Ultimate Heroes Collection

by Various Authors

  ‘Remind me why.’

  She clenched her fists and dug her toes into the flaky mossy tiles beneath her feet and reminded herself he was smooth and gorgeous and always said the right things and that was why she’d fallen in love with him. But that it didn’t mean he would ever love her back.

  ‘Because,’ she said, ‘ninety per cent of the time you’ll find me with limp hair, wet clothes, and head-to-toe sweat. I don’t own a suit and you live in a world peopled by them. I eat leftovers for breakfast, not eggs hollandaise. My idea of a fabulous Saturday night is hunkered beneath a mohair blanket watching a movie in the park. I don’t know one wine from another, I don’t give a hoot about the FTSE or the yen, or bar openings, and when it comes down to it we don’t have one single thing in common.’

  ‘I think we’ve verified that we both love dogs,’ he said, his voice so warm, so understanding, so near.

  ‘Not good enough,’ she said, squeezing her eyes shut.

  ‘Okay, so I like movies. And mohair. And the idea of you in a wet T-shirt almost short-circuited my brain right now.’

  At his words she actually felt her uncooperative breasts straining against the cotton of her long-sleeved T-shirt. ‘I have no boobs. Wetting them is not exciting.’

  ‘It’s exciting to me.’

  Damn him, he knew just how to get beneath her defences. She took a deep breath and mentally brought in reinforcements in the form of her old friends doubt and mistrust.

  He reached out again and continued to play with her hair, sliding it over her back, running his fingers along that special place between her neck and shoulder. ‘Chelsea, all I see every day are women in suits. Slick and cunning in head-to-toe Melbourne black. While you have been like a breath of fresh air in my life. Since the first moment I laid eyes on you it was like my world view shifted. No woman had ever sassed me like you did. No woman ever continually confounded me as you have. And no woman ever gave into me with as much delight as you did. And I find I can’t let that go. I want you to come back to me. I want you to give us another chance.’

  There. He’d said it. The words she ached for yet had hoped for the sake of her tender heart he hadn’t come here to say.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ she blurted out before she threw herself into his arms. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why?’ He moved nearer, all but blocking out the setting sun with his broad shoulders.

  ‘Because you are one of those slick and cunning types in your head-to-toe Melbourne black.’

  His languorous, sensual exploration of the skin behind her ear came to an agonising halt. It was obvious that was not the answer Damien had been expecting. ‘Meaning?’

  She momentarily blinked into his eyes before looking back to the ramshackle house with its broken roof tiles and faded floral curtains. The real home and family her sister had built for herself from the ashes of a debilitating childhood. A youth peppered by parasitic—

  ‘Men in suits,’ she said aloud, ‘from my experience, may never think to steal your wallet but would con the contents of your bank account out from under you as soon as look at you if it might make them an extra buck.’

  ‘Is that really who you think I am?’ he asked.

  No, she thought instantly. But instead out of her mouth came the words, ‘I don’t know who you are.’

  A lock of hair fell across her face. She knew he’d noticed but he didn’t make a move to tuck it anywhere, so she was forced to do so herself. But that was nothing compared with the ache that slammed her body when she felt the palpable wall of cool coming from Damien’s end of the railing.

  His face turned red with rage. Disappointment. Shock. ‘No wonder you’re hiding me out the back of the house where I can’t infect your family with my pestilence. Why did you even bother to go out with me at all if I am just one more example of the kind of filth you wouldn’t deign to scrape off your shoe?’

  A ray of sunlight suddenly shone from beneath a cloud bringing with it clarity, and renewed optimism. Or at least that was how Chelsea felt.

  His words were harsh. The harshest she’d ever heard him utter. But hearing the hurt in his voice only made her realise that he cared more than he’d ever let on.

  And to find out just how much he really did care, she was going to have to give up a part of herself without any kind of surety she would ever get it back. She was going to have to gamble more than she could afford to lose.

  ‘Damien, I need you to really hear me. Okay?’

