Cupid’s Confederates

“I absolutely love you to bits, Mom,” Bett said blindly. “I know you can’t sleep; I wish I could help you with that. I will help you; maybe we can get an appointment for you with a doctor tomorrow. But right now, you’re just going to have to forgive me-I’m exhausted. Okay?”

Elizabeth sighed. “Of course. I-good night, darling.”

Bett closed the door, and whirled back to Zach. His arms felt like coming home. Zach held her close, and with a crooked smile, felt her cuddling, surrendering form turn stiff as her mother’s words sank in. “No,” she murmured into his shoulder.

“Open the door, two bits.”

“No.”

“It’s all right,” he whispered into her hair. “This is different.”

“She had to have made that up.”

“Open the door.”

“All day. All day I have been trying to show you how very much more you matter to me than my mother. Or than turkeys and holidays. Or than other people. Every single thing that could possibly go wrong with this day went wrong-”

His lips brushed her forehead. “Open the door.”

***

Five minutes later, the three of them were having instant coffee in the kitchen. “Now, he isn’t particularly good-looking,” Elizabeth said nervously. “But he plays canasta. So do I. He stays up until all hours of the night, can’t sleep. And he talks, all the time. I just…every time I’ve been in town I’ve found myself going there. We have coffee in the back and he takes me out to lunch. And three of the dinners-I didn’t tell you, Brittany. You were all for my going out, but this was…different. I knew it was different. And I thought you would feel I was being disloyal to your father-”

“Mom, that isn’t so,” Bett rushed in compassionately. “But for heaven’s sake, you can’t have known him very long.”

“Well, these three months. We’re hardly planning on a shotgun wedding, but at our age, there isn’t much point in our waiting, either. The thing is-you two. Whether you’d object-”

Zach and Bett exchanged a fleeting glance. “We don’t object,” Zach said quietly. “As long as you’re happy.”

“He’s such a fool. He just won’t take care of himself if he doesn’t have a woman around,” Elizabeth said distractedly. “He likes being bossed, he tells me. Not that I’m the bossy type-”

Bett’s lips parted. Zach laid a repressive hand on her knee. “You certainly aren’t,” he agreed.

“I don’t want either of you to think I’ve done anything…immoral-”

Bett debated for a second and a half whether to advise her mother that, truthfully, she’d better kick around an immoral action or two before she made any permanent commitments. Zach’s hand anchored on her knee again. “We never thought that,” he assured his mother-in-law.

“I never would,” Elizabeth said.

“I’m sure of that.”

Zach had the sneaking suspicion that the lady had compromised her…morals. Bett had to get her genes from somewhere. Chet undoubtedly contributed the dominant portion, but someone had to have been on the receiving end.

“And I came here to help you,” Elizabeth said worriedly. “It’s not that I want to desert you now.”

“Mom, you wouldn’t be,” Bett said swiftly. Elizabeth didn’t appear to notice any frantically enthusiastic notes.

It was one in the morning before the three of them trudged back upstairs. Zach, once the bedroom door had closed, reached for Bett, hauled her up into his arms and laid her giggling form on their bed. Seconds later, he collapsed next to her.

“Some matchmaker you are,” he scolded. “She ended up having to do all the work herself.” His words came out in whispers, in breaths that fanned the tender skin of her throat. He turned her until her stomach was against the mattress, making it easy for him to unzip the back of her dress. It was a long zipper, ending at the base of her spine. And it was going to take him a very long time to get it down, if he was going to kiss her exposed skin lingeringly at inch intervals.

“You didn’t do any better than I did,” Bett whispered back, her voice muffled in the comforter.

“Do you even know Harold?”

“Are you joking? In the winter, I live in that bookstore. I’ve known him ever since we moved here.”

“So?”

“So, he’s perfect. So why didn’t you invite him to the house?”

Her favorite red dress was suddenly pulled over her head and landed on the floor beside the bed. She peered over the side of the mattress, staring at it. Zach was kissing her vertebrae, one by one. Given an ounce of encouragement, he wouldn’t last for a minute and a half. But then, given an ounce of weakness, she was afraid she wouldn’t last either. But how long could a person stare at one wrinkling red dress?

“Why didn’t I? How about, why didn’t you ask him?” He’d forgotten the exact look of Bett’s back, from spine to bottom to calves. He was usually obsessed with the front of her. He skimmed off her panty hose, a task he’d mastered over the years, this time made slightly easier by the fact that her legs were dangling over the side of the bed. The curve of her spine ended in a delightful raise of fanny; Bett had beautiful thighs.

“It was your project. Getting my mother married off.” She rolled to her back, regarding Zach in the semidarkness. He certainly seemed to be in a terrible hurry to remove his clothes.

“It appears she is married off,” he said flatly. His naked weight made a serious depression in the mattress.

“Yes.” Her hands reached for him. Her fingers gently touched his firm cheekbones, then slid into his hair. “Yes,” she echoed vaguely.

“That was never the point, you know,” he whispered. He slid up, his bare skin against her bare skin. His fingertips, too, found her cheekbones, then her hair. “Not marrying her off, two bits. Just you and me. Lost and found. I don’t think we’ll play tag with losing each other again. It wasn’t much fun.”

“No,” she agreed.

Without warning, his voice turned quiet. “I was there, Bett,” Zach said roughly. “We were never really lost.”

When he pulled her to him so very tightly, she held on. But that wasn’t entirely true, she thought. One could lose love, and she’d needed to learn that. It was precious knowledge, because they would have a child in time, and their priorities probably would get confused again…but never quite so confused. Love was so precious that one could never take it for granted. Love was that vulnerable. That strong. That worth holding on to.

About the Author

Jennifer sold her first book in 1980, and since then she has sold more than eighty books in the contemporary romance genre. Her first professional writing award came from RWA-a Silver Medallion in l984-followed by more than twenty nominations and awards, including being honored in RWA’s Hall of Fame and presented with the RWA Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award. Jennifer has been on numerous bestseller lists, has written for Harlequin Books, Avon, Berkley and Dell, and has sold over the world in more than twenty languages. She has written under a number of pseudonyms, most recognizably Jennifer Greene, but also Jeanne Grant and Jessica Massey.

She was born in Michigan, started writing in high school, and graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in English and psychology. The university honored her with their “Lantern Night Award,” a tradition