by JoAnn Ross
Thirty minutes later, Zach arrived, looking every bit as foreboding and dangerous as the weather.
"I didn't ask Eleanor to send you." Alex blinked with surprise at the sight of Zach practically filling the tasting room doorway.
"I volunteered."
"Oh." While far from drunk, Alex was relaxed enough to be able to ignore his lambent fury. "Well, it was certainly nice of you to come out in the rain this way."
"You can thank me later." He pulled a bill from his wallet and tossed it onto the oak bar.
The young man pushed the money back. "It's on the house. My pleasure."
He was talking to Zach, but his gaze was on Alex.
"Zach, this is Steve," Alex said with remarkable cheer, considering the events of the past hour. "Steve, this is Zachary. My, uh, business associate."
"Nice to meet you," Steve said without so much as a glance Zach's way.
Seeing Alex through the other man's eyes, observing the familiar aching on his young face, irritated the hell out of Zach.
"Mrs. Lord appreciates you helping her houseguest," he muttered. He took hold of Alex's arm and yanked her off the bar stool. He also left the bill where it was.
"Come back some time when you're not in such a hurry," Steve called out after them. Zach knew damn well the irritatingly good-looking Steve was not talking to him.
"Thank you, I'll do that," Alex said. Her sunny smile, as Zach dragged her across the wooden floor, could have banished all the rain clouds overhead.
"Wasn't he nice?" Alex asked as they drove away from the winery in Zach's Jag.
"A real prince," Zach muttered. "You certainly didn't waste any time making another conquest."
"What?" Alex glanced toward his rigid profile. "What are you talking about?"
"First you have Averill practically tripping all over himself to take you sailing, and now your new little friend Steve—the guy reminded me of my old hunting dog, Duke, slobbering over a juicy steak bone. By the time you leave town, you'll probably have every male within a thirty-mile radius of Santa Barbara lusting after you."
Was he actually jealous? The idea was both surprising and encouraging. "That's not a very nice thing to say."
"In case you haven't noticed, sweetheart, I'm not exactly in a very nice mood. Have you noticed how fate keeps decreeing I step in and rescue you from your own stupidity? Kinda makes you wonder what I must've done in a past life to deserve such lousy karma, doesn't it?"
So much for encouraging. The warm glow instilled by the wine was shot to smithereens by his gritty tone and unkind words. Refusing to respond, Alex folded her arms and pretended avid interest in the scenery flashing by the passenger window.
Neither one of them spoke for a long time. Finally Zach said, "I arranged for a tow truck to pick up the Mercedes."
"Thank you," she answered stonily, still refusing to look at him.
"In case you're interested, it's not that banged up."
"Oh, I'm so glad," she said on a burst of honest relief. "I was afraid I'd totaled Eleanor's car."
"If you were so concerned about the damn car, you shouldn't have been driving so fast. Christ, Alex, don't you have any more sense than to speed on a wet highway in the rain?"
"Speeding? You think I was speeding?"
"If you'd been driving at a halfway prudent speed, you wouldn't have gone off the road," he said with the unwavering logic she usually admired.
She gave an unladylike snort. "Gee, you've got a helluva lot of faith in me."
"You're not exactly a model of restraint, sweetheart."
Alex knew he didn't mean the term as an endearment. "I am, too!"
Didn't he realize how much restraint it had taken her not to pull out all the stops and seduce him?
Most of the time, Alex didn't think it would be all that difficult to lure Zachary into her frustratingly lonely bed; at other times, such as now, she almost got the impression that he didn't like her at all.
And women were supposed to be the changeable ones, she thought darkly. Men might not suffer PMS, but they damn well had their own share of mood swings, nevertheless.
He brought the car to a halt at a four-way stop. "Honey, you wouldn't even know how to spell restraint."
That did it. To hear such a disparaging tone from the man she loved was the last straw in a very trying day.
"Go to hell." Unfastening her seat belt with trembling fingers, she opened the door and began walking angrily down the road.
