A Weaver Wedding

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  One of Axel’s nearly invisible “guardian angels.”

  “Will your sister and her family be there?”

  “No. They went to Braden for the night.”

  Tara couldn’t afford to think too long about Braden.

  “I suppose your parents know what you really do for a living.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why keep up the pretense for them where we…where we’re concerned?”

  “What conclusions they draw are theirs.”

  “I don’t understand that kind of thinking. Not when they know what you do.”

  “You really want to know why I don’t talk about you with them? Because they’ll see right through me just like they always have. They’ll know I’m—” he said, then broke off, exhaling sharply. “They’ll know you’re not just an assignment.”

  Her lips parted.

  “They’ll know I am interested in you. So you see, it really doesn’t matter whether I tell them about this assignment or not. And I can assure you that, of any secrets I’m keeping, this one is the least of my worries!” He gave her a glance that was searing. “Are you satisfied now?”

  She slowly closed her mouth.

  He gave one sharp nod, and they finished the drive in silence.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Thank you for dinner,” Tara told Emily several hours later. “It was delicious.”

  Axel’s mother beamed. “Honey, you can come any time you like. Particularly since it’s one way of getting Axel to show his face around here.” She reached up to kiss her son’s cheek. “You’ll be here tomorrow, too. Right? We’re going to have a cake for Justin’s twenty-first birthday.”

  Axel grimaced. “He’s too young to be turning twenty-one already.”

  “That’s what we say about all of you.” Emily sent Tara an impish smile. “When you have kids of your own, you’ll see.”

  “God help us,” Axel deadpanned. He lifted his head toward his father, who was looking at some vacation snapshots that Rebecca and Sawyer had brought with them.

  They’d arrived just minutes before Axel started herding Tara toward the door.

  Tara barely had a chance to say anything before Axel nudged her out and she had to practically skip to keep up with him as they headed to his pickup. “What’s the sudden rush to get back to town?”

  He pulled open the passenger door for her. “I’m not in a hurry to go back to Weaver.” He tucked the hem of her coat inside before closing her door and going around to his side. “I want to go by my cabin,” he told her as he started the engine. “Won’t take long.”

  She’d longed to see his cabin since he’d described it to her in Braden, but she shrugged as if she didn’t care one way or the other.

  He’d told her the cabin wasn’t far from his parents’ house, but it was certainly far enough. The road leading there wasn’t even paved and before long, even the lights from the outbuildings were out of sight. “How can you tell where you’re going?” The night was black as pitch, his headlights reflecting back the sheen of snow.

  “I grew up here. There’s not a foot of land around this place that I don’t know like the back of my hand.” He went around another curve then pulled to a stop.

  “Watch your step,” he said when he came around to open her door. “The snow’s deep.”

  Sure enough, her black boots sank at least four inches as they waded toward the shadowy door of the darkened structure. But when they went up several steps to a wide porch, even in the dark, she found it alarmingly easy to imagine old-fashioned rocking chairs, great pots of blooming flowers and icy pitchers of lemonade.

  She blinked hard, but the appealing image didn’t fade.

  He unlocked the door. “Come on in.”

  She followed him inside where he flipped on switches as he went, flooding the interior with golden light. The entry turned toward the right and opened into an unexpectedly large room.

  Thoughts of rocking on a warm summer day on the front porch were small potatoes in comparison to the pleasure that sank right into her bones at the sight before her.

  Rough-hewn logs formed the exterior walls that were studded with sky-high windows. The interior walls were a smooth off-white color devoid entirely of decoration—a canvas just waiting for the right touches. Natural wood planks covered the floor.

  Other than an enormous, stone-fronted fireplace, there was a large pool table situated almost directly opposite where she stood, a half-dozen large packing crates, and the couch he’d bought from her shop.

  “What do you think?”

  She loved it. All of it. “The couch looks good,” she admitted. The day after he’d bought it, several of his cousins had hauled the massive couch away in a truck with the Double-C logo printed on the door. Now, she looked at the piece, perfectly situated in front of the fireplace.

  Her overactive imagination had no trouble at all imagining the two of them sharing its enveloping space while a fire roared in front of them.

  You and I are going to make love on that couch.

  She quickly looked away from the couch, but the memory of his words still echoed in her head.

  “I like it.” He stood in the center of the room, hands on his hips, looking around. “Rest of the cabin is still pretty empty, though. Walls are too bare.”

  Personally, she thought “cabin” was far too modest a word. “What else do you need?” She wandered over to the pool table. Even it was a masterpiece with its gleaming dark wood and weighty, carved legs. There was a pendant light hanging over the center of the deep green felt, but she imagined that he rarely had to use the artificial light during the day, since the table was situated in front of three floor-to-ceiling windows that were angled to take in the sunlight.

  “Why? You want to add some more sales to your coffers?”

  She couldn’t help but smile at that. “Once a shopkeeper, always a shopkeeper.”

  “I need a king-size headboard for my bed.”

