“Is something wrong?” Lori Lee asked. “Have y’all run into a problem of some sort in removing the old heating system?”
“No, ma’am, not a problem, just an interesting development,” Rick said. “While we were tearing out the old heating unit, a part of the wooden wall behind it fell in. The boards were rotted clean through.”
“Was it some type of support wall?” Lori Lee went into the basement as seldom as possible. She hated the creepy feeling it gave her, as if she were inside a tomb. “Is there any danger of the upper level floor falling in?”
“No, nothing like that,” Rick assured her. “The wall served no purpose, really. I figure it was put up to close off part of the basement. We found something down there I thought you and Miss...Aunt Birdie might like to see.”
“Something in our basement?” Dimples creased Birdie’s fat cheeks. “Well, you go on over, sugar, and check it out. I’m afraid I can’t get up and down those rickety old stairs.” She smiled at Rick. “Just what have you found?”
“It looks like a bar,” Rick said. “And not just any bar. This sucker is a huge, ornately carved wooden bar, a good fifteen feet long.”
“Oh, my, yes.” Birdie clapped her hands together like a giddy child. “I’ve heard the rumors all my life, but I never realized that the old speakeasy was located in the basement of one of my buildings. Isn’t this exciting?”
Lori Lee didn’t know whether she would call the discovery of an old bar beneath her studio exciting or not, but Aunt Birdie and Rick certainly seemed to think so. She really wasn’t interested in exploring the subterranean depths beneath Tuscumbia, but if she didn’t pacify Aunt Birdie’s curiosity, her elderly aunt just might try to make the journey into the basement herself.
“All right. Let’s go see this great marvel.” Lori Lee wondered if she’d need her jacket. But if she took the time to bundle up and get an umbrella it would only prolong this little adventure. “We’ll be back in just a few minutes.”
“Take your time,” Birdie called after them as they rushed out the door.
The awnings connecting the two buildings partially protected them from the downpour, but not from the wind gusts. Rick flung the door open for her, then followed her inside. Several workers spoke or nodded to Lori Lee; she returned their greetings. The men sat on the floor, their lunches spread out around them like a picnic.
“It’s quite a sight, Miss Guy. Bet that bar’s been in the basement since the twenties,” one of the crew members said. “After lunch we’ll clean up all that old rotted wood before we do anything else.”
Rick placed his hand in the small of Lori Lee’s back and guided her down the basement steps. His hand was big and warm and strong. His touch seared her through her sweater.
No other man’s touch had ever affected her the way Rick’s did. Years after he’d grabbed her on the front porch when she was seventeen, she’d told herself that she had exaggerated the power of his touch, that memories often played tricks on a person’s emotions. But this touch wasn’t memory. It was here and now—and its power was as great as she remembered.
She hurried down the steps, fleeing from him, trying to escape the unwanted sensations spiraling up from the depths of her femininity. The chill of the damp basement hit her suddenly. She shivered. Hugging her body to warm herself, she rubbed her palms up and down her arms.
“Are you cold?” Rick asked, coming up behind her.
“Yes,” she admitted. “I should have brought my coat.”
Before she could utter a protest, he removed his jacket and flung it around her shoulders. As she turned to face him, he pulled the zippered edge across her chest. His hands lingered, his long, thick fingers clutching the material. His knuckles rested in the crevice between her breasts.
Lori Lee looked at his hands. Big and broad. The tops sprinkled with dark hair. The palms callused.
“Thank you. But won’t you be cold without it?” She lifted her gaze to his face and her breath caught in her throat. Didn’t the man ever shave? Or was it that his heavy black beard gave him a perpetual five-o’clock shadow?
A lock of hair hung across the edge of his forehead. She longed to brush the errant strand away from his eye. She clenched her hand into a tight fist, warning herself not to touch him.
“I’m tough,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
He didn’t have to tell her how tough he was. She knew—everyone knew. Fifteen years ago, he’d been the toughest kid in town. Everyone, even the young hoods who didn’t have sense enough to be afraid, steered clear of Rick Warrick. Perhaps even they’d sensed what Lori Lee had—that Rick had a death wish, creating a wild, reckless fearlessness in him.
