Their breathing changed, getting hoarser, raspier. Their coupling was primal now. Fierce and hungry. He plunged heedlessly into her, driving them closer and closer to the edge.
They were almost there. Both of them. Ready to come together. As one.
“Ah-ah-ah.” Rachael made a noise, desperate, hungry.
He must have misinterpreted her sound of encouragement and thought she wanted him to hurry when she wanted the exact opposite. He began to pump faster, sliding in and out of her, quickening his rhythm.
Why was he speeding up when they’d been so in sync before? If he kept this up, he was going to go off without her. Half-cocked.
It had been too long for him. She feared he wasn’t going to last.
And then Brody just stopped.
Rachael felt as if she’d been left hanging headfirst off a cliff. Bizarre sensation. Then she realized her shoulders and head had slipped off the bed and she was indeed dangling.
“You’re falling off the bed.” Brody slipped out of her and gently moved her back onto the pillows.
They looked at each other.
“I was going too fast,” he said.
She nodded.
“Tell me these things. Don’t let me be a bad lover,” he pleaded and his vulnerability hit her straight in the heart.
She stroked him, but kept talking, low and soothing. “You’re not a bad lover, not at all. You’re just a surprise. It’s okay if our first time together feels a little strange.”
In the past, she would have taken any glitch in lovemaking as a sign they weren’t meant to be. Now, that seemed incredibly shortsighted. They were just getting to know each other’s bodies.
“I surprise you?” he asked.
“Sheriff,” she said huskily, “you have no idea.”
“How do we overcome this strangeness?”
“No way through it . . . ” she started to say.
“Except to do it,” he finished for her.
They smiled at each other.
And began anew.
He kept up the steady rocking, driving her deeper and deeper into the savage wanting that was changing everything she had ever known about herself and what she was capable of.
Brody thrust into her again and again. His entire being seemed to slide deeper and deeper into hers until she could not differentiate where her body stopped and his began.
Something earth-shattering happened. Something she’d never experienced before. It was as if his soul had leaped from his body and shot straight into hers along with his orgasm.
He cried out as his essence poured out of him, imbuing her with streaming currents of his masculine energy.
Together, they melted.
Nothing else existed.
Even the cabin was gone, disappearing in the laser- beam moment of blissful orgasmic feeling.
He cried out one last time and shoved himself as deep as he could go into her warmth.
The walls of her sucked at him, gripping, kneading, pulling this man into the very core of her.
Mystical, magical sparks of flesh and fire melded together. Shattering, scattering, torturing. Melting her heart from the inside out.
A second orgasm sprang up from inside her groin, flooded her body, drowning her brain. She was numb, wrung, spent.
Brody’s body shuddered, then went limp.
They clung to each other, helpless, as wave after wave of energy rippled through them. Gasping, he rolled over, sinking onto his back and taking her with him. He held her close as her chest heaved and quivered.
She slipped her arms around his powerful neck, squeezing him tight as tears flowed warm and free down her cheeks. His strength pinched her chest and stole her breath.
And she had the most terrifying feeling that he had given her his heart for safekeeping and she had tucked it irrevocably inside her soul.
RACHAEL WOKE IN the night to find Brody snuggled up behind her. His thick forearm was thrown around her waist, her butt tucked against his pelvis. In that brief moment of hazy half-sleep, Rachael allowed herself to dream.
Mine.
Joy flooded her heart. Weightlessness lifted her mind. Her toes curled inside her socks and a grin spread across her face. But just as quickly as her joy came, it was immediately replaced with crippling fear.
Her smiled vanished. Her toes straightened. Reality stomped around inside her head like a stevedore in hobnailed boots. The joy drained from her heart, swirled away into the darkness of the quiet cabin.
She’d been here before. Thought the same romantic thoughts. Found out later she was wrong. She’d promised herself she wasn’t going to romanticize any man ever again and she’d gone and done that very thing with Brody.
Sadly, the poor guy had no clue what he’d let himself in for and she had a horrible feeling he was falling in love with her.
Hope flickered again, a desperate flame struggling to take hold. Ruthlessly, Rachael snubbed it out. No. She was not doing this again.
He stirred in his sleep, pulling her tighter against him.
Panic flapped inside her rib cage. She wriggled out from under his arm and sat up. She had to distance herself.
“Rachael?” he mumbled drowsily. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, go back to sleep, just heading for the bathroom.”
“Hurry back,” he said and patted the spot beside him. “It’s lonesome without you.”
Lonesome without you.
Oh! She so wanted to rhapsodize that comment. Instead, she dug her fingernails into her palms and padded to the bathroom.
She stayed in the bathroom for at least fifteen minutes, giving him time to fall back asleep. Finally, after her butt grew numb from sitting so long on the toilet, she headed back to bed.
And the minute she sank down onto the mattress, his arm was around her again, drawing her flush against him as if they were spoons in a drawer.
Wistfulness mingled with regret inside her. Why couldn’t she have met him before Trace and Robert and all the others?
Wait. She had met him first. He was her first unrequited love. He’d had his chance and he blew it.
