by Susan Ward
His words hang in the air between us as his thumb moves to brush the line of my jaw. My thoughts and emotions whirl. I’m sure this is the most romantic evening I’ve had with a man.
But how can it be?
I asked him to bed and he said no.
That should hurt me.
Only it doesn’t.
It makes me want him more.
Chapter Sixteen
Eric
I TAP HER HIP, BUT Willow doesn’t climb from my lap. Her midnight eyes are rapidly searching my face. I’m drowning in them and painfully hard.
No woman has ever affected me like this. Ever. The feel of her—it’s intoxicating—and I want her in a way I’ve never wanted anyone before.
The dull ache I’ve carried in my heart for years has immediate definition. I have missed her, in a way that’s real and always present, every day since I left her.
Desire bursts through my body, pushing my goal into the far recesses of my mind. My hands hunger to travel down her body and reacquaint with the feel of her: those sloping curves, her breasts, her hip, her ass and legs.
My passion is fighting to be unleashed. Every fiber in my body is sharply alert, and in my head are visons of capturing her lips with mine and filling her mouth with my tongue.
I’m ready for us. I’m positive of that. There’s no direction left for me except back to her. Like a forest fire around me, she’s consumed me.
In the distance and through the haze of my arousal, I hear a foghorn scream. I rub the back of my neck, thankful for the obtrusive sound; it helps me recover some semblance of self-control. I need to untangle our bodies and get her home fast or I will carry her below to make love to her.
I take in deep, thought-clearing breaths, then I close my hands on her waist, stand, and set Willow on her feet. “Come, I should drive you home.”
“It’s early. Surely we don’t need to leave yet. It’s wonderful here. Why do we have to go?”
Because if we don’t I’ll fuck you.
I take both her hands in mine. “I’ve lived the last year trying to avoid any sudden emotion. I’m still learning how to feel things sober. Sticking to schedules and routines, maintaining structure in my life. Yet you…you bring out more feeling than I’m completely comfortable with. It’s very—” Words desert me from how she’s staring at me. I can’t find a gentle way to describe what she does to me, that she brings me to the brink of no control and that I don’t completely trust myself there yet. “—overwhelming for me at times.”
“Oh.”
Her soft, breathless voice causes me to tense and look down at her. Her eyes are wide with promise, but there’s also something undefinable that’s troubling.
After releasing her hands, I move to retrieve her purse and sweater from a deck cushion and hand them to her. “You’re going to have to tell me where you live so I can get you home.”
Willow purses her lips. “That’s not necessary. You can take me back to the bar. I have to close tonight and my car’s there.”
“Don’t argue with me. I’m driving you home. You’ve had a few glasses of wine. I’ll pick you up in the morning and drive you to work.”
Her dark eyes flash. “That won’t be necessary. You don’t need to go out of your way for me. I can manage on my own.”
“You don’t have to manage on your own. I’m here.”
Her cheeks pink and she examines her hands. Yes, I’m confusing her. This is not how I would have chosen for our night to end, but I’m not sure how to correct it.
By the time we reach the car, it’s clear she didn’t get what I was trying to tell her with my rambling speech on avoiding emotion triggers, and I should have explained it better.
As I open her door and watch her settle on the passenger seat, Hank’s earlier words flash in my head: Honesty is the door you walk through if you want to rebuild your life, EJ.
He’s fucking right. I should have listened instead of all evening trying to skirt issues I don’t want to face yet. But fuck, truth is such an easy concept in theory, but hard to do in real life with someone you love. Especially when the truth is of the humiliating brand…or of the variety that could cost you everything, like telling her who I am.
EJ, you’re holding on too tight.
Not good.
Trust the higher power.
Trust her.
I shut her door and climb in behind the steering wheel. I tap the ignition and hit the GPS button.
Raking my hair from my face, I pause to study her squared shoulders and lifted nose as she stares straight forward out the windshield. It’s a posture I remember well from version 1.0 of us. The you fucked up, Eric James pose. I used to know how to manage it better. Or maybe not. Maybe it was Willow who managed everything for both of us all along.
“You’ve got to give me your address.”
She rattles it off without looking at me. I focus on typing it on the screen to keep my focus off her and what I’d prefer to be doing in this car.
Thirty minutes later, I pull into her driveway. I haven’t been to her house before. It’s a small 1950s single-story tract-style home, but it proclaims pride of ownership in the cheerful touches on the front porch—wicker furniture, potted plants and hanging chimes—and the neatly tended lawn bordered by long flower beds.
I wonder who takes care of it for her. Dean? That thought’s unpleasant, that he might still come around. Then I dismiss it quickly because the yard has the look of Willow in every leaf and bud. It’s irrelevant either way. I’m back, Willow is mine, and even when she wasn’t, she was never his.
Her gaze flits to me as though wondering why I’m just sitting here. “I like your house,” I remark conversationally while unbuckling. “It’s very welcoming. The way home should look.”
“Thank you. It’s the first thing I ever bought on my own.”
On her own—interesting comment. She was married to Dean when they moved in.
