Matthew nodded, lines of tension back in his forehead. “Then let’s get to work,” he said.
Within minutes everyone had a paintbrush or a roller, and despite the circumstances that had brought them all together, a party atmosphere appeared.
At noon Aunt Clara arrived, bringing with her a tray of sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade. They took a quick break to eat, then got back to work.
As Lilly painted, she once again found herself watching the byplay between the Delaney siblings and wondering why Matthew seemed so isolated from the others. He was a lone wolf in what should have been a pack.
It was nearing noon when Luke appeared at the door of the cottage they were all now painting. “Matthew?” Luke’s face was set in grim lines. “We have another problem,” he said.
“What now?” Matthew asked.
“I was just out at the old barn. The supplies that were delivered yesterday morning? Half of them are gone now.”
“Gone? What do you mean, gone?” Johnna asked.
Luke shrugged. “Disappeared. Vanished. Stolen. I don’t know what happened to them, but they’re gone.”
Matthew raked a hand through his hair. “What in the hell is going on around here?” he asked nobody in particular.
And nobody had an answer for him.
Matthew sat on the baled hay in the hayloft of the old barn, staring out the opened loft door toward the main house and outbuildings of the ranch in the distance.
He’d spent most of the afternoon in town at the lumber yard, trying to figure out exactly what had been stolen and what needed to be reordered. He’d then gone to Sheriff Broder’s office and had filed another report.
He lay back on an old blanket on top of the hay and stared up at the rafters. He might have been able to agree with Broder and write off the spray-painted cottages as preHalloween mischief, but the robbery of the materials made him rethink everything.
He just couldn’t believe it had been kids who had loaded up that material and hauled it off. Matthew had a feeling it was something much more sinister than mischief. But what? Who was responsible? And what did they hope to accomplish?
He drew a deep breath, his head filling with a vision of Lilly. He’d enjoyed her company that morning while the two of them had painted. She’d been a charming and entertaining companion on those summer days so long ago, and she hadn’t lost those qualities in the intervening years.
Again he found himself thinking of the kiss they had shared and felt a stir of hunger awaken inside him. He had wanted Lilly when he’d been sixteen, when he’d been seventeen and the last time he’d seen her, when they’d been eighteen. And it surprised and vaguely irritated him that he still wanted her.
Consciously he shoved aside thoughts of her and instead thought of his family.
As always, when all of them were together, whether working or socializing, Matthew felt a curious aloneness.
He’d always prided himself on being a solitary man who needed nobody, but watching his siblings interact so easily with each other that afternoon had bothered him.
For just a moment he’d wanted to laugh with them, be able to forget the past and reach out to each of them, but he couldn’t…and he wasn’t sure why.
The sound of horse hooves pounding the ground drew him up from his prone position and he looked out the loft door to see Lilly approaching on horseback.
She rode the way she did everything else—wholeheartedly. It was one of the qualities about her that had always drawn him. She seemed to embrace all of life, without fear and without reservation.
He wasn’t sure if he was glad to see her or irritated that she had managed to hunt him down. His nerves were pulled taut enough as it was and he wasn’t sure if her presence would make things worse or better.
He watched as she dismounted and tied her horse next to his, then heard her open the door below. “Matthew?” Her voice carried easily in the otherwise stillness of the barn.
He thought of keeping silent, unsure if he wanted her company or not. “I’m up here,” he called out after a moment of hesitation.
A moment later her head popped up in the loft near where he was sprawled. “You missed supper,” she said. Her hair was tousled, and the exertion of the ride had whipped a pleasing color into her cheeks.
“What did I miss?”
She climbed up into the loft the rest of the way and sank down beside him on the blanket. “Tuna surprise. The surprise is that it tastes like tuna at all.”
He knew she was trying to make him smile, but he simply couldn’t work up the energy for even that simple gesture. He stared out the loft door, aware of her gaze on him.
“Matthew? Are you all right?”
He opened his mouth to tell her that of course he was all right, that he’d simply come here to be alone and avoid talking to anyone. “I don’t know,” he surprised himself by replying.
Again he focused his gaze out to the distance. “I’ve just been sitting up here trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“Did you come up with any answers?”
He shook his head. “Nothing that makes any kind of sense.”
She stretched out on her side next to him, her elbow propping her up. “Did they steal a lot from here?”
“Enough.” Once again he lay on his back and stared at the roof beams, intensely aware of her so close to him. Where before the only scent in the air had been the odor of hay and a lingering hint of horseflesh, now the air was redolent with the scent of her.
Her nearness had bothered him all morning as they had painted together. Clad in a coral-colored tank top that exposed the faintest hint of the top of her breasts, and in another pair of those shorts that made her legs appear impossibly long, she had been a source of temptation. And the temptation certainly hadn’t diminished.
With the scent of her and the hay around him, if he closed his eyes he could almost imagine them back in time. They had spent a lot of hours in this hayloft trying to solve world problems. Even in the midst of one of their serious conversations, Matthew had never lost sight of her attractiveness.
