Necessity was a charming town, she decided an hour later. Its main street, only a couple of blocks long, had several businesses in buildings that had clearly been there since the town's original founding. Their stone facades were carved with words like "Bank" and "Attorney," often at odds with the actual businesses housed in those buildings. One new-looking sign advertised "Aerio Oil and Gas." An actual attorney's office inhabited the original bank. A donut shop took up a tiny corner space. And at opposite ends of downtown stood Necessity's only two restaurants, as far as Leta could tell.
Tor parked his truck in one of the angled parking spots, and when she lowered herself to the ground, careful to favor her hurt ankle, he was already there to help.
She wasn't using the crutches any longer, and Tor offered his arm to steady her as they stepped up onto the sidewalk.
Leta hesitated to touch even his shirt sleeve.
Friends, she reminded herself.
Determined to ignore the simmering attraction between them, she resolutely accepted his help. Overall, things seemed to be going well.
Right up to the moment they got to the door, and Tor apparently forgot how to open it.
TOR FROZE AT THE RESTAURANT door.
Since that hellish night at the last fundraiser he'd attended, he had become almost a recluse. If not for the fact that the citizens of Necessity periodically sent out a delegation to check on him if he didn't show up sometimes, he might have never gone to town.
In fact, it would probably be okay with him if he didn't see anyone but the occasional ranch hand more than once or twice a month.
Going out in public still bothered him.
Leta turned around and peered into his face, her eyebrows drawn down in a sharp vee. "Are you okay?"
He wasn't, of course, but he couldn't very well tell her that.
Not if I want to keep my man card.
The thought made him grin, and that, combined with looking into Leta's eyes, convinced him that he could do this.
"Let's go," he said.
Her usual sunny smile broke across her face, and she pushed the door open with one hand. With her other, she grabbed his fingers in hers. A spark of electricity shot up his arm, and he couldn't help but grip her tighter.
By the time they walked through the doors of The Chargrill, they were actually holding hands. Tor wasn't entirely certain Leta was aware of it, but he wasn't about to point it out if it meant stopping. When Ava Jordan, who had worked at the restaurant since she was in high school, turned around and saw Tor, she squealed aloud and rushed over to throw her arms around him.
"Where have you been, Tor Edwards?" she demanded. "We have missed you."
Quietly, Leta untangled her fingers from Tor's and took a half-step back. But when he glanced over at her, she was smiling softly.
Of course she was glad someone had missed him, rather than irritated that someone else was taking his attention away from her. That's how she was.
He returned Ava's hug with a quick squeeze, then set her away from him a little. "Grandma Jordan?" he asked, the words coming out more smoothly than they had in years.
As usual, Ava ignored any difficulties he had asking the question. "She's good. Excited about the wedding."
Tor's quizzical look caused the effervescent woman to change direction. "Oh. You probably don't know, do you?" She held out her left hand to show off a sparkling diamond solitaire, laughing at Tor's exaggerated surprise. "It's from Grant Porter, silly."
Turning to draw Leta into the conversation, Ava said, "My fiancé Grant and Tor were in the same class in high school here in Necessity, along with my brother Seth. Of course, we don't see Tor around so much, not since—"
Tor cut off her next words. "Table?" he asked.
"Oh. Of course." Ava gathered menus and silverware and led them toward a booth near the back. "Maybe you can get him to come around more. He's turning into a real hermit."
"I'll see what I can do," Leta said, and she and Ava shared the kind of smile that, when passed between women, usually meant trouble for the man on the other end of their plotting.
"I'm Ava, by the way," said the waitress.
"Leta Delaney."
Ava leaned in conspiratorially. "It's nice to see him out with a normal woman. Those society types never were right for him." She slid their menus in front of them. "What can I get you to drink?"
As Ava left, Leta turned her quizzical gaze toward Tor. "Society types?" She glanced around the rustic restaurant, decorated with antique farm implements hanging from the walls. "I don't mean to disparage your hometown—I really like it here—and I don’t want to seem like I'm being snooty or anything, but somehow, I don't think Necessity's elite would really count as 'society types.'"
The twinkle in her eye took any sting that might have been in her words at another time. Tor grinned at her, more in relief that she hadn't made more of Ava's words than serious amusement at his choice of dates; it was fine with him if Leta misconstrued that.
Eventually, he was going to have to tell her the truth. Unless he wanted the growing attraction between them to amount to nothing, he needed to come clean with her.
For one thing, it was the only right move. But more than that, he was discovering that he really wanted to tell her who he was.
As soon as he was sure she was really and truly interested in him for himself.
Instantly, the thought was followed with a question: And exactly what will it take to convince me of that?
He wasn't being fair to Leta. He knew it. Even if the thought of coming clean with her made his heart pound in utter terror.
Tonight, he decided. I'll tell her tonight. As soon as we get home.
Maybe he could get her to tell him her story, too.
Chapter 7
"Wait here," Tor said as they walked into the bunkhouse.
Leta raised one eyebrow, but she perched on the arm of the sofa.