Chapter Twenty-Six
"Goddammit, Alexandra!"
He'd been panic-stricken when her call had come. All during the nerve-racking drive to the winery, thoughts of Alex lying in the roadway, broken and bleeding, had billowed in his mind like dark and deadly smoke from a sugarcane field fire.
Wanting, needing, to get to her as quickly as possible, he'd disregarded personal safety and all state speed statutes, racing into the mountains, planning to take her into his arms, to soothe her, to love her.
But then he'd found her sitting coyly atop that bar stool, sipping wine as if she were in some damn nightclub, flirting with that blond beachboy, who in turn looked as if he'd been struck by lightning, and every one of Zach's good intentions had disintegrated.
He was, admittedly, furious. Furious at her for risking her life, furious at himself for allowing loyalty to Eleanor and responsibility toward Lord's to prevent him from simply saying the hell with the company and his marriage and taking what he wanted.
And what he wanted, dammit, was Alex.
"Dammit, Alexandra," he complained, driving slowly along the edge of the road, "would you quit acting like a spoiled brat and get back into this car?"
She didn't answer; nor did she so much as spare him a glance. She just kept walking, her hooded cardinal slicker brightening the dismal gray day.
"It's another ten miles to the house."
"I run ten miles all the time."
"Not in weather like this."
She turned. "It just so happens that I like walking in the rain. And for your information, Mr. Know-It-All Deveraux, if you check with a mechanic after the tow truck driver pulls the car out of that ditch, you'll discover that the brakes gave out. I wasn't speeding."
"Are you saying the brakes failed?"
"Got it on the first try. I guess the famed German automotive engineering isn't all it's cracked up to be." She turned away and began marching down the road again.
This was ridiculous. He couldn't follow her all the way back to Eleanor's. Muttering a string of pungent curses, he pulled the car over to the side of the deserted roadway.
He moved quickly, planning to drag her, kicking and screaming if necessary, back to the car.
She didn't look back when she heard the car door slam. Nor did she pause as his long, determined strides brought him alongside her.
"Go away. And leave me alone."
"The hell I will," he snarled, his temper approaching boiling point. "You're coming with me."
But he'd no sooner grabbed her arm when Alex surprised them both. Swinging her fist wildly, she connected firmly with his jaw.
"I said, leave me alone!" she shouted, her words whipped away by the driving wind.
"Too late." It was the last straw. Ignoring the surprising pain in his jaw, he grabbed hold of the front of her slicker and pulled her toward him. Water streamed down his furious face.
"I'm sick of this," he shouted. "I'm fed up with this entire fucking charade."
A lesser woman would have been intimidated by the savage gleam glittering in his midnight dark eyes. Alex tilted her head—disregarding her hood as it fell backward, exposing her head to the driving rain—and met his dangerous gaze with a challenging glare of her own.
"What charade?"
"For starters, my sitting in my office, drinking in your scent, trying to keep my mind on facts and figures when all the time I'm wondering what you're wearing beneath those outrageously sexy outfits you insist on wearing, instead of proper little pinstriped
dress-for-success business suits.
"I'm sick and tired of spending some of the most miserable nights of my life lying alone in bed, imagining you across town—so near, and yet so impossibly far away—and wondering what you're doing. Or worse yet, who you're doing it with.
"I'm sick of remembering that night, when I held you in my arms and wished that I possessed the power to stop time. I'm sick of going to sleep so horny my balls ache and having to take cold showers every morning to get rid of the goddamn hard-on that comes from dreaming about you.
"And mostly I'm sick of having spent all this time wishing for what might have been and kicking myself for not having made love to you when we had the chance.
"I've wanted you more than I've ever wanted any woman in my life. But because I care about you more than I've ever cared about any woman in my life, I've been killing myself trying to keep from hurting you. And what the hell have all these good and noble intentions gotten me?
"A punch in the jaw from a snotty, stubborn female who doesn't even have enough common sense to come in out of the rain!"
