by Nancy Bush
“You can’t keep me from my son forever. One of these days, I’m just going to haul off and tell Jesse the truth.”
“Not yet,” Hawk bit out.
“You’re paranoid,” she declared, shaking her head, her lustrous mane of hair shimmering in the light. “And I’m tired of playing by your rules.”
“You tell him, you’ll be sorry.”
“You’re threatening me?”
“I just know how Jesse’ll react. He felt abandoned by Laura, and she couldn’t help not being there for him. He won’t forgive you.”
He spoke the truth, and though she didn’t know it, it cut him a bit, too. Her face registered her conflicting emotions.
“You owe Tawny an apology,” she said unevenly, fighting for control.
“Yeah, well,” he muttered gruffly. “She shouldn’t have been here.”
“They didn’t do anything wrong.”
“How do you know?”
“Tawny told me the whole story.”
Hawk lifted a brow. “Like you told your parents the whole story when you were sneaking off to see me?”
Liz drew a shaking breath. “I was young and stupid when you and I had our affair, but you were old enough to know better. I’m sorry for everything, but by God, you’d better look in the mirror before you start hurling accusations because your face is just as guilty!”
Her words were darts. Hawk swilled back more beer.
“I know you were in pain. But you were also drunk most of the time we were together.” She added, “I don’t even know how much you remember.”
“I was aware,” he lied.
“You called me Laura,” Liz said bitterly. “That’s how aware you were.”
“Well, I sobered right up when I found out you were aborting my child.”
She shook her head. “You’re just trying to divert blame.”
“Damn right I am!” Hawk admitted, finishing the beer. He tested the weight of the bottle in his hand, then hurled it at the river-rock fireplace. Pieces of glass flew in all directions.
Liz remained unmoved. He expected her to rail at him some more, but she didn’t. “You can’t hurt me anymore,” she told him flatly. “I won’t let you.”
“I’ve hurt you?”
“You’ve nearly annihilated me,” she murmured, turning away. “But it’s over now.”
“Wait.” He struggled toward her, catching her elbow at the door, his fingers closing over smooth skin. She pulled back, attempting to release his grip, but he hung firm. She refused to look at him and all he could see was her profile. An upturned nose, a generous mouth currently tight with disapproval, a defined, downy cheek, and a sweep of thick lashes.
“Don’t touch me,” she ordered, but there was no heat to her words.
“I don’t want to fight.”
“I don’t want you—to touch me,” she said again. “All I want is to see my son. And I want Jesse to know I’m his mother.”
Hawk didn’t answer. He resisted on principle.
“You told him Laura was his mother,” she accused, and the hurt in her voice was as huge as the ocean.
“I wanted Laura to be his mother,” he admitted. God, her skin was sleek. His thumb caressed her arm.
She trembled and tried to pull back, but Hawk held on. It was a replay of his scene with Jesse, but with a far different driving emotion.
She pressed her lips together, then burst out, “I can’t do this. I don’t want to feel that way again.”
“What way?”
“That way. Like when I was seventeen.”
“I want you,” he admitted, almost surprised by his own admission. “I don’t want to, but I do.”
“I want Jesse.”
His leg ached and his head ached, too. Suddenly, he just needed to collapse into bed—with Liz. “I want to make love to you.”
Liz’s answer was a strangled sound that could have meant anything. He stared at her and slowly, ever so slowly, her eyes turned to meet his. Their gazes remained locked for long moments in which Hawk counted his heartbeats and Liz’s lips parted.
Slowly, he bent forward, delicately balanced, and kissed her deeply, his mouth melding to hers, his tongue searching inside that warm crevice as Liz’s hands found his arms, holding him at length even while her kiss reached out for him.
* * *
The view down the short hallway caught the front door, part of the wall, and a glimpse of the corner of the fireplace. Jesse was a statue, his gaze riveted. He’d heard the fight as soon as he slipped inside his bedroom window and he’d tiptoed forward into the hall, wondering what in God’s name his father was saying about him and Tawny to Ms. Havers.
