by Neesa Hart
Cora’s hands had freed his hair from the leather tie at his nape. She sifted the weight of it through her fingers and opened herself to his marauding kiss. Pillaging, he thought, had never felt so good. Returning the favor, he stripped the elastic band from her hair. Waves of gold-tipped silk tumbled over his hands. He fisted one hand in it and held her mouth locked to his. In one swift move he eased her beneath him on the long sofa.
With her body aligned with his, he used his hands to explore her. He wanted to know every secret, every sensitive spot on her body. And still, he realized, it wouldn’t be enough to quench his thirst for her. Needing the exquisite feel of flesh against flesh, he thrust his hands beneath the hem of her T-shirt. Her skin was warm and supple and felt like satin beneath his fingertips.
Cora trailed a line of kisses along his jaw, down the cords of his neck and across his collarbone. The featherlight touch made him groan. “More,” he urged.
“Everything,” she responded, and nipped his earlobe.
His hands tightened on her flesh as he angled his head for a better taste of her. “Let me in,” he growled, and took her mouth again. Cora received him with a moan of undiluted pleasure. The sound enslaved him. He could feel the top of his head lifting away as bliss streaked through his bloodstream and seared his brain. The headiness of her discovery about del Flores was quickly being eclipsed by the even more dizzying sensation of making love to her.
His hand moved to the button of her jeans. “Be sure,” he warned her, knowing there would be no turning back.
She nodded. “I am.”
He began to work the fastener.
“Aunt Cora?” The soft voice penetrated his brain like a bullet.
His head lifted swiftly. When his vision focused, he saw Kaitlin standing at the bottom of the stairs, watching them. Her expression was simultaneously wary and confused. Beneath him, he felt Cora tense. Slowly he eased his hand from under her shirt. “What’s wrong?” he asked Kaitlin, not surprised at the rawness of his voice.
Cora was struggling now, so he eased to the side and allowed her to sit up. She would have pushed his hands away, but he held firm. Cora looked at Kaitlin. “Honey, are you all right?”
Kaitlin hesitated, then nodded. “I need to tell you something.”
Rafael pushed his hair back from his face as he struggled for balance. The woman was absolutely wrecking him. He could not remember a time when he’d felt so thoroughly rattled by a passionate kiss and the unfulfilled promise of more. Deliberately he gentled his voice. “What’s wrong?” he asked Kaitlin.
“Can I come in?” she said, still watching them, still hovering in the shadows by the stairs.
Cora moved away from Rafael to make room for her niece on the couch. “Of course.” She held out a hand. “Come here.”
“But you were…” Kaitlin frowned. “Mama doesn’t like it if we interrupt when she’s…” The child stopped again and shook her head.
He saw Cora’s hand clench into a fist, so he rubbed his fingers along the back of her knuckles. “It’s okay, kiddo,” he assured Kaitlin, and himself.
She looked as if she wanted to flee up the stairs. “I shouldn’t have come down.”
Rafael shook his head. “Nobody should lie awake and be alone with their problems.” He squeezed Cora’s hand in a silent promise that said, We’ll finish this later.
Cora turned her hand so she could intertwine their fingers. Her tight grip gave the only outward sign that she, too, was struggling. She beckoned to her niece. “It’s all right, sweetie,” she said. “Come here and tell us what’s wrong.”
Kaitlin slowly advanced into the room. “I couldn’t sleep.” She was tugging at the hem of her nightshirt. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I couldn’t sleep.” When she was standing in front of Cora, she crossed her feet and looked up with a worried expression. “Are you going to be mad?”
Cora took Kaitlin’s hand and tugged until the child climbed onto the couch to sit between them. Guiding the child’s head to her lap, Cora stroked her hair. “I’m not going to be mad. What’s the matter?”
Kaitlin shivered. “This afternoon while you were gone, Rafael was outside with Liza and Molly.”
Cora glanced at him over Kaitlin’s head. He nodded. “Around two,” he told her.
