by Jane Graves
He opened his eyes. “I can do without more heat.”
“I’m getting to the cold part. Will you just be patient?”
He twisted his mouth with disgust, then closed his eyes again.
“Then evening comes,” she said, her voice a near whisper. “The warmth starts to fade. At first you don’t even notice it. But then you turn to the west and see the sun finally slip behind the mountains. A chill seeps into the air. A breeze stirs it up a little, swirling it around you until you feel a little shiver. Goose bumps pop out all over your arms.”
Alex didn’t feel the least bit cooler, but he had to admit he was enjoying every word Val spoke in that soft, mesmerizing voice.
“It was so warm during the day that you’re wearing short sleeves,” she went on, “but suddenly it’s not enough to keep you warm. You go inside to grab a sweater. When you come back out, the last of the orange-and-red sunset is fading away and a narrow crescent moon appears. The night sky looks like a black velvet canvas, and stars pop out all over it like little chips of ice. The air is still. Totally still and quiet, as if the chill has slowed everything to a standstill.”
Val paused. With his eyes still closed, Alex listened to the soft cadence of her breathing, waiting for her to continue.
“Finally it gets cold,” she went on, “so cold that a sweater won’t even keep you warm, so you slip inside, get a blanket, and put it around your shoulders. The moon turns from yellow to white, and your breath starts to fog the air. Pretty soon even the blanket isn’t enough, but you don’t care, because the cold feels so wonderful that you don’t want to leave it. And now you know that there’s a place where, no matter how hot it gets during the day, a little bit of winter comes at night to chase it all away.” She paused. “A place you never want to leave as long as you live.”
Then she was silent.
Alex kept his eyes closed, thinking about the place she’d described. And, miraculously, for those moments in time, the heat didn’t feel quite so oppressive. But it had nothing to do with the wintry imagery and everything to do with the sound of Val’s voice.
“Better?” she whispered.
Slowly he opened his eyes. With his head still resting against the wall of the shed, he turned to look at her.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “It must be a beautiful place.”
“The mountains of northern New Mexico. I spent a week there one summer. Best vacation I ever had.”
“When you were a kid?”
She frowned. “No. Summers when I was a kid were spent in only one place. Cape Cod.”
Alex knew that Cape Cod was hardly hell on earth. But clearly it held no fond memories for Val.
“You went there every year?” he asked.
“My stepfather had a house there. He had houses all over the place.”
Ah. Her stepfather. The man she supposedly hated. “Cape Cod is nice.”
“Yeah. I suppose it is. But he and my mother spent most of the summer entertaining business clients. And I spent most of the summer wishing I were anywhere else.”
“So he had a lot of money.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Alex wanted to know more. But he had a feeling if he asked, she’d never tell him a thing.
Instead, he waited.
Val wiped her forehead on the shoulder of her T-shirt, and he wondered if she was going to continue. Finally she sighed softly and spoke again. But this time her voice was tight. Strained.
“See, William Hamilton was a very wealthy man. My mother worked for him. She had nothing growing up, and she wanted more. A lot more. They got married when I was nine years old.”
“He married one of his employees?”
“Yes. Because she had something he wanted.”
“Which was?”
“She was beautiful. I don’t mean just a little. She was a knockout. Perfect hair, perfect teeth, perfect figure. Every spare dime she had went to manicurists, hairstylists, department stores. She worked hard at losing her accent, and finally went so far as to forbid me to speak Spanish, even though we’d spoken it almost exclusively until I was seven years old. My mother had me when she was seventeen, so she was only twenty-six when she married William Hamilton. He was forty-eight.”
“Trophy wife.”
“Yeah. And she lived in mortal fear that she wouldn’t fit in. Actually, she fit in just fine. I was the one who didn’t.”
“How so?”
“We came to live with my stepfather in a house that made the Reichert house look like servants’ quarters. My mother never spoke Spanish again. From that moment on, I had to talk right, sit right, walk right, act right. Appearances were everything. And when I didn’t conform, my mother was horrified.”
“Like when you dyed your hair orange.”
“Yes. She spent every waking minute trying to keep me from doing something that might displease my stepfather, because, after all, he held the purse strings. She wanted me to dress like some little debutante and act like one, too. What I wanted was never taken into consideration if it clashed with her lifestyle.”
Alex thought about where Val lived now, a cozy little apartment in a quirky neighborhood that fit her personality perfectly. He just couldn’t see her in some big mansion with servants all over the place.
“Every time I changed my hair color, every time I got caught smoking pot at school, every time I got bad grades, my mother panicked just a little bit more. She hated the fact that I was such an embarrassment to her and her husband. She didn’t give a damn about me. She saw me only as somebody who was systematically screwing up her life. The more rebellious I got, the more hateful she became, and I seriously got to thinking that she’d toss me aside in a heartbeat if it came down to me or William Hamilton’s money. Then one day I found out—”
She stopped short.
“Found out what?”
She stared down at her hands, her face falling into a tight frown. “I found out how right I was. And just how sleazy a stepfather can be.”
