Mac slipped his arms around Sid’s waist. “You were not a tramp. You probably slept with half as many guys as the guys did women, and you were not a tramp.”
“I was easy, and once you get that reputation, the guys make it easy to be easy, you know?”
Yes, he did know. Knew exactly how tempting it was to believe sexual congress meant something to his partners, to believe he meant something to them because they’d shared some fleeting physical encounters.
“We all have regrets, Sid. Maybe you’d do it differently if you had it to do over, but who wouldn’t?”
“Oh, MacKenzie.” She sounded so lost, so utterly without hope. He pulled her back against his chest.
“You were young, Sid. You were coping as best you could, and I’ve been every bit as much at a loss.”
“We pay a price for coping like that.” She rested her cheek against his arm, and Mac felt a world of sorrow in one small female.
“Tell me, Sid. I don’t care who you were with five or ten years ago. I don’t care how many people you were with. I don’t care about your past at all except insofar as it shadows your future and weighs on your heart.”
She turned, so she was again in his embrace, leaning on him. “Have you ever wondered why I’m doing foster care?”
“Because it’s what you’re supposed to do. Some people are supposed to teach therapeutic riding, and some people are supposed to be foster parents. It’s a calling.”
“Bless you, MacKenzie Knightley.” She rested on him more heavily, and again he waited. Whatever troubled her, to her it was real and powerful, and she was about to share it with him. He felt Sid gathering her courage, so he kept his caresses on her back slow and easy, willing her to lean on his emotional strength even as she leaned on him physically.
“I’m a city girl, but growing up, I always knew I’d end up in the country. It’s a better place to raise kids, and if I knew anything about myself, it was that I wanted kids. I used to draw pictures in my imagination of me on a big porch swing with a half-dozen kids around me. We’d read children’s stories, the kind where everything turns out all right in the end.”
The wistfulness of her words lingered in the night air as the moon rose higher and the tree frogs sang their love songs.
“Pity me, MacKenzie. I am that most pathetic of creatures, the foster parent who cannot have her own children.”
Sid’s voice was so quiet, a whisper in the darkness, but Mac heard her. By God, he heard her, and the sense of her words slammed through him like a gale-force wind.
“Not pathetic.” He gathered her up, held her close, his words coming out in a fierce growl. “You are not pathetic because of an accident of nature. You are courageous and beautiful, and a goddamned saint to be reaching out to other people’s children when you deserve to have your own. If anybody should be having children, lots and lots of them, it’s you. You mother the hell out of the one cub you’ve got, and for all you know, Luis is just on loan. Jesus, God.”
Sid wasn’t saying anything, and this drove Mac crazy.
“Argue with me, Sid. Kiss me, smack me, tell me you understand what I’m saying, don’t just—Sidonie, for God’s sake, please don’t cry.”
“I’m not—it’s not that kind of crying. I’m done with that kind of crying.”
Mac had to bend his head to catch her words. Her hands were fisted in his hair, though, holding him desperately close, and her cheek was damp against his chest.
“It’s some goddamned kind of crying.” He brushed her tears away with his thumbs, his chest aching. He should have seen this, should have seen it in the way she watched Luis, the way the social worker’s stupid games got to her.
“Men don’t get it.” Sid rubbed her cheek on Mac’s chest. He eased back so she was sprawled over him, the better for him to get his hands everywhere they needed to be. Her face, her back, her hair, her arms, her shoulders, her everything.
“What don’t we get?”
“The emptiness, the sorrow, the ache. It never goes away, that ache. You have a period every month, just as if your body had the same reproductive ability every other female body does. You have the PMS, the bloating, the cramps, all of the messy, undignified burden, but you never get the reward. You get failure. You get nothing. Then you feel like nothing.”
“You’re not nothing to Luis.” Or to me.
“He won’t let me adopt him, Mac, and I tell myself that’s fine. He shouldn’t have to un-choose his mom to choose me. I can love him anyway.”
