Tangled Up in Blue Read online

  Everything about this guy—his smile, his voice, his eyes, his breath, and of course, the rest of his beautiful body—make me feel as if I can never get enough of him. And I'm pretty sure Blue Danube’s well aware of that.

  “You know,” he says with a languid smile, running his free hand over my lime-green sheets, “I probably lost a ton of testosterone just making up this bed. These are some seriously girlie sheets.”

  I smile, a little embarrassed. “Virginia gave them to me.” I so don't want to talk about my sheets, or my grandmother, right now. I outline the razor stubble along his jaw with my finger. “I don't know why I accepted them, but I did. My relationship with her is so weird. . .beyond complicated.”

  He pulls away a little to give me a look I can’t quite interpret. And then I stop being able to think at all because he lets go of me, sits up and pulls off his shirt, then stretches out next to me with his smiling face propped on his hand. He’s obviously enjoying the way my mouth falls open as I stare at his bare torso. His sculpted muscles and smooth, tanned skin are practically tugging my tongue out of my mouth. He still smells like the woods and the fire and the cave. It’s earthy and indescribably erotic.

  My lips zero in on Blue's belly button and start slowly making their way up, saying “thank you” between each kiss. Blue moans, then catches my face in his hands and pulls my mouth toward his.

  “If you really want to thank me, bar girl,” he whispers, “you should have gone south of the belly button.” I just manage to whisper back, “all in good time, Double D, all in good time,” before it feels like he’s feasting on me, searing my lips with his, probing my mouth with his tongue, chomping lightly on my chin while his hands set all the other parts of my body on fire.

  With all that going on, it takes my fogged brain a few minutes to process what he'd said about making up my bed. “Wait,” I say when we finally come up for air. I sit up and bend over Blue's legs to pull the sheets up. It’s not the same mattress. “Did you buy me a new bed too?” I hadn't even noticed the mattress and box springs are now held by a new frame or the new wooden headboard at one end. “Oh Blue, you didn't need to do that!”

  “Yeah, I did. I couldn't stand the thought of you sleeping another night on the same bed where Hunter was.”

  “You really don't like him, huh?” I caress his face.

  He shrugs. “It's his type I don't like, I guess. Slick and manipulative. Phony. I grew up with one like that. I can't stand the way Hunter uses people.” His face darkens. “Just like my old man.”

  I’ve just had an idea. I surprise Blue by rolling off the bed and jumping to my feet, then hold out my hand to him. “There's something I want to do right now, Mr. Blue Danube.” He’s wearing a bemused smile. “I want to do your dance. I want you to teach me how to do The Blue Danube.”

  His smile gets deeper. “Did you say you want to do Blue Danube? He's right here, baby, ready and waiting.” Blue sits up and gestures toward the front of his jeans, where the proof of his interest is obvious.

  I twirl around, preposterously happy. I was terrified a few hours ago, and that fear is still with me. But I’m feeling stronger, more upbeat. The editorial meeting went well. We have a lot of great stories ready for the coming week’s issues. I addressed the whole stalker thing with the staff in a way that made me sound confident and in control. I am still nervous as hell about the sponsor meeting. But just being around Blue makes me feel better.

  “You heard me, Double D.” I shake a finger at him, then beckon him with my hand. I love the way we tease each other. “I want to dance to The Blue Danube. Do you know how to do it?”

  He doesn’t admit that he knows how, but the smile playing on his lips confirms it. “Come on, Blue, teach me how to waltz. You do know how, don’t you? It'll be fun.”

  He falls back on the bed, groaning, his hands on his face. “Bar girl, you always keep me guessing.” And then he’s on his feet before I know it, yanking me against his body with a growl. “Fine, I'll teach you to do The Blue Danube. But it ain't gonna be your grandmother's waltz.”

  He’s grinding his crotch into mine, and my loins have reached five-alarm status. I take hold of his shoulders, running my hands down his arms and grinding my hips right back into him. “I'm counting on that.”

  Blue slowly leans my head back, then stands there without saying anything, his eyes blazing into mine, his chest rising and falling rapidly, his breath ragged. I think for a moment he’s about to throw me on the bed and make me forget all about the dance lesson. But then a classic Blue Danube smile creeps over his face. He lets go of me, stepping back to pick up his phone off the dresser.

