“You were my fantasy,” he admitted, his eyes hot with desire as they raked over her face and breasts. “You were everything I wanted and the one woman I knew I could never have. You were way too good for me and I knew it. But I wanted to be good enough, to be worthy of you.”
“I can’t believe you ever felt that way about me.” Her heart beat erratically. Joy overladen with regret and fear burst inside her, like fireworks exploding into the sky.
“When I got rich and started living the good life in Houston, I thought about you. I pictured you happily married to some great guy, and I figured you’d have two or three kids. Not once did it ever cross my mind that you would have married Kent.” Johnny Mack gazed into her eyes. “I never came back because I thought you were better off without me.”
Lane stroked his stubble-rough cheek. “You were my fantasy, too. I knew you were fooling around with a lot of women, and I was so jealous of them. I desperately wanted to know what it would be like to be one of your women.” Lifting herself up just enough to bring her breasts into contact with his hairy chest, she wrapped her arms around his neck and brought him down to her. “I dreamed that I would be the one you’d truly love. I wanted you to be mine forever.”
He grabbed her hand, jerked it away from his face and dragged it down his body. She knew his destination, even before he laid her hand over his sex.
“If you want me, Lane, then take me.”
His eyes glittered like black diamonds, the need that rode him hard showing plainly in his expression. Big, dark and dangerously male, he waited. Despite how much he wanted her, he was giving her the power to make the next move.
With unsteady fingers, she unzipped his jeans and gasped when his large, erect penis surged toward her. Without hesitation, she caressed him, her fingers wrapping around the long, hard length of him.
“I want you, Johnny Mack. I’ve always wanted you.”
His smile created havoc inside her, like the aftereffects of a bomb blast. A lethal combination of masculinity and sensuality made him irresistible. He smelled of sleep and body musk and night air. He looked like a dark angel come to earth to entrap her and capture her soul. And he felt like molten steel beneath her fingers.
Without saying a word, he forcefully loosened her grip around his penis, lifted her hand and laid her arm across the cool, thick blanket of grass on which she lay. His fingers skimmed her body, paraded over her breasts, down her belly and to the apex between her thighs. He spread her legs apart and lifted her hips just enough to allow him a full view of his objective. Unsure and suddenly nervous, Lane squirmed when he lowered his mouth to her mound.
“Easy, baby. Easy.” He kissed a spot just above her pubic hair and nuzzled her belly with his head.
Giving herself over to him completely, trusting him to take care of her, Lane surrendered. She was his in every way a woman could belong to a man.
With her body open to his pillage, he spread kisses along one inner thigh and then the other. Sensation after sensation of pure, undiluted passion rippled through her. And when his tongue touched her intimately, she lifted her hips and dug her heels into the moist soil at her feet. For one brief moment she wondered what he thought of her, naked, aroused and abandoning herself to sexual pleasures. But then his lips sucked and his tongue laved and all coherent thought left her mind.
His fingers reached upward and found her tight nipples. She moaned deep and loud as he plucked and caressed. The tension built higher and higher until she flew apart, into a million shards, shaking with an orgasm unlike anything she had ever experienced. As the aftershocks of release tingled through her body, Lane opened her eyes and looked up into Johnny Mack’s smiling face. And she realized that he knew the truth.
“You never climaxed when Kent made love to you, did you?”
Unable to speak, she simply shook her head.
“Then, I’m the first man who’s ever made you come.
He spoke the words triumphantly, inordinately, masculinely pleased with himself. “I want you to come for me again.”
“What?”
She tried to rise from the ground, but before she did more than lift her head, Johnny Mack attacked, zeroing in on the flesh that seemed too oversensitized to react. But within minutes, he had brought that numb flesh back to life, and Lane wholeheartedly accepted the pleasure that was forthcoming.
As she climaxed for the second time, Johnny Mack lifted his head, shrugged out of his jeans and brought his big body up and over hers.
“I don’t have a condom,” he moaned into her ear.
