Mason stood up with the hat held casually in front of him. He offered Cassidy his hand and after another deep breath, she took it, letting him pull her out of the gondola. Mason wore his most charming smile, the one that said, “Yep, you caught me dead-to-rights, but can you blame a guy for trying?”
He pulled her close and refused to let go of her hand, which didn’t make thinking any easier. But at least she could attempt a smile of her own now, a small one that people could probably see right through.
“Mason Hannigan,” Kayla cooed, “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.” She rushed over with her husband, Todd, in tow. He carried a gassy-looking baby in one arm. Their oldest boy, Richard, gazed worshipfully at Mason.
It surprised Cassidy to see how much Todd had changed. She hadn’t seen him for six or seven months, maybe. He wasn’t even thirty yet, but half his hair was gone and an extra twenty pounds hung over his big silver belt buckle. Kayla, on the other hand, had never looked more beautiful. In true Kayla fashion, she had her breasts shored up and on display in a black, low-cut cowgirl shirt. She went extra heavy on the makeup, but there was no denying she looked alluring. And if she’d doubled up on the warmth of her greeting to Mason, Todd seemed to be too star-struck to notice. He hung back, bouncing the baby a little to keep it quiet.
“What are you doing in town?” she asked Mason, clearly doing her best to ignore the fact that he had Cassidy under one arm.
“We had a bye week. I figured why not.” Mason nodded to Kayla’s husband. “Hey, Todd.”
Todd nodded back. “Hey, Mason.”
“We follow all your games, of course,” Kayla went on. “I swear you keep getting better looking every time I see you.”
Cassidy shot a look of sympathy at Todd, but he just kept grinning.
“How is it a big handsome man like you hasn’t settled down and started a family yet?” Kayla gave the toddler in her arms a showy smile. He stared back at her, eyes unfocused, mouth slack. Then she turned to Mason. “I’m so glad we ran into you. Now I can invite you to dinner. I don’t like to brag, but we make a pretty mean chicken-fried steak. I could invite Parker, too, so you boys could catch up.”
The invitation was clearly for Mason only. But what made Cassidy’s head spin was Kayla wanting to insert Parker into the equation. What on earth was she thinking? Mason and Parker were never friends. They played on different sports teams and ran with different crowds. In fact, the only thing they had in common was that both of them, at one time, had liked her.
Then the truth struck, and sweat popped out on Cassidy’s skin. In Kayla’s mind, Cassidy had no business starting a relationship, especially since she was the mother of Parker’s child. Cassidy knew that Kayla had some pretty hidebound notions about marriage and family. Kayla had gotten married and started a family the “right” way, whereas she, Cassidy, had made an impetuous mistake and needed to be punished. I wasn’t the one who walked away, she wanted to say to Kayla.
Yet what if Mason came around to feeling the way Kayla did? That as Lexie’s mother, she, Cassidy, ought to “try to make things work” with Parker? Cassidy felt as though her heart might lurch sideways right out of her chest.
“I’m afraid my dance card’s full up,” Mason said, smiling down at Cassidy. He tightened his grip around her, but still held the hat in front of him. “But all due respect, Kayla, I don’t know that Parker and I really have much to say to each other. Much that’s polite anyway.”
Kayla’s smile collapsed. Mason had said it in a way that was firm but not unfriendly, kind of like he had with the insurance salesman at the Double Aces. If Cassidy hadn’t felt as though her own smile was cemented to her face, she might have laughed. Maybe when you were one of the top quarterbacks in the country, you didn’t have to put up with people’s nonsense anymore.
“You surprise me, Mason,” Kayla said, making an obvious effort to recover herself. She glanced around to see if anyone had overheard them. A flurry of victorious ding-ding-dings sounded from the game arcade. “You and Parker went to school together. Is that any way to treat an old friend?”
“Oh, Parker and I were never friends,” Mason said evenly. “Now, if you want to invite me and Cassidy over to dinner one night and Cassidy says it’s okay, we’d be happy to go. Lexie, too. But not if Parker’s there.”