He was definitely on a roll. Alex, who was finally seeing the fire she'd always suspected dwelt beneath that infuriatingly remote exterior, stared up at him in awe. She knew she should find such violent emotion frightening. But knowing that Zach would never actually harm her, she was finding it thrilling.
His head swooped down and Alex cried out as his mouth captured hers in a hard, rapacious kiss.
She began kissing him back, desperately, hungrily.
The rain sluicing over their taut, straining bodies went ignored as they consumed each other with deep kisses. They were caught in the unrelenting grip of something powerful and ageless and primal. Something that could no longer be denied.
"If that wasn't an earthquake," she said breathlessly, "we're in trouble."
"It was no earthquake." His lips skimmed hotly up her face; he pulled her hard against him.
Zach wanted to take her here and now. He wanted to drag her to the side of the road and bury his throbbing shaft in her silken, welcoming warmth. Deep, then deeper still. Until he could touch her womb.
Alexandra wanted him to do exactly that. And more.
"Do you have any idea how long I've wanted you?"
"How long?" Her shaky laugh was half seduction, half promise.
"Forever." His declaration was half wonder, half certainty.
A rush of warmth flooded through her, so deep and hot she was amazed that steam wasn't rising from her skin. She rained kisses, stinging, avid kisses all over his wonderful, handsome face. She continued to kiss him as he carried her back to the car.
He set her down on the back seat, impatiently ripped open her slicker, then covered her body with his. He was hard and aroused, and the movement of her hips against his aching groin created a building pressure that made him feel on the brink of exploding.
One final last voice of conscience, lurking in the far reaches of his mind, struggled to make itself heard. He pushed himself up on his elbows. Her cheeks were flushed the deep, pink hue of the Old Blush blossoms in Eleanor's rose garden, her lips were slightly parted, her hair was a gleaming wet tangle. Her eyes shone with a dazzling gold light.
She was, as always, the most beautiful, alluring woman he'd ever seen. But as his grand-mère had always told him, and he'd learned the hard way with Miranda, beauty was only skin-deep. Alex's true beauty, Zach knew, was a deep-seated, inner beauty of heart and spirit that would make her still stunning on her one-hundredth birthday.
"I don't want to hurt you."
Caught up in ancient, primal needs, Alex misunderstood his concern. "You won't."
He decided to try one last time. Then he wouldn't be responsible for the consequences. "I can't give you what you want, Alexandra. What you need."
She smiled at that. A slow, fatally seductive smile that beautiful sirens had been using to lure men to their doom since the dawning of time.
"Oh, I think you're wrong about that," she murmured silkily. Lifting her hips, she rubbed her pelvis against the placket of his jeans.
When her hand moved in the direction of his painful tumescence, Zach grasped it and lifted it to his lips. "That's not what I meant." He kissed the soft, delicate flesh at the center of her palm. "You deserve a man who can promise you a future."
She didn't want to think of that. Not now. Not when every nerve ending in her body felt as if it were on fire. "You talk too much." Dragging her hands through his hair, she pulled his head down and gave him another long, heartfelt kiss.
"I don't want to think about the future," she insisted against his lips. "I only want to think about now. And how much I want you."
For months, he'd fought his feelings. Fought her. And now he wouldn't, couldn't, fight any longer.
Consequences be damned. Zach surrendered to her husky voice trembling with pent-up emotion, the seductive movement of her hips, her lips, plucking so enticingly at his. He surrendered to the inevitable.
He pulled down her jeans, saying something pungent and profane when the wet denim clung to her smooth legs. Today's panties were the bright blue color of cornflowers, tied low on her hips with narrow white satin ribbons. He cupped his palm against her silk-covered mound and elicited a soft, shuddering moan of pleasure.
"Christ." Edging his way beneath the lace-trimmed leg band, he eased a finger deep inside her. Her voluptuous flesh was as hot as hellfire, as wet as her lusciously ripe mouth. "You are so hot," he rasped. "So ready for me." He kissed her again, tasting the rain. Tasting her.
