But he wasn’t alone, and he wasn’t unloved. Not as long as Lucy’s heart was still beating.
“I always felt like there was something wrong with me,” Blue told Lucy, “because here I was, living this dream of my mother’s and hating every damn minute of it. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized it was her dream, Yankee. Not mine. Sure, it would have been nice if it had all worked out, but it didn’t, and that wasn’t my fault.”
Maybe that dream of Blue’s mother had just taken a whole lot longer to work out than she’d anticipated. Because right now there was someone in Hatboro Creek—someone who would do her damnedest to take care of Blue and keep him safe. Someone who loved him. Someone named Lucy Tait.
But that, too, was something Lucy couldn’t tell Blue. Her words would scare him away. Instead of telling him in words that she loved him, she would show him how she felt.
She reached out and took his hand, lacing her fingers through his.
But there was regret in his eyes as he looked down at her. “Lucy, I don’t think—”
“Shh,” she said, lifting herself slightly onto her toes to kiss him. His mouth was soft and warm and tasted like sweetened coffee. He groaned as she ran her tongue lightly across his lips and he pulled her into his arms, deepening the kiss.
Blue was spinning. One kiss, and he couldn’t stop. One kiss, and he’d finally discovered the meaning of the word impossible. All his life he’d refused to acknowledge that anything could be undo-able. All his life impossible wasn’t a word that was in his working vocabulary. Before this kiss, nothing was impossible. But now he knew he’d been mistaken. Staying away from Lucy, keeping the hot-burning sex, the uncontrollable need, out of their relationship was proving to be just that.
Her hands were up underneath the edge of his shirt, her fingers cool against his skin despite the heat of the night. Her touch left no doubt in his mind exactly what Lucy wanted. She wanted him. All of him. And she wanted him now.
And dear Lord, as much as he knew that he shouldn’t, the truth was that he wanted her, too. He wanted her with a power that shook him to his very soul, a power that steamrolled over his resolve to keep sex out of their friendship, a power that neutralized his need to meet the impossible head-on and win.
Staying away from Lucy was going to be impossible, because as much as he wanted to do the right thing, he wanted even more to make love to her, to please her, to hear that incredible, sexy catch in her breath as he filled her. He wanted all that so much more.
He wanted to stop, but he didn’t want to stop badly enough.
She was unfastening his shirt, and he helped her with the last button, then let it slide from his arms onto the grass. He unbuckled his shoulder holster as she pulled her T-shirt over her head. The moonlight glistened enticingly on her beautiful, smooth skin, on the curve of her breasts and the white lace of her bra. And then she was in his arms again and he was touching her.
Mercy! All day long he’d fought the urge to touch her. All day long he’d told himself Lucy couldn’t possibly be as soft and as smooth and as delicious to touch and kiss and taste as he remembered. What they’d done last night had been damn good, but his imagination and raging libido had surely taken those memories and inflated them beyond reason.
He was wrong.
She was perfection.
And she was his.
“Let’s go for a swim,” she whispered, unbuckling his belt. Her eyes were shining a promise that took his breath away as she smiled at him. Blue knew without a doubt that she could have suggested that they go down into the darkest reaches of Hell and he would have gladly followed.
He kicked off his sandals and stripped off the rest of his clothes as Lucy did the same.
She was beautiful in the moonlight—so much so that his chest felt painfully tight at the sight of her. She started toward the water, but then stopped and turned to face him, as if she somehow knew that he wanted to take a moment to look at her. Her dark hair hung thick and shining around her shoulders—shoulders that were both strong and feminine at the same time. She was muscular and sleek, yet soft in all the right places. Her legs were long and well toned, leading up to slim hips and a flat stomach. The silvery light gleamed off her golden skin, casting enticing shadows, emphasizing the soft curve of her hips, the fullness of her breasts. Her nipples were taut with anticipation and need.
That need was echoed on her beautiful face. Her lips were moist and parted slightly and her usually dancing eyes were heavy-lidded and filled with a molten desire as she gazed back at him.
Lucy hadn’t turned back to let him look at her, Blue realized suddenly, a jolt of new fire flooding through his veins. She’d turned back because she wanted to look at him.
Her gaze was almost as palpable as a caress as her eyes skimmed across his body. She boldly took her time when she reached the obvious evidence of his arousal. When she finally looked up again, she smiled into his eyes, a smile sweet and hot and filled with pleasure.
Then she turned, and a few short steps brought her to the edge of the pond. She did a surface dive out into the center, barely making a splash, then disappeared into the darkness of the water.
Blue followed more slowly, watching as she emerged on the other side of the small pond.
“Hell,” he said as he stepped off the edge and found himself suddenly waist deep in icy water. “This water is cold.”
“There’s some kind of underground cold spring feeding into this pond,” Lucy said, drifting toward him. “It’s great—normally around here a pond this size would become stagnant and turn into a swamp within a matter of months. But this thing has been around for years. I used to come out here and skinny-dip all the time back in high school.”
“If only I’d known,” Blue murmured, lowering himself so that the cool water went up to his chin. The cut on his arm stung for a moment, but only for a moment.