Kayla’s nostrils flared. Her lips went white around the corners. She swung an accusing gaze at Cassidy.
“Kayla, honey, why don’t we just calm down?” Todd said, patting her shoulder. “Let’s not lose our temper.”
“I am not losing my temper,” Kayla said testily.
“Sure you are, baby. Let’s go take us a walk before words start flying out that we can’t take back again.”
Cassidy didn’t dare blink because she was afraid she’d miss something. She stood, as rooted to the ground as a tree and just as mute. Todd put his hand firmly in the middle of Kayla’s back, steering her away. Before going, he said to Mason, “Kayla’s heart’s in the right place. She just believes in family, is all.”
Kayla gave Cassidy a brief venomous glare, but then softened her expression when she got to Mason. “Nothing’s more important than family.”
Mason nodded. “’Night, Kayla, ’Night, Todd.”
Cassidy and Mason turned back to the midway. She trotted along beside him, still in a state of shock, wondering how she was going to explain what had just happened to Maggie and April. Maggie made no bones about hating Kayla. April took a softer approach, but even she admitted Kayla wasn’t her favorite person in the whole world. Cassidy replayed the episode in her head, with all the sound effects, while Mason guided her through the crowd.
For a minute or two, he didn’t say anything. Maybe he was angry or maybe he was waiting for her to speak first. They passed a group of cowhands drinking beer and pitching horseshoes behind a trailer. A popcorn vendor opened the Plexiglas doors of his cart, releasing gusts of hot buttery steam from a freshly popped batch. One of the concessionaires called to them to try their luck tossing ping-pong balls into bowls of live goldfish, but Cassidy was in no mood for games. She wanted to thank Mason for defending her, especially to Kayla. But there was something else she needed to confess.
“Thanks for standing up to Kayla,” she began. “You were great.”
“Kayla’s okay, I guess. Not a fan of yours, though, is she?”
“Not really. Look, you know there isn’t anything going on between me and Parker besides Lexie, right?” For a moment, she felt the same disappointment that Kayla must have felt, that things hadn’t worked out, that Lexie didn’t have a dad telling her every day how amazing she was. “Also… I know that Kayla was once your girlfriend.”
Mason lifted his arm off her shoulders and took her hand instead. She felt the thrill of it, the cozy warmth, right down to her bones. “Kayla my girlfriend? No, a girlfriend is something else entirely.”
So they hadn’t really gone steady then. She bit her lip and remembered the Cattle Rancher motel rumors. Had she heard wrong or was he telling the truth? And why was she so relieved to hear that he and Kayla were never serious?
“Look, I never told Parker he couldn’t see Lexie,” she explained. “But I don’t encourage him either. It’s the same reason I never asked him for money. In the beginning, I knew he didn’t have any. I also didn’t want him asking to take Lexie over the summer or on Christmas breaks. How could I trust him to look after her? Maybe that’s selfish of me, but it’s the truth.”
“Parker Nolen took something that wasn’t his to take,” Mason said with a flintiness she’d never heard in his voice before. “Then he split town and left you to clean up the mess. In my opinion, that makes Parker a dick.”
Cassidy had a feeling that they were veering dangerously close to a past she didn’t want to look at too closely right now. There were times she found herself yearning to ask Mason why he’d ditched her for Kay
la, why he’d left town to go to college without saying goodbye. But not now. Not with everything so good between them.
“Telling people off works up a powerful thirst in a man,” Mason said, clearly as eager to change the subject as she was. “I’m ready for a beer. How about you?”
Cassidy peered inside the beer tent, glad no one she knew was waiting in line. Then she looked up at Mason. His eyes held a glint of mischief in them and a kind of lazy appreciation that made it hard to focus on things like beer. The space between them had a hungrier edge to it now. It frightened her a little, but not enough to stop gazing into his dark eyes and wishing that she and Mason were alone. Her fingers yearned to touch him. She could feel that yearning pulse inside every cell of her body. She knew he was thinking about what had happened inside the haunted house and now she was, too. Maybe she’d never stopped thinking about it.