  “Okay, Keegan Crenshaw, I hope you’re ready for this.” He pushes buttons on his phone, and a tinny-sounding song begins to play. Disgusted, Blue throws the phone on the bed. “The speakers on this thing suck” he says, heading out the door. “I'll be right back.”

  I hear him pounding down the stairs. I move to the window and pull it up, inhaling the cold, clean-smelling air and catching a glimpse of the full moon through the bare branches of the oak tree just before I hear Blue's feet clunking back up the steps.

  He shuts the door with a swift kick and turns off the light, then moves to my new dresser, using the light from the moon and the streetlight beyond the tree to plug the external speaker he’s holding into his phone. Then I hear a much better-sounding version of The Blue Danube. Blue pulls me to him, then gently pushes me back a few inches, clasping his right hand in my left and holding it at shoulder's height. Then he cups my right shoulder blade with his left hand, and I place my right hand on his shoulder, our elbows up. Blue stands straight, a sad little smile playing on his lips as the song's shimmering violin introduction flows over us.

  “Just think of a box, bar girl,” he says. “Our feet will make a box on the floor.” He pushes his left foot forward while I step back with my right. Then he steps diagonally with his right foot. “Okay, now you.” He nods at my left, and I slide it out. Then he brings his left foot to his right, so that both feet are together again, and I do the same.

  “Okay, now we go the opposite way. 1, 2, 3. . . 1, 2, 3. . .”

  Blue's right foot steps back while my left foot goes forward, and so on. We do it over and over again there in my room in The Canadian Embassy, while The Blue Danube, set on repeat, just keeps on playing.

  It has to be one of the most memorable days of my life, and it’s not even over yet.

  I’m doing really well with the steps until Blue tries to do a turn. Then I clumsily get tangled up in his legs. I would have fallen if he hadn't caught me. He dips me back until my head almost touches the floor. My whole body tingles as his lips grazes my neck. Then he pulls me up hard against him.

  “You're a natural. . .almost.” He grins and releases me, then runs his hands down the front of my shirt. And I got from tingling to throbbing, especially when Blue starts to unbutton his jeans.

  “I guess the dance lesson's over,” I drawl. Not that I mind.

  “Oh no.” Blue tosses his jeans aside. “You're not getting off that easy. I'm just making myself more comfortable.” Would I ever stop melting when he grinned the way he did then? “Without the jeans on, I can waltz like a wild man.”

  He twirls me around and around, counting out the steps as I follow and try to focus, while my loins, pressed up against Blue, are scalding me from the inside out. Finally, I stop and step back from him, my fingers slowly unzipping my shorts while I watch Blue's face. I figure turnabout is fair play. I inch the cutoffs down my thighs. His eyes widen; in the dim light, the whites of his eyes seem to glow. His lips part.

  “I need to get more comfortable too,” I say, sliding the cutoffs over one foot, then lifting the other foot off the floor. The shorts catch on my heel as I pull them off, and I stumble a little, stepping on something hard. My journal, on the floor by the bed. I pick it up and slip it under my pillow.

  “I noticed that today when I brought in the furniture.” Blue’s voi
ce is husky. “Your diary?”

  Oh God, I hope he didn't read it. He is, of course, all over the last week’s entries. I’m not ready for him to find out how pathetically infatuated I sound when writing about him. Or about how just plain pathetic I sound about everything else. How scared I really am about the stalker, about what might happen to me. How insecure I am about whether I'll be able to handle the editor job and my class load. About whether I am screwing everything up.

  “Journal.” I always feel foolish correcting people, but I can’t stand to hear it called a diary. I’m standing there in my thong. The curtains flutter as cold air blows into the room, and I can’t help shivering. I’d left the window open.

  Blue pulls me to him. “Am I in the journal?” he asks.

  “What do you think?”

  We’re both panting even though we are not moving; we’re just standing there half-naked, pressed against each other, while The Blue Danube plays on. Blue suddenly looks very serious. His hands grabs my face, his thumbs caressing my cheeks. “Do you have any idea what you've done to me, Keegan?” His voice is choked, almost frightened. “What you're doing to me?”