“I don’t care.”
“Do you know what you’re saying, what we’re risking?”
“Yes.”
He lifted her hips and surged into her. His shaft thrust deep and wide and filled her to the hilt. The mating began in a frenzy of need beyond enduring, of a hunger born from starvation. He rode her fast and hard. She responded with equal fury. And when he came, jetting his release into her receptive body, he growled with animalistic pleasure, and she held on to him while her body shook with fulfillment.
He rolled over onto the ground beside her, his breathing ragged, and then pulled her up and on top of him. For one long, endless moment they stared at each other, but neither spoke. She laid her head in the crook of his shoulder and curved her back, snuggling against him. He draped her in his embrace, holding her securely against his damp body.
She wanted to tell him that she loved him. That she had never really stopped loving him, not even when she had hated him. But instead she said, “Was it…was it…?”
He kissed her temple and caressed her naked hip. “My fantasy come true.”
“Mine, too.” She sighed and cuddled close, refusing to think about anything, except this one glorious moment.
Chapter 18
Lillie Mae watched them as they came through the garden. Miss Lane in her gown and Johnny Mack with his shirt undone. They had been down by the river, down by the old boathouse. Alone at dawn. With a wispy breeze still stirring and the softness of night barely dissolved into the harsh light of day, they stood at the far edge of the patio, arms wrapped around each other, and kissed. Lillie Mae glanced away, down into the kitchen sink, not wanting to intrude on their private moment.
She had known this would happen, sooner or later. Once Johnny Mack returned to Noble’s Crossing, there had been no denying that the old attraction was still there between Lane and him. Lillie Mae sighed. Only now, he and Lane were adults, not kids, and what happened between them would be all the more powerful, especially since they were dealing with fulfilling the fantasies of first love. Even if Johnny Mack still might be unable to properly label what he had felt for Lane fifteen years ago, Lillie Mae knew. That boy had loved Lane.
Without glancing back out the window, she prepared the coffee machine, then opened the pantry door and walked inside to get a new bag of flour for her homemade biscuits. When she heard the back door open, she peeped out into the kitchen and saw Lane heading up the back stairs. Before Johnny Mack could follow, Lillie Mae scurried across the kitchen and grabbed his arm.
“Wait up a minute,” she told him.
He whipped around to face her. “Damn! Scare the daylights out of a man, would you?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“You’re up awfully early, aren’t you?”
“Not as early as some folks,” she replied.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I saw you and Miss Lane walking up from the river.”
“Never thought you were the nosy type, Lillie Mae.
“I’m not,” she replied. “And under normal circumstances whatever went on between you and Miss Lane would be none of my business, but these aren’t normal circumstances, are they?”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“I’m giving you a warning,” she said. “That gal has gone through more than anybody should have to go through and her not even thirty-five yet. If you hurt her, you’ll have to answer to me.
Don’t make her no promises you don’t intend to keep.”
Johnny Mack buttoned his wrinkled shirt and stuffed the ends into his damp jeans, then ran a hand through his disheveled hair. “Lane told me that you’d once issued Kent a warning. Want to tell me about it?”
Lillie Mae lifted her eyebrows in a speculative glare. “So, she told you about what Kent did to her.”
“Yeah, she told me that when she refused to sleep with him, he raped her. And she also told me that you threatened to kill Kent if he ever touched Lane again.”
“He never raped her again,” Lillie Mae said. “But I sure didn’t ever forgive him for the misery he put that gal through. He was a mean, hate-filled drunk, and he deserved to die. And I would have killed him. Gladly. But I didn’t. And neither did Miss Lane.”
“But she would have, if she’d had to, to protect Will, just as you would have and just as Will would have in order to protect Lane.”
“You’ve got that right. It’s been just the three of us against the world for a long time. And now, you’re here. Finally. Where you belong. With Lane and Will.”