When her de facto roommate walked back into the living room, he sported a blanket over one shoulder. Leta quit yelling as he marched into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out a bottle of white wine and an opener.
"Where did that come from?" she asked, certain it hadn't been there that afternoon when she had made lunch.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
Tor waved at her to follow him out the front door.
At the edge of the porch, she paused, gesturing at the crutches leaning against wall beside the door. "I'm not sure I can follow you in the dark. Would it be easier if I used those again?"
"Wait here," he said. For once, his words didn't get hung up on their way out.
Leta leaned against the banister as Tor disappeared into the darkness. After a few minutes, she lowered herself to sit on the steps, breathing in the peace of the cool night air. The sound of crickets in the dark soothed her here. At home in Dallas, a single cricket chirping would have driven her insane. On the Stuart Ranch, their voices combined with the slight breeze to create a kind of music. Even the howls of coyotes in the distance didn't worry her.
By the time Tor returned, sans blanket or wine, she had relaxed into a kind of calm that had become unusual for her in recent years.
"Ready?" Tor asked.
"I guess." She reached for the crutches, but before she touched them, Tor slid one arm under her knees and the other around her back. Without any apparent effort, he lifted her into his arms and strode off into the night. With a gasp of surprise—and if she were to admit it, some delight—Leta threw her arms around his neck.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"Blanket." Even in the dark, she could see the twinkle in his eyes as he offered his one-word response.
She laughed aloud. "You're doing that on purpose, aren't you?"
Tor shrugged, but the dimple creasing his unscarred cheek was close enough to her face that it was all Leta could do to keep from dropping a kiss onto it.
What is wrong with me? It's like I can barely keep from throwing myself
at the man.
Tor had spread the quilt out on the down-slope side of a slight hill, facing away from the house so that what little light leaked from the windows was blocked from view.
When he set her gently down on the blanket, Leta gasped. She couldn't remember having seen so many stars stretching across the night sky, free from light pollution or distraction.
"It looks like a painting," she whispered. "Or some kind of time-release photograph."
Tor's chuckle came from deep in his chest, the most relaxed sound she'd heard from him since they'd met, like something within him had loosened. "City girl," he teased. When he wasn't fighting against it, his voice was deep, almost bass.
"Never denied it," she laughed.
Tor popped the cork out of the bottle and poured a glass of wine out for her.
Leaning back on her elbows, she sipped the full-bodied red and watched the lights of an airplane passing overhead, almost indistinguishable from the stars, except in its motion.
"What happened?" Tor asked, and she didn't even pretend not to understand him.
"I work in a hospital," she began. "Not as a doctor or anything. I'm a coder. An office worker." She lifted her elbows off the quilt and pillowed her head on her hands. "We hardly ever even see the doctors over in admin. But I ate lunch in the cafeteria every day."
Her voice took on the sing-song cadence of a children's bedtime story.
It's easier this way, she realized. Turn it into a story and it becomes like something that happened to someone else.
"One of the doctors asked if he could join me one day. I didn't even know him. Not then." She laughed, a short, harsh, bitter sound. "Of course, by the end of a month, I thought I did know him. By the end of two months, we were going out after work. And after three...." Her voice trailed off and she shrugged. "I thought I was in love." She shook her head. "He was charming and funny and rich and he thought I was wonderful."
When she was quiet for several moments, Tor prompted her as he refilled her glass. "And then?"
"We planned a trip together for this week."
"What happened?"
"His wife found the reservations and assumed it was a surprise for her." She huffed a little laugh. "The fact that he had a wife was a surprise for me. Brent acted I like I should have known all along—as if of course he had a wife. As if I should have been perfectly fine with it from the beginning."
"Ouch."
"So I went online and booked the first place within driving distance that I could afford for the entire week."
"I'm sorry you had to deal with that." Tor's voice came easily out of the darkness, low and rich. When he wasn't fighting to form words, he sounded like a television announcer.
"I thought he was some kind of prince charming. Turns out he was just some rich asshole who thought he could have whatever he wanted, and wasn't above lying to get it." Now that he was talking, she waited for a response to that, but Tor simply stared thoughtfully into the night sky.
She gazed up into the Milky Way, stretching across the sky above her. "It seems kind of small, compared to all that up there." Taking the wine bottle from the grass where Tor had propped it, she held it up so the moonlight shined through it, then split the remainder into their wineglasses. Tor took his from her and drained it without comment.
Since she had first met him, Leta had wanted to ask about the scar. The wine, combined with the stars and the darkness that enveloped them, bolstered her confidence. Before she could talk herself out of it, she ran her fingertips gently across the ridge of the scar that slashed down the far side of his face.
"What happened here?"
His hand made an abortive motion toward hers, as if to stop her from touching the blemish, but then his hand closed into a loose fist and he dropped it into his lap.
"Rodeo accident."
Damn. He was back to monosyllables.
But he leaned into her touch, closing his eyes briefly. Whatever difficulties he might have speaking about the incident, he didn't actually dislike it that she was touching him.
This is a bad idea, Leta. You came out here to get away from men.