Alex felt his stomach clench. He glanced at her, hating to say the words. “Do you mean—”
“Never mind,” she said quickly. “I have no idea why I told you that.”
“Are you telling me your stepfather—”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, Alex. It wasn’t as bad as what you’re thinking.”
“Just how bad was it?”
“Bad enough. But you’ll notice I survived just fine.”
Alex couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. He’d spent a lot of time wondering what made Val tick, but here was more evidence that he’d barely scratched the surface. She said she’d survived just fine. He wasn’t so sure.
“And they’re both dead now anyway,” Val said. “So none of it really matters anymore.”
“Dead? Your mother? You said she was pretty young.”
“Never mind, Alex.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it?” he said gently.
She made a scoffing noise. “Because it’s a sordid little story full of a lot of pathetic, tear-jerky stuff. And I know how you hate all that emotional crap. Believe me—you don’t want to hear it.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Come on, Alex. Anyone with half a brain can see that you’re not exactly overflowing with sensitivity. The last thing you want to hear about is my stepfather problems.”
“Then why do you suppose I asked?”
“I told you before. Don’t try to be sympathetic. It doesn’t suit you.”
With that, she dismissed him completely. She folded her arms and turned away, as if she wanted to get as far away from him as possible. Something had happened back then, but she wasn’t going to talk about it.
At least not to him.
Alex told himself that he should be glad Val had refused to talk. Why had he even asked her any questions in the first place? He didn’t need to know any of her deep, dark secrets. After all, she was right. Sympathy was not his strong suit. All his life he’d run the ot
her way as soon as it looked as if he was going to get dragged down into somebody else’s problems, because that was the last place he’d ever wanted to be.
Until now.
The moment that thought came into his mind, he shoved it aside. But the more Val huddled against the wall of the shed, refusing to look at him, the more he realized the truth.
He didn’t want her to push him away. He wanted her to talk to him. He wanted to know everything about her, the good and the bad. Suddenly the idea of a woman’s life becoming part of his didn’t scare him in the least. In fact, he welcomed it.
This made no sense. None at all. Given the situation they were in, he knew he should be thanking his lucky stars that she’d chosen to keep her problems to herself. Instead, for the first time in his life he wanted to get close to a woman.
And she wouldn’t let him.
“What are you so afraid of?” he asked.
She turned, a look of surprise in her eyes. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
“I used to believe that. But it’s not the truth, is it?” Moving slowly, he sat up, then turned to stare at her. “In fact, I think there are a lot of things you’re afraid of. But you can scratch one off your list.”
“What’s that?”
“Me.”
She blinked with surprise, but instead of denying it, she turned away, looking flustered. He pushed a strand of sweat-dampened hair away from her cheek, then coaxed her to look back at him again.
“I care about you, Val. How long is it going to take you to figure that out?”
For a moment she looked at him openly, her eyes wide. Then, slowly, her expression melted into distrust again. And all at once he knew that he wasn’t the only one in her life who’d ever gotten that look. It was so sharp, so intense, so well practiced that it had become part of her, a weapon of defense she used when she sensed that one more person was going to let her down. It was her way of beating somebody to the punch.
But right now, something else was mingling with that expression, something she was trying very hard to hide: hope. One tiny glimmer of hope that he was telling her the truth. Christ, what in the world had happened to make her so cynical? To give her such a hard shell that he couldn’t blast his way through it?
He could have told her again that he cared about her. He could have told her to trust him, that he wasn’t going to hurt her ever again. He could have spoken a hundred different phrases of reassurance, but she was so adept at verbal sidestepping that he knew words just weren’t going to cut it. He didn’t know exactly what had happened to her in the past to make her so wary. He only knew that he never wanted to see that look on her face again.
Finally, out of sheer frustration, he did the only thing he could think of to do: he curled his hand around the back of her neck, pulled her toward him, and kissed her.
The moment his mouth fell against hers, he felt her surprise. Every muscle in her body tensed. He could feel her inclination to pull away, which told him that kissing her was probably a monumental mistake. But he didn’t back off. Instead, he urged her lips apart with his, tangling his fingers in her hair and kissing her hard and deep, without restraint and without the slightest bit of mercy. He wanted the connection between them to hum through every cell in her body, until she knew for a fact that even when he stopped kissing her, something was still between them that wasn’t going to go away.
Her initial resistance slowly subsided, but he didn’t give an inch. He continued to kiss her until she went limp in his arms, surrendering completely. Only then did he finally pull away. She stared at him breathlessly, her eyes glazed and her cheeks flushed red, her voice as hot as the hill country of southwest Texas in the dead of summer.
“Alex?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t stop.”
chapter nineteen
The moment Val spoke those two words, Alex’s mouth was on hers again. He tightened his hand against the back of her neck, his fingers spread, as he swept his tongue, hot and moist and insistent, deep into her mouth.