“Have you ever asked him what his reservations are?”
“He’s a teenaged boy. He probably doesn’t know what his reservations are, and couldn’t put them into words even if he did. It comes down to him not wanting to be legally mine, and if I love him, I have to accept that. The legalities aren’t what matter anyway.”
The lawyer part of Mac’s brain wasn’t so sure, but family law wasn’t his area. The situation was worth discussing with Trent though. Some other time. Some other time, when Sidonie Lindstrom had told him the full extent of her sorrow.
“Why can’t you have kids, Sidonie?”
“Indirectly, it’s my own damned fault.”
“No, it is not.” Mac was utterly certain of that.
“I was the hookup queen of my class, Mac, before hooking up was as popular as it is now. I was stupid and I took risks and my body put an end to it. You know what endometriosis is?”
“I do.”
“Well, I didn’t. I generally comported myself like a shameless hussy on a perpetual spring break, until I was with a guy in the fall of my sophomore year, and for the first time ever, it hurt. Not a big, dramatic pain, just a twinge. When it happened again, I went in to get checked out, and the doc listed endometriosis along with a lot of other it-could-bes. I didn’t think anything of it, because the sex wasn’t important.”
More sorrow, because sex should be important. Mac’s belief in that regard probably qualified him as a caveman.
“You’re important, Sid.”
She kissed his heart. “I’m honest enough to admit my sleeping around was one long, protracted mistake. I settled down, applied myself academically, and found—wonder of wonders—a lot more than I liked sleeping around, I liked learning things, liked excelling in my studies.”
“Of course you would. You’re smart as a whip.” Sid went silent, and Mac mentally kicked himself, because all those good grades hadn’t left her feeling smart as a whip. “Something happened, didn’t it?”
He kissed her temple, hoping to reassure her back into speaking.
“In grad school, I met a guy. We hit it off. We got engaged.” She took a deep breath, her chest expanding against Mac’s. “We got married because we wanted to have kids.”
Mac knew, knew as if he’d written the script himself, what came next.
“We got divorced a couple years later because I couldn’t have kids.” Her voice caught. “I can’t have kids.”
“Breathe, Sid. Don’t fight it.”
She let out her breath on a gusty, miserable sigh. “My husband was a decent guy, and I think if it had just been my infertility, he would have coped. But I couldn’t cope. I felt guilty and ashamed and angry, and pushed him away, and clung, and pushed him away. I don’t blame him for giving up. He remarried. They’re happy.”
While Sid was broke, heart-broke, grieving on top of grieving, and pretending nothing was wrong.
“If you tell me they have two adorable kids, which your charming ex has the temerity to send you a picture of with his damned Christmas card, I will know where to dump your first load of top-quality horseshit.”
She lifted her head, the tracks of her tears glimmering by the light of the low-hanging moon. “They’re all over his social networking pages too. The cutest damned little rug rats you ever did see.”
“Two loads, then. One
on each of their birthdays.”
Sid folded down against him, and if she hadn’t been sprawled over him, Mac would have hunted down the sorry bastard and wrapped his nuts around his neck.
“So that was it? He dumped you, and you and your faulty plumbing started doing foster care?”
“You make it sound like I’m a utility sink, but my uterus is fine. My fallopian tubes seem to be the problem, though I still have all my equipment, and my yearly checkups suggest I’ve dodged the bullet for now.”
Mac shifted, because Sid’s weight was pressing on parts of his body that had no sense of timing, no respect for a woman’s distress. Those parts of him only knew Sid was warm and soft and female, and under other circumstances, probably willing.
“You let yourself have any rebound relationships?”
“Yes, MacKenzie. I got back on the horse, but it wasn’t much of a ride. Then Tony was diagnosed, or let me know he was diagnosed, and that was that.”
That was a tragedy wrapped in a misery tied up with a sorrow. Mac could feel the gears whizzing in Sid’s female brain, maybe thinking up questions he wasn’t ready to answer.