Even at thirty-three, he still possessed an aura of strength that warned others away. It was as if he wore a sign stating Trespass At Your Own Risk.
“Where’s the bar?” she asked. “I need to take a look at it and report back to Aunt Birdie.”
Releasing the jacket, he reached down and grabbed her hand. “Come on. It’s back here. Be careful. Step over the shards of wood there.” He nodded to the floor.
Pulling a small flashlight out of his back pocket, he flipped it on and pointed the beam through the huge opening in the flimsy wooden wall. Rick maneuvered around the debris on the floor, guiding her safely into the mouth of the hole. Lori Lee hesitated,
“Hey, there’s nothing to be afraid of down here,” he told her, grinning in his cocky, masculine way.
“I know there isn’t. I just don’t like dark, closed-in places, especially underground.”
“Then we won’t stay long. Just take a quick look at the bar and I’ll get you back upstairs.”
Holding his hand tightly, she allowed him to guide her into the once sealed-off section of the basement. He flashed the light directly on the bar. Lori Lee gasped. She truly never would have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own two eyes. Dirty, dust and cobweb covered, the huge bar rested along the side of the brick wall. An enormous, cracked, gilt-framed mirror hung above it.
“This is incredible.” Lori Lee stared at the bar, her mouth open, her blue eyes wide. “Aunt Birdie must be right about a speakeasy having been in this basement during prohibition.”
“Just imagine the stories that bar could tell if it could talk,” Rick said. “All the fun times, the wild parties, the loud music, the sexy women. Think how many upstanding citizens drove down Main Street, up there—” Rick nodded his head toward the ceiling “—on their way to church on Sunday morning, after having committed more than their share of sins down here the Saturday night before.”
“Knowing Aunt Birdie’s penchant for the unorthodox, I wouldn’t put it past her to fix things up down here and turn it into a tourist attraction.”
“I doubt the city council would allow it.”
“Tuscumbia is not nearly as old-fashioned and narrowminded as you think,” Lori Lee assured him. “Besides, as obsessed as everyone here is with history, I can’t believe they’d turn their backs on this part of the city’s past.”
“Think what you will, honey, but I’d lay odds against this town agreeing to show off the remains of a speakeasy.”
“If you think so little of our town, why did you come back here?”
Fifteen years ago Rick couldn’t leave Colbert County fast enough, couldn’t put enough miles between him and Tuscumbia, Alabama. He had hated being an outcast, a misfit the townspeople had never accepted. When he’d been a kid, he’d wanted what his little sister had—foster parents who eventually adopted her. But he’d been ten when his mother died and already labeled as a bad seed. He’d heard people whispering about him, predicting that he’d turn out to be as worthless as his father had been. And by the age of eighteen, he had proved them right.
But he was a man now, thirty-three, with all his wild oats sown. He had a child depending on him, and more than anything, he wanted to make a place for Darcie in this community.
“I think Tuscumbia is as good or bad as any other small Southern town,”
Rick said. “Probably more good than bad. That’s why I came back. I wanted Darcie to grow up here, close to her aunt and cousins. I want her to have friends, be accepted.”
“The way you weren’t?” Lori Lee didn’t mean to touch him. Her fingertips seemed to have a life of their own as she reached up and caressed his cheek.
He grabbed her hand, covering it with his own, holding its soft warmth against his face. “Feeling sorry for me, honey?”
“Maybe, just a little. But mostly I’m remembering what a loner you used to be and how, when I’d see you at school or on the street, I’d wonder what was going on inside you. You acted like you didn’t need anybody.”
Rick eased his arm around her waist, up under his jacket that she wore. His fingers slipped beneath the hem of her pink turtleneck sweater and spread gently across her naked back. “I learned at an early age not to need anyone and not to show weakness of any kind. People looked down on me because my old man had been a worthless drifter and my mother was white trash. When the Mayfields adopted Eve, she became acceptable. I wasn’t so lucky.”