  He didn’t nod, but at least he didn’t turn his back.

  ‘This has all happened so quickly between us. I feel like I’ve been swept well and truly off my feet. And that could never have happened with someone I didn’t trust. Someone I didn’t truly believe was different from all the other guys who made me doubt your gender was worth the effort. Why is this so hard?’

  She ran a hand over her eyes, trying to subdue the rising panic that it was already too late. And then she found deep within herself a way to make him understand. She lifted her eyes from the relative safety of the ground to his haunting eyes as she said, ‘I’ve always thought that if people were only forced to wear T-shirts with signs on them the world would be a better place. Signs that said who they really were.’

  A muscle continued to flicker in his jaw, but his teeth seemed to unclench. The hard line of his mouth softened. He was at least listening.

  ‘Signs like Verbal Abuser with Mother Issues. Self-Obsessive Narcissist. Sweet as Honey All the Way to the Bone. Shark in Goldfish Skin.’

  She shook her hair off her face again before asking, ‘I’d love to know what your T-shirt would say.’

  He blinked slowly. ‘I think it’s more important right now for you to tell me what you think my T-shirt would say.’

  The first word that came to mind was Dreamy. From the beginning he’d been a six-foot-something, broad-shouldered, delicious dream of a man. But had he, at some stage over the past week, while she had been fluttering and floundering, and finding reasons to keep him at arm’s length, actually become real? Was he right alongside her struggling with the enormity of what had actually happened between them?

  She felt like a butterfly under a magnifying glass as he pierced her with his unrelenting gaze. And her mouth was so dry she couldn’t hope to speak.

  ‘Or do you want to know what I think your T-shirt should say?’ he asked.

  Yes, she thought. Desperately. But no. Not while you’re looking at me like that. All wounded and gorgeous. Not while our worlds are balancing on a knife’s edge.

  She flapped a hand between them as though it didn’t matter. He caught it and pulled it to his chest and she stumbled after it until she was bodily against him. Again. Exactly the same way as they had been when they first met. At his nearness, her breath whooshed from her lungs and a pulse began to beat erratically in her throat.

  Only this time he wasn’t a beautiful stranger; this time he was a man with whom she had shared far more of herself, of her thoughts, her dreams, her past, her body, and her innermost self than she had with any man.

  She tried to pull away, but he only tugged her back, sliding one hand around her waist, stopping where the small of her back met the top of her jeans, pressing her against the full length of him while with the other hand he turned her hand in his until he held it over his heart. She could feel the pulse beat strong and fast behind his ribs. And hers soon altered to match his beat for beat.

  A shriek of laughter spilled from somewhere inside the cottage. A crash of saucepans was followed by Kensey’s raised voice scolding someone. But after about ten words the admonishment turned to laughter too.

  ‘Come on,’ Damien said. He held her hand and drew her down the rambling, weed-encrusted back steps to the messy yard below. Feeling like an emotionally overwrought rag doll, she gave in and let him lead her where he may.

  When they reached the shade of an old oak tree, Damien edged her around the side so that they were shielded from prying eyes by the shade of the large trunk
and a curtain of drooping branches that almost touched the ground.

  She leaned back against the tree, the bark digging into her back in twenty different places. He leant a hand beside her head, so close all she’d have to do was look left and she could nuzzle against his warm skin.

  ‘I hurt you, didn’t I? Trying to squeeze you to fit you into a compartment in my life like I do my job, my friends, my family?’

  Okay, now this was getting really real. There was no artifice between them. No flirtation. No mobile phones to keep them at a comfortable distance.

  ‘I’ll live,’ she said.

  ‘I know you will. And I know I will too. But what I don’t see is why either of us should just live. I want more than that. And I know you do too. I think. I believe that we owe it to ourselves to see if we might just be able to do it together. What can I do to make you trust me again?’

  She shrugged. Tempted by the almost promise behind his words, but completely unsure it would be possible for her to trust anyone again, least of all herself.

  ‘Your father really did a number on you, didn’t he?’