Words jumped from their hot fight . . . I want to know my son . . . mother . . . affair . . . abortion . . . I want Jesse . . . I want to make love to you.
Jesse’s head was thick. Too much information.
Ms. Havers was his mother?
He backed away as if he’d been burned. Maybe he had been. He felt as if he’d turned to ash. A pillar of salt. Like that Bible story—he’d looked back. By mistake. To a past he hadn’t known existed.
His mother.
A lurch to his stomach. Jesse melted back to his bedroom. Years of long practice saved him from screaming out his feelings. He knew how to hide. To run. To escape the forces of law and order and deadly emotion.
Silent as a ghost, he slipped back outside the window. Metal glimmered in the bluish moonlight. The handlebars of his bike. In a heartbeat, he was on the vehicle and circumventing the house, his father, and the shrink’s car.
His mother.
“God,” he whispered into the darkly shadowed night.
* * *
She shouldn’t let him touch her. She shouldn’t let him get close enough for the air to tighten between them. She shouldn’t be here with him. Liz opened her mouth to say as much, but it just provided entry for his tongue. Her knees quivered. Resolve seesawed. Her fingers clung to his arms as if it were she who needed the support.
“Hawk,” she murmured against his lips.
More kisses for an answer. Hot, short invitations driven from a deep hunger. Her shoulders sagged. She was losing. His body drew closer, more of a leaning because he couldn’t put all his weight on his leg.
Then she was pressed against the wall, his weight deliciously hard against hers. Her brain disengaged. She gave up. He wanted her and she wanted him just as much.
“Liz,” he said thickly somewhere near her ear.
Distantly, she thought, he got it right this time. The memory scoured inside her head. It bothered her.
“I can’t!” she burst out. “You’re just doing this to keep me from seeing Jesse!”
“No,” he growled through tight lips. Abruptly, he shoved himself away from her, overbalanced and crashed to the floor.
“Hawk!”
She bent down, scared at the white pallor to his face. His lashes were closed. For a second she worried he wasn’t breathing before she realized he was holding his breath against the pain.
“Are you okay?” she asked, touching his face lightly. “Hawk?”
“Get away.”
The words were forced out. Liz, who’d shown no inclination to listen to him yet, didn’t budge an inch. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t . . . say anything,” he expelled again, this time with more fury than pain. “Damn it.”
Out of nowhere, Liz was struck with humor. She pressed a hand to her mouth, fighting a half-hysterical giggle. Hawk chose that moment to lift his lashes and eye her with those intense blue-gray eyes that missed nothing. He was too humiliated to join in her amusement at his expense, but his lips twisted as if he, too, recognized how ridiculous they both could be.
With unusual lack of inhibition, Liz bent down and kissed him lightly on the lips. “I really am sorry you’re hurt,” she whispered. “I don’t want to fight.”
Hawk groaned and closed his eyes again. “Don’t tell Jesse yet,” he said. “Please.�
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“All right.”
Her sudden capitulation threw him. “All right?” he asked cautiously.
“I’ll be patient. I’ll wait.”
Now he stared openly at her. Liz’s heart started a slow, sensual beat as she stared into the cool depths of his eyes. They were his most beautiful feature. She’d been seduced by them once; she could be seduced again.
Her hair fell forward and Hawk automatically reached up to brush it back. He didn’t release her. “Come here,” he said a bit fatalistically and Liz understood because she felt the same inexorable pull.
The floor was harder than the couch. Liz scraped elbows on the hardwood and complained, and Hawk and she struggled to their feet. She slung his arm around her neck rather than reach for his crutches and, as if they’d had their movements choreographed, they moved as one down the hall to the bedroom that was his.
Barren and male. That was how Liz saw it. A king-size bed with a navy spread. A pine nightstand and chest of drawers. A black Tensor lamp and a closet with too few clothes on the hangers and only two pairs of shoes.
This she took in at a glance as she lowered Hawk onto the edge of the bed. “You look like hell,” she told him, aware that his pallor had yet to return to normal.
