by Diana Palmer
“Of course I want you,” he growled against her mouth.
He pulled her close, ignoring her floury hands, and wrapped her up against him from head to toe. His lips were hungry, ardent. It had been years, and she was as soft and sweet as he remembered her. He groaned under his breath and deepened the kiss.
She felt as if she’d died and gone to heaven. He wanted her. She wanted him, too. She pressed closer and whimpered.
Tom forgot that there were people in the other room. He lifted her clear of the floor and kissed her until his mouth hurt. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed. Now, his lack of love came home with a violence that made him oblivious to everything else. In all the world, there was only one woman for him, and he had her in his arms right now.
She felt him stiffen finally and her feet touched the floor. He was breathing roughly, but he didn’t look as if he felt the least bit guilty. He touched her face gently and brushed the hair back from her face.
“You don’t look a day older than you did in New York,” he said unsteadily. “You’re as lovely as you were then.”
She searched his face with eyes that were just as inquisitive as his. She wanted to believe him, she wanted to trust him. But they weren’t married and he wanted his daughter. She hesitated.
He drew in a slow breath. “It’s too soon, isn’t it?” he asked. “All right. Suppose you go out with me, just the two of us, tomorrow night? I’ll take you out to eat and we’ll find somewhere to dance.”
“In Jacobsville?”
“In Houston,” he informed. “We’ll need to leave about five. Can you close up early?”
“I will,” she said immediately.
He smiled, and his whole face changed. “Maybe they’re right about second chances,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”
She knew those words came hard to him. She smiled back. It was like the sun coming out after a long storm.
* * *
But the shadows lingered, too. That night, after he went home, Tom had nightmares. His father’s mocking, hateful words echoed over and over again in his ears. He wanted Elysia, but the barrier between his brain and his body still existed. Love was a weakness. Sex was a bigger one. His one taste of her had left him aching for months afterward. What would it be like, now, if he gave in to her? Could he really trust her not to want revenge for the emotional pain she’d suffered after his cold rejection, for leaving her alone to bear their child?
He was tormented by doubts and irrational fears. By morning, he was already regretting his impulsive invitation to Elysia for supper. If he could have found a single logical excuse for backing out, he would have. But as things went, he was forced to go.
* * *
When he went to pick her up, he found Elysia wearing a very pretty black lacy dress with short sleeves and a black velvet jacket. She looked elegant and expensive. Considering her inherited wealth, and the amount of money she seemed to earn with her exclusive boutique, it was no wonder that she had the right sort of clothes for any occasion. He remembered painfully well the simple black crepe sheath she’d worn the night he’d seduced her in New York City. It had been a cheap dress, and looked it. The one she was wearing tonight was probably a designer model. With her blond hair in a neat chignon and her pretty feet in simple black high heels, she was a knockout.
“You’re staring,” she said.
He chuckled. “I suppose I am. You look very nice.”
“Thanks. So do you.” He was wearing a dark suit, which emphasized his own dark complexion. He looked remote and elegant and very sexy. She lowered her eyes and spoke to his chin. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
Hearing her repeat aloud his own doubts startled him.
She glanced up into his eyes and saw the indecision there. “I thought you might be regretting it,” she said with a forced smile. “All of this was rather forced on you, wasn’t it? You just wanted someone for a night, and now you have a past and a child to show for it.” She sighed heavily. “I’m sorry. If I’d been more streetwise than I was—”
“Crissy is a treasure,” he said, interrupting her. “I’ll never regret her.”
She brightened a little. “Honestly?”
He smiled. “Honestly.” He glanced around. “Speaking of Crissy, where is she?”
“There’s a carnival in town. Luke took her to eat cotton candy and go on the rides,” she replied. “After he’d made sure they were safe, of course.” She grinned. “He’s very protective of her.”
“I noticed. I like Luke,” he added.
“So do I. He was my guardian angel when our father was still alive.” She searched his bitter eyes. “Oh, Tom, we didn’t have much of a childhood, either of us, did we?”
His jaw tautened. “No. It wasn’t my father’s fault, but that doesn’t make the memories any easier.” He reached out slowly and touched her soft hair. He grimaced as he moved a little closer, his smile almost apologetic. “I’m not used to touching, or being touched. It’s hard for me to talk about how I feel, much less show it.”
“I understand.”
His dark green eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Yes, I think you do.” He searched her face. “Could you live with it, though, from day to day? You’d have no guarantee that I could ever be like a normal man.”
“If by normal you mean ready, willing and able to sleep with every woman you date, then I’d just as soon have you the way you are,” she said flatly. “I’m not risking my life with a man who sees women as a party favor.”
He chuckled softly. “Funny, that’s just how I feel about women who are rounders.”
“See? We have plenty of things in common.”
“We always did. You were the only thing that made New York City bearable, and I never even told you. Just seeing you at your desk every morning, smiling and cheerful, made my day.” He sighed. “Not that I realized it until you were gone, of course,” he added ruefully.
“They say we never know what we’re missing until we don’t have it anymore.”