Lillie Mae broke eye contact, then turned and walked across the kitchen and into the pantry. After retrieving a sack of flour, she came out to find Johnny Mack waiting for her at the door.
“Breakfast won’t be ready for another hour,” she said.
“Why didn’t you send for me sooner?”
She sidestepped him and carried the flour sack over to the counter, where she opened it and dumped its contents into a large cannister. “I was tempted. More than once,” she admitted. “But of course those first five years, I didn’t know where you were. After that, when you started sending me those money orders and I saw the envelopes were marked Houston, I asked Miss Lane if she would want to know where you were and if she did, would she ask you to come back to Noble’s Crossing.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said no. By that time, she’d started hating you. And she was convinced that you’d never come back. I guess I figured she was right.” Lillie Mae opened a top cupboard and brought out a large mixing bowl. “Besides, I knew that if you came back, you and Kent would have wound up trying to kill each other.” Using a cup nestled inside the bowl, she measured out flour from the cannister. “I had no way of knowing that you had enough power to fight Miss Edith’s rule over Noble’s Crossing. And to be honest, I thought I was protecting Will from the ugly truth. I knew how Kent would react if he ever found out Will wasn’t really his child.”
“I didn’t do much to earn your trust or Lane’s, did I?” Johnny Mack pulled out a chair from the kitchen table, turned it backward and sat, his legs straddling the seat. He crossed his arms over the back of the chair and rested his chin on his arms.
“I don’t blame you for the kind of boy you were.” Lillie Mae retrieved milk from the refrigerator and shortening from a cabinet under the counter. “What chance did you have to become a decent human being, with no father and Faith Cahill for a mother? You and my Sharon were a lot alike, both growing up with no fathers, both of you wild and dirt poor and hungry for what you couldn’t have. God knows I tried to be a good mama, but I couldn’t give Sharon nothing she wanted and very little of what she needed.”
“Sharon was damn lucky to have had you, to have had someone in her life who loved her, who cared what happened to her.”
“She was a lot like her father, that gal of mine.” Lillie Mae’s chest heaved with the deep breath she took. Thinking about the life Sharon had chosen, about the depths to which she had sunk, broke Lillie Mae’s heart. If only Sharon had taken the fifty thousand dollars Miss Lane had given her and done something worthwhile with her life, she might still be alive. But no, she had blown that money, used it up quick as a wink on a car and clothes and drugs. The drugs were what killed her, long before the HIV ever entered her body.
“Didn’t you ever worry about Will?” Johnny Mack asked. “I mean with Sharon for a mother and me for a father—”
“Didn’t worry much. Most of what was wrong with you and with Sharon was being poor nobodies from the wrong side of the Chickasaw River. If you two had been raised by two loving parents, with a little money and a lot of discipline, y’all would have turned out all right.”
“And that’s what you wanted for Will, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t deny it.” Lillie Mae cut the shortening into the flour and added a little milk. “Sharon didn’t want her baby, and you were long gone. Of course I wanted my grandchild to be raised in the lap of luxury, for his daddy to be a Graham and his mama a Noble.”
“Didn’t it ever bother you not being able to tell Will that you were his grandmother?”
“Maybe it did. Sometimes. But mostly I was just grateful that Miss Lane loved Will so much. And in the beginning, Kent was different. He adored Will, and in his way, I think he loved Lane. I had no idea what a cruel, hurtful man he could be.”
“If you had it to do over again, would you? Would you help Lane perpetuate a lie?”
Lillie Mae began working the dough with her hands. “If I didn’t know what I know now, I suppose I would have. But if I’d realized…” How could she even begin to tell Johnny Mack about how difficult Lane’s life had been, how much sorrow and pain she had endured? But he should know. The only way he could ever truly know Lane, the woman she was today, was to understand what she had lived through. “These past fifteen years haven’t been easy for Miss Lane.”
“Because she married Kent.” Anger tinged his voice.
