Father Of The Brood - Elizabeth Bevarly

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the way you do nowadays. The Age of Aquarius ended twenty-five years ago. People found out they couldn’t change the world with love-ins and protests. Nobody cared then. Nobody cares now. Deal with it.”

      He hadn’t meant to go off like that, and, too late, Ike realized how awful he must have sounded. There was just something about Annie Malone that put him on edge and made him feel defensive. Something that made him quick to overreact. But before he could apologize and try to explain himself—no easy feat, since he didn’t understand his behavior himself—Annie withdrew, both literally and figuratively.

      She narrowed her eyes and clamped her mouth shut, then reached past Ike to curl her fingers over the doorknob, clearly intending to close the door tight, too. But she could only pull it closed a few inches before it hit his big body and stopped. Instead of moving away, he circled her wrist with loose fingers.

      “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “That was out of line.”

      “Yeah, it was,” she agreed every bit as quietly. She glanced up and met his gaze, then looked past him into his room. “But you’re right. I did make a snap judgment about you. And for that, I apologize, too.”

      Neither seemed to know what to say after that, and as much as Ike wished Annie would look into his eyes again, her gaze ricocheted everywhere but there. She did have nice eyes, he thought. Pale green irises ringed by a darker circle of color, and thick, dark lashes that were so perfect, they almost looked false. But if there was one thing Ike was certain about in Annie, it was that there was absolutely nothing false about her.

      The silence between them stretched until it became even more uncomfortable than their-angry exchange had been. Finally, he released her wrist and stepped away from the door. Without a word, she began to tug it toward herself again.

      “I guess I’ll just have to prove to you that you’re wrong about me,” he said when the door was nearly closed, wondering why it was so important that Annie Malone not misjudge him.

      The door paused in its slow movement for only a moment, and he heard her reply softly, “I guess you will.”

      “How about grabbing some lunch?” he rushed on before she could close the door completely. “I know a great little place that most of the tourists overlook.”

      For one long moment, when she didn’t reply right away, Ike thought Annie was going to tell him to take a flying leap. Not for the first time, he wondered why she had come along on this jaunt when she clearly would have preferred to be anywhere but alone with him in romantic surroundings. Then she surprised him by pushing the door open again.

      She surveyed him slowly, literally from head to toe, then lifted her shoulders in a quick shrug. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I am pretty hungry. And I wouldn’t mind doing a little shopping. I promised the kids a couple of souvenirs. Just give me a few more minutes to get unpacked.”

      Ike nodded, oddly pleased to discover that he wouldn’t be spending the entire weekend alone after all. He decided it might be best if he didn’t think about how curious a realization that was when he’d awakened that morning wanting nothing more in the world than simply to be left alone. He hadn’t wanted to leave Philadelphia, hadn’t wanted to go anywhere with Annie Malone. But now that he was here in Cape May, alone with the woman he had been so sure would annoy him, he felt anything but annoyed.

      What exactly he was feeling, he wasn’t quite certain. But Annie’s presence was doing something to him—something rather weird and wonderful—of that he was sure.

      While he was mulling the revelation over, however, the door connecting his room to Annie’s—and to her—closed with a quiet, but resolute, click.

       Three

      Ike needn’t have worried that Annie would take his remark about her dressing habits to heart. When he knocked on her hotel room door some hours later—the real room to her door, not the connecting one—she responded to his summons wearing an ankle-skimming dress of some crinkly fabric, that buttoned from hem to scooped neck, claret in color and patterned with tiny flowers in pale yellow and ivory. A velvet, burgundy ribbon tied around her neck and simple gold hoops looped through her earlobes served as her only jewelry, and her hair hung down her back in a foot-long, loosely plaited braid. Her shoes were flat, the same texture and color as the ribbon around her neck, and as a result, she was forced to tip her head back substantially to meet his gaze.

      She still looked like a hippie, he thought. But there was something about her getup that he found more than a little appealing.

      And Patchouli, he suddenly realized. That was the scent that surrounded Annie Malone. But only faintly, as if it were the result of soap or powder, and not a heavily applied perfume. The fragrance was clean and fresh and slightly exotic, much like the woman herself. For some reason, Ike wanted to bend to bury his head in the curve of her neck and drink in great gulps of her scent. Only with a massive amount of restraint did he keep himself from doing just that.

      “You look lovely,” he said, surprising himself. He’d never called a woman lovely before. Beautiful, many times, ravishing on a few occasions, and incredible when the word seemed appropriate. But lovely? It was an outdated term, something a person normally used when referring to an elderly aunt. At least, that’s what Ike had always thought before. But the word seemed somehow suited to Annie.

      “Thanks,” she said. She eyed his dove gray Hugo Boss suit, his pale lavender Geoffrey Beene dress shirt and his multihued pastel silk tie. Then she grinned mischievously. “You look like an ad for GQ.“

      He narrowed his eyes at her tone of voice. “You don’t make that sound like a compliment.”

      Her grin broadened, and her tone was playful as she assured him, “Oh, it wasn’t meant to be.”

      He smiled back in spite of himself. “I see. You, no doubt, prefer a man in Levi’s, Earth shoes and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, right?”

      She lifted a hand to finger the necktie that was splashed with color like an abstract painting. She turned it over to check the label, smiled, then flattened her palm over the length of silk as she patted it back into place. “Hey, you’re the one wearing the Jerry Garcia tie, Ike, not me.”

      It was the first time she had referred to him using his given name, and they both seemed to feel a little uncomfortable at having it hanging between them that way. Annie continued to meet his gaze levelly, tracing an idle pattern on his tie with her fingertip, seemingly oblivious to the oddly heated sensations her gesture raised elsewhere on his body. Before he became completely undone by the careless meanderings of her hand, Ike curled his fingers around hers and lifted her palm to his lips.

      “You’re right,” he said after pressing his lips against the warm pad of her palm.

      He had meant to say more, something about there being a little of the sixties in everyone, as hard as people like him tried to exorcise the decade. But the taste and feel of her skin on his seemed to numb his lips. Annie Malone may seem brittle and clipped, he thought, but she wasn’t. She was soft. Warm. He didn’t know how he could be so certain when he knew so little about her, but there were no edges to Annie, as much as she might try to make people believe that there were. And when Ike realized he was about to lift her hand to his mouth again for an even more intimate exploration, he quickly released her fingers and shoved his hands deep into his pockets.

      “We’d better go,” he said, hoping his voice sounded steadier than it felt. “Our reservation is for seven.”

      She nodded silently and preceded him down the hall. Ike followed closely behind, watching with much interest the way the skirt of her dress swung first one way and then the other in response to the subtle sway of her hips. He sighed. He had spent the entire afternoon following Annie all over Cape May in much the same way, wondering how he could have been so bothered by her hip-hugger jeans initially, when they hugged her

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