“I invited you out here for a swim once,” Lucy said, treading water as she gazed at him. “I told you all about this pond. But you never showed.”
He didn’t remember.
“It was a really hot day, and you stopped to talk to me,” Lucy said. “It was the only other time we actually spoke—besides that time you came to my rescue.”
“You mean the time those damn fools broke your rib out on the baseball field.”
“It was only cracked.”
“Same difference.”
“It was almost exactly a month after that happened,” she said. “And it’s not the same difference. It takes less time for a cracked rib to heal.”
“I know. I’ve experienced both,” Blue said. “Neither is any fun.” He smiled at her. “Both times I thought about you, Yankee, while the doctor was taping me up.”
Lucy splashed water in his direction. “You did not.”
“God’s truth,” he said, dodging the water. “I honestly did. I thought what a tough kid you must’ve been to handle that kind of pain.”
“You’re just saying that to make up for not remembering the only other time we ever talked back in high school,” Lucy teased to cover up her embarrassment. “Shoot, it was one of the highlights of my freshman year, and you don’t have even the vaguest recollection.”
Blue protested. “Remind me more about it,” he said. “Maybe I’ll remember.”
“It was about a month after that fight. You and I nearly had a head-on collision in the hall outside the locker rooms,” Lucy told him. “I was coming inside after a practice.”
Blue felt his memory stirring. “And I just finished some long-distance run?”
“And it was about a million degrees out,” Lucy said. “We were having some kind of weird heat wave.”
“Yeah, that’s right. It was October, right?” Blue said. He could see her, standing in the hallway of the school. She was wearing her baseball uniform, her knees all torn up from fielding ground balls, her hair falling out of a ponytail. Somehow he hadn’t noticed her five-thousand-watt smile and her beautiful, sparkling
eyes. He must have been blind, or a damned fool, or both. “But it was around ninety degrees, wasn’t it? I do remember, Yankee. I was dying of heat.”
“You were literally dripping with sweat.”
“I was disgusting.”
“You were sexy as hell.”
She was sexy as hell right now, with the cool water barely covering the tops of her breasts. The first shock of the water had cooled Blue’s overheated body down, but now he was getting used to the chilly temperature. And the thought of Lucy wrapping her long legs around his waist was creating quite a bit of new heat. Any minute now, this cold-water pond was going to start boiling.
“You were fifteen years old,” he said. “You didn’t even know what that word meant.”
“Sexy?” Lucy’s eyebrows went up. “Wanna make a bet, McCoy? One look at you and I was practically paralyzed.”
He laughed again. “I thought you were just shy.”
“Me? No way.” She smiled at him. “No, I was just overdosing on a sudden release of hormones.”
He could relate to that phenomenon, but it didn’t make him paralyzed. She was still drifting in the water, about six feet away from Blue, but he meant to change that soon.
“I think I asked you how the baseball team was doing, right?” he inquired, moving in a big, lazy circle around her. He went briefly under the water and came back up, tossing his wet hair out of his face.
“You did.” She turned in the water to keep facing him, paddling with her hands to stay afloat. “I told you we’d won our first six games, but that the team still had some personality problems to work through. I said that just that afternoon, the catcher and the center fielder got into a fistfight. You said that the unseasonable heat and humidity were making everyone more irritable.”
Blue stopped swimming. “You really remember all that?”
Lucy smiled. “I wrote a word-for-word account in my journal,” she confessed.
“That’s when you told me about this pond of yours,” Blue said. “You invited me over for a swim. I remember. It sounded really nice, and I told you maybe I’d drop by.”
“But you didn’t show. I was heartbroken.”
Her voice was light and teasing, but Blue knew there had to be at least a touch of truth to her words.
“I was a fool, Lucy.”
“I was way out of my league.”
“You were a little young,” Blue admitted. “I knew you maybe had a crush on me, but I didn’t take it seriously. If I had—if I’d really looked at you…”
“You had Jenny Lee,” Lucy said. “She was perfect. I was the poster model for bad-hair days.”
“At least you weren’t afraid to go swimming and get your hair wet,” Blue said. “I swear, the entire time Jenny and I dated, she never went into the water.”
“That’s the problem with perfection,” Lucy said wistfully. “Once you’ve got it, I imagine you spend a great deal of time worrying about losing it.”
Blue knew that she was talking about more than just Jenny Lee Beaumont’s hair. But as if she sensed him about to question her, she dove underneath the water. When she came back up, her hair was sleek against her head. She ran her hands back across it, pushing out most of the water.
Lucy met his eyes and smiled. “I used to see you down at the beach and over at the marina,” she said. “I always wondered why Jenny wasn’t with you. I didn’t realize it was a hair thing.” She shook her head and laughed. “God, if I had been your girlfriend, I would have followed you everywhere, including into the water.”
If Lucy had been his girlfriend…Jenny Lee had given Blue an intense physical relationship, but she hadn’t cared about him, not really. Lucy would have cared.
“It was more than a hair thing with Jenny Lee,” Blue said. He started to swim in circles around her again. Each circle was tighter, bringing him closer to her. “If I had been smart, I would’ve had a cute Yankee freshman for my girlfriend.”