“You’ve got dust all over you,” he returned, and Liz glanced down at her sleeveless blouse, snorting a bit as she realized he was right.
“When do you think Jesse will come home?”
“When he’s darn good and ready,” Hawk said. “He won’t be back tonight.”
“He could be.”
Hawk’s eyes were heavy-lidded. He lay back on the bed, but his hand drifted toward Liz. His tanned fingers restlessly played with the hem of her blouse. “He could be,” he agreed in a voice that said the likelihood was very rare.
Liz knew she should leave. She’d had ample opportunity already. Sleeping with Hawthorne Hart would only add to her problems, not alleviate them. But he looked so helpless just now, and though it was partly his helplessness that had gotten to her in the past, she couldn’t tear herself away.
His fingers crept downward, to her knee, gently massaging in a way that dug beneath her skin. If his hand drifted to more intimate areas she didn’t know what she’d do. Bolt? Gasp? Guide him?
“Hawk, I—”
“What?” he asked when she broke off. Those fingers. Those damn fingers were stealing upward. It was so bold. So intimate. She could only wait in a sort of breathless anticipation.
“I—can’t think.”
His hand reached the juncture of her thighs. He caressed her and she collapsed against him. Now there was no holding back. She squirmed against him, as close as she could be. At some level, she was conscious of his cast, but because Hawk seemed completely unaware as his hands groped for her, Liz concentrated on the angles of his body that meshed with hers.
“I want you,” he muttered, and that was all it took. No more waiting. He pulled her atop him and she went down like wax. Then they were touching and exploring, only their heartbeats and ragged breaths punctuating the still night.
Hawk slid Liz’s blouse from her shoulders. His hands molded her breasts. Dimly, she worried that she shouldn’t be here with him, but her own hands removed his shirt. His pants were split to the thigh to accommodate his cast and Liz undid his belt buckle with expert fingers. This touched a far corner of her mind, for her inexperience was something she took for granted. That she could be so adept was almost funny. But when Hawk’s mouth covered her bare nipple she swept in a sharp breath, all humor gone in the suddenness of pure sensation.
His mouth was hot and moist. Frozen, she braced herself on her arms, stunned by the urgency of her need. Quickly, her hands helped him remove the rest of their clothes until they were both naked and dragging each other close.
“Your leg,” she gasped at one point, to which Hawk only doubled his efforts to keep them both at the frenzied brink of sexual fulfillment. His mouth explored all of her, hot and wet and trailing along her skin until she melted from the inside out. When he found the deepest part of her she moaned and thrashed on the pillow, her fingers digging into his hair. She climaxed so fast she let out a cry of shock and pleasure.
When he slid inside her, she grasped his buttocks and pulled him hard and close. He tried to hold back, but she started her own campaign of pleasure, kneading his skin, circling his legs with hers, her own kisses deep and strong and sliding from his ear to his mouth. His groan of torment was surrender. Deep within her, he pumped rhythmically, Liz’s breaths echoing the hard thrusts.
“Liz,” he groaned thickly.
She didn’t care. Her eyes were squinched shut. Her body peaking again. She moved fast and he matched her thrusts until they both cried out in ecstasy together, worlds colliding. Liz’s head was thrown back, throat arched, body quivering as she felt Hawk’s hot climax.
An eternity later, she opened her eyes. Hawk’s arm was thrown possessively around her, his lips a hairbreadth from her ear, his face covered by a tangle of sleek brown-blond hair. He lay on his back, his casted leg out straight, but apart from this covering he was naked and Liz’s gaze feasted on his male beauty.
She loved looking at him. She loved all the sinewy muscles and smooth skin and the dusting of dark chest hair. His hip bones and thighs and legs were totally masculine. She could even rhapsodize about his feet, though one was showing definite signs of discoloration from the blood that had drained down his leg post-operation.
He was everything she wanted in a male. Everything. Harshness and humor and sometimes scathing irony. He was tough with elements of weakness, the kind only visible to a female, the kind his type of man would abhor.