Cora continued her steady stroking of Kaitlin’s pale hair. “Did something happen?”
Kaitlin traced an idle circle on Cora’s knee with her index finger. “The phone rang, and I thought it might be you, so I answered it.”
“Who was it?” Cora prompted.
Kaitlin sat up, her eyes filled with tears. “It was Mama. She was really mad. She said she saw your picture in the paper and that if she’d known you were going to drag us into the scandal sheets, she never would have left us here.” Kaitlin started to cry in earnest.
“Shh.” Cora hugged her. “Honey, it’s okay.”
“She was so mad. She just kept yelling and yelling and she wouldn’t listen to me. She said really mean things about you, Aunt Cora, and about Rafael, and I didn’t know what to do.”
Cora looked at Rafael, her expression worried. He scowled. Kaitlin buried her face in Cora’s neck. “She said she was coming here to get us and that I’d better make sure me and Molly and Liza were ready to leave because she wasn’t going to let you get away with treating us like this.”
Cora kissed the top of Kaitlin’s head. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”
“Why did she say that?” Kaitlin reared back so she could look at Cora’s face. “I don’t even know what she’s talking about. Why is she so mad at us?”
“She’s not mad at you,” Cora assured her.
“She wouldn’t stop yelling at me.”
“I know.” Cora snatched a tissue from the box on the coffee table and wiped Kaitlin’s cheeks. “Your mother loses her temper sometimes, and she says things she doesn’t mean.”
“She said you were corrupting us because Rafael lives here, and that we shouldn’t be exposed to people like that. She made it sound like—” she hiccupped on a renewed sob “—she made it sound like you weren’t taking care of us. I told her it was a lie, but she wouldn’t listen to me, Aunt Cora. She wouldn’t.”
“I know,” Cora told her. She handed Kaitlin a fresh tissue. “But you have to trust me, Kaitlin. It’s going to be all right.”
“She’s going to come get us and make us go with her and George. And I don’t want to,” Kaitlin added on a fresh burst of tears. “I don’t want to.”
“Me, neither,” Molly yelled from the stairs. Her small face was watching them defiantly.
Liza nodded emphatically and hugged Benedict Bunny. “Me, neither,” she echoed.
Cora glanced swiftly at Rafael. He was already off the couch and striding toward the stairs. “Nobody’s going anywhere,” he said. “At least not tonight.” He picked up one girl in each arm and walked toward the sofa. “How come you’re out of bed?” he asked Liza.
“We heard Kaitlin crying,” Liza said. “She kept crying and crying, and we didn’t know why she was so sad.”
“Kaitlin never cries,” Molly added. “Only Liza.”
“And you,” Liza insisted.
“There’s nothing wrong with crying,” Rafael said. “It’s good for you sometimes.” He set his charges down next to Cora, then leaned over to press a brief kiss to her lips. “Sounds like a cocoa night to me,” he said, and felt a smile twitch at the corners of his mouth. “I’ll go make some. Any preferences?”
Cora’s eyes twinkled with a mixture of amusement and banked desire. “I’ll tell you later,” she said.
“Can I have marshmallows?” Kaitlin asked. Her voice sounded so defeated that Rafael briefly contemplated the advisability of strangling the child’s mother.
He kept his voice deliberately light. “Big ones or small ones?”
“I like small ones,” she said, “but Molly doesn’t like any and Liza likes one big one.”
“It fizzes on my lip,”
Liza explained.
He nodded. “And then you lick it off.”
Her eyes widened appreciatively. “You know everything.”
Ruffling her hair, he allowed his hungry gaze to linger on Cora for a few seconds longer, then quietly whispered, “Not yet.”
IT TOOK TWO HOURS to get the girls settled and back to sleep. They lay on the floor by the sofa in an indistinguishable tangle of arms and legs. A haphazard array of pillows—survivors of an earlier pillow fight where Rafael had taken the bulk of the blows from the giggling, squealing trio of girls—formed their makeshift bed. Fluffs of scattered popcorn littered the carpet like dandelions on a summer lawn. Discarded cocoa mugs sat on the coffee table, and the animated movie had ended, leaving a snowy blue screen on the silent television.