She wondered if he would walk her home after the rodeo.
Then she wondered what might happen after Lexie went to sleep.
* * * *
Mason couldn’t get sense impressions of Cassidy out of his mind: the heat of her skin, the silkiness of her hair, the fragrance of it, like spice and flowers.
Because he couldn’t get them out of his mind, he’d stayed hard pretty much the whole time since leaving the rodeo and walking her back to the house. He was so hard it was beginning to ache, and since Lexie galloped ahead of them clutching her spoils of victory from the midway, and he couldn’t drag Cassidy up to meet his lips, he found himself getting his first lesson in dating a woman with kids.
He and Cassidy maintained a safe distance, but that only made him want her more urgently. He couldn’t so much as brush against her without experiencing a corresponding throb in his groin, and the whole time he wondered how a sensual tornado like her kept such a tight lid on her sexuality. Women he’d kissed, and plenty of them, but never one like her.
Never.
He shifted around on the porch swing, trying to disguise his problem, while Cassidy herded Lexie inside the house and got her ready for bed. He heard water running in the bathroom; a toilet flushing; Lexie making a halfhearted attempt to stay up and watch something called Kung Fu Panda. He admired the guile Cassidy used to handle her daughter. She ignored the most unreasonable requests, stonewalled on others, and made short work of stall tactics like pre-bedtime glasses of water. It impressed him because Cassidy was little more than a kid herself.
Although she sure didn’t kiss like one.
Find a new topic, he told himself. Statistics for traffic fatalities. The smell of the team laundry bin after practice. Or what the hell did Kayla Nolen have against Cassidy?
That Kayla was jealous of Cassidy was obvious. What he couldn’t figure out was why Kayla was possessive of her, too—not just possessive, but punishing, as though Cassidy were a terrible mom who needed watching. Parker was out of the picture, which made Kayla’s behavior even stranger, given the fact that he’d dropped the ball as far as being a dad went.
Mason found himself so deep in thought, he almost didn’t hear the screen door creak open and Cassidy step barefoot onto the porch.
Her honey-colored hair streamed over her shoulders. The night wind picked up pieces of it and tossed them carelessly around her face. Her lips were slightly parted, and even from this distance, he could see her nipples harden beneath the thin cotton T-shirt.
At once, his problem achingly reasserted itself. He didn’t bother to hide it. He couldn’t. Instead, he gazed at her while she gazed at him, and then her attention dropped to the bulge in his pants.
“That’s for me, isn’t it?” she asked huskily.
“Yes.”
“Why me?”
He frowned in confusion.
“I’m not a supermodel. I don’t wear designer clothes or go to fashion shows.”
“You’re better than that. You’re the real thing.”
She bit her lip, still uncertain.
“Come here,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
She walked toward him and he heard each muffled footfall on the weathered boards of the porch like he heard the beating of his own heart. At last she stood in front of him. Her expression was unreadable, half of her face illuminated by the porch light and the rest in shadow. Crickets chirped sleepily in the bushes. The moon had sunk low in the Southern sky.
Never in his life had Mason wanted a woman the way he wanted her. It seemed as though no one existed except them, just them in this very moment, through eternity. When he reached for her, wind stirred the brittle leaves and it sounded like sighing.
Reverently, he slid his hands along the curving sides of her breasts, feeling them give beneath the pressure. A low moan escaped her. Stuck in that gondola at the rodeo, he’d had no room to explore her body or show her what he could do to please her. Here on the porch wasn’t nearly as private, but at this hour no one on her street appeared to be awake. Still, a strange protectiveness made him say, “Turn off the light.”
She obeyed and then returned to where she’d been before. Only one light from the road shone across her face now. The wind picked up again, sending a shower of leaves to the porch. He cupped her breasts, less gently this time, running his thumbs across her nipples, testing, teasing. Every sound she made went straight to his cock.