  She blinked up at him, sideswiped by the change of tack. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I’m not like him. Or the people who let him down. I’m here,’ he said, ‘even after you brushed me off. And I can tell you that took some kind of leap of faith on my part. Now it’s your turn. Chelsea. Tell me about your father. What did he do to make you so unwilling to take a chance on us?’

  The thread of apprehension for ever wrapped around Chelsea’s heart tightened, strangling her ability to do as he asked. But the thought of feeling that way, trapped between her desires and her fears for ever, suddenly felt too much. And just not fair.

  She breathed in as deeply as she could until she felt the thread snap and her breath shuddered as it released. And she watched the pulse beating in the base of his neck as she said, ‘He used to use us in his scams.’

  Damien swore beneath his breath. ‘Were you ever in any danger?’

  ‘Not in the line of fire as far as I can remember. He was smart enough to move us onto a new place whenever he got close.’

  ‘And when your family stayed out this way with the guy who could cook? The man with the dog?’

  ‘I never knew how they knew one another. But I’ve always wondered if he was my uncle. My mum’s brother. Whoever he was he made us go to school, and kept Dad on the straight and narrow for a full six months before we upped and moved in the middle of the night.’

  ‘And your uncle loved dogs.’

  ‘With all his heart.’

  The questions dried up. She wondered if he’d found out what he wanted to know. If he had enough information to slap himself over the back of his head and tell himself to give up on her for good. The backs of her eyes burnt anew as she began to feel the pain that losing him now would cause.

  ‘So you could really steal my wallet easy as you please,’ he said. ‘No joke.’

  A shift in his voice made her look up. There was a glimmer in his eye. The tiniest glimmer, but enough that she knew that he was turned on. By her ability to hoodwink him. Hope sprang through her veins like the elixir of life.

  ‘I might have done it a half dozen times already, and put it back, and you’d never have known.’

  He leaned in towards her. If he kissed her now she wouldn’t be able to stop him. But at the last second he pulled back. The hand beside her head moved to hover at her cheek, then clenched and tucked into the pocket of his trousers.

  He looked past her into the distance. ‘I don’t chase women, Chelsea. Maybe because I’ve never had to. It may seem arrogant but it’s the truth. I’ve never begged a woman to be with me. Then when I drove away, believing I might never see you again …’ His eyes blazed and when he looked at her it was as if now he wasn’t sure whether to kiss her senseless or wring her neck.

  But the very fact that he was struggling at all meant the world. It meant her hope, her trust, had never been misplaced. Her instincts were right. He was different. He was worth the fight. And her spirit was not completely downtrodden yet.

  ‘Damien…’ she said, reaching out and laying a hand upon his chest. The moment her fingers curled into his cotton shirt his eyes darkened, his breaths grew deeper beneath her hand, and she knew she wasn’t ready for him to not be there. Would never be. ‘If you’d like to stay that would be okay with me.’

  He breathed deep through his nose. All neck-wringing thoughts seemed to have dried up as his gaze dropped to her mouth. ‘Never has a man heard happier words.’

  ‘I meant for dinner,’ she explained.

  His gaze travelled up her warming cheek and back to her eyes. ‘Are you sure?’

  Sure? Sure that she wanted him back, even though he’d not once told her he loved her, or could promise her more than he already had? She’d never been less sure in her life. But she was willing to take the chance that he cared enough he might yet one day grow to love her.

  She swallowed the lump in her throat. This was it. Time to test her newly unfettered heart. ‘I’m highly protective of my family. I’ve never invited a man to eat dinner with them before.’

  His left eyebrow rose. ‘Yet you chose me. A fully fledged suit-and-tie conman?’

  She nodded. ‘And if you don’t behave there are plenty of places out here in which to hide a dead body.’

  And for the first time since he’d arrived, he laughed. The beautiful sound raced through her veins.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ Damien said, leaning in against her flattened hand until her elbow brushed against the tree and their noses were mere inches apart.

