“That the greatness of your presence would heal him?”
“You know I don’t think that.”
“Don’t you?”
Pierce blew out a breath. He knew Malcolm resented his success. Who could blame him with the way his dad had always put Pierce ahead of his younger brother? “I’m sorry for so many things.”
“Yeah,” Malcolm said. “Me too.”
That gave him hope that something good would come of their father’s illness. Mend a few fences.
“If this turns out to be something really serious, we’re going to have to pace ourselves—”
“I was there with Mom, I know how it goes.”
Meaning Pierce had no idea how a bedside vigil went because he hadn’t been there while their mother lay dying. “I want to be here,” he said.
“You’re here right now.” Malcolm’s voice softened. “That means something.”
“I know you’ve sacrificed a lot for our family, delaying starting a family of your own—”
“Please, let’s not go into it. Besides, I’m seeing someone.”
“Hey, that’s good. I’m happy for you and I want to meet her. We need to have a talk. A long one.”
“Gotta go. We have a heifer in labor and she’s prone to breech births.”
“Listen, Malcolm. I lo—”
A dial tone sounded in his ear.
Pierce hung up. He meandered to the window and stared out at the parking lot. Absently, he ran his hand down his left leg.
A car dragging tin cans pulled up in the parking lot underneath the vapor security lamps. “Just Married” was written in white shoe polish on the back window. The fresh-faced groom got out of the driver’s seat, sprinted around to the passenger-side door, and yanked it open. He pulled out a laughing young woman and hoisted her into his arms. He dropped kisses on her face and she flung her arms around his neck.
Pierce’s throat tightened. He rubbed his dry eyes, and turned away from their happiness.
Chapter 12
Tendril: a slender portion of a leaf or stem, modified for twining.
LACE had just stepped out of the shower, dressed in nothing but the terry-cloth robe provided by the hotel, when a knock sounded on the door. She only knew one person in San Antonio, so she already knew who it was before she squinted through the peephole because she hadn’t yet put her glasses on after her shower.
Pierce stood in the corridor, his sleeves rolled up above his elbows, the top two snaps of his shirt undone, revealing just enough hard-muscled chest to be intriguing, his hair crimped from the impression of wearing his Stetson. Who knew hat hair could be so attractive?
She pressed her hand to her mouth and considered not opening the door, but knowing him he would just keep knocking until she answered. Her hair, still damp from the steam of the shower, coiled against her jaw. Feeling foolishly giddy to see him, she undid the lock, and opened the door.
“Hi.” His grin was lopsided, boyish, and just a hint forlorn.
The forlorn part was what did her in, despite the fact that his gaze strolled a long trek down the length of her body, taking in her robe, bare legs, and socked feet. Lace never walked barefooted on hotel carpeting—she knew too much about bacteria to be comfortable doing that. By the time he glanced back to her face, forlorn had vanished, replaced by wolfish desire.
A tendril of heat started in her stomach, twined low and deep. Well, Little Red Riding Hood, you did open the door to him.
“You got settled in I see.”
“I did.” She kept her hand firmly on the doorknob.
He nodded. The air thickened between them. She curled her toes inside her socks, painfully aware of how susceptible she was in nothing but a robe, while he was fully dressed. Not so different from the dressing room cubicle. How was it that she found herself in a similar situation twice in one day, nearly naked in front of the one man who had the potential to dismantle her whole life?
“I ordered room service.”
“Well then you better get on back to your room.” She started to close the door, but she didn’t really want to.
He propped the toe of his cowboy boot against the door. “I ordered room service for us. I told them to deliver it to your room.”
“That was pretty high-handed.”
Pierce narrowed his eyes. “Do you always react negatively when someone tries to do something nice for you?”
“I suppose in your world trying to get inside my panties is considered doing something nice.”
“Do you even have any panties on to get into?” He dropped his gaze again.
“Move your foot or get it slammed,” she threatened. She wouldn’t really slam his foot in the door, but he didn’t know that.
He held up his hand in a gesture of surrender, but kept his foot planted firmly against the door. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong. As you’ve pointed out, I’ve got a bad habit of reaching for the jock-speak. Plus, I find you sexy as hell, Lacy, and sometimes I spout off before I think about how it sounds. I just wanted to buy you dinner to thank you for being so understanding about my dad. A lot of women wouldn’t have agreed to stay.”
Her knees wobbled. “I’m not sure having dinner alone with you in my hotel room is such a good idea.”
“Why do you keep pushing me away?” he asked.
Why? Because she didn’t want to end up a puddle of goo at his feet. The truth was she didn’t know how to moderate her feelings. When it came to love, she was either all in as she’d been at fourteen or she was detached, as she’d been in every single romantic encounter she’d ever had. Her aloof independence attracted men, but in the end, when she broke off the relationships—and she’d always been the one to break things off—the men invariably called her cold. But she wasn’t cold, in fact quite the opposite. She felt so deeply that she couldn’t bear the pain of having her love spurned, so she never allowed herself to get emotionally close to anyone.
“Pierce,” she murmured. “I can’t—”
“Please don’t send me away, Lace,” he said, and drew in a ragged breath, and for the first time she noticed the raw exhaustion in his eyes. “I don’t want to be alone.”