“Do you see now?” he asked her. “You’re the one. You’re the woman I want.”
Her head dropped back, exposing her slender throat, in itself an act of submission. When she opened her eyes again, they gleamed. He pulled her down to his lap more roughly than he intended and, finding her lips, devoured them.
If kissing her before had been a shock, now it felt like a revelation. She trembled with unchecked need. He tasted her deeply, deeper, his thumbs flicking restlessly over her nipples. He fastened his mouth on one, right through the fabric, and heard her sharp intake of breath. She blossomed beneath his tongue, and he laved her and pinched her and bit her until she writhed on top of him. He thought he’d come on the spot when she reached down to touch him. His whole body went rigid.
This was no ordinary woman, he thought jaggedly. Cassidy was something different. She didn’t even look up to see if anybody was watching this time as she pawed at him through his jeans. He groaned and slid down to give her better access, half-wishing she would take his cock out right there and let him explode. Had he brought condoms with him? He tried to remember, but her eager mouth was pressed against his and he couldn’t think straight.
“Baby, let’s go inside,” he said, groaning. “Let me show you how good this can be.”
For the second time in one night, Cassidy sprang out of his lap as though something had stung her, chest heaving, eyes wide. And when Mason saw the screen door open and a sleepy, befuddled-looking Lexie stumble onto the porch, he found himself receiving another lesson in dating a woman with kids.
As in, the kids were always there.
* * * *
Mason lined up the football and threw it to Denny Hargrove, one of the assistant coaches, who reminded him for the third time to power through the hips. It was something Mason always forgot to do when he was tired and sweaty and tragically under-caffeinated. He reached up and pulled his shirt over his head, adding it to a growing pile of his other sweat-soaked clothes.
He could feel the blazing Texas sun soak into his bones and muscles. If the smell of the turf wasn’t so heavy, he might have still been able to detect Cassidy’s perfume on his skin. The entire ride to the airport this morning he kept breathing it in, and all he could think about was her.
“You played for shit today,” came Jasper’s voice from somewhere behind him.
Mason silenced a groan. Maybe he had played for shit during practice, but Jasper surely remembered the reason why as he sauntered over, big muscles, big grin, talking smack with his big mouth. He had an apple in his hand and was chewing lustily.
&nb
sp; “Like hell,” Mason snorted. “I threw better than you tackled, Grandma.”
Jasper gave a casual salute to Denny, who was about their same age and clearly enjoying the banter. “So… you finally close that deal, Hannigan?”
Here it comes. Mason put his game face on. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Aw, c’mon now. Don’t tool me around. I was there, remember? I was right there in the middle of it, watching you follow her around with your dick in your hand.”
Mason tossed the ball to Denny and then shook his head to show he was done. “I did not have my dick in my hand.”
“Poor baby, you’re sensitive about it,” Jasper said with mock sympathy. “You can’t figure out how anybody as pretty as you are keeps striking out with your honey.” He took one last chomp out of the apple and then shied it at wide receiver Darnell Washington, who managed to sidestep it and cheerfully flip him the bird.
“So how did you do with the kid?” Jasper asked.
Mason thought about Lexie shuffling out to the porch last night, how he and Cassidy had tried to appear as though they’d been having a normal conversation. Lexie had looked so forlorn, standing there in her bunny slippers and nightshirt, scrubbing one eye with the heel of her palm. “I had a bad dream,” she said miserably, and despite having a stomachache from being hard for too long, he found himself commiserating.
“I did fine with Lexie,” Mason said. “She’s a great kid.”
He didn’t like the look on Jasper’s face. Jasper had an air of gleeful expectation, as though waiting for Mason to figure something out, something he wasn’t going to like at all, especially on next to no sleep and a raging case of blue balls. “Why are you smiling?” Mason said. “I hate it when you smile like that.”
“Remember how you need to learn more about interacting with kids?” Jasper said. “Little Brothers and Sisters of America is coming today. In fact, it looks as though they’re already here.”
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