  She swallowed a little. “I’ll keep an eye out for one.” There was an open carton sitting on the floor near the base of one of the windows and she knelt next to it, plucking out one of the photo frames stacked inside.

  Axel, flanked by his beaming parents and wearing his college cap and gown, sent a wicked grin up at her from the picture.

  Her fingers walked through the rest of the frames, getting a glance at nearly a dozen shots chronicling the Clay family. “Here’s some of the answer to your bare walls. Hang these up.” She held one of the frames for him to see. “They have similar frames. They’d look wonderful hanging together.”

  “Maybe if someone with an eye for that sort of thing hung them.” His voice was leading.

  She sent him a skeptical look. “Don’t try to convince me that your mother or your sister or your cousins haven’t already offered to help.”

  “Are you kidding? They’d swarm the place if I let them.” He looked appalled at the very idea of it.

  “But they have excellent taste.”

  “It’d be their taste.”

  “But you want me to do it.”

  “I don’t mind having your taste.”

  Everything inside her liquefied.

  And from the look in his eyes, she knew he was perfectly aware of the way his words had sounded.

  She swallowed against the heartbeat threatening to choke her and grabbed the carton as she rose. She placed it on the pool table and began unloading the frames, spreading them out on the dark green felt.

  After a moment, she felt more than heard his sigh as he came up next to her, planting his hands wide on the side of the pool table. “What are you doing?”

  “Seeing what sort of arrangement might look best.” She was going to act as if she weren’t ready to dissolve from need if it killed her. “Who’s the guy in the navy whites?” She picked up the informal shot of Axel and several other men, most of whom she recognized, standing with their beer mugs held aloft.

  “Ryan. My cousin. Rebecca and Saw
yer’s oldest.”

  She set the frame back into the arrangement. She’d never met Ryan Clay, but had certainly heard about his death. For one thing, he was the son of the retired sheriff and the most prominent doctor in town. For another, he’d been a serviceman. The entire town had nearly shut down the day his memorial service had been held. But the small black-and-white memorial photo of an unsmiling soldier that had been carried in the local paper barely resembled the carefree-looking guy in Axel’s photograph. “Were you close?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was as gruff as hers was soft. “He’s—he was a few years older than me, but we were best friends, pretty much.”

  She looked up at him and the hard set of his jaw. The dark shadows filling his eyes.

  Before she knew what she was doing, she’d rested her fingers on top of his broad hand. “I’m sorry.” She hadn’t lost Sloan to death—she’d prayed every night that she never would. But she still felt as if he were lost to her, anyway. “It must be very painful.”

  He turned his hand and caught her fingers. “I’d rather talk about nearly anything else.”

  She moistened her lips. “H-how about whether you have a hammer and nails?”

  His eyes burned over her face for a long moment. “Okay. Coming up.”

  She tucked her tingling fingers into a fist when he left the room, and looked back at the photographs. But she wasn’t really seeing them.

  He was back too quickly for her to master the emotion swirling around inside her.

  “Nails.” He set a small box on the felt. “Hammer.” He held it up. “Point me where you want me.”

  She tucked her tongue behind her teeth for a moment. When she was certain “the couch” wouldn’t escape, she picked up the largest frame from the pool table and carried it to the wall adjacent the front door. She held up the photo of his mother and father on their wedding day, envisioning its placement as the center of the arrangement. “Nail there.”

  “Looks a little low to me.”

  “I thought you trusted me.”

  His lips twisted a little, but he deftly set the nail.

  “Do you have a pencil and a level?”

  “I wasn’t a Boy Scout—” he said as he pulled both out of his back pocket “—but I can be prepared.”

  She quickly turned to face the wall, using the level to mark the rest of the nail placements.

  He’d been prepared the night in Braden, and she’d gotten pregnant, anyway.

  Proof positive that the ninety-nine-percent-effective statement on the little box of condoms they’d bought at the same store as the birthday cake really didn’t mean one-hundredpercent foolproof.

  “Real picture hangers would be better than nails,” she murmured. “I don’t suppose—”

  “No. We’ll bring some the next time we come out here, and you can change out the nails for ’em,” he said.

  Next time? There was going to be a next time?

  She shouldn’t feel the least bit excited about that prospect, but a curl of something dangerous twined through her anyway.

  What she needed to be doing was keeping a distance between herself and Axel because once he’d moved on from being her bodyguard, that would be that.

  He could say a family could be “normal” given the kind of work he did. But she’d lived too long knowing otherwise.

  She finished making her pencil marks and after Axel set the nails, she finished hanging the frames.

  “Looks good to me,” he said when she stepped back to study them.

  “Not quite yet.” She switched two frames.

  “You didn’t warn me we’d be playing musical picture frames.”

  “You said you weren’t in any hurry to get back to Weaver.” She took the empty box and put it on the pool table. “But I’m done, anyway. So what do you think?”

  His hand slid up her spine. Slowly settled on her nape. “I think it’s time we stopped pretending.”

  Tara went still. She closed her eyes. Her fingers tightened over the edge of the pool table. “Axel—”

  His thumb stroked along the side of her neck.