“So they do.”
She frowned suddenly. “You asked if I could live with the way you are,” she recalled.
He shrugged, sliding his hands into his pockets. “Maybe it was too soon to say anything. But eventually, I’d like it if we got married. I hope you would, too.”
She whistled silently. “There’d be a lot of adjustments to make,” she said.
“Oh, yes, there would,” he agreed. “Crissy’s never known any father except your late husband. This house has been home for you both for a while. She’s used to Uncle Luke being around constantly. I’m not an easy companion, and I like my own way—I expect you do, too. We’d have to do a lot of compromising.”
“I like paying my own way,” she added.
“So do I.” He smiled. “So what?”
“I don’t plan to give up my boutique.”
His eyebrows arched. “Did I ask you to?”
“It takes up a lot of my time,” she began.
“My work takes up a lot of mine,” he told her. “But we’d have weekends with each other and Crissy. She’d have a balanced family.”
“She doesn’t know that you’re her father,” she said worriedly.
“One day, she will. We don’t have to decide anything in the next five hours, do we?”
She laughed out loud. “Tom, you make it all seem so simple.”
“Generally life is simple. People complicate it when emotions get in the way.” He looked at her openly, with tender appreciation. “You’re amazingly pretty.”
She flushed. “I am not. I’m five pounds overweight for my height and I have wrinkles.”
“I’d be getting there, myself, if I didn’t spend so much time chasing Moose out of things.”
“Your dog?”
“My small horse. Once you meet him, it will take a while to get used to him. It would be all right as long as you don’t have anything fragile.”
She cocked her head at him. “This sounds serious.�
�
“It is. He’s still a puppy and he has no respect for personal property, unless it’s his.”
“I like dogs,” she said.
“That’s because you haven’t met Moose.”
“When am I going to?”
He eyed her warily. “I was hoping to put that off until the very last minute, just in case. But if you have to, you have to. How about tomorrow? You can bring Crissy with you.”
“She’d like that.”
He checked his watch. “We’d better get going. I made reservations for supper.”
“This sounds like serious eating,” she said as he led her to the Lincoln.
“It is. I hope you still like seafood.”
Her breath caught. “I do. How did you remember that, after all this time?”
He got in beside her and cranked the engine. “You’d be surprised at some of the things I remember about you,” he replied. “You were memorable.”
She averted her eyes. “So were you.”
He drove quietly for several minutes. “I hurt you.”
“Inevitably,” she agreed. “But, before…” She cleared her throat.
“Before?” he prompted.
She turned her purse over in her lap. “Before…it was…wonderful.”
“For me, too,” he said stiffly. “A feast of first times. I’d never touched a woman that intimately in my life.”
She smiled shyly. “I know. I’m glad.”
He glanced at her ruefully. “Thank God you weren’t experienced,” he murmured.
“Why?”
“You’d have laughed your head off at all that fumbling.”
“Don’t be silly,” she replied. “No matter what you’d done, it would have been wonderful. I loved you, you know,” she added huskily, and she didn’t look at him.
“Well, that’s nice to know,” he told her. “Because I was head over heels in love with you, too.”
CHAPTER FIVE
She gaped at him. “You were?”
He didn’t look at her. “Didn’t you know?” he asked softly. “Everyone else did. It was why I couldn’t face you the next morning. It had been the most exquisite experience of my life. But I had no way of knowing for sure if you were innocent, even though I suspected it. I was afraid you’d laugh at me.”
“As if I could, ever!” she exclaimed. “I worked for you for two years. Didn’t that give you some clue to my character?”
“I never knew you intimately,” he explained. “And most women these days are very experienced and they expect a lot in bed. I wasn’t sure I could measure up to those expectations. That’s one reason I shied away from being intimate. At least, until you came along.” He glanced at her. “I didn’t plan it, either. I drank too much and things just seemed to happen.”
“I know. It was like that for me, too, nothing planned.” She smiled, the first time she’d been able to smile about her naiveté. “You might have noticed the lack of precautions…”
He chuckled with delight. “All four feet of her,” he said with a nod.
She dropped her gaze to his chest and shook her head. “I guess we were both pretty naive.”
“I’m sorry,” he said gravely, and his eyes were somber when hers lifted to them. “About the way I behaved, and most especially about the way things worked out for you and Crissy. I’ve missed so much of her life,” he added. “I have years to catch up on. If you’re going to let me.”
She felt startled. “Why wouldn’t I?”
His broad shoulders lifted and fell. “You have every right to hold a grudge against me for the past. I couldn’t really blame you for wanting me out of your life all over again.”
The statement shocked and relieved her. She’d been afraid that he might sue for full custody of his daughter, but he didn’t sound vindictive at all. He sounded as if the past left him guilty and empty.
“I won’t deny you access to your daughter, Tom,” she said honestly. “I wouldn’t do that.”
He let out the breath he’d been holding. “Thank you for that. I’d worried, you know.”
“So had I,” she had to confess. “I thought you might feel vengeful toward me for not contacting you when I knew I was pregnant.”
