Texas Cinderella

by Victoria Pade

  Tate’s smile made a reappearance. “That’s it? One high school sweetheart? That’s all you had?” he teased.

  “Kevin Narcy,” Tanya confirmed. “We went steady from ninth grade through graduation.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “It was. As high school romances go. Just not serious enough to change either of our plans for after high school—Kevin dreamed of moving to Alaska and living some rustic, he-man lumberjack kind of life. I had no intention of doing that.”

  “Understandably. Did you part friends, and did he move to Alaska?”

  “Yes on both counts—we parted friends and I wished him well when he climbed on the bus north. We even kept in contact for a while—as much as we could with him living in a cabin somewhere in the middle of nowhere, doing maintenance on the oil pipeline. But then he met a girl up there and got involved with her. I was invited to their wedding two years ago but I couldn’t swing it, and since then I’ve just had Christmas cards.”

  “He got involved with someone else but you didn’t?” Tate asked, obviously interested in her romantic history.

  “Of course I did, too.”

  “Just one guy all the way through college?”

  Tanya put her fingertips in the water and flicked a little at him because he made her sound so boring. “No, not just one guy all the way through college,” she repeated. “Although there was only one serious guy—I started going out with him my junior year and it lasted until about eight months ago.”

  “How serious?”

  “Serious enough to talk marriage.”

  “That’s all? You just talked about it?” Tate asked.

  “And talked and talked and talked…”

  “Why so much talk and no action?”

  “Jordan just couldn’t make up his mind—he kept going back and forth, back and forth. It seems like that’s something you might be familiar with,” Tanya goaded him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never had any problem making up my mind—it’s just that sometimes, when it’s been about Katie, it might have seemed as if I made it up one way, then made it up another way, then made it up back to the first way again,” he joked with some self-deprecation.

  “Umm-hmm. Well, Jordan couldn’t make up his mind about anything,” Tanya continued. “He would order two full meals at dinner because he couldn’t decide between them, and then have to eat part of my food, too, because it would look better to him and he’d think he should have ordered that instead. He is four years older than I am and had been in college long enough to have a degree by the time I started, but even after I’d finished my degree, he still didn’t have one—”

  “Not too smart?”

  “It wasn’t that. In fact, he had a nearly four-point grade average. He could have done anything he wanted. The problem was that he changed his major and what he wanted to be almost every semester. And when he did that, most of the credits he’d accumulated wouldn’t count toward the new degree and he’d basically have to start over. He’s up to his eyeballs in school loans and still hasn’t graduated the last I heard. He can’t vote because he can’t settle on a candidate or a side on any issue. And he certainly couldn’t commit completely to me or marriage or having kids.”

  “What if you had made the decision that he was going to marry you and just told him that was the way it was—so it wasn’t a choice he had to make?”

  “Right—that’s just how I want someone to be with me—because I order them to and don’t give them a choice. No thanks,” Tanya said facetiously. “I finally decided enough was enough, I was sick of his back-and-forth, and I broke up with him—again, something you might have experienced….”

  “I have not experienced just two serious relationships in my life,” he said with a sly half smile that let her know he was purposely misunderstanding her.

  “No, you’ve only had one serious relationship. That’s on and off and on and off and on and off….”

  “I beg your pardon. I’ve had several serious relationships.”

  Tanya rolled her eyes. “Who besides young Miss Whitcomb-Salgar?” she challenged in disbelief.

  “There was Heather McGinnley,” he said with an exaggeratedly rapturous expression and tone. “She was my seventeen-year-old camp counselor when I was fifteen. I gave her my virginity and a marriage proposal.”

  Tanya laughed. “Wow, you were really grateful.”

  “Hey!” Tate chastised, laughing too. “It wasn’t gratitude, it was love.”

  “But then you came home from camp and—”

  “Yes, then I came home from camp and there was Katie,” he acknowledged, “and I had to honor my obligation to escort her to Junior Cotillion. But Heather had turned me down, anyway, so what’s a guy to do? But that doesn’t mean I was any less seriously head over heels with Heather before she rejected me.”

  “So, two serious relationships—sort of,” Tanya allowed. “That’s the same as me.”

  “Then there was Marnie Wilson, the lifeguard at the country-club pool,” Tate added. “We had three very serious summers together and might have had more than the summers except that she spent the rest of the time away at boarding school.”

  “And in between there was—”

  “Yes, Katie,” he granted. “But I was still serious about Marnie when I was with her.”

  “And even though I’m sure you can go on with a half-dozen more brief—but serious—interludes that you had through college and medical school, the bottom line is that the only genuinely serious relationship you’ve had was with Katie Whitcomb-Salgar.”

  “You can just call her Katie—I’ll know who you’re talking about. And you’re wrong again. Yes, there have been a lot of on-and-offs with Katie and me but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t serious about anyone in between. The other relationships just didn’t pan out. But if they had…Who knows?” he concluded.

  “I know I’m sticking with you just having one serious relationship,” Tanya persisted.

  “And I could argue that the relationship with Katie didn’t have all the earmarks of a serious relationship itself.”

