Long Time Coming Read Online Free PDF Page A

still mindful of the watching eyes of the customers all around them.
    "I always wear a rubber."
    Scalding coffee sloshed over her hand, burning it and flooding the saucer. She gasped. "I beg your pardon?"
    He calmly plucked two napkins from the dispenser on the table and used them to soak up the brown lake in her saucer. "Did you burn your hand?"
    "It's fine," she lied, wondering if she dared ask the waitress for butter. She didn't have to. Law waved her over and asked for some.
    "No, it's fine, really," Marnie protested when the waitress promptly returned with a plate bearing a slab of butter the size of Rhode Island for Law Kincaid's clumsy date who had spilled coffee on her hand.
    "Thanks," he told the waitress with a smile meant to dismiss her.
    "I can do it," Marnie said. "Really such a fuss over—"
    "Give me your hand."
    She stuck out her red, stinging hand. With two fingers he scooped up a glob of butter and smoothed it over the burn.
    "Whenever I sleep with a woman, I use a condom," he said in a low voice. "Without fail."
    His fingers slid between two of hers, smearing the creamy butter into the highly sensitive groove. Marnie nearly came off the booth's vinyl bench.
    "The surgeon general would commend you."
    Her voice didn't sound normal at all. The burn had caused it to go husky and rough.
    Either that, or Law's touch had. As his fingers continued to slide between hers, she squirmed on her seat and rolled her lips inward to keep from making small whimpers of pleasure. His touch also elicited a fluttering sensation in her lower body and a tingling in her breasts, especially at their centers.
    "I was with Sharon before anybody ever heard of AIDS," he was saying. "I've always used condoms to prevent pregnancy. I wouldn't have had sex with a girl I met on the Galveston beach without wearing one."
    His hand massage was too wonderful. It was about to liquify Marnie with the ease that their combined body heat was melting the butter into her skin. Regretfully she pulled her hand out of his reach.
    "Then you're still not convinced that David is your son."
    "Be fair," he said, leaning across the table. "I didn't even know he existed before today.
    Do you expect me to blindly accept your explanations as fact?"
    "I don't expect anything from you, Colonel Kincaid," she said frostily, "I told you that at the door of the hospital."
    "Well, I'm not the kind of a man who can shrug off even the possibility that I fathered a child. Granted I might get testy, because this is a real shocker. So indulge me. Let me ask a few questions and give me straight answers."
    She moved her cup and saucer aside and propped her forearms on the table, providing ventilation to her injured hand. "So ask. What do you want to know?"
    "How could David be mine if I took precautions?"
    "You didn't."
    "How the hell do you know?" he demanded frowning sternly. "Or was that a game?
    Chesty Sharon got to make it while little sister got to watch?"
    Marnie grabbed her purse and scooted to the edge of the booth. He caught her arm.
    "I'm sorry. Uncalled for. Please." She worked her arm free but his eyes arrested her.
    "Please, Marnie."
    Perhaps it was hearing her name coming from his lips for the first time in seventeen years, or perhaps it was her own need to set the record straight after so long a time. For whatever reason she slid back into the booth.
    "I can see why you might not hold Sharon in high regard," she told him stiffly. "After all, she was easy. But I don't deserve your insults."
    "I said I was sorry and I meant it. Okay?" She conceded with a terse nod. "So how do you know what happened?"
    "Sharon told me that you didn't have … that you were … unprepared one night.
    According to her, things had gotten pretty uh, hot." She glanced up at him inquiringly.
    "I'm with you so far. Go on."
    "She didn't want you to stop, so she lied to you. She told you that she was taking birth control pills."
    He gazed into near space a moment, then shook his head. "I