“Do you have any idea who might be responsible?” Her soft voice intruded on his thoughts.
He turned to his side and propped himself on his elbow, so they were face-to-face and only mere inches apart. “I don’t have a clue,” he replied.
She frowned, her eyes slightly deeper in hue than usual. “What about somebody from the development company that wants to buy this place?”
“Why would they want to make this kind of trouble for us?” he asked, fighting the impulse to reach out and touch a strand of her dark, shiny hair. He knew it would be wonderfully silky.
“I don’t know. Maybe they want to make problems, then renegotiate a lower price.”
“Maybe,” he said, although he didn’t believe it. “Or, maybe Jacob Tilley is paying back the Delaneys for his father being in prison.”
Her eyes widened. “You really think so?”
He rolled onto his back again, finding it much easier to concentrate on the conversation if he wasn’t looking at her. “Who knows. Sometimes I just get the feeling that this place is cursed.”
“You mentioned that last night.” She placed a hand on his forearm. “Cursed by whom? By what?”
Her hand was warm…too warm, and he wanted to shake it off him. How could he tell her that he felt as if this land, this ranch was cursed by the spirit of a miserable man? How could he tell her that the specter of his father seemed to be in every room, in every corner, and there would never be any happiness found here because of his ghostly presence.
“Forget it,” he said. He sat up and faced the loft door, his back to her. He drew a deep breath, wondering why at this moment all his emotions seemed so close, too close, to the surface?
“Matthew, talk to me. Tell me what you’re thinking…what you’re feeling.” She was silent for a moment, then continued. “You seem so alone.”
“I like being alone.”
&nbs
p; “Well, right now you aren’t alone.” She crawled over to sit next to him, and for several long minutes they simply sat and stared out into the distance. The sun was riding low in the sky, sending out a splash of farewell colors in pinks and oranges.
“It’s beautiful from up here.” She finally broke the silence.
“Yes, it is,” he replied grudgingly. He couldn’t dispute the beauty of the land…their land…his father’s land.
“Don’t you want to have a son or daughter to pass all this onto?” she asked, then didn’t wait for his reply. “That’s the only thing I regret about never marrying, the fact that I’ll never have children.”
“You could have a child without marriage. Women do it all the time.”
She shook her head, her hair swaying around her shoulders with the movement. “That’s never been an option for me. I guess I’m more conservative than I thought.”
He frowned thoughtfully and cast his gaze once again out the loft door. “I should have left this place a long time ago, made my own way somewhere else.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I had to stay. I had to protect them.” The words fell from his mouth unbidden and were met with a long moment of silence.
“Protect them? You mean your sister and brothers?” Again she placed a hand on his arm. “Protect them from what?”
He hesitated before replying, wondering if he would later regret this conversation, yet suddenly unable to stop himself from having it. “From my father, who was the meanest bastard on the planet.”
He turned and looked at her and fought the anger that always surged inside him at thoughts of Adam Delaney. “I had to stick around and make sure things ran smoothly, do the right thing to keep him happy and hope to God when he did have one of his explosions he didn’t manage to kill me or one of them.”
Her eyes widened, and her hand gently squeezed his forearm. “Your father was abusive?”
“My father was a sick son-of-a-bitch who took pleasure in beating and tormenting his children.” Matthew heard the venom in his voice and drew another deep breath to steady himself. “He was physically and mentally abusive every day of our lives.”
“Oh, Matthew.”
He turned to look at her, and his breath was nearly stolen away by the sweet empathy of her expression, the gentleness and compassion in her eyes. He shrugged and emitted a small laugh of embarrassment. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s all in the past, anyway.”
She placed a hand on the side of his face, her fingers stroking softly down his cheek. “I’m so sorry, Matthew. I had no idea.”
He shrugged, a bitter smile on his face. “How could you know? The old man was always on his best behavior while you were here.”
He pulled her hand from his face, but instead of releasing it, held it in his own and stared down at it. She had pretty hands, slender and long-fingered, and her nails were painted a pretty pearlized pink. Her hand was warm, and he was surprised to feel some of his anger dissipate as he held it.
“Those weeks that you were here visiting were the very best weeks of my life,” he said softly. “I knew that during the time you were here my father wouldn’t beat me or any of the other kids. For that week I could pretend that we were a normal family and we had a normal father.”
Her fingers curled around his and he felt the stir of a tension that had nothing to do with thoughts of his father. He released her hand and stood and moved to the loft door, needing to distance himself from her nearness, from her touch. If he didn’t get some distance, he wasn’t sure what he might do.
“But there was always a consequence to that week of no beatings,” he continued. He rubbed the center of his forehead with two fingers as he thought of those days so long ago. “The day that you and Clara left I’d get the beating of my life.”
“For what?” she asked as she stood up and moved behind him.
He turned back and looked at her with a wry, humorless smile. “For whatever. I got hit for being nice to you and for not being nice enough. I got slapped for the way I’d looked at you over the dinner table, for not looking at you while we were eating dinner.”