And he was hers. From long ago. She’d tagged him as the man she loved and nothing had changed in over sixteen long years of separation.
So, why was her heart so heavy? Why did she feel the need to guiltily pull on her clothes and slink into the cloak of night?
Because he didn’t love her.
The answer was so simple her flesh broke out into goose bumps. She tried to talk herself out of it, tell herself it didn’t matter, but she’d never been good at fooling herself for long.
Hawk murmured a protest as she slid from his embrace. Now that she was rational again, a thousand worries crowded her mind. Jesse could return at any moment. Worse yet, he might never return. Tawny was home alone at her house.
She hadn’t used any protection.
Frozen with shock, Liz broke into a cold sweat. But . . . this wasn’t the time of the month for a pregnancy. She’d known that in the back of her mind. She was regular enough to set a clock by. Even so, how could she be so reckless?
How could he?
She yanked on the rest of her clothes as Hawthorne surfaced from his alcohol-supported stupor and demanded, “Where are you going?”
“Home. Away. I don’t know.” He didn’t argue with her. It upset and infuriated her that he didn’t even try, and she knew that was ridiculous, but . . . “I must be out of my mind,” she railed softly, her voice strangled.
“Don’t leave.”
“Hawk, for God’s sake . . . !”
“Wait until Jesse gets back.”
“Oh, sure. Great idea.”
“Come here . . .”
His pleading did her in. She took a step forward, wanting so badly to climb back into bed with him, she felt weak from the effort of holding back.
“Just for a moment,” she told him, hating herself a little as she slid into the cradle of his arms once more.
* * *
His lungs ached. His throat burned rawly. Legs pumping furiously, Jesse rode blindly to Tawny’s house, throwing down the bike and running toward her window in one lithe movement. He banged on the pane, heart thundering, ears ringing,
Ms. Havers was his mother!
The thought lanced his brain. A second later, he sank against the siding, sliding down until he was kneeling beneath Tawny’s window, spent. It couldn’t be. It made no s
ense. He didn’t understand how it could happen.
The front porch light blinked on. Jesse shrank into the shadows. A woman’s voice. “Tawny?”
Jesse hunched his shoulders. He’d made Tawny’s mom check the noise and he felt bad. But it gave him an answer: Tawny wasn’t home.
That meant she was still at the shrink’s house.
His mother.
Shivering, Jesse stealthily picked up the bike and rode as fast as he could toward Liz’s. He had to be fast. He sure as hell didn’t want to run into her, and there was no telling how long she’d be with Dad.
Dad. And Mom.
He swore violently and spat between his teeth, pumping the pedals harder.
* * *
“Where do you think he is?” Liz asked. It was dangerous lying here beside Hawthorne. If Jesse returned, she couldn’t hide that she was in Hawk’s room, locked bedroom door or no. How could she explain it? Yet she was paralyzed, unable to leave this warm comfort. The real world was out there waiting. Let it wait a bit longer.
“Halfway to Timbuktu. He’ll come home when he’s good and ready.” Weariness edged his voice. Failure. He didn’t like being the kind of parent who doesn’t know where his kid is.
“I’ve got to call Tawny. She’s waiting for me.”
“Tell her you won’t be home.”
“No, Hawk. I can’t.”
He turned toward her, fiddling with the buttons down the front of her blouse. Liz’s fingers covered his, stopping him. “I don’t want to think about anything,” Hawk said in that low voice that always made her heart hurt.
She was weak. Wanton. Without will. In slow motion, her clothes came off for a second time and she moved into the rhythm of lovemaking with far too much eagerness and not enough sanity.
* * *
The shrink’s house was lit by a single lamp in the living room. There was no black Miata in the driveway and he already knew the garage was full of boxes, no room for a car. So Mom wasn’t home yet. Good.
Jesse slunk through the shadows to the window, spying Tawny’s blondish hair tucked onto a pillow on the couch. He tapped on the pane. She lifted her head instantly, clearly not sleepy in the least. Signaling to her, he saw that she recognized him. Her lithe form slid from the couch and she opened the front door.