The relentless heat in this shed was making her mind so hazy she couldn’t think straight, and everything Alex was doing to her was only making her hotter. She needed to push him away, to keep him at arm’s length until she could get her bearings. Instead she went limp in his arms, giving in, letting him lower her to the hard plank floor of the shed. He pushed her sweat-soaked hair away from her left cheek and kissed her there, then moved downward to her neck, threading his fingers through her hair at the same time. She moaned softly and tilted her head back, allowing him to kiss all the way down her throat and back up again.
He moved to the tender spot just beneath her ear and teased it with a swirl of his tongue, then gave her a little nip on her earlobe that sent shivers all the way through her. He circled back around to recapture her lips in one more deep, all-encompassing kiss, until the heat they were generating together made the heat in the shed seem frigid by comparison.
She reached around to the small of his back and caught his T-shirt at the edge of his jeans. She yanked it up until it was free, then took a fistful of the hem and pulled it halfway up his back. She placed her palm flat against his bare skin, skimming over its sweat-slicked surface. That one skin-to-skin touch told her that she was never going to get enough of him. Never.
She slid both hands down his back, raking her nails all the way from his shoulders to his waist and back up again. He groaned softly, his lips humming against hers. Then she took a double handful of the back of his shirt and pulled it up toward his neck, urging him to take it off. He rose quickly to his knees. He pulled the gun out of the waistband of his jeans and laid it aside, then dragged his shirt off over his head and threw it down, the veins of his arms standing out in sharp relief every time his biceps flexed. He hovered over her for a moment, his chest and shoulders slick with sweat, and she didn’t think she’d ever seen a more gorgeous man in her life. He was all bone and muscle, with dark hair across his chest that came together in a narrow band that ran down the hollow between his abdominals and swirled around his navel, before finally disappearing into the waistband of his jeans.
Still on his knees, he reached down, tugged the hem of her T-shirt free, then tucked his hands beneath it. He skimmed his hands up her sides, dragging her T-shirt along with them until it was bunched up under her arms, exposing her bra. She gasped.
“Alex—”
“My shirt, now yours.”
“But—”
“You said don’t stop. Did you mean it?”
He loomed over her, breathing hard, impatience running wild on his face. She tried to drag in a decent breath, but the thick, heat-soaked air in the shed made it impossible, netting her nothing but the scent of old wood and dust and sweat. The moment of lucidity she’d managed to find vanished again.
She reached up, grabbed him by the shoulders, and pulled him down, seeking his lips again. As his mouth fell against hers, she wrapped her arms around his neck, dragging him down to rest on one elbow beside her. She hooked her heel over the back of his calf and pulled him around until his leg was draped over both of hers, denim scraping against denim. She felt his erection against her thigh, straining against his jeans, pressing against her so hard that she knew she’d have a bruise in the morning and she couldn’t have cared less.
He shoved her T-shirt out of the way again. He touched her breast through the thin fabric of her bra, circling its fullness, pressing, squeezing, moving tantalizingly close to her nipple, then moving away again. Her bra was so sweat-soaked that it felt like a second skin, offering virtually no barrier between her skin and his. She twisted, arched, until finally he caught her nipple between his thumb and forefinger and teased it gently. She felt a hard jolt of pleasure and squirmed beneath him, but he pressed his leg down harder against hers and continued to tease her nipple until she thought she’d go crazy. Finally he flicked her bra open and pushed the sweat-soaked fabric away. He took her hand, tangled his fingers with hers, then pressed it
against the floor near her shoulder. At the same time, he leaned over her, lowering his mouth, brushing his tongue against first one nipple, then the other. She closed her eyes and threw her head back, her breathing harsh and irregular, as he continued the delicious torment with his tongue and lips. It was heaven and hell all at the same time, a pleasure so intense it was almost painful, making her want to scream at him to stop at the same time she wanted it to go on forever. But with his leg still draped over hers and her hand imprisoned in his, she was at his mercy.
Then she felt him shift. A moment later his breath, hot and ragged, skimmed the column of her throat, moving upward to the pulse point behind her ear. He kissed her there, sending warm shivers coursing through her. Then he whispered hotly into her ear, “If you really do want me to stop, say so now. This is your one and only chance.”
Her throat was so tight with pure sexual arousal that she could barely get the words out. “No. Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”
He rose immediately, placing one knee on either side of her thighs, then reached for the button fly of her jeans. Yes. Yes. She wanted the damned things off, wanted to feel his hands on her there and everywhere. She wanted to do the same to him, to peel his jeans off until they were skin-to-skin with nothing in between them. She didn’t give a damn where they were or what was happening. She only knew that she wanted Alex in every way there was for a woman to have a man, and when she ran out of those, she intended to invent a few more.
As she lay on the floor of the shed, barely able to catch a breath, Alex unbuttoned one button of her fly. The anticipation she felt was excruciating, and she wanted to shout at him to hurry, please hurry, because she couldn’t take it anymore.
Instead, with one button hanging open, he placed his palms on her legs and skimmed his thumbs over her inner thighs, back and forth, over and over. She squeezed her eyes closed. Even through the heavy fabric of her jeans, it was just about more than she could stand. Now, right now, when she was desperate for him to move fast, he was slowing down. Driving her crazy. Knowing he was driving her crazy.