“Yes, in great part because she married Kent.” Lillie Mae sprinkled flour on a wooden board and up and down the rolling pin. “But there were other things. Her father’s sudden death in that car accident. And nearly two years of watching her mother die slowly.” She dumped the dough onto the board and patted it out until the entire surface rose to about half an inch high. “And realizing how little money her father had left took Lane by surprise. With only the income from the Herald, she had to figure out ways to keep up this big old house and the grounds and to pay for nurses for Miss Celeste.”
“Why didn’t Kent help her financially?” Johnny Mack lifted his chin from his arms and ran a hand over the beard stubble covering his jaw.
“Kent didn’t have any money. It hadn’t taken him long to go through the trust fund Mr. John left him. And you might recall just how tight Miss Edith is with the purse strings. She’s known for her stinginess.”
“And naturally, Miss Edith refused to help Lane.”
“Miss Lane never asked her mother-in-law for help. I reckon she knew Witch Edith wouldn’t part with any of her money, except the child support for Will.” Using a round cutter, Lillie Mae formed the biscuits and laid them out on a greased pan. “For a girl who grew up without a care in the world, Miss Lane wasn’t prepared for reality. Marrying a man she didn’t love. Raising a child, while protecting the truth about his true identity. Dealing with an abusive husband, a crazy sister-in-law, a bitch mother-in-law and an invalid mother. And growing to hate the man she had once loved. Hard days. Sad days. More than most could have endured. Many a time I thought that girl would come unraveled, but somehow she kept it all together.”
“For Will.”
“Yes, mostly for Will.” Lillie Mae placed the pan of uncooked biscuits into the oven.
“You truly love Lane, don’t you?” Johnny Mack stood, walked across the room and placed his hand on Lillie Mae’s shoulder.
She looked him square in the eye. “I sure do love her. And I admire her. And I want to see her happy. Can you do that for her? Can you make that girl happy?”
“I don’t know,” Johnny Mack admitted. “But I promise you that I’m going to try.”
Lillie Mae smiled, a sense of relief washing over her. She had done the right thing sending for Johnny Mack. She wiped her hands off on her apron and patted him on the cheek. “You’d better go upstairs and get a shower and shave before breakfast. You don’t want Will coming down and seeing you looking li
ke a bum who’s been out tomcatting all night.”
Lillie Mae winked at him. He winked back at her before he kissed her on the cheek and then headed up the back stairs.
Lillie Mae laid the silverware at each place setting on the kitchen table just as Will bounded downstairs.
“Good morning. Am I the first one up?”
“Looks that way.”
“I’m starving,” he said. “I think I’ll go ahead and eat and not wait on Mama and our guests.”
“Mind if I join you for that early breakfast?” Quinn Cortez halted halfway down the stairs.
Will watched as his mother’s lawyer entered the room.
“Come on in, Mr. Cortez,” Lillie Mae said.
Will glowered at the man who smiled cordially at his grandmother. What did Cortez think of him? After his confession to Johnny Mack and his mother’s hysterical reaction last night, he had escaped to his room and shut himself off from the world. But a guy could hide out only so long before he had to face his accusers, before he had to face himself and admit the truth. But what was the truth? Had he really murdered Kent? Was he capable of brutally bludgeoning to death the man he had once believed was his father?
He knew that his mother feared the worst. And so did Lillie Mae. They had lied to protect him, but now what would happen since Johnny Mack knew the truth? He wasn’t sure why he’d told Johnny Mack what had happened the day of Kent’s death, why he’d been honest with him. Maybe it was because the man was his father. Or maybe it was because he had finally begun to trust him a little bit. He sure seemed sincere when he said all he wanted to do was help them.
What about Quinn Cortez? Did this man think he had killed Kent? The last thing he wanted right now was to be given the third degree, without his mother and Johnny Mack around for support. Maybe he should act like a man, confess the truth to the police and accept the consequences. But God help him, right now he didn’t feel much like a man. He felt like a kid. A kid who was scared to death and wanted his mama.
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