Lori Lee shivered involuntarily, not from the chill in the basement, but from the excitement of his touch. She wanted to take him in her arms, hold him close and kiss away yesterday’s pain. The pain of a lost and lonely little boy no one had wanted. “You always fascinated me,” she admitted. “I heard people talking about you. They said some pretty terrible things. I didn’t want to believe what they said was true, but you never gave me or anyone else a chance to believe in you.”
Rick caressed her back, his palm warm and hard on her delicate skin. She gasped as purely sensual sensations tingled along her nerve endings.
“Don’t think I didn’t want you back then, honey. You were the sweetest temptation I’d ever know.” He cupped her hip with his other hand, drawing her intimately close. Her breath came in quick, heated gasps. “You were everything I wanted, and everything I couldn’t have. Scaring you off that night I showed up at the Debutante party was probably the noblest thing I ever did.”
She placed her hands on his chest, intending to push him away. Words of protest formed in her mind. She shouldn’t allow him to touch her this way or say these things to her. She was inviting trouble that she had no idea how to handle. Rick Warrick wasn’t like other men. On the surface he might be a reformed sinner, but something told Lori Lee that underneath his newly formed civilized facade, the wild and wicked Rick still existed.
“You didn’t scare me off.” Her fingers spread apart on his chest, her palms tingling. “The night you kissed me on the front porch, I would have followed you anywhere, even to hell. Even after you shoved me away and warned me against you, I would have given you anything you wanted. But you made it clear you didn’t want me, so I ran away. But a few minutes later, I worked up enough courage to go back outside and look for you. Mary Dru Sparkman was waiting for you in her car. I—I saw the two of you. I—”
“Yeah, I know, honey. I wanted you to see us. I thought you needed to know that I was the kind of guy who had no qualms about going from kissing your sweet, innocent lips to making out with a little tramp like Mary Dru.”
“You did it on purpose, didn’t you?” Lori Lee gripped his shoulders. “I figured it out, years later.”
“Sometimes, I wish I hadn’t been so damned noble.” He pulled her into his arms, crushing her breasts into his chest, pressing her against his growing hardness. “I should have taken you with me that night and said to hell with your innocence and to hell with the barriers that stood between us.”
Lori Lee pulsated deep in the secret heart of her body. Longings more intense than any she’d ever known radiated through her. She eased her hands up his chest, over his shoulders and around his neck. “I’ve always wondered what it would have been like with you.”
“I’d have been your first, if I’d taken you that night.” The words were a statement, not a question. All the guys had known that Lori Lee Guy didn’t put out, that she was waiting for Prince Charming.
A thousand times since that night, she’d wished that Rick Warrick had been her first lover. Her wedding night had been a disappointment, despite how much she loved her husband. Tory had been quite experienced at having sex, but knew very little about making love. As time passed, their love life improved and she’d been happy. Then she discovered Tory’s many infidelities shortly after her third miscarriage. At the lowest point in her life, her husband had destroyed her self-confidence and undermined her worth as a woman.
“I wish—” Standing on tiptoe, Lori Lee gazed up at Rick. Her eyes filled with a desire she could not disguise, and she whispered against his lips, “I wish you had been my first lover.”
Blazing heat waves followed by cold, jarring shocks pelted Rick’s body. Of all the things for her to have said to him, why that? Dear God in heaven, didn’t she know what her admission was doing to him? For fifteen years, hers had been the image of perfection he had carried in his heart. Every woman he’d known had fallen short of his idealized lover. He’d lost track of the women in his past, before and after his brief marriage to April. But the one woman he’d never been able to forget was the one woman he’d never made love to—except in his dreams.
When they’d been teenagers, he hadn’t been good enough for her. Their social positions, her innocence, his insecurities and his stupid sense of chivalry when it came to Lori Lee had kept them apart. Now, all these years later, he still wasn’t good enough for her. But at this precise moment, he really didn’t give a damn.