Come on. You were seven. He was twelve. It was a childhood crush. What did you expect from him?
The heat from his body warmed her. The reassuring sound of his steady breathing made her feel safe. The smell of him was in her nose, rich and masculine and so utterly . . . Brody.
“What’s the matter, Peaches?”
Peaches. His pet name for her. Oh gosh, she was going to have to hurt him.
“Nothing,” she mumbled.
“Can’t sleep?”
She didn’t answer.
“Would you like to talk about it?” he asked.
Now was as good a time as any, she supposed, to get it over with.
“I . . . ” she started. “I have a feeling you want more than I can give you.”
He responded by pushing her hair aside and kissing the nape of her neck. “I have no expectations.”
“Honestly?” She turned, faced him.
“Honestly.”
“Um . . . why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why are you satisfied with what you can get? Don’t you want the fairy tale? Great love, kids, happily-ever- after.”
“The fairy tale is a myth,” he said. “You know that.”
“What about great love?”
“Great love scares the hell out of me.”
“Really? How come? I was under the impression nothing scared you.”
He didn’t say anything for the longest time and she figured he wasn’t going to tell her, then he said, “I saw great love destroy my parents.”
She rested her chin on his chest and looked into his eyes. It was too dark to see any more than a glimmer. His body was a rock-solid layer of muscle beneath his skin, hard and warm.
“Love destroyed them? How?”
He shifted. She felt his breathing quicken.
“My parents were always that couple you see
holding hands at the shopping mall. The couple who give each other knowing looks across a crowded room, even after they’ve been married for years. You never saw one without the other. They were always together.”
“That’s how my parents were. It was nice,” Rachael whispered.
“Mom got sick,” Brody continued. “She needed an operation but we didn’t have any insurance because my dad was self-employed. Her surgery was going to cost double my dad’s annual salary. This was during the first Gulf War and oil companies were paying huge amounts of money for people to rebuild Kuwait. My dad signed up to go in order to earn money for my mother’s surgery. That’s why we left Valentine when I was twelve. To go live with my mother’s parents in Midland while my dad was away.”
He told the story matter-of-factly, but Rachael heard the underlying pain in his voice.
“Six months later, my dad died in an oil-rig accident in Kuwait.” Brody loosened his grip on her. “My mother was devastated.”
Silence filled the cabin. An ember from the fireplace glowed dark red.
“The company had taken out life insurance on him, but by the time all the legal rigmarole was over and the money arrived, my mother was dead.”
“Oh no.” Rachael hissed in a breath.
“Not from her illness. If she’d held on, the operation would have had a good chance of curing her, but out of grief over losing my father. Without him, she didn’t want to live. Not even for Deana and me.”
“I’m so sorry, Brody.”
He grunted. “So was I. But losing my parents at such a young age taught me a lot. It taught me how to stand on my own two feet and not depend on anyone to rescue me. It taught me life was damned hard. And, it taught me to stay away from great love.”
“So,” she said. “You’ve spent your life avoiding great love. That’s why you married a woman you didn’t really love. Because it was safe.”
“Something along those lines.”
Tears for everything he had suffered welled up inside her. She wanted to tell him great love was worth taking a chance on, but she didn’t know that. She’d taken chance after chance and she’d never found the kind of great love his parents had shared.
“You see, Peaches, you’ve got nothing to be scared of where I’m concerned. So you can relax. The last thing I’m looking for is a great love.”
Chapter Seventeen
Long after Rachael had gone back to sleep, Brody lay in bed listening to the gentle sounds of her soft breathing and thinking about how he’d lied to her.
He’d told her he wasn’t looking for a great love. The truth was, he’d already found it.
In her.
But he knew if he’d said that, if he’d given her the slightest inkling that he was stone-cold in love with her, she would run for the hills, afraid of her own feelings, afraid to take one last gamble on love.
He realized the only way to convince her was to not convince her. He couldn’t romance her, no badly how he might want to. Romantic gestures would make her skeptical. She’d learned to see right through flowers and candy and long moonlit walks. The woman needed substance. A man she could believe in.
And he was determined to be that man. No matter how hard it was to keep his distance.
She was staunch in her anti-romance stance and he applauded her for her convictions. She’d grown a great deal in the past few months. She had gone from starry-eyed innocent, ready to believe any man who murmured the words “I love you,” to a self-confident woman who refused to let anyone define who and what she was capable of becoming. He admired her for that, even though it made things harder for him.
He also had to admit he liked the challenge. And when he won her, it would be for all the marbles — a ring, marriage, commitment, kids, happily-ever-after, a forever kind of love.
Because Rachael wasn’t the only one who had changed, and he hadn’t fully realized it until tonight, until he’d been inside her, made love to her, fused with her.
He’d been wrong about his parents, about great love. He understood now that he was experiencing it. Great love didn’t destroy. It made you whole in a way nothing else ever could. Rachael made him feel that way. Whole again.
And for a man who’d lost his leg, feeling whole again had seemed impossible.