She couldn't seem to walk away from this one, though.
"Is that what caused the speech issue?" she asked, her voice gentle.
He nodded, his cheek lightly stubbled under her touch, his eyes reflecting the starlight as he watched her face. She shifted her hand until it cupped his face, covering the scar. Tor leaned toward her and brushed her hair back away from her cheeks.
"I'm sorry you had to deal with that." Her repetition of his earlier words was whispered almost against his mouth as his lips hovered just over hers.
They stayed like that for several seconds, holding themselves—and each other—millimeters from closing that last space in a way that would change this from a strange, if entertaining, interlude, to something potentially much deeper.
Finally, as if inhaling each other's breath had synchronized their movements, they closed the distance in a heated rush that left Leta dizzy with desire.
"STOP." DESPITE EVERY instinct telling him to push forward, Tor forced himself to pull away from Leta.
"What's wrong?" Her voice, breathless from the kiss, sent a bolt of heat straight through him, and he felt himself harden.
What was wrong? Nothing—and everything. He couldn't let this go any further without telling her who he really was.
It had been one thing to let her think he was just another ranch hand when she was some stranger he was helping out.
But now that he knew her story—knew her—he shouldn't keep up the deception. Not if he wanted to be able to look himself in the mirror.
And for the first time in a long time, he discovered that he did.
Scars and all.
When she twined her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him, though, he didn't want to stop.
If we keep going, I might never want to quit again.
He'd almost convinced himself to take her back up to the house, to tell her everything.
Then she pulled her shirt off and stared at him, waiting, her eyes reflecting the starlight above.
WHAT HAD POSSESSED her to strip her shirt off?
He was about to suggest we quit.
And she didn't want that.
In fact, she realized, if I don't quit now, I'm not going to stop at all.
Suddenly, Leta didn't care.
Tor's gaze raked across her, snagging on her mouth for an instant before he dragged it up to meet her own wide-eyed stare. Everywhere his look had touched burned, as if his eyes had trailed fire across her skin.
His gray eyes turned smoky, darkening even more with desire as she watched, pinned in place by the heat he exuded.
The shy, diffident ranch hand was gone. In his place was a tall, muscular cowboy ready to take what he wanted.
And apparently what he wanted at the moment was Leta. As he held her gaze with his, he held out one hand, lightly closed, and ran his knuckles, slightly roughened from working outside, down the side of her face. The feel of his skin rasping against her sent shivers rolling up and down her back.
"Okay?" The jagged edges of his voice seemed to follow his touch, back down to the side of her neck.
"Yes," she whispered, her own words ragged with want.
This was a bad idea. She had run away from Dallas to get away from the possibility of being seduced by the idea of finding love where she knew it couldn't bloom. But suddenly, she didn't care.
This isn't love. I couldn't fall in love with someone I just met. Someone who can't even talk to me much.
As Tor pulled her into his arms, she decided she didn't care.
Just for tonight, she would let go of her almost obsessive need to analyze everything around her, and allow herself to simply act on her desires.
His lips descended toward hers, and a wave of desire crashed through Leta, stronger than she had anticipated, or even thought possible after the last few months.
She
tilted her face toward him, and he claimed her mouth, his tongue tangling with hers in a heated kiss that left her breathless as he unhooked her bra.
Tor ran his forefinger along the side of Leta's breast. As the ridges of the callous brushed against her skin, goose bumps popped up along her arms. Her nipples tightened and her breath caught in the back of her throat.
He watched her intently as he slipped one arm behind her shoulders, pulled her in tighter against him, and brushed his lips against hers.
He swept his hand across her nipple, and it pebbled under his touch. Leta's attention split between concentrating on the feel of his mouth against hers and the stroke of his fingertips as they drifted down, tracing a line from her hardened, sensitive breast down to the skin around her belly button. There he used the raised ridges of the skin on his hands to circle her navel.
At every point he touched, the contrast between the harsh, not-quite-painful scrape of his fingertips and her own soft skin sent chills racing out across every inch of her.
When he grazed his lightly stubbled chin across her cheek and took her earlobe in between his teeth, the sensation made her moan aloud.
Almost frantically, she shoved his jeans down—then waited impatiently as he gently removed her pants, careful with her ankle. As soon as she could. she pushed him backward onto the blanket, allowing his thumb to flick against her clit. As she settled him into her, she could feel the head of his cock pressing against the most intimate part of her.
She closed her eyes to concentrate until she had pulled all of him in, the base of his shaft pressing against her and every inch of him buried inside her. She pulled her feet up onto him and rested her hurt ankle on his thigh, then hooked the toes of the other foot around his leg, pulling her own legs even further apart, as if she could sink down against him even further.
Leaning her hands against his chest and using her foot as leverage, she lifted herself up high. Finally, she opened her eyes to catch his gaze with her own, and slid down him, faster this time.
Tor rested his hands against her hips without really holding on, letting those work-roughened palms slide up and down as she moved against him.
Loving Necessity: The Complete Necessity, Texas Collection Page 17