Rafael lay on the couch with his head propped on a pillow against the armrest and Cora tucked securely against him, spoon fashion. Her back pressed against his chest, her bottom curved into his groin. She fit perfectly, he mused. He rested his chin against the top of her head and watched the flickering blue light cast shadows in the room. He wished it was cold enough for a fire. He would like to see the subtle textures of Cora’s skin in the amber glow of firelight.
Cora stirred. “You trashed my house,” she accused him quietly.
He nuzzled his nose against her hair. “I sent you letters warning you this would happen.”
She snorted. “I also recall promises of full restitution.”
He couldn’t wait to fulfill that promise, either. “Pirates always pillage and plunder,” he said arrogantly. “The cleanup is someone else’s problem.”
Cora’s chuckle warmed his blood. “Good thing I have such a great nanny. I’m sure he won’t mind.”
In retaliation, he nipped her earlobe. “Keep it up, Professor, and I’ll never show you what’s involved in a well-executed pillage.”
“Liar,” she chided. Her fingers caressed his forearm where it lay solidly beneath her breasts. “You were wonderful with them.”
“Practice,” he assured her. “It’s not the first time I’ve stayed up late with a brokenhearted female.”
“Sisters?” she probed.
“Yes. They’re more prone to melodrama than brothers.”
“Like mine,” she muttered. “I’m glad I only had one sibling to deal with.”
“That woman’s a menace,” he grumbled.
Cora didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. “Lauren’s always been…mercurial.”
Not the word he would have used, he thought uncharitably. “Explain to me how the two of you came from the same gene pool.”
Her laugh tickled his nerve endings. “Well, it’s always possible that maybe we didn’t.”
Another layer, he thought with some amazement. Here was another layer of this incredible, complex, bewitching woman. He waited for her to explain. Cora’s hands continued to stroke his arms. “My mother was just like Lauren,” she finally said. “Beautiful, talented, smart and completely self-absorbed.” She paused. “And terrified of being alone.”
“Your father,” he prompted, beginning to see a picture he didn’t like.
“Distant and reserved. He was bookish and scholarly, but he came from money. He was a professor at Hollins College in Virginia.”
“The women’s school?”
“Yes. Mama went there for two years. They met, had an affair and got married. I think Mama married him because she thought she could control him and his money.”
“He resisted?”
“Not exactly.” Her hands stilled. “He was just indifferent. I never understood why he bothered to get married, unless he just got tired of fighting it. He wasn’t interested in anything except his books. His ambivalence drove Mother crazy. She complained about it constantly.”
“You heard them arguing?”
“A few times,” she said, “But generally, no. The more she yelled, the more he withdrew. And when I was seven, my mother took Lauren and me and left.”
“How old was your sister?”
“Three, so I don’t think it affected her as much as it did me.” She sighed. “I was sad a lot. I remember always feeling sad and not very safe, like everything familiar could just disappear.”
He tipped his head to nuzzle her ear. “It’s scary for a child to go through something like that.”
“Elena told me,” she said gently, “that your father abandoned your family.”
“He did.” The ease of the confession surprised him. So many things seemed easier with Cora.
“It must have hurt you deeply.”
“I was angry and disappointed. I felt like he’d betrayed us—especially my mother.”
“Have you ever heard from him?”
“No,” he said, “and I don’t want to.”
Cora nodded. “I can understand that.”
He smoothed her hair away from her face so he could run a fingertip along her jaw. “What about your father?”
She frowned, and the corners of her eyes crinkled. “I was so shy then, and I think that’s why I had always responded better to my father than I did to my mother. He was a very quiet man, even and calm, and I wanted so desperately for him to like me.”