He loved her not just for what she was — which in itself was significant with her beauty, her spontaneity, and her profound passion for life — but for what he was when he was with her.
Rachael’s honesty about her emotions and inner struggles helped him face his own feelings. Feelings he’d kept buried for a long time, feelings that needed to be examined and then released. Her playful charm made him feel like a kid again, unburdened and free. And her supportive compassion had him trying his best to live up to the ideal of the man he saw in her eyes.
He loved her not for what she had made of herself — -turning from a jilted bride dependent on a man for her self-worth into a sharp woman in charge of her own life — but for what she was turning him into, a man who was no longer afraid to put his heart on the line.
And that was the thing, wasn’t it? He was no longer afraid, but she was. Ironic, really.
Brody smiled into the darkness, smiled and smiled and smiled because he knew she didn’t have a chance. One way or the other, he was going to have her heart. And he could wait until she was ready because Rachael was worth waiting for.
BRODY HAD A plan for trapping the vandal. His time with Rachael had unleashed his creativity and he realized what he could do to put a stop to the shenanigans that had been disrupting his town.
The Monday after the fishing tournament and his rendezvous with Rachael, he strode into Kelvin’s office. “I want to borrow your mock-up replica of Valentine Land and put it on display in the town square.”
Kelvin leaned back in his chair, feet propped on his desk. “Now why in the hell do you think I would agree to that? The model was ten years in the making.”
“To catch the vandal and up your chances of getting the bond election passed.”
That got the mayor’s attention. He sat up straight, dropped his feet to the floor and leaned forward, fingers steepled. “I’m listening.”
MICHAEL HAD SPENT the weekend trying to get hold of Selina but she didn’t answer her phone or come to the door. They’d been close to something out there on the lake before Vivian had shown up and ruined it all.
He hung around Higgy’s Diner hoping Selina would show up in town. Audie Gaston took great delight in telling the story of how Selina had rented a jackhammer to break up their heart on the Walk of Flames. Michael’s heart had slid uneasily in his chest. He’d gone right out and counted out the squares. One, two, three, four. There it was, scuffed but still intact. He’d inhaled a hungry lungful of air and it was only then that he realized he’d been holding his breath.
On the following Monday Michael walked the quarter mile down their driveway to the heart-shaped mailbox in his boxer shorts and bathrobe. On the stroll, he’d been thinking about ways to win Selina back. Romantic gestures hadn’t worked. Neither had Rachael’s advice to leave her alone. He knew there had to be some way to get through to her; he just didn’t know what that was.
He popped open the mailbox lid, took out the bills and circulars and the ubiquitous credit card applications, and then he saw it.
The yellow envelope from Purdy Maculroy.
Michael’s heart pinched painfully. He slipped a finger underneath the flap and got a nasty paper cut, but he barely felt it. His heart was what hurt as he took out the divorce papers, flipped to the back, and saw Selina’s signature.
The pain in his chest intensified, shot up his shoulder, down his back, through his arm. The cut on his index finger was leaving dabs of blood on the divorce papers. His vision blurred. Sweat popped out on his forehead. He sat down hard on the ground, clutching his left arm. His mouth went dry. His body shook.
His heart!
He’d never felt such pain.
Later the doctors told
him that if Brody Carlton hadn’t driven by when he did, Michael wouldn’t have survived the heart attack.
SELINA AND RACHAEL arrived at the hospital together and raced to Michael’s bedside. The minute Selina saw her husband lying in the hospital bed hooked up to tubes and machinery she wanted to burst into tears. She was heartsick for the man she’d loved for as long as she could remember.
She expected Michael to say something to her but he did not. Instead he looked at Rachael. “Sweetheart, tell your mother to sit down. She looks like she’s about to faint.”
What? He wasn’t even going to speak to her directly? Selina swayed on her feet. If Michael wouldn’t talk to her after a heart attack it truly meant things were over for them. The thought hit her in the belly like a solid punch. She’d lost him forever.
“Mom?”
Rachael’s voice sounded far away. She felt her daughter’s hand on her shoulder, pushing her down onto the plastic chair at Michael’s bedside. Selina swallowed back the tears. Even when she’d been so angry over Vivian she’d never stopped loving him. She’d simply been hoping against hope that he would prove to her she truly was the one he loved. That she hadn’t made a mistake all those years ago.
Now those hopes were shattered.
But he was still the father of her children and she cared about him, even if he didn’t care about her.
Michael didn’t meet her gaze. “Rachael, could you run down to the cafeteria and get me a soda from the Coke machine?”
“You’re not supposed to have . . . ” Selina started, then bit down on her bottom lip.
“Sure, Daddy.” Rachael headed for the door.
“Why don’t you go ahead and have breakfast while you’re down there,” he said. “The nurse told me they have an omelet station until ten.”
Was he sending Rachael away on purpose? Hope lifted her heart.
“You want to be alone with Mom?”
A muscle ticked at her husband’s eye. He nodded, but did not smile. An ominous feeling twisted inside Selina and her hopes nosedived.
“She looks stretched thin,” he commented as the door shut behind their daughter.
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