"More than ready." Leaning up on her elbows, she began tearing with urgent frenzy at his zipper. "I want you, Zach." She knew she was begging. But she didn't care. She'd have gotten down on her knees if necessary, if only to end this agonizing torment. "Now. Please." A sob of relief escaped her ravished lips when his penis burst free, as hard and smooth as polished marble, rampant with vitality.
When she stroked it wonderingly, from its base amid its nest of crisp ebony hair to its silken tip, spreading the gleaming bead of cream with an innocently seductive fingertip, reason shattered.
Zach ripped at the satin ribbons and tore away the scrap of blue silk. Their lips fused again as together they fought to pull down his own wet jeans. He plunged into her, taking her with a ravenous hunger he feared could never be quenched.
All thought evaporated. Passion burst from their hot, wet pores. When her body went rigid beneath him, he buried his mouth in her throat and moved his hips in one deep, final thrust. She cried out, clinging to him as they came together, proving to Zach that sometimes fantasies really did come true.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Alex had known this would happen. Just today, she'd admitted the inevitability of making love with Zach, little suspecting that the opportunity would come so soon.
No, she reminded herself, this was not making love. This was sex. Hot, fast and thrilling. But it was not love. At least not on Zach's part.
His passion had been born from anger and jealousy, and perhaps, she conceded, from a fear she'd been injured in her accident. But none of those reasons, as understandable as they were, equaled love.
He was lying on top of her, their legs tangled, their hearts still beating in unison even as the shared rhythm gradually slowed. He lifted his head and looked down into her face, his dark eyes as grave as his expression.
"Alex—"
"No." She caught his hand as it brushed away the tangled damp hairs clinging to her cheek. "If you dare apologize—"
This time it was he who cut her off with a quick, hard kiss that would have sent her reeling had she not already been lying down.
"I wasn't going to apologize. Well, maybe I was," he allowed when she gave him a knowing look. "But not in the way you think. I'm not at all sorry this happened. But I am sorry that when I finally did get around to doing what I've wanted to do for months, for years, what I should have done that first night…"
He frowned and shook his head in obviou
s self-disgust. He hadn't even bothered taking off her raincoat or sweater.
"Lord, Alexandra, never in my wildest dreams did I envision making love to you in the back seat of a car like some oversexed teenager."
His tender gaze threatened to be her undoing. Afraid that her love for him was written across her face in bold, black script, Alex wiggled out from beneath him and began struggling to locate her clothes.
Her panties had landed atop the back of the front seat; they were, she decided, observing the torn ribbons, a lost cause.
"I'll buy you a new pair."
"That's not necessary." She shoved them into her slicker pocket and started working on turning her jeans right side out.
"I said I'll buy you a new pair."
"Fine. Do whatever you want." She began to struggle into the tight jeans, which wasn't all that easy, from a sitting position, with Zach watching her with those steady, unblinking eyes.
If she kept wiggling her little ass like that, he was going to end up stripping those jeans back off again, Zach mused, as he felt an all too familiar tightening in his groin.
She'd encased herself in enough ice to cover the North and South poles. Silently working his way through every curse he knew, both in English and the Acadian of his roots, Zach jerked his own pants up and wished he hadn't given up smoking during football training in his freshman year of college.
His renewed frustration gave birth to an urge for a cigarette. Or a drink. Jack Daniel's, straight up, no ice.
"Look," he said, deciding to try again, "I said I was sorry. What else can I say to try and make this right?"
"I told you, you don't have to apologize." To Alex's aghast humiliation, fat hot tears started flowing down her cheeks. "I understand, Zach."
Unable to bear the pity she thought she was reading in his expression, she turned her head away and stared out unseeing into the rain, trying to calm her whirling mind and soothe her aching heart.
"Dammit—"
"We got carried away. It happens sometimes." She took another deep, shuddering breath. "No harm, no foul. Besides—"