Heaven Can't Wait by Pamela Clare Page B

talk about it?” He could feel the tension in her body.
    “No. I want you to kiss me.”
    He traced the fullness of her lower lip with his thumb. “Well, okay, but when you kiss and make up, aren’t you supposed to kiss the person you argued with?”
    She gaped at him for a moment, then burst into giggles, burying her face in his chest to mute the sound. “Oh, Will, you always make me laugh!”
    “No, sugar. Sometimes I make you scream.” He ducked down, took her mouth with his.
    He kept the kiss light, more about lips than tongues, comfort than lust. The bet was still in full force, and though going twelve days without sex had left him as randy as a frat boy, her mother’s presence had left no doubt in Will’s mind that there was more at stake for Lissy in this little wager of theirs than which one of them caved first. She was trying to prove something to herself about him, about their relationship. He didn’t want to let her down.
    But the connection between them had always been a live wire, and without meaning to, he found himself kissing her hard, cupping the fullness of her breast in his hand, teasing her hardened nipple with his thumb.
    He pulled back from her, brushed the hair from her face and chuckled when she whimpered her frustration. “I’m starting to remember what it’s like to be a teenager and stuck at second base—tits but no tail.”
    She laughed, smoothed her hands over his chest, her thumb catching one of his nipples. Then her face grew serious. “I don’t know why you’re putting up with her, Will.”
    So they were to back to her mother again.
    He pressed his lips to her cheek. “I put up with her because I’m madly in love with her daughter.”
    Her body relaxed in his arms. “Her daughter’s madly in love with you, too.”
    Soon, she was asleep.
     
    “Surely you have some kind of mineral water that doesn’t come in cheap, plastic bottles. And I’d like lemon—fresh, sliced lemon.”
    “I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s the only brand of bottled water we carry.”
    “That is simply unacceptable.”
    Lissy tried to ignore her mother’s complaining, willing the tension to leave her shoulders as the aesthetician wrapped her hair in a towel and prepared to give her a facial. Beside her Holly, Tessa, Sophie and Kara lay on treatment tables, dressed in thick, white terry robes, their hair also wrapped in towels. Soft music drifted over the sound system like clouds, but it was no mask for the barbed wire of her mother’s voice.
    This was spa day. It was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be relaxing. But her mother was ruining it for all of them with her constant criticism, her mood a chilling frost. Nothing was good enough: not the music, not the size of the dressing rooms, not the décor. Now the bottled water was below her standards, as well.
    Lissy had felt obligated to bring her mother along and had been naïve enough to think this sort of pampering would make her mother happy. But it seemed nothing made her mother happy.
    “When I pay for a full day at the spa, I expect to be treated like a princess!”
    “You’re not paying for it, Mother.” Lissy tried to sound calm, as if her mother’s whining weren’t plucking on her last nerve. “I’m paying for it, and I like this bottled water just fine.”
    “Then you’re wasting your money, Melisande.”
    An uncomfortable stillness fell over the room.
    Tessa spoke in her most sophisticated Savannah drawl. “You know, the last time I visited this establishment, I found the Venetian mud bath to be most enjoyable.”
    “I heard they have the mud flown in straight from Venetia,” chirped Holly.
    “You mean Venice,” Sophie corrected.
    “Oh. Yeah.”
    “I quite enjoyed the Venetian mud bath, as well,” Kara said, the tone of her voice strangely snobbish. “It was a gift from my husband, the senator, after Caitlyn was born.”
    “Your husband is a senator?”
    “Why, yes, Mrs. Charteris. Didn’t Lissy tell you?