“It was bad, wasn’t it, having to have her without a husband?”
“Fred Nash gave me respectability,” she reminded him. “He was a good man, Tom. You’d have liked him. He was in a terrible condition, with no family to care for him, and he was dying. I needed a husband, he needed a companion and nurse. We helped each other. He loved Crissy as if she were his own.”
He grimaced at the thought of Elysia having to marry someone she didn’t love in order to live in this small community. Respectability was important in small towns. He remembered when he and Kate had gone to live with their grandmother, and how careful she was about relating any of their past. Elysia had her brother to think of, and his business. It must have been very difficult for her. And she’d gone back to school, managing that as well as a child and a husband with cancer. His mind boggled at the stress she’d lived under.
“What a life you must have had,” he murmured out loud.
She met his searching gaze. “It was difficult at times, but I have a lot to show for my sacrifices. I’ve grown up.”
“So have I,” he mused. “I didn’t realize it until I landed here, but I suppose you had a lot to do with the maturing process. I was a late bloomer.”
“So was I,” she told him. “I’ve learned a lot. I’m independent now. I can take care of myself and Crissy.”
His eyes narrowed. Was she telling him that she had no need of him in her life?
“What I meant,” she said when she saw the uncertainty in his dark face, “is that I wouldn’t ever be a financial burden to any man. And that I wouldn’t be left dangling if he left me or died.”
“I see.”
“Not that I expect you to die anytime soon,” she added quickly.
His green gaze slid over her flushed face and he smiled. “I’ll do my best not to.”
She glanced at him shyly as he stopped at a traffic light. It seemed unreal to be sitting beside him in a car after so many lonely years of nothing but memories. When she’d worked for him in New York, they’d often spent their lunch hours talking about the places they’d seen, the people they met. He always had time for those conversations. It had never occurred to her that, as busy as he usually was, he was making the time he gave her. Now, it mattered.
His head turned toward her and he caught her searching gaze. He smiled. “I still can’t quite get over it,” he mused. “You don’t look like a woman who’s had a child.”
“Thank you,” she replied.
“Did you have her naturally?” he asked.
She shook her head. “That wasn’t possible. I have a quirky little heart defect—nothing serious, except when I have a lot of physical stress. I had an arrythmia that wouldn’t stop and they had to take Crissy. I have a scar. It’s faint, but noticeable.”
“I should have been there,” he said quietly, reproaching himself mentally. “Your husband couldn’t be, could he?” he added suddenly.
She grimaced. “He’d just had chemotherapy and he was so sick…Luke drove me to the hospital and stayed with me all the time. I don’t know what I’d have done without him.”
He was somber, and he didn’t speak again until they were almost to Houston.
“You could have died,” he said.
She studied his hard face. “I didn’t.”
He drew in a heavy breath. “All that suffering, all that loneliness, because I was too ashamed to tell you the truth.”
“I understand.” And it was true, she did. She smiled gently at him. “A man’s pride is a hard thing to give up. But I wouldn’t have made fun of you if you’d told me. I think…”
“You think…” he prompted, when she didn’t finish her sentence.
“I think it would made it easier,” she confessed. “I was very nervous and u
pset because I thought you’d had dozens of women, and I was so inexperienced. I didn’t even know what to do exactly.” She flushed, averting her eyes to the darkness outside the window, broken intermittently by the lights of Houston in the distance. “I thought you wouldn’t talk to me because I’d disappointed you.”
“I was thinking the same thing, about myself,” he added. He shook his head. “What a couple of prize idiots we were. At least you had your age as an excuse. All I had was an overdose of pride. I’m sorry.”
“You said yourself that we have a second chance, Tom,” she replied.
His breathing was audible. “We do. And we’re going to make the most of it.” His eyes darted toward her face. “You won’t get away from me this time, Mrs. Nash,” he mused. “No matter how far or fast you run.”
“I don’t think I want to run anymore,” she told him.
“Good. Because I’m getting too old to run.”
She chuckled. “You’ll get over that if you’re around Crissy much more. She loves all sports. Just wait until school starts!”
“I’m rather looking forward to a real Christmas for once,” he said. “I haven’t had one since Kate and I left our grandmother’s house. I miss decorating a tree and having presents to open.”
“We’ll see that you have both,” she promised, her gray eyes twinkling.
* * *
The restaurant he took her to was in the best section of Houston, an elegant one with no prices on the menu at all and a table near the window overlooking the canal that brought sea traffic into the city. Huge ships were visible in the distance, and she imagined that in the daylight, sea gulls dipped and soared everywhere here.
“This is very nice,” she remarked.
“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “I used to come here with business clients when I worked in Houston. Never with a woman, though, except once,” he added with a cold look.
“Bad experience?” she queried softly.
“She was one of those very aggressive business women who liked sex as a sideline. I wouldn’t play ball and I lost a very big contract.” He glanced at her warmly. “If you could have seen the look on her face. She was very attractive and she tried every trick in the book.”