The Intruders Read Free Page B

kitchen to finish cleaning up.
    “You sure handled Dad,” Callie told her boyfriend.
    “Huh?”
    “You took the wind right out of Dad’s sails. He thought you were going
to give him a bang-up fight.”
    She was looking straight into his gray eyes when he said, “The war’s
over. It’s history. What is there to fight about?”
    “Well…… Callie said dubiously.
    Jake just shrugged. His knee was fairly healed and the dead were
buried. That chapter of his life was over.
    He gathered her into his arms and smiled. “What are we going to do
today?”
    He had good eyes, Callie thought. You could almost look in and see the
inner man, and that inner man was simple and good. He wasn’t
complicated or self-absorbed like her father, nor was he warped with
secret doubts and phobias like so many of the young men she knew.
Amazingly, after Vietnam his scars were merely physical, like that slash
on his temple where a bullet gouged him.
    Acutely aware of the warmth and pressure of his body against hers, she
gave him a fierce hug and whispered, “What would you like to do?”
    The feel and smell and warmth of her seemed more than Jake could take
in. “Anything you want, Miss McKenzie,” he said hoarsely, mildly
surprised at his reaction to her presence, “as long as we do it
together.” that didn’t come out quite the way he intended, and he felt
slightly flustered. You can’t just invite a woman to bed at
eight-thirty in the morning!
    His hand massaged the small of her back and she felt her knees get weak.
She took a deep breath to steady herself, then said, “I’d like to take
you to meet my brother, Theron.
    He lives in Milwaukee. But first let’s clean up these dishes.
    Then, since you so coyly suggested it, let’s slip upstairs in a Freudian
way and get seriously naked.”
    When Jake’s cheeks reddened, Callie laughed, a deep, throaty woman’s
laugh. “Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking about that!”
    Jake dearly enjoyed seeing her laugh. She had a way of throwing her
head back and unashamedly displaying a mouthful of beautiful teeth that
he found captivating. When she did it her hair swayed and her eyes
crinkled. The effect was mesmerizing. You wanted her to do it again,
and again, and again.
    “The thought did flit across my little mind,” he admitted, grinning,
watching her, eyes.
    “Ooh, I want you, Jake Grafton,” she said, and kissed him.
    A shaft of sunlight streamed through the open window and fell squarely
across them in the bed. After all those months of living aboard ship,
in a steel cubicle in the bowels of the beast where the sun never
reached, Jake thought the sunlight magical. He gently turned her so
their heads were in the sun. The zephyr from the window played with
strands of her brown hair and the sun flecked them with gold. She was
woman, all warm taut sleek smoothness and supple, sensuous wetness.
    Somehow she ended up on top and set the rhythm of their lovemaking. As
her hair caressed his cheeks and her hands kneaded his body, the urgency
became overwhelming. He guided her onto him.
    When she lay spent across him, her lashes stroking his cheek, her breath
hot on his shoulder, he whispered, “I love YOU-”
    “I know,” she replied.
    Theron McKenzie had been drafted into the Army in 1967. On October 7,
1968, he stepped on a land mine. He lost one leg below the knee and one
above. Today he walked on artificial legs. Jake thought he was pretty
good at it, although he had to sway his body from side to side to keep
his balance when he threw the legs forward.
    “It was in II Corps,” he told Jake Grafton, “at the base camp. And the
worst of it was that the mine was one of ours. I just forgot for a
moment and walked the wrong way.”
    He shrugged and grinned.
    He had a good grin. Jake liked him immediately. Yet he was slightly
taken aback when Theron asked, “So are you going to marry her?” This
while his sister walked between them holding on to Jake’s arm.
    Grafton recovered