It had been a long dry spell. After her four-year wild spree when she was a wide-eyed coed set free on the Texas A&M campus chockful of cowboys, she’d put herself on a man-free diet. Which, come to think of it, seemed to be backfiring. The fact that she hadn’t been intimate with anything other than a sex toy since she’d started graduate school made Pierce that much more tempting.
Man, she did not want to be that girl. The one, who when she finally got a chance to sleep with the guy she’d once had an unrequited crush on, she grabbed it like a starving hawk moth caterpillar devouring a tomato plant. That’s what her sexual-exploration binge had been about, getting him out of her system. And honestly, it had worked like a charm until he’d come strolling back into town. But now all her best intentions were shriveling up under the heat of his sizzling stare and she was thinking things she had no business thinking.
Then again, there was a special magic between them that she could not deny. She knew that with Pierce, she was in for the best sex of her life. Wouldn’t she be an idiot to walk away from that? She gave in, gave up, surrendered. White flag. The whole works. Take me prisoner. I’m yours.
Quietly, she opened the door all the way. “C’mon in.”
He stepped inside, bringing his rugged masculinity with him, and touched down on the mattress of the single queen-sized bed. He looked so commanding sitting there like he owned the world.
Goose bumps played up and down her spine. Here she was alone in a hotel room with Dallas Cowboys quarterback Pierce Hollister. Any number of women would kill to be in her socks. She inclined her head in the direction of the bathroom. “I’m just going to get dressed.”
“No need to slip into something less comfortable on my account.” He gave her a dazzling grin that sucked the air right out of her lungs. “I promise to keep my hands to myself.�
��
A knock sounded on the door. “Room service.”
Pierce hopped off the bed. Lace backed out of the way. She could change—but she’d washed out her underwear and left it to dry over the towel bar so she’d have to go commando under her jeans—or she could just stay in the robe, keep her knees firmly pressed together, have dinner with him, and send him on his way as quickly as possible. Considering he’d already signed for the meal and was wheeling the room service cart into the room, blocking her entry into the bathroom, she took the path of least resistance and moved to pull out the desk chair and sit down.
A delicious scent filled the room and Lace’s stomach growled.
Pierce maneuvered the cart in front of her, positioning it to create a makeshift table between the two of them as he sank onto the end of the mattress. He lifted the lids, revealing two plates of chicken-fried steak, a pile of mashed potatoes and gravy, yeast rolls, Roma green beans, and chocolate cake for dessert. Two glasses of iced tea flanked the plates.
“Is it sweet tea?” she asked.
“Is there any other kind?”
“Chicken-fried steak is my favorite. How did you know?”
“Whenever I had dinner at your house and your mom served chicken-fried steak, you’d gleefully announce it.”
Warmth undulated through her. “You remember that?”
His brown eyes with those intriguing green flecks studied her. “I remember a lot of things, Lace.”
“For instance?”
“I remember how you had this big black magnifying glass you’d take with you everywhere and whip out of your back pocket whenever you found a bug or plant that caught your interest. You were brainy even then.”
“My girl cousins thought I was weird because I liked spiders and toads and lizards and snakes.”
“But you were every little boy’s dream girl.”
She laughed. “Not yours. You liked the girly-girls who wore pink and cried when they broke a fingernail.”
“I’ve come to realize that might have been a little shortsighted of me.”
“What was?”
“Not looking beyond the pretty surface.”
“If you were an insect you’d be Gerris remigis,” Lace commented.
“What’s that?”
“A water strider.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Water striders have long legs.” She couldn’t help glancing at his legs that were stretched out on either side of the room service cart. “So they can easily skim the surface. They spend their lives skimming the surface.”
“So they’re light on their feet.”
“Just as you are. Never going deep.”
“Well.” His gaze flicked to her lap. “I wouldn’t say never.”
Lace ducked her head and forked a bit of mashed potatoes into her mouth so he couldn’t see her blush. Yes, she was embarrassed, so you would have thought she’d leave it alone, but oh no, once she swallowed her potatoes, she had to keep talking. “When the male water striders are looking for a mate they send out ripple frequency across the surface of the water, transmitting sound waves to attract female water striders. If the female is receptive, she will zip on over. If she’s not receptive, she’ll emit her own ripple frequency that warns him to back off.”
Pierce tugged at his collar. “Ripple frequency, huh? So that’s what I do? Cause a ripple?”
“Everywhere you go.”
“What would you be?” he asked. “If you were an insect.”
She paused to consider that. “I was a lacewing once.”
“When?” He chuckled. “In another life?”
“In a second grade school play about gardens. I wore the costume for Halloween the same year. It confused everyone. They thought I was supposed to be a character from some animated space movie. I should have gone as a scorpion. No one can mistake a scorpion. With a scorpion, what you see is what you get.”
“You always were light-years ahead of everyone else.”
“No. I’m just different. It’s not an easy thing to be when you’re a small-town kid.”
“You think like a roadrunner moves,” Pierce said. “Lightning quick.”