He shrugged and once again focused his attention back to the distance. “I think he knew I liked you, and he wanted to taint that, ruin it. He knew I had fun with you, enjoyed your company, and so he always made sure I paid.”
She took his hand and pulled him around to face her. Her eyes shone with a shimmering light that made his chest ache. “He’s not here to make you pay anymore,” she said softly, then she leaned forward and placed her lips on his.
With his emotions so close to the surface, he had no defenses against the onslaught of heat and the taste of desire that was ripe in her mouth.
It was what he’d feared…and what he’d wanted.
A groan of pleasure escaped him as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tightly against him, returning her kiss with a savage hunger that felt as if it had burned in him for her for years.
When he finally broke the kiss, she stepped back from him and stretched out on the bed of hay. “Make love to me, Matthew.” Her voice was an urgent whisper of need. “Make love to me now like you wanted to then. There’s nobody to punish us, and I promise there won’t be any consequences.”
As if to break the inertia that held him in place, she reached down and grabbed the bottom of her tank top and pulled it off over her head, exposing to him the nude-colored bra that did little to hide her breasts.
In an instant he knew he was going to make love to her, he knew it would be a mistake, knew that even though his father wasn’t around to punish him, eventually he would punish himself.
But at that moment all the reasons why they shouldn’t do this were distant cries that echoed faintly, overridden by the white-hot streak of desire that seared through him.
With a fevered groan, he sank down on the hay and took her back into his arms.
Chapter 6
As Matthew drew her against him on the soft bed of hay, Lilly felt as if this moment in time had been destined long ago. It was as if all those hours they had spent talking together, laughing together, so long ago had been a kind of foreplay that now would come to fruition.
His confession about his father had stunned her. She’d had no idea what the Delaney children had suffered at the hands of their father. Matthew’s pain, when he’d told her about the past, had filled the loft and seeped into her heart to the point where all she wanted to do was somehow erase that pain.
But all thoughts of his father and abuse disappeared from her head as Matthew claimed her lips in a kiss of intense hunger and sweet mastery. It was impossible, as his hands ran up the length of her back and his lips plied hers with flames, to think of anything but making love to him.
Her heart beat a quicksilver rhythm as their kiss deepened. She placed her hands on either side of his face, loving the feel of the faint scrub of whiskers there, the strength of his jawline just beneath the emerging beard.
He broke the kiss only long enough to sit up and pull his T-shirt over his head, then captured her mouth again as her hands raked across the broad width of his bare back and her legs twined with his.
Endless moments were spent in kissing, their tongues touching, seeking, then retreating and beginning anew. There was a wildness in his kiss that intoxicated her and with the press of their bodies so close, she could feel his hardness against her. It filled her with a need so yawning and rich, a need such as she’d never known before.
“Lilliana,” he finally uttered against her hair, into her ear as his fingers worked the clasp of her bra.
“Matthew,” she replied, loving the sound of her name on his lips, the feel of his name on hers. She moaned as her bra fell away and his hands cupped her breasts.
His thumbs raked across her nipples, and they responded, rising to pebble hardness and aching with sweet sensation. She pulled his head down, wanting to feel his tongue on them.
He complied, using the tip of
his tongue to tease and torment, sending her higher up the spiral of desire. As his mouth pleasured her breasts, his fingers danced across her stomach at the waistband of her shorts.
His hands were hot, fevered, and it was a fever she relished, a fever that burned inside her, as well. As his hands worked the button snap of her shorts, her fingers did the same to his jeans.
Impatience made her fingers clumsy. She wanted to feel his nakedness against hers. She wanted no barriers between them. As if he felt the same way, he gently shoved her hands aside and stood.
With his gray eyes burning into hers, he unsnapped his jeans and slid them off. For a moment she had a glimpse of him clad only in a pair of navy briefs, and his beauty stunned her. Then the briefs were gone and he knelt down and grabbed the waist of her shorts.
In slow, deliberate movements, he pulled her shorts off and threw them aside, leaving her only in a pair of wispy silk panties.
She shivered, instinctively knowing she was about to be loved more thoroughly, more passionately than she’d ever been loved in her life. She saw it in the flames of his eyes, felt the crackle of electric heat that sizzled in the air.
“You are so beautiful.” The words eased out of him as if from beneath an enormous pressure.
She wanted to tell him that he was beautiful, too, that his broad shoulders stirred her, his muscled abdomen awed her, and his arousal stole her breath away. But she got no opportunity to say anything, for once again he was against her and his mouth took utter possession of hers.
As he kissed her, his hands worked her panties down and she aided his efforts, arching her hips up to meet his intimate touch.
She felt as if she’d been ready for that touch for years, and it shattered her. As he stroked her she cried out and rode a crest of pleasure so intense it melted her from the inside out.
For a long moment she remained motionless, gasping from the sheer power of her release, then she reached a hand down and encircled him.
He gasped and froze, not moving a muscle. She thought she could hear his heartbeat pounding in the otherwise silent loft. But she wasn’t sure if it was his or her own.
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