Rafael’s jaw tightened. Two of his own sisters had been that way. Quiet and reserved, they’d suffered the bone-deep wounds of their father’s desertion in silence, while their siblings had volubly expressed rage at his betrayal. To this day, the two were the most compassionate and generous of his family. Shared pain, he imagined, was a bond like no other. Now he could offer Cora some meaningless platitude, the kind he’d dredged up on his sisters’ behalf when he’d been younger and more naive; but it wouldn’t help. “You tried hard, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
He could picture it so easily. An awkward, bespectacled child silently screaming for attention and validation. “The jerk,” he muttered.
Her sultry chuckle eased some of the pressure in his chest. “It’s all right, you know,” she said. “It hurt terribly at the time, but I don’t have any lasting scars from it.”
Except, he thought with startling new insight, that you still doubt your desirability. As a child, the most important man in her life hadn’t seemed to want her. No wonder she had questioned his own motives. He slid his hand down her arm to her hip, then over her abdomen. Using a gentle pressure at the swell of her belly, he shifted their position so she could fully feel the extent of his desire. “I’m sorry,” he said against her ear.
Cora shuddered. “I tried so hard. I wanted to be interested in all the things he was interested in. He liked books, so I liked books. I read newspapers and newsmagazines so I could talk to him about current events. And for a while I believed it was working.”
There was a wealth of hurt in that statement. Rafael tightened his hold on her, but waited for her to continue. She kept her gaze carefully trained on the blue television screen.
“Summers were the worst,” she finally said. “When we were out of school, Mama would drop us off at his house and leave for an extended vacation with her new lover. By the time I was fifteen, my mother had been married and divorced four times.
“You resented her,” he guessed.
“I think she embarrassed me,” Cora confessed. “I was too young to really understand how afraid she was of being alone, so I just buried everything I was feeling under a pile of indignation.” A short and humorless laugh tore from her throat. “She would get so angry at me when I wouldn’t respond to her. When I really pushed her too hard, she’d tell me I was just like my father—heartless, cold and incredibly boring.”
Rafael flinched. Cora nodded. “It hurt,” she said, “but not as much as finding out that I’d spent years cultivating what I thought was my father’s dignity and reserve only to find out that he really didn’t care about me at all.”
“When?” he asked.
“I was sixteen. He called Mama and told her I was old enough to take care of Lauren for the summer and not to
bring us to him. He’d been having an affair with one of his students—just as he had with Mama. I found out later that it was a pattern for him, and if I’d been paying attention, I probably would have noticed it before.” She shook her head ruefully. “Lauren and I had an inordinate number of college-age baby-sitters when we stayed with him.”
Rafael muttered a dark curse. Cora tweaked his arm. “One particular student must have had something the others didn’t, though, because he told Mama he was going to get married as soon as she graduated.”
“How old was he?”
“Um, sixty, maybe. I’m not sure. He was older than my mother when they married, but I can’t remember how much.”
Several long seconds of silence passed before Cora spoke again. “Mama was furious of course. Even though I was old enough to drive, she couldn’t justify leaving Lauren and me alone for an entire month. That was the first time we got dumped on a strange relative’s doorstep.”
“Who?”
“My mother’s cousin. And it was awful. She didn’t want us there, and she was furious with Mama. The whole thing chafed, and I kept harboring fantasies that it was obviously a terrible misunderstanding. My father would call soon and straighten everything out.”
“And he didn’t?”
“Nope. He was in Aruba with his new wife. We didn’t even get a postcard.”
“Ah, Cora—” he breathed.
She snuggled closer to him. “That was when I started to feel responsible for Lauren, and resentful of Mama. Lauren was just like her. In public, she was the life of the party. Always happy, always entertaining the crowd. She smiled all the time and she was gorgeous, even then. She had perfect hair and perfect teeth and perfect skin, and she drew boys like a magnet.”
He stroked her shoulder until he found a tense spot, then steadily rubbed it. “Where were you?” he asked.
“Standing on the sidelines, feeling awkward and uncomfortable,” she admitted.