  ‘Will you stay?’ she asked.

  ‘I did come all this way,’ he murmured.

  ‘Stalker,’ she said, biting back a smile.

  ‘Cynic,’ he shot back before closing the gap between them and kissing her with such heat she clenched a fist into his shirt.

  His tongue swooped into her mouth and took her breath away with such intensity she truly believed he’d wanted to kiss her from the second he got out of the car.

  He pulled back and whispered against her swollen lips, ‘I knew I missed you for a good reason.’

  ‘If that’s the only reason, then I warn you I consider that already misbehaving.’

  ‘If I get my way we’ll both be misbehaving a hell of a lot more before this night is done.’ He leaned in and kissed her again, with even less restraint than he had before.

  And she let herself do the same. She let go. Completely. Allowing her love for him to overflow, to tell him just how much she missed him through her actions rather than her words.

  He pulled away far too soon. ‘I can smell dinner.’

  ‘She’s a bad cook. It can wait.’

  He smiled. ‘The sooner we eat, the sooner we can think about moving onto after-dinner pursuits.’ He let her go, easily as you please, and walked past her headed back to the house.

  She hugged her arms about herself, amazed anew that he had come. That he was staying. And that she was letting him. But the absolute truth was he wasn’t the same man she’d left the night before. There was still something different about him. Some kind of calm resolution she couldn’t put her finger on.

  She wasn’t sure if it was a good or bad thing, just that somehow, after today, things were never going to be the same again.

  Her heart ached to know if this weekend would be a bittersweet end to the greatest week of her life. If he might stay with her a month. Two. Or if the whole dream really was there for the taking.

  He turned to walk backwards, away from her. ‘Coming?’

  She pushed away from the tree and followed.

  ‘Still want to know what I’d write on your T-shirt?’ he asked as she approached.

  She nodded.

  ‘You’d need enough cotton to go to the moon and back to fit upon it all the things I think make you you.’

  And with that he jogged up the weedy back steps and into the house.

  CHAPTER TH
IRTEEN

  CHELSEA followed Damien into the cottage on shaky legs to find the place in uproar. Kensey stood over Slimer with a tipped-over cake-mix pan while Slimer sat on his rug trying to lick the delicious mixed ingredients off his fur.

  ‘Chelsea, thank God,’ Kensey said. ‘Can you do the honours while I whip up another batch? Lucy, stop crying, honey. There will be birthday cake.’

  Chelsea kept on walking into the laundry where she found the Slimer pack: a bucket, soap, a pair of clippers, and a hard bristled brush.

  ‘Slimer, outside,’ she called out and turned to run smack bang into a hard wall of Damien.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

  She glanced at his beautiful suit with the paw-print stains already baked on. Then thought that if she left him inside how quickly the kids would smell fresh blood and climb all over him and what else Kensey would let on if she wasn’t there to stop her.

  ‘Are you sure? It’s getting cold out and I can do it by myself.’

  ‘Not gonna happen,’ he said, shucking off his jacket and laying it casually atop the dryer.

  Her certainty there had been some kind of change in him intensified until it actually gave her goose-bumps. ‘I class being bossy as misbehaving.’

  ‘Well, that’s just tough. The way I see it I’m going to need a firm hand if we are going to have any kind of chance at turning this crazy attraction into what it seems determined to become. So get over yourself and let me be there for you.’

  He reached out and took a hold of the handle of the bucket, his thumb brushing against hers, sending sparks of electricity from her hand to his.

  ‘What this seems determined to become?’ she repeated, fixated on the words rather than the dark, dangerous look in his eye.

  His voice dropped as he said, ‘I have no intention of having that conversation in a place that smells like wet dog and detergent.’

  She wasn’t letting him off the hook that easy. ‘If you want anything to do with me, Slick, you’re going to have to get used to the smell.’

  He rolled his eyes to the heavens. ‘Hell, Chelsea, I wouldn’t want to do it surrounded by computer terminals and screaming, overworked day traders either.’