I alight the XT5 and round it to her door. My intent is to walk her quickly to the front stoop, say a polite good night, and get the hell out of here before I trip up again, but how she’s sitting stops me. I can’t take my eyes off her, and we’re very connected only in the wrong way. We’re both trying to discern what the other is thinking and what this odd current is that’s held constant between us since we left the yacht club.
When a few seconds pass without me moving, she glances at me fast and looks away doubly so, but not quick enough that I don’t see what’s in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“Sorry for what?”
“For putting a downer on our evening and being more complicated than you deserve.”
“I understand.” There’s a tremor in her voice. Hell. If I keep this up, she’ll be done with me.
I ease down to sit on the floorboard at her feet, because no fucking way am I standing through this. She startles when I lightly close my fingers around her jean-clad knee.
“No, Willow. You don’t understand, and I don’t expect you to,” I mutter.
She inhales sharply and looks at me then. Her sweet and honest compassion is written all over her lovely face as she waits for me to finish. This is my chance.
Tell her, Eric.
She’s listening, and as hard as this is I’ve got to start trusting us sometime. I dread where this may leave us, but I know I’ll dread more if I’m not honest with her and it kills our second chance.
“I haven’t made love to a woman in a year,” I whisper, almost choking on the words. “I haven’t made love to a woman sober in over seven years. That part about needing to go slow isn’t a line or a brush-off. It’s true. I’m not even supposed to attempt a relationship until after my first year of recovery. I’m still adjusting to experiencing things without a filter. What I feel for you is inspiring and exciting and frightening. But most of all it’s unfiltered. I’m as desperate to go to bed with you as I’m afraid to, if that makes sense.”
> A heavy silence follows my confession and it’s hard to hold back as I wait for her reaction.
“Perfect sense,” she says, a hint of relief in her voice. “I understand being afraid of something you want. It’s been two years for me. I haven’t been with anyone since my divorce. I’m scared, too. I used to take so many chances, but they never worked out well. But I feel things with you that push me to not be afraid, things that remind me that without taking chances people don’t live.”
She leans forward, placing her hand over mine, and I’m unprepared for the confounding combination of what I see on her face.
“I don’t know when it hit me during dinner,” she says earnestly. “But I knew I wanted to start living again. To feel things again. To try being with someone, and as irrational as it sounds since we don’t know each other very well, I wanted to do that with you.”
Fuck. My heart rate escalates; the blood thrums through my body, pounding past my eardrums, blocking the voice of caution that’s been my ally all night. And she says that…
I might be able to battle my body.
Or her impossibly large, beautiful bedroom eyes.
Or her words.
But not all three, not at once, no way.
“That suggestion you made after dinner. Is that now in the past tense?”
A slight breath with laughter escapes her. “No, EJ, it’s not.”
“Good. Give me your house key,” I demand.
She’s silent for a moment, then the keys jingle in front of my face. There’s a flirty glint in her eyes and she’s holding her lower lip between her teeth.
It’s as if I’ve stepped back in time. She’s impish, take-charge-of-Eric Willow, and here I am, besotted by her as ever and unable to think clearly. Held captive by her. In what I feel. In what I feel from her. And it rises in answer in my memory that seven years ago it was Willow who always managed everything for the both of us.
If she thinks this is the direction we should go, I’m going with her. She’s the one true and honest thing that’s ever been in my life.
I rip the fob from her fingers as I pluck her from the seat to carry her up the walk. She curls her arms around my neck and hugs me, her cheek against mine. The wandering of her fingers against my nape is like a full-body caress. The press of her against my chest is agony. Her scent causes my hands to shake as I attempt to work her key into the deadlock.
Deep breath, Eric.
Kicking the door closed behind me, I tell myself to hold it together. If I don’t, not even this part of us is going to go slow.
Chapter Seventeen
Eric
IT’S PITCH BLACK INSIDE the house, but the layout’s simple enough to figure out without sight or instruction which direction is her bedroom.
I like the notion of carrying her all the way to the starting line. In fact, having her voluptuous curves filling my arms and her heart beating against me feels better than anything I can remember. Her breasts are a delicious tease each time they rub my chest when I take a step, and my erection grows by the second.
I lean in, starving for a taste of her lips, no longer giving a fuck about any consequences. Only, before I can crash my mouth into hers, she pulls back and wiggles like she’s changed her mind about me.
“What’s wrong?” I don’t recognize my own voice. It’s lower and huskier than I’m positive it’s ever been before, probably because my runaway anticipation fears we’ve just hit a roadblock.
“Nothing’s wrong if I act fast. I need to punch the alarm before we’re surrounded by Better Man Security,” she says, breathless.
Relief shoots through my body, enough so that even the disappointment of setting Willow on her feet has the power to be an aphrodisiac. “There’s really a security company named that?”
“Yes, and they really are the better man.” I hear a series of beeps from the wall panel. “At least when the competition is ex-husbands.”
“Ouch,” I moan, but I’m not serious. “I’m an ex-husband, lest you forget.”