“Are you scared to have sex with me, MacKenzie?”
Or questions from so far out in left field, Mac didn’t even have sense enough to see them coming.
“Why would I be scared?”
“You should be. I’ve been a mess most of my adult life.”
“Phi Beta Kappa?” Mac asked.
“Well, yeah.”
“Mensa?”
“I qualified. I didn’t join.”
“Dean’s list?”
“I missed out freshman year by a whisker.”
“And you ran your brother’s production company, managed his hospice care, kept an eye on Luis, pulled up stakes and moved out here when that was best for the kid. You’re a rolling wreck, all right.”
She nuzzled a spot below his ear that was damned near ticklish. “You’ve changed the subject.”
“Not really. Will you respect my request for an exclusive arrangement with you, Sidonie? We’re all carrying baggage, and yours is not as unique as you think.”
“What about you?” She sat up to survey him, which meant she was again parked on the evidence of his inconvenient arousal. This felt wonderful physically, which made him feel lousy otherwise.
“What about me?”
“You going to tell me about those near misses someday, Mr. Knightley?”
“Yes, I am.” If he’d been thinking up ways to dodge that conversation earlier, he knew now he couldn’t put it off forever. “This might not be the best time.”
“Because you’re aroused?” Sid scooted back, her hands going to the fly of his jeans. Before Mac could protest, she had him unzipped. “If I recall, there’s a guy in here whose acquaintance I’d like to make, or make again.”
“Sid, you don’t have to do this. Let me hold you.”
“You’ve been holding me, and we’ve talked, and, yes, I will guaran-ass-damned-tee you an exclusive, you idiot.”
“I’m an idiot?”
“A horny idiot, thank God. Do you think I’d want to share you, for pity’s sake? I want all of you, all to myself, because I am not an idiot.” She extracted him from his clothing, her hands cool and careful on him in a sexy contrast to her brusque tone of voice.
“Sidonie, just because I have the beginnings of an erection doesn’t mean you have to humor me.” He was as hard as a muck fork handle—before she ran her finger around the tip of his shaft.
“Lose the jeans, MacKenzie.” She climbed off him and started unbuttoning her shirt. Her breasts, those glorious, soft, peachy-perfect breasts emerged into the moonlight when her bra came off a moment later.
“I don’t take advantage of women when they’re emotionally distraught.” Mac’s voice shook. He hoped Sid didn’t hear it, but she grinned up at him, which shot that theory all to hell.
“I will take advantage of you, though, MacKenzie. It isn’t polite to argue with a lady, and it’s plain silly when you’re nakey-nakey and rarin’ to go.” Her jeans came off, which effectively obliterated Mac’s ability to argue.
He wanted those sturdy, feminine legs wrapped around him, wanted to bury his face in that soft thatch of curly reddish-blond hair, wanted to consume her with his every sense. Naked in the moonlight, Sid folded their clothing at the foot of the blanket, and Mac understood that this wasn’t about her feminine confidence.
She was a confident woman, or he wouldn’t have noticed her.
This was to reassure Sid he saw her as confident, he saw her as desirable.
And he did. More than ever, Mac absolutely did. He might possibly desire her more than he could show her, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying.
“I’m calling the shots here, Knightley, lest you get some fool manly notion about who’s in charge of this round. On your back, please.”
She pushed him on the chest and down he went. He was a big guy; women and even men seemed to defer to him naturally in most situations—except, of course, his little brothers and their womenfolk and offspring. Being bossed around by a naked woman, though… Mac could get used to it.
Might take a lot of practice, but he was willing to make the investment. Mac made this vow to himself because he suspected it hadn’t been like this for Sid with all those little college boys.
Her freshman year—the single year of her big, wicked sex spree—she would have been eighteen years old. She hadn’t been bossing anybody then. Eighteen was still a child, in many ways. Legally, an adult; emotionally, the barest approximation thereof.
“Get comfortable, MacKenzie. This could take a while.”
