"t seen each other in months, with a desperate urgency she"d never thought was possible.
They showered together, then looked to see what Colin had bought at the grocery. They managed to cook a whole meal together, eating half of it as they cooked. They finally sat down at their table, in their dining room, and looked out at their garden.
When they finished dessert, the last of Rachel"s blackberry cobbler, Colin looked across the table and said, "Have you ever felt as though you were exactly where you should be and doing exactly what you should be doing?"
"Yes," she said, and her heart was beating in her throat. She didn"t feel she needed to say that here and now was where she was supposed to be.
After dinner, they talked. They still knew so few facts about each other, and both of them had many things they"d never told anyone.
Colin told how he"d been made a full sheriff only recently. A special election needed to be held before the job could be filled, and he hadn"t wanted to go through it. "The thought of sticking posters up around town touting me for sheriff wasn"t something I could imagine myself doing," he said.
"So who ran your campaign?"
Colin looked down at his beer for a moment. "My mother hired some woman from . . ." He waved his hand.
"New York?"
"Of course."
Together they laughed about the whole thing.
They were in bed by ten and at the gym the next morning at six-thirty. This time, they were the only ones there. Mike and Sara had gone back to Fort Lauderdale, and Luke texted that he and Joce had been up all night with the babies. No one else showed up. After their workout, Colin bolted the front door and they made love on a couple of weight benches, then showered together.
After a week together, they"d fallen into a routine, with both of them spending their days separate and at their respective jobs. In the evening, Colin would text the single word Home and Gemma would leave the guesthouse and drive to their house.
A second robbery that was very much like the first one interrupted their peace. Again, it happened during the day, while the owner was home. This time a small wall safe had been opened and an antique brooch taken.
That night Gemma saw a different Colin than the one she"d been seeing. When he was silent, his brow furrowed, she knew she needed to get him to talk.
It wasn"t easy. After she"d failed at several attempts at conversation, she said, "I guess you are the kind of man I have to beg."
He gave a little smile, then got up and went out to his car. He brought back a thick folder of photos that Roy had taken at the two crime scenes.
"Both times," Colin said, "the burglar walked in the front door, unseen by anyone of the house or any of the neighbors. And both times something that was hidden was stolen."
Gemma looked at the pictures. Both houses had trees around them that made it easier to get in without being seen. But then what? How was a hidden compartment in a bedpost found? Who knew how to crack a safe?
Colin spread all the doc.u.ments out on the big coffee table Gemma had chosen. She sat on a pillow on the floor while he took the couch. Together, they spent hours reading the statements and going over the photos.
Gemma was startled to read that the little wall safe had contained $25,000 in cash as well as doc.u.ments and the brooch. "But the thief left the money?" she asked.
"Didn"t touch it." He pulled a paper from the bottom of the pile. "This is an insurance photo of what was taken."
It was a big, and very ugly, brooch with little garnets and dirty-looking aquamarines.
"I can"t see that it would bring a lot of money when they tried to sell it," Gemma said. "It"s certainly not fashionable. Unless it was owned by someone famous, maybe."
"No, it wasn"t, and it was appraised at only two thousand two hundred dollars."
"That makes no sense," Gemma said. "Why would someone risk jail for a robbery of a pin they would sell for much less than the cash that was just sitting there?"
"You come up with an answer, let me know," Colin said as he stood up and yawned. "I don"t know about you, but I"m bushed."
Smiling, she went to the bedroom with him and they made love. But afterward, Colin fell asleep and Gemma, ever curious, went back to the living room to look at the photos from the robberies.
She reread the questions Colin had asked the victims and their replies. There didn"t appear to be anything linking the two families. They didn"t know each other, never went to the same functions.
But on the back of one paper Colin had written They both have ten-year-old daughters. Below it he"d written, School? Church? Clubs? Rival cliques at school? Did the girls steal on a dare?
Gemma got her purse, found the little magnifying gla.s.s she kept in the zipped compartment, and began looking at the photos Roy had taken of the girls" rooms. It was 3 A.M. when she circled the two little branches of willow, their stems tied with pink bows.
Her impulse was to wake Colin and show him, but then she thought he"d probably seen the little bouquets. She crawled into bed beside him, put her back against his big one, and fell asleep instantly.
She was awakened by what sounded like the roar of a bull, and before she could open her eyes, Colin was pulling her out of bed. He lifted her by her shoulders and planted a hard kiss on her lips.
"I didn"t see that and neither did Roy," he said as he began to dress. "Gemma, you are great, wonderful. I have to go to the office, and I"ll need to talk to these girls before they go to school. If these branches were left by the thief, I"ll look at all the files to see if someone matches that MO. Mike has contacts in the Feds, and so does Frank. Maybe I can tap into their files."
She was very pleased that she"d made him so happy.
When he was dressed, he kissed her again. "I don"t know how long this will take. If I have to go somewhere to find out anything . . ." He looked at her as if to ask if that was all right with her.
"Go! Do your work. I"m going to get someone to show me those old carriages."
"Get Dad. He never has enough people to listen to him about his old wagons."
He kissed her again, then was gone.
22.
COLIN CALLED HER at 10 A.M. and said he was going to D.C. to check out a lead. He said the robberies might have been committed by someone the FBI had been hunting for years.
"I"ll miss you," he said. "Me too." She was smiling as she hung up.
Gemma took Colin"s advice and asked Mr. Frazier to show her the carriages, and they ended up spending the whole day together. As he talked knowledgeably about, as she"d been told, "anything with wheels," she began to understand his disappointment that none of his children shared the Frazier pa.s.sion. What would happen to all that the family had so carefully stored over the centuries if there was no one to carry it into the next generation?
As for the pretty little yellow carriage, Shamus had already removed the seat and photographed the plaque. It read: A GIFT TO.
EDILEAN TALBOT MCTERN HARCOURT.
FROM SHAMUS FRAZIER.
1802.