Later, neither of them knew who had actually instigated the kiss. It seemed to have happened spontaneously. He lowered his mouth—she lifted hers. And the world around them vanished. The damp, dark basement. The cold winter sleet outside. The workmen on their lunch break upstairs. Nothing and no one existed except the two of them and their hot, wild, uncontrollable lust.
He had remembered that long-ago kiss, had lived off the memory for fifteen years, had even thought his mind had exaggerated the importance of it. But as he took her mouth, forcefully shoving his tongue inside, he knew the memory didn’t do justice to the reality. This was what a kiss was meant to be—so powerful it propelled a man to the edge of release.
She accepted his invasion, her own tongue pushing against his, seeking and finding the wet heat it craved. Rick cupped her buttocks, kneading them with gentle strength through the pink wool of her slacks. Her body tightened, moistened, throbbed. She clung to him, kissing him with mindless passion. Wanting. Needing. Longing for more. So much more.
He loved the way she moaned into his mouth. Sweet little cries of need. He wanted her naked beneath him, her wet, tight body milking him of his last ounce of strength. If he didn’t end this now, before he lost complete control, he would take her in the dark, dank basement. Against the damp wall. On the hard dirt floor. Or on the rickety wooden steps.
He ended the kiss by slow degrees. Removing his tongue, he licked her lips, then nibbled on her soft flesh. She opened her eyes, their expression dreamy.
“Rick?” With her arms draped around his neck, she rubbed against him, like a cat curling around its master’s leg.
“I want you so bad I’m dying.” He gave her a hard, quick kiss, then grabbed her shoulders and pushed her a few feet away from his aching body. “I could take you, right here, right now. God knows I want to. But do you want our first time to be here? Like this?”
“Our first time,” she repeated the words, her voice a dazed whisper. “I...I...oh, Rick, I don’t know what happened to me.”
“To us, honey. It happened to us. And I know exactly what happened. We touched each other and ignited a fire. It’s going to happen every time we’re together. You might as well accept that fact, and deal with it.” He dropped his hands from her shoulders, but his gaze held her captive.
“This shouldn’t have happened,” Lori Lee said, her voice quivering slightly.. “It’s my fault. I’m not blaming you. The truth is that I wanted you even though...”
&
nbsp; “Are you trying to tell me that your body wants mine, but your mind warns you against me?”
Her body had warmed with desire, her face hotly flushed. She’d made a terrible mistake giving in to her emotions.
“Rick, I’m not the right woman for you.” He wanted and needed a woman capable of giving him more children—she could never be that woman. “And you’re not the right man for me.” She knew exactly what most of her female friends would say about A. K. Warrick. They’d tell her to have a discreet affair with him and work him out of her system, but God forbid that she marry him. He wasn’t their kind. He had come from nothing, and was still struggling to overcome his heritage therefore certain people considered the man himself nothing.
“The bottom line is that I’m not good enough for you.” His voice possessed a cold, bitter edge. “I never have been, and no matter what, I never will be.”
“That isn’t true,” she said, all the while she could hear other people’s voices repeating his statement. Rick Warrick isn’t good enough for someone like Lori Lee Guy. Not good enough. Not good enough. But she knew the truth. She was the one who wasn’t good enough. She could never be enough woman for Rick because she was only half a woman. Barren. Childless. Her body incapable of a woman’s most basic function—giving birth.
“Deny it all you want, honey.” He grabbed her by the arm, his dark eyes glaring at her. “But we both know it’s how you feel. How most of this town feels. And it’s true. I can work my fingers to the bone. I can become a successful businessman. I can prove myself a good father. But people aren’t going to forget who I was and what I came from, are they?”
She looked at him pleadingly. “That’s not true. Just because you and I can’t have a relationship doesn’t mean you aren’t good enough for me.”
“Yeah, sure.” He jerked on her arm. “Let’s get out of here. I’m sure your Aunt Birdie is eager to hear all about our discovery.”
“Rick, please—”
He halted abruptly, releasing his hold on her. “Please what? Please stop wanting you? Please stop comparing every woman I meet to you? Please stop breathing?”
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