  She trembled and hauled in a deep breath. Exhaled on his name. Weak. That’s what she was. “Axel. I want…I mean I don’t want—”

  “Sh.” His lips hovered around her ear. All down the back of her she could feel the heat of him penetrating the thick knit of her sweater, the thin fabric of her skirt. “I’ll tell you what I want.” His other hand slid around her waist from behind, his palm flattening over her abdomen.

  She sucked in another breath, redolent with desire…and alarm.

  Where was her head?

  She shouldn’t be allowing him to touch her. Shouldn’t be contemplating making love with him.

  “What I’ve wanted for days.” His voice lowered even more, until it rumbled, deep and low across her nerve endings. “What I’ve thought about for weeks. Months. No matter how hard I try not to.”

  “Axel—”

  “I want to touch you.” His words burned against her ear almost as hotly as did his hand as it slowly began inching downward. “Taste you.” His teeth caught her earlobe in a gentle, seductive tug. “Again.”

  She bit the inside of her lip, hard, when his fingers grazed the juncture of her thighs, right through her skirt. “Axel—”

  “I want to hear my name on your lips when I slide into you. Hear you make that little gasp you make when I slide—” while his hand delved further, taking the fabric with it “—almost out again.”

  Heat steamed through her veins. She frantically grabbed his hand, but couldn’t make herself pull him away. “Is this why you brought me here?”

  “Are you going to be mad if I said yes?”

  She trembled. “I don’t know.”

  “I wanted you to see my place.” His voice dropped even lower. “I wanted to see you in my place.”

  Her heart squeezed. “We really shouldn’t.” Her voice was faint. More like a plea to be convinced otherwise, than the stand every logical cell she possessed knew she should be taking.

  “You’re right. I’d be yanked from this detail in a heartbeat if it got out that I’d crossed this line again. But I can’t make myself care right now about the shouldn ’ts. So there’s only one question left.” His hand intimately glided again. Cupped between her legs. His other hand settled against the underside of her breast, his thumb unerringly finding the hard point of her nipple even through her thick sweater. “Do you really want me to stop?”

  Did she want to stop the madness?

  Or did she want to sink into it, into him, without any regard for the consequences?

  His hand moved against her again and her ability for decisionmaking slid right out of her, alongside her dissolving knees.

  Her head fell back weakly against his chest. “No.” The admission was oddly freeing. “Don’t stop.”

  He let out a low, harsh breath then and spun her around to face him. His mouth covered hers.

  The earth seemed to fall away as their tongues tangled.

  He tasted of coffee. And deep, dark bliss.

  And then she felt the side rail of the pool table beneath her and realized he’d lifted her up onto it. He nudged her legs apart and stepped between them. His hands gathered folds of her skirt as he ran them up to her knees. Her thighs.

  Her arms slid around his shoulders, grasping for steadiness. And when she felt his fingers slide against her hips, fingertips looping over the sides of her stretchy lace panties to draw them down, she was pathetically eager to help.

  They were all the way down to her knees when she realized her boots would get in the way. “My boots—”

  But he solved the matter by simply giving the lacy panties one swift tug. They tore and he tossed them aside.

  Her breath rushed through her, oddly intoxicated.

  And then his fingers grazed her.

  There.

  She hissed out a breath, her fingers closing around his shoulders. Sliding through his hair. “Ax
el—”

  “That’s the sound.” His voice was low. Fierce. His fingers delved. Slid. Tormented. His mouth burned over hers. “Tell me you want this as much as I do.”

  “I want this as much as you do,” she whispered. Then she couldn’t say another word, because everything inside her was suddenly bursting out of control. And all she could do was gasp and shudder and cling as he drove her right off the precipice, and she was still quaking when he worked his belt loose and pulled her hard, right onto himself.

  She cried out, clutching his shoulders, feeling so perfectly impaled by him that she shot up toward that peak again without ever having hit bottom.

  His breath was harsh against her ear as he carried her to the couch, never parting from her. “We’re going to take more time next time,” he said, following her down onto the leather.

  She couldn’t fathom a next time, because she couldn’t fathom surviving the endless pleasure careening through her. Her mouth found his, her legs twining around his.

  Skirt and jeans tangled, but it didn’t matter.

  Nothing mattered but him.

  And just when she thought she couldn’t bear the sensation coiling inside her another moment without screaming from it, he tensed, bracing his hand on the leather above her head, and muttered her name.

  She splintered, everything inside her greedily, keenly clutching as she felt the pulse of him in the very heart of her.

  Only when the world started spinning again did he lower his head until it hit her shoulder. “This is a good couch,” he muttered.

  Her lips curved. A weak laugh escaped.

  And then he moved, sliding off her and the couch and she had to tamp down hard on the protest that rose to her lips. Quick and needful.

  He raked his fingers through his hair and turned toward her. “Tara—”

  “Yo, yo, yo.” The loud deep voice hailed them just as the front door creaked open and heavy boots sounded on the wood floor.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tara stiffened like a branding iron had pressed against her spine at the sound of people just minutes away from discovering them.