  I put my arms around his neck and press my mouth against first one of his eyes and then the other. I taste a salty tear. “Blue.”

  It’s all I can bring myself to say. We stand like that for a few minutes. I close my eyes, buzzing from the intensity, the raw need, that has flowed like an electric current between us from the first time we met. I never want it to end.

  But Blue finally breaks the moment with a flash of the humor that’s so much a part of him. “If that fucking song plays one more time, I'm going to have to throw the phone out the window.” We both laugh, and he steps over to the dresser, stopping the song. When he turns back to me, I can’t help chuckling at the way he gasps and lets his mouth hang open as he stares. I've whipped off my shirt and bra and I’m standing there in only my thong, amazed at my new-found confidence.

  Blue crosses the space between us in an instant and takes me in his arms. “I am so unbelievably turned on right now, Keegan,” he whispers. I barely recognize myself as I push him down on the bed and say in a seductive voice, “Then do something about it.”

  And he did.

  “You will marry me, won't you?”

  For the second time that day, I’m lying on Blue's chest, tracing his chest tattoo with my finger, every exhausted cell in my body purring with bone-deep satisfaction. Does it matter that some lunatic has me in his sights? Or that, because of me, the newspaper probably looks bad in front of the whole school? Sure, it still matters. But I’m not panicked about it, not at the moment, anyway.

  I am safe, strong, calm Keegan. I am throw-caution-to-the-wind Keegan. I’m a girl, a woman, who's been expertly laid twice in one day. And in spite of everything, I’m feeling playful. So I come out with a quip from my mother's favorite movie. And then I laugh at Blue's loud gulp.

  “Um. What?” His Adam's apple bounces up and down like the bobber my dad always put on my fishing pole when I was a kid. Men.

  Time to put him out of his misery. “It's just a joke, Blue. Have you ever seen the movie Somewhere in Time? With Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve? After they make love, they're sitting on the floor eating, and she says to him 'You will marry me, won't you?' That line just popped into my head.” Do people actually say 'make love' anymore or do I sound like a naive little fool?

  “When my mom was sick,” I tell him, “she'd beg me to watch movies with her, and we'd watch all her favorites over and over again.” I pull the covers over us and settle into Blue's warm body to fight the chill. I can’t bring myself to get up to close the window. “Somewhere in Time, Romeo and Juliet, Titanic, Casablanca, Legends of the Fall.”

  He tightens his arms around me. “Now that I think about it, all of those movies were about doomed lovers. How could I never have noticed that before?” The realization gives me an odd fluttering in the stomach. I can see my mother's face—pale, gaunt, with sunken eyes—and the 'chemo cap' she wore even at home over her bald head. She'd stare at the screen, her lips moving along with the words. She knew every line, every gesture, in every movie. I haven’t watched any of those movies since she died. I’ll probably never watch them again.

  Blue is staring at the ceiling as if he could bore a hole in it with his eyes. I wave a hand in front of his face. “Blue? You still with me?”

  “I'm sorry.” He runs his fingers up and down my spine, then touches his lips to my forehead. “I was just thinking about how I'm going to stop the guy. I will stop this sonofabitch. You shouldn't have to deal with this shit. One way or another, I am going to make it stop.”

  I shiver, maybe from the cold. We stay like that for what seems like a long time. And then my phone buzzes. I come up on both elbows and stare at the dresser.

  “Just leave it,” Blue says, his voice hoarse. “Can't you just turn it off?”

  I sit up and let my head fall forward. “We already went over this.” I shift my feet toward the floor, but before I can stand up, Blue springs off the bed and grabs the phone off the dresser. I see his mouth tighten as he stares at the screen. Then he punches a couple of buttons and puts the phone down.

  “Was it him?”

  He nods briefly and comes back to the bed, folding his body around mine. “Yeah, it was him. The same nasty shit as before. I deleted it.”

  “Detective Lugner's not going to like that. I'm supposed to show him all the texts when I meet with him tomorrow.”

  “Fuck Lugner! He's got plenty of evidence already and he doesn't seem to be doing much with it. You shouldn't have to keep seeing this vile crap.”