He expected Sid to swing a leg over him and kiss the daylights out of him. Her hair brushed his stomach an instant before her lips settled on the end of his cock.
Between thank-God-I-showered-after-work and complete ecstatic oblivion, Mac had one coherent thought: he needed this. His first impulse was to protest, to lever up and gently put Sid on her back, while he explained to her that certain intimacies could be reserved for when he’d earned them.
The lecture died a silent death, swallowed up in the vast sea of Mac’s gratitude.
He needed this. Needed the reassurance that a worthy woman desired him this way, wanted to give to him this intimately. He needed the trust, the pleasure, the sharing of his arousal, the courage on both their parts.
He needed her.
He settled his hand in Sid’s hair, wanting to be connected to her as she drove him beyond reason. Her tongue was a psychological weapon designed to part a man from his wits; her hands were maddeningly gentle as they cupped and stroked him.
Sid paused and shifted her body so she was straddling Mac’s leg, her hair drifting over his belly, and her hands sleeving his shaft. He was wet; she’d licked him wet and moved her hands down his shaft, one after the other, as she drew on him. Her mouth tugged one way, her hands the other, and Mac nearly flew apart.
“Slow down, Sidonie. For the love of… You can’t… I’m going to…Jesus.”
She raised her head to peer at him, teasing her fingers through the down at the base of his shaft. “Am I doing this right, MacKenzie?”
“Yes.” That tortured whisper was his voice, telling her the God’s honest truth. “Exactly right.”
“Good.” She arched up and cradled his erect cock between her breasts, getting her tongue on the end of him as she moved her body to caress his length. “Wouldn’t want to think I’ve worn you out already.”
Mac knew a vulgar term for what she was doing, but it felt sublime. Her moving on him, her breasts and her mouth, her heat, her tongue…
He tried to think of Supreme Court opinions he’d memorized. Tried to recite the Gettysburg Address, but he made the mistake of opening his eyes as Sid shifted again to rub her cheek over the end
of his engorged cock. She looked enraptured, a pagan goddess come to earth to indulge herself with him.
“Sid, I can’t hold out much longer. My wallet’s…”
“Hush.” She licked him delicately, like a cat. “No wallet. We didn’t use your wallet the last time we were on this blanket, and turnabout is fair play.”
She was going to kill him, and Mac would be grateful. He felt for her hair, palming the back of her head in hopes he might be able to control her if he couldn’t control himself. She got her mouth on that spot under the tip of his cock, scraped her teeth over it, and sent lightning bolts through his self-restraint.
“Sidonie, I’m close.”
She closed her mouth over him and drew on him firmly, rhythmically, relentlessly. Within five seconds, Mac’s mind shut down as pleasure rocketed through him. He barely had time to roll over and wedge himself against the edge of the blanket before he was coming in great, wracking spasms of glory. His body trembled and jerked with it; behind his closed eyes, fireworks exploded in brilliant colors. His lungs heaved like a colt who’d set the new record for the Derby, while his entire being was suffused with pleasure.
He might have passed out, so thoroughly had Sidonie satisfied him.
When Mac could think again, Sid was what he first became aware of. She’d hiked her leg over his hips and cuddled close. Her arm banded his chest, and her body was spooned around him to the extent a woman almost a foot shorter than he could spoon with him.
In the welter of emotions following these physical sensations, he spotted the temptation to cry, which would not do. The urge to laugh wasn’t quite right either, so he kept sorting, even as Sid’s hand stroked over his chest.
Mac moved to his back and took her in his arms, putting her head on his shoulder.
She sighed the kind of smug, dreamy sigh he associated with women who’d found their pleasure, though he knew she hadn’t. She laid her palm to his jaw and turned his head, stretching up to kiss him lingeringly on the lips, then subsided to his shoulder again.
God in heaven, he needed to say something, to think something.
Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe Sid had just said it for both of them.
Kiss Me Hello (Sweetest Kisses) Page 20