She straightened in her chair. “Thank you for the compliment. Geococcyx californianus, also known as the Californian earth-cuckoo or chaparral cock, is my favorite bird and they can run up to twenty-six miles an hour.”
The second she said the word “cock,” she realized how suggestive it sounded given the circumstance—them alone in a hotel room, she in her robe without any underwear on—but she plowed ahead. Once upon a time she would have stumbled and stuttered over the word “cock.” She braced for his snappy comeback.
Pierce grinned, but he didn’t go there. “Californian earth-cuckoo, huh?” Somehow the way he said it sounded even more suggestive than if he’d said, “chaparral cock.”
“The name doesn’t define their range. They’re desert birds.”
“Your head was always full of the desert. I’m not surprised you came back here instead of taking that job at the Smithsonian.”
“Who told you about that?”
He shrugged, put his napkin onto his empty plate. “You know small-town gossip.”
“I imagine they’re gossiping about us right now.”
“No doubt I’ve sullied your reputation.”
She smiled. “Perhaps I’ve sullied yours.”
“It would take a lot to do that.”
“You wouldn’t believe some of the stories that get passed around about you,” she said.
“Such as?”
“You’ve had group sex with the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.”
“Sweetheart,” he drawled. “I get enough team action on the football field.”
Her heart thumped erratically.
“You’ve generated some gossip of your own,” he said.
“You mean besides turning down the Smithsonian?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Which is?”
“I heard that you’re still a virgin.”
Lace’s pulse revved. “Did you?”
“I did.”
“Cupidites don’t have enough to talk about if the question of my virginity is a hot topic of conversation. You’d think Olive Cooksey’s criminal activities would have snagged top billing.”
“Are you?” he murmured. “Still a virgin?”
She lowered her lashes, gave him a seductive sidelong glance meant to put starch in his pants. If he could tease, so could she. “Am I?”
His grinned widened, but his eyes were serious. “You like messing with people’s heads.”
“Do I?”
“You know that you do.”
“So is that why you’re pursuing me so relentlessly? You’re interested in deflowering me?”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“But the idea of being with a virgin makes you hot.”
“The idea of being with you makes me hot.”
Perspiration beaded between Lace’s breasts in spite of the air-conditioner vent blowing cool air on her. “So if you learned I was not a virgin, would you be disappointed?”
“Honestly?”
“By all means.”
“I’d be relieved.”
“Why? So you wouldn’t have to feel bad about popping my cherry and then sneaking out the back door the next morning?”
“Woman, any man who would sneak out the back door after a night with you needs his head examined.”
“But you’ve done it before. Sneaked out on a woman after a hot night of passion.”
He looked guilty. “I’m no saint, Lace.”
Neither am I. She’d done her share of sneaking out the morning after, but she wasn’t about to let him know that. Those were not some of her finer moments.
“And if I were a virgin,” she asked, enjoying stringing him along, “could you deal with that?”
He gulped visibly. “Lace, have you been waiting for me—”
She burs
t out laughing.
“What?” He sounded hurt.
“Don’t worry, Pierce, I have not been saving myself for you, in fact, quite the opposite. I completely purged you from my system.”
“Oh.”
“That’s not what you wanted to hear?”
He looked caught off guard. “But you’re not … involved with anyone right now?”
“You’re just now asking?”
“It just now occurred to me that’s why you’re resisting this thing between us.”
“There’s no thing.”
He looked smug. “Deny it all you want, there’s a thing.”
“It would serve you right if I said yes, that I was involved with someone else.”
“But you’re not.”
“No.”
He nodded. “Good, great.”
“Why the affirmative response?”
“Are you finished?” He waved at her plate.
“Yes, I—”
He stood up, shoved the food cart off to one side, reached down, took her hand, and pulled her to her feet.
“What are you doing?”
“What water striders do best, sending out ripples.” He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her up tight against his chest.
“Hey!”
He ended her protest by closing his mouth over hers. Lace stiffened and pushed against him with her palms, but he simply tightened his grip. His tongue pressed against her teeth and, dammit, she opened up like a clam in a hot steamer. He tasted like rich dark chocolate, warm and inviting, too deviously delicious to disobey.
Could she do this? Could she have sex with him and not stir up those old feelings? It was dangerous ground. Emotional quicksand. But here was the kicker, if she could sleep with him and keep her feelings from getting involved, then she would know she had well and truly moved past her schoolgirl crush. If she could treat Pierce like a tasty bonbon, as she had done with those guys in college, wouldn’t that be the ultimate freedom?
Maybe, but what if she couldn’t?
What if she had sex with him and fell madly in love all over again? What then? What if she lost her heart and in the end he didn’t love her back?
Just the idea of it made her queasy, and in that split second of sweet agony, she relived her teenage angst all over again. Her crush—and the humiliating way it came out—had been a watershed moment. It had taken her a while to get over him and put the past behind her. Yes, it had been horrible, but the experience had made her tougher, stronger, and more resilient. She’d conquered her stutter, lost weight, and then gained it back when she realized that she had not been the problem. Loving him had changed her in irrevocable ways, good ways, healthy ways, even when he had not loved her back.
Lori Wilde - [Cupid, Texas 02] Page 16