“You had your chance,” Lucy said. She started swimming in circles, too, at the same leisurely speed. At this pace, he’d never reach her. “I invited you out here for a swim. I had the perfect evening planned. You were the one who didn’t show up.”
“You quit too soon,” Blue said. “What happened to that famous Yankee tenacity I always read about? You could’ve done something to get me to notice you.”
Lucy snorted. “You wouldn’t have noticed me even if I’d juggled chain saws. You wouldn’t have been able to see me past Jenny Lee’s big—”
Blue had to laugh at that. “Give me a break,” he said. “I was eighteen years old, and Jenny just sort of hand-delivered herself to me. Did you know she asked me out first?”
Lucy silently shook her head.
He raked his wet hair back with one hand. “The first three times we went out, Jenny called me,” Blue said. “Before I knew it, we were going steady.” He laughed in disbelief. “I figured she really did love me, because all she ever wanted to do was come over to my house and hang out, just the two of us. We’d watch TV and you know…get real cozy on the couch. Truth was, there were more than two of us in that TV room. There was Jenny and there was me and there was Gerry—or at least the possibility that Gerry would appear. He came home from college a lot on the weekends. See, it turned out that Jenny was using me to get close to Gerry. Even back then, he was the one she wanted.”
What was he doing, dissecting his relationship with Jenny Lee in front of Lucy? She didn’t want to hear about this, so why was he telling her? He should be kissing her, not talking. All he seemed to do these days was talk.
But it was so easy to talk to Lucy. Blue never got the sense that she was listening with only half an ear. When she listened to him talk, she really paid attention. And she wasn’t afraid of silence, like most people. Most people felt a need to fill in a pause in a conversation. Lucy seemed to understand that—at least for him—the pauses and silence added to what he was saying.
She was quiet now, just watching him. He wanted desperately to get back to where they’d been heading before he’d brought up the sobering subject of Jenny Lee.
Purposely, he made his voice light. “So tell me. This perfect evening you had planned for me that hot October night. What would’ve happened if I had shown?”
“You really want to know?”
“I certainly do,” Blue said, smiling at her.
Lucy pushed herself backward in the water, treading with her arms and letting her legs float. Her toes broke the surface and she stared at them pensively.
“Well, you would’ve walked up here and found me already in the water, just like this,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“I would’ve smiled and waved and said, ‘Come on in—the water is nice.’”
“And I would have.”
“Nope.” Lucy looked up at him and smiled, mischief lighting her eyes. “You would’ve said…” She mimicked his Southern drawl. “‘Do you think your mama would mind if I went into the house and changed into my swimsuit?’ And I would’ve said, ‘You don’t need a suit to swim in this pond, Blue McCoy. Don’t worry—if you’re shy, I’ll close my eyes until you’re in the water.’”
Blue laughed. “Then I would’ve gone in.”
“Nope.” Lucy bit her lower lip, barely able to keep from laughing. Her eyes were sparkling with amusement. “Then you would’ve stood there on the grass, deciding whether or not to be shy, and I would’ve said, ‘I’m not wearing a suit, either. See?’ and I would’ve done this.”
Lucy had reached a shallow spot in the pond, and she now stood up, like a goddess rising from the deep, the moonlight glistening on her wet breasts, her nipples tightly peaked from the cold. The water didn’t quite reach her belly button and she looked indescribably sexy as she smiled at him.
She laughed aloud at the look on his face. Her voice was musical in the night air.
“Sure, I was a little skinnier when I was fifteen,” she told him, “but I can’t imagine that you would’ve spent m
ore than oh, five or ten more minutes up on shore, deciding whether or not to come into the water.”
“Try five seconds,” Blue said, starting toward her.
“After successfully enticing you into the pond,” Lucy said, backing away from him, her eyes dancing with laughter, “I would’ve suddenly disappeared beneath the water. You would have stood there, wondering where I went—until suddenly I appeared.”
Blue reached for her, but she deftly moved away, vanishing, just as she’d described, underneath the water. Only a small ripple or two marred the surface of the pond before it once again became still. He watched for any sign of bubbles, waited for any movement. But all he could see was the moon’s silvery reflection. All he could hear was the sound of the crickets and his own breathing.
And then the water swirled around him, and Lucy was there beneath the water, swimming around his legs, touching him. She erupted, up and out of the water, sliding against him as she roped her arms around his neck and kissed him.
The sensation of her sleek, naked body suddenly pressed against his was unbearably perfect. He heard himself cry out at the pure, gut-wrenching pleasure of her kisses, and he swept his hands across her wet skin, unable to get enough of her, wanting more.
She pulled back, catching her breath and laughing.
“No way would you have done that back when we were in high school,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse in the still night air.
Lucy’s eyes were brimming with laughter as she pushed her wet hair from her face. “Of course not,” she said. “I was fifteen years old. Just because I knew what sexy meant didn’t mean I had a clue what to do with you if I got you alone.” She shook her head, closing her eyes in pleasure as he swept his hands again over her slick body. “No, my perfect evening with you would have been taking a swim—with bathing suits on. Then we would have headed back to the house and watched the baseball game on TV while we ate popcorn. I would have been in teenage heaven.”
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 44