Glancing over her shoulder at me, she does her signature shake of the head finished by spunky lift of her nose. “You’re not my ex, so it doesn’t count. At least not to Better Man and their marketing strategy.”
“I take it their pitch is designed around divorced women?”
Her face isn’t toward me—she’s checking the alarm panel, waiting for a green light, I assume—but she’s nodding.
“There,” she announces, swinging toward me, only to ease back against the wall, going in the wrong direction again.
Her eyes are fixed on the vacant floor between us. Neither of us moves. There’s pulse-like tension spinning around us.
I wait for her to say something. Anything I can construe as a green light to continue where we were. I keep waiting. Silence.
“Willow?” I can only mange the one word and it’s mostly breath.
For another beat, still nothing, then she looks up and, oh, the ways she’s looking at me. I’m completely hard now, trapped at the decision point between, I fear, either bliss or agony.
I sense she’s waiting for me to say something, but all I can think of is how much I want her, how wrong it is to be with her now, and that anything short of her showing me the door isn’t changing the trajectory of this.
“I really want this,” she whispers, shocking me out of my trance. Her words, the sound of her voice make me light-headed. “I’ve even fantasized what we’d be like. But…”
Oh fuck, not but.
“I haven’t had a lot of happy experiences with men. My life hasn’t been hearts and flowers, rainbows and doves. It’s been more like being lied to, used, and left high and dry. If hurting me is something you’re likely to do, I’d prefer you walk out that door. Otherwise…”
Another pause in her speech that stretches my nerves. Even if I wanted to speak, I can’t. It’s not possible.
“I’m going to my bedroom. You guessed correctly when you carried me into the house. It’s down that hall.”
She prowls toward me, stopping directly in front of where I seem to have grown roots. In my memory rises her adorable little speech before we went to bed together for the first time. It’d been like this, only more frenzied because she’d been younger and less composed back then.
“I’m going in there alone. You stay out here five minutes. Have an honest chat with yourself. Then either leave or join me.”
The way she’s looking at me makes me swallow hard and nod. My heart is jackhammering in my chest. Willow taking out the big guns is not necessary. I’m already a goner, totally hers. Fucking up with her a second time isn’t in the mix.
The way her eyes sweep me before she leaves makes it damn hard to stay in the front hall as instructed. I hear her bedroom door click closed and let out the full chest of air I’ve been unknowingly holding.
Holding up by the front door for five minutes is going to seem like eternity. To keep cool and not crash the bedroom before I’m supposed to, I study her place, anything and everything to keep my thoughts off what’s waiting for me down the hall.
Her house is basically one giant open living area, with a short hallway feeding off the kitchen space. Now that there’s light, I can see it has only two doors: one at the end of the passageway that’s her bedroom and one near to the great room that’s probably a bathroom.
Interesting that Willow had been married to Dean and purchased a house with one bedroom. I can’t help wondering if that was her idea, his, or a joint decision that they didn’t want children. Or maybe an unspoken sign that neither of them thought their marriage would make it for the long haul.
None of this matters to me at all, except it gives me something to ponder and helps keep my nerves steady as I wait. It also gives my cock a bit of a breather, though not so much that he isn’t tapping Morse code in my briefs, demanding to know if time’s up.
I hear her bedroom door click open, and relief—and a whole lot of o
ther things—crash through me. The old me could never have given her the space I’m sure she needs before taking this next step with me, and I’m a little giddy that I could hold back until she sent me a clear signal, like the door opening, that she was ready for me.
I head down the hall and step into her bedroom. I expect her to be sitting on the bed; instead she’s standing just inside the door. Maybe listening for me and wondering if I’m still here?
That’s a problem we don’t have: my not wanting her.
Right now, I’m sure we have only one problem: we’re too damn far apart.
“I’m glad you stayed,” Willow whispers, breaking the silence, and a shudder shakes down my body as I soak her in through all my senses.
She’s wearing nothing but lace panties and a practically see-through bra. Her long dark hair is mussed and I’m not sure if it’s from pulling off her top or if she’s run her fingers through it. Either way, the look is sexy as fuck.
“A man would have to be a fool to leave you,” I say softly, and I melt from the smile that takes possession of her lips. I don’t think my body can take more buildup.
“I really like you,” she says softly, and I breathe in deeply trying to contain the fire raging inside me. “But don’t get too serious, OK?”
“Too late. I already am,” I admit, coming up to her and caging her between me and the bed.
I bring my body up against hers, my hands moving down her back, not forcing the contact but unable to resist it. She could step away if she wants to; she doesn’t.
I lay my forehead against hers then let my cheek trail down hers. For a long moment I don’t move. I’m submerged in feeling only her, wanting her to feel only me.
Urgency prompts me to deepen our contact, to use my hands on her backside to mold her into me, and her head tilts perfectly to the side for my kisses to roam her neck.
“I want you in the worst way,” I whisper. “I have since I first saw you. And it hasn’t changed, not once, not in a single moment since then. You’re in my head, in my music, you’re in me, and you have been from the first moment there was you and me.”