  I collapse on his chest again. Neither one of us speaks for a while. I’m almost asleep when Blue starts talking, slowly, with a raspy edge to the words.

  “We were brothers.”

  That's all he says for a couple of minutes. I’m beginning to wonder if I imagined the words. But then he continues. “Richie Cunningham, Jonathan Monti, Kyle Hudson.” He inhales slowly and then blows it out. His heart, right under my ear, starts beating faster.

  I come up on one elbow and let my hair fall onto his chest, covering the tattoo. “The names on the guitar?”

  He nods, slipping a strand of my hair between his fingers. He doesn’t meet my gaze. “I don't have any brothers or sisters,” he says. “I had friends in high school, but nobody I was really close to. Except my mother.” Now he smiles, lifting my hair to his nose. “I guess that makes me a mama's boy, huh?”

  I kiss him, then settle down again. “I like mama's boys,” I say.

  He makes this sarcastic hissing sound.

  “Well, I like boys who treat their mamas right. I guess that's not quite the same thing.” He kisses the top of my head. After a moment of silence that makes me shiver again, he goes on.

  “I sure wasn't close to my old man. But when I got over to Afghanistan, especially when I got assigned to route clearance, the guys I served with, man, we got close. We were brothers. We'd have done anything for each other. I would have died for those guys. I should have died for them.”

  The last sentence comes out between clenched teeth. I feel Blue’s hands curl into fists on my back. He starts shaking. That seam that is sealing our skin together gets slippery. He’s sweating.

  “Blue. . .” I try to make that one word comforting, reassuring. But instead, I sound unsteady and scared. Because I am. Something’s happening that will change the way things are between us. I can sense it, and, selfishly, I want to stop it.

  “Blue.” I sound stronger this time. “It's okay. You don't have to tell me.” I stroke his cheek. Even in the nearly dark room, I can see his contorted expression. “It's okay.”

  “No, Keegan! It's not okay!” His fingers wrap around mine and pull my hand away from his face. He closes his eyes for a second. “I have to tell you this. We can't go any further until you know this. I have to tell you.”

  Just stop talking. Just don't say another word.
A tear slips out of the corner of my eye and falls on Blue's chest. He presses my body against his so hard it hurts. “I should have died for them, Keegan. The whole thing was my fault. They were out there trying to cover my ass. Trying to keep my stupid, sorry ass from getting in trouble. It should have been me in pieces all over that fucking road. I killed them! I killed my brothers!”

  I try to kiss him, try to block the anguished words coming out of his mouth. But he wrenches his face away from mine and goes on, his teeth clenched again, his voice full of self-loathing. “And that's not even the worst part. . .”

  And then the blare of a car stereo, turned up as loud as it can go, tears into my room through the open window. The booming bass pounds against my eardrums. The car is obviously parked right in front of the Embassy.

  “What the fuck!” Blue whips the covers off and jumps out of bed. He leans out the window just as the music abruptly stops. I hear car doors slamming, then raucous laughter and the sound of footsteps on the front porch. After a few seconds, I hear Hunter whooping on the stairs. “C'mere baby! Come to Daddy!” Then a loud, drunken giggle I instantly recognize. I sit up. “It's Megz.”

  Blue’s standing in the middle of the room, staring at the door. It sounds like Hunter and Megz are running up the stairs. And then we hear someone hit the wall, hard, right outside my door, and the unmistakable groans, moans, pants and growls of two people in the throes of passion.

  “Oh. My. God,” I say. Blue seems to be frozen in place, his hands still fisted. I bury my head under the sheets. I don’t really want to hear Megz and Hunter going at it. And then, to make things even weirder, we hear Max barking. It sounds like he’s right outside the door as well.

  “Max! Get out of here!” Hunter's strangled, furious shout does nothing to quell the dog. “Get the fuck away from. . .” I hear a solid thump, followed by a pitiful whimpering that fades as Max apparently retreats down the stairs.

  Blue, still naked, moves so fast across the room that I don’t even register it until he yanks the door open so hard it crashes against the wall. “What did you do?" He screams at Hunter. He sounds enraged, even unhinged. “Did you kick him, you sonofabitch, did you kick my dog?”