  “That seems like a stretch.”

  “Not really,” Tate said as he hoisted himself out of the water and sat on the pool’s edge beside her.

  Tanya’s pulse sped up a notch at the sight of him in nothing but trunks, his massively muscled thighs dwarfing hers there on the deck, so much of him bare….

  “The real bottom line with Katie and me,” he was saying, forcing Tanya to concentrate on the subject and not on his magnificent body, “is that we weren’t serious enough about our relationship. At least I wasn’t. Which is why there were so many breaks from it, why it was so easy for us to be on-again, off-again. And, ultimately, that’s why we ended it for good this time. I told you, we finally admitted to ourselves that we’re more friends than anything else. That it was family pressure—not fate or destiny or any really strong feelings—putting us together.”

  “Maybe it’s fate that keeps urging your families to pressure you and Katie to be together,” Tanya suggested, testing him.

  “Or maybe it was fate that put you behind the library desk last week….”

  “I hate to tell you, but it was families—not fate—that put us together, too,” Tanya said, her voice quiet even though she was trying not to let him or his words or the look of appreciation in those eyes get to her. “Remember that you and I only know each other because your mother hired my mother.”

  Tate grinned. “I didn’t think of that. But it doesn’t change my mind—I still believe it was fate that brought you back here, now, just when I needed a little color and life and energy injected into things.”

  “I’m a shot in the arm?” she joked.

  “A shot in the arm that I must need because I was hating the thought that today was going to go by without my getting to see you. And then I opened my eyes a few minutes ago and there you were and…” He shook his head as if in awe. “It was definitely a
pick-me-up.” He suddenly grinned a wicked grin and added, “In more ways than one…”

  This time it was Tanya who chose to misconstrue what he was implying. “I’m just glad that you’re happier than you were last night.”

  He bent over and kissed the top of her shoulder, sending little shards of glitter sparkling along her nerve endings.

  “Oh, I’m happy all right,” he assured her.

  “And not because Katie is back in Dallas?” Tanya said, testing still.

  Tate leaned farther over and kissed her just behind the shoulder. “I didn’t know she was,” he said without any indication that he cared.

  “That’s what I heard,” Tanya persisted.

  “Okay.”

  He kissed the top of her shoulder a second time and then the front of it and Tanya wished it didn’t feel like heaven. It was just so difficult to deny herself when everything he did made her want him all the more.

  “She’s always going to be a part of your circle…. Katie is…isn’t she?” Tanya felt compelled to say for her own sake, reminding herself.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he assured her in a voice growing more husky by the minute.

  Then he slipped into the water again, standing directly in front of her. His hands came around her calves and he pulled her in with him before she even realized what he was doing.

  The surprise of it and that initial jolt of cold made her gasp, and she had the impression that a shock was what he wanted to cause.

  “I respect Katie. I like her. I care about her as a friend. But as far as anything else goes, she and I are done. So no more Katie,” he decreed. “No more Katie in any important way in my life, and definitely not in tonight or anything that has to do with you and me. Got it?”

  He was staring down at Tanya intently and with so much heat in his eyes that it was almost enough to wipe away the coolness that she was submerged in to her neck. But still she raised a saucy chin to him and said, “You’re laying down the law?”

  He smiled and his hands went to her upper arms, clasping them in a firm grip. “That’s only the start of what I want to lay down,” he said under his breath before he caught her mouth with his in a way that was as if no time had passed between last night and this, as if everything that had ignited in the den then had just simmered below the surface in him until that moment, and at that moment it had bubbled up, demanding to have its day.

  Not only in Tate, though. In Tanya, too, she realized as her answer to his kiss was every bit as hungry as his, as her hands went to those amazing pectorals she’d been dying to know the feel of. Her own nipples—already perked up by the cold—now hardened into tiny pebbles instantly striving for his touch.

  She struggled against her own inclinations to recall why she hadn’t let this happen last night.

  They’d been in the main house, the McCord house. Tate had had a bad night that had brought up his feelings about his friend’s death and she hadn’t wanted to just be a diversion from that. Or a diversion he filled the time with when he was off-again with Katie.

  But tonight…

  They weren’t exactly in the McCords’ house and could easily sneak away to the guest cottage nearby.

  He wasn’t looking for a quick fix for bad feelings about losing his friend.

  But could she believe that he was genuinely finished with Katie Whitcomb-Salgar and not only in an intermission?

  Maybe she was fooling herself but she had the sense that Tate believed it. And if he believed it, didn’t that strengthen the possibility that things between Katie and him really, truly, once and for all, were over?

  Or do I just want him so much I’m talking myself into it?

  Because as mouths opened wide and Tate’s tongue came to claim hers and teach it a tango all their own, she did want him so much it hurt….

  His hands went from her arms to her breasts and the thin, wet layers of her tank top and built-in bra were nothing like the armor that the designer dress had been. It wasn’t exactly like having her skin enveloped in his, but it was still good enough to make her nipples strain into his palms as if they only existed for that.

  He has to be through with the other woman, she thought. He just has to be.

  Because tonight, no matter what, Tanya didn’t have the strength to say no….

  She ran her hands all over him—from the tautness of his lower back up the widening vee to broad shoulders, down impressive biceps, across to a chest where his own nipples were mimicking hers.

  And all the while that kiss!

  It was open and urgent and enough to drive her out of her mind all on its own….

  Maybe it also let Tate know just how willing she was tonight because he took his hands from her breasts, scooped her into his arms and carried her up the pool steps and out of the water. He had to stop kissing her to watch where he was going but even so he didn’t ask permission, he merely took her to the guesthouse.

  To the guesthouse’s bedroom…

  Of course Tanya could have objected. But she didn’t.

  Once they were secluded in his room and she was on her own two feet again, Tate didn’t hesitate to peel off her wet tank top and warm her breasts with his hands first, and then with his mouth. After a moment, he took off her shorts and his swimsuit in quick succession.

  Then there they were, and for a brief moment it was almost inconceivable to Tanya that she was actually standing there naked, facing an also naked Tate McCord. But the unreality of it passed almost instantly as wanting him overwhelmed the awkwardness. And from that moment on nothing seemed anything but right.

  Tate again whisked her into his arms and laid her on the bed. The curtains were open and moonlight cast a spotlight’s glow on him as he stood at the bedside, savoring the sight of her.

  She did the same, feasting on the magnificence of a body no sculptor would ignore as that milky light caressed him the way Tanya’s hands ached to. And did the moment he joined her, stretching out next to her, lying on his side, his front running the length of her as his mouth rediscovered hers and one of his hands closed around her bare breast once more.

  Massaging, kneading, gently plucking at her nipple with agile, talented fingers while mouths again did a sexy reunion kiss that took no time to turn into a randy, uninhibited plundering.

  But even a surgeon’s hands could only perform so much and Tanya had no complaints when his mouth abandoned hers a second time to kiss a trail from there to the hollow of her throat, to her collarbone, to her breast….

  Tiny, feathery kisses were what he placed all around first one nipple and then the other, teasing her, tantalizing her with anticipation before his lips parted enough to draw her between them, and then—at last—to pull her whole breast into the divine warmth of his open mouth.

  Tanya’s spine arched off the mattress in response to the delights he was unveiling, to flicks of his tongue and tender tugs of his teeth, to his other hand at her other breast, kneading and pressing and—rather than satisfying her—only making her want even more.

  She sent her own hands exploring then, boldly, brazenly, coursing all over him again until she found the long, steely shaft that announced how much he wanted her, too.

  A low moan of pleasure rumbled from his throat as he draped a heavy thigh over hers. And while his mouth continued its wonders at her breast, the hand that was titillating the other slid away.

  With his palm flat against her, that hand traveled down to her stomach, down farther to the juncture of her legs, following the curve of her body to dip between them. And just when Tanya thought she’d been driving him a little crazier than he’d been driving her, he proved her wrong.

  Long fingers worked a magic of their own, inside of her and out, raising new levels of need that she hadn’t even known she was capable of, leaving her right on the brink.

  As if he knew that, he rose above her, recapturing her mouth with his as he positioned himself between her thighs, probing with that portion of him she’d just released. Finding h
is home, he slipped into her slowly, smoothly, sleekly, until he was embedded deeply within her.

  He pulsed there several times. Then he stopped kissing her and dipped to her breast again, sending only the tip of his tongue to the very crest of her breast as his hips began to move—barely in and out in the same slow, measured rhythm his tongue was keeping at her nipple.

  But that didn’t last for long before his hips picked up speed and force, before his back arched so he could plunge into her, before he devoted himself to those fabulous thrusts that fitted them together flawlessly.

  Tanya kept pace, meeting him, matching him, holding tight for the ride that took them up another notch each time he came into her, each time he drew out. Passion, need grew. Bigger and bigger, like a giant balloon carrying her higher and higher until Tanya reached the pinnacle and couldn’t do anything but cling to Tate while crystal clear, pristine pleasure held her at the very peak for one mindless moment. One moment when Tate, too, reached the same climax, buried so deeply within her that they were nearly melded together.

  And then it began to ebb, to deflate and, in perfect sync, they both slowly drifted back from that shared bliss.

  Muscles relaxed and Tate let more of his weight rest on her, his cheek pressed to hers, his breath a hot breeze on her shoulder.

  But it was only a few minutes before his arms insinuated themselves around her so he could roll them to their sides, bodies still joined and molded together into one.

  Then his lips were on the top of her head, in her hair, placing a reverent kiss there before he whispered, “What you do to me is like nothing I’ve ever known.”

  There was a sort of reverence in his tone, too, and all Tanya could do was kiss the marvelous chest she was facing and whisper in return, “Me, too.”

  That was how they stayed until she felt him beginning to fall asleep. Then he caught himself, finally slipped out of her and laid on his back, pulling her as close as he could to lie alongside him with her head cradled on his shoulder.

  His arms around her were still tight enough to let her know he wasn’t letting her go. And while she hated the thought of her mother or any other member of the staff finding out about this, she couldn’t make herself roll away from him and leave.