Payback

by Jasmine Cresswell

  It was Kate who changed the nature of what was happening between them. At one moment she was soft and pliant, almost docile, in his arms. The next instant, she reached up and held his face between her hands, pressing her lips against his and kissing him with fierce hunger. He kissed her back with equal fierceness, his tongue thrusting deep, his hands tangling in her hair, holding her body pressed tightly against his. When he was with Kate, it took a lot less than passionate, open-mouthed kisses to send him into a state of instant arousal and tonight was no exception.

  “Make love to me, Luke.” It was the first time she’d spoken since she opened the door. She murmured the words against his mouth, her hands raking down his spine, her breasts thrust against his chest.

  “God, yes.” He was only too happy to oblige. Thrilled, delighted and ecstatic to oblige, in fact.

  He’d already started to propel her toward the living room couch, mouths and bodies locked together, when the cold wash of reason intervened. His desire for her was spiraling upward at breakneck speed, but for once when they were together he was more in control than Kate. Enticing as it was to throw away restraint and seize her invitation with both hands, there was no way to ignore the fact that her father’s visit must have been a devastating experience. The fact that she was physically unharmed was almost irrelevant. Her choppy, truncated phone call was evidence of her mental turmoil, not to mention the silent intensity of her behavior since she opened the front door. Luke’s conscience—his infuriating conscience—sent out a loud warning that only a major league asshole would take advantage of her vulnerability.

  Even so, since he’d spent most of the past three weeks fantasizing about having Katie in his bed again, he struggled with temptation before gulping in air and stopping their progression toward the couch a scant few seconds before they toppled onto its welcoming cushions. The effort of calling a halt left him panting as if he’d run a fast three miles. He consoled himself as best he could with the thought that having sex now would surely kill any chance of rebuilding a long-term relationship with Kate, and he was finally ready to acknowledge that he wanted her back in his life even more than he wanted to have sex with her right this second. And God knew, that was saying a lot.

  He pushed her hair out of her eyes and tilted her head back so that he could look straight into her eyes. They were as startlingly blue as ever, but stormy with emotion. And the hell of it was, he couldn’t be sure precisely what emotion.

  “Kate, you know I want to make love to you.”

  She smiled slightly. “Yes, I kinda figured that.”

  He was relieved to see that she could smile, even joke a little. “Smart-ass.” He dropped a light, friendly kiss on her forehead, although the restraint damn near killed him. “Look, as you can tell, I’m totally in favor of us spending the next several hours having down-and-dirty sex. The next several days, in fact. But first, we need to talk about what happened with your father.”

  “No, we don’t. Not now. It’s not relevant.”

  “It’s very relevant, Katie.”

  “No.” She made a short, impatient gesture and her smile became rueful. “You’re doing your noble thing again, Luke, but you don’t have to. You’re afraid I’m reacting to stress, but that’s not what this is about. Or at least not in the way you think. I’m not looking for a quick and easy way to forget what happened. I want to make love to you, but that’s because of how I feel about you, not because of how I feel about my father.”

  He wished he could believe her. “Katie-love, how can you be sure you know the difference right now?”

  “It’s easy.” She sounded surprisingly confident. “While I was waiting for you to arrive, I realized I never even considered calling anyone else for help before dialing your number. I didn’t call 911, or one of my girlfriends. I didn’t call my uncle, or even my mother, although I love her and admire her a lot. It was you I called. You were the person I wanted, the person I trusted to make me feel safe again.”

  Somehow he managed to say the honorable thing. “And because you trust me, that’s why I have to do what’s right, not what I want.”

  “Making love to me is what’s right, as well as what we both want.” She made another impatient, sweeping gesture. “I understand we have to talk about my father sometime soon. I understand we have to talk about what happened between you and me back in March. If you like, we can even have a serious conversation about ways to make our relationship work despite the fact that we’re both ambitious workaholics with impossible schedules. But not right now. None of that matters right now. At least not to me.”

  He was afraid she was underestimating the impact of her father’s cruelty, but she was stroking her hands over him as she spoke, and he was a man, not a eunuch or a saint. Nevertheless, he raked up the pathetic last few dregs of his willpower and gave resistance one final shot.

  He grabbed hold of her hands and stepped back so that no part of his body touched any part of her. “I can’t believe I’m fighting to convince you that you don’t want to have sex with me. I must be insane! But I’m doing it because I don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning and discover that you hate me.”

  She smiled a little wryly. “There’s no chance I’m going to hate you tomorrow morning. I tried hating you for seven months already and it didn’t work worth a damn.” She moved into his arms again, linking her hands at the nape of his neck. “I’m glad you’re an honorable man, Luke. I’m sure I’ll appreciate your integrity many times in the years to come. But right at this moment, you’re driving me crazy. Your honor isn’t what I need. I need your passion.” Her smile flickered, elusive and impossibly erotic. “I need you to shut up and kiss me, for God’s sake.”

  Luke gave up the fight he had never wanted to win and kissed her with all the fire and longing he’d been holding in check. She responded with a passion hot enough to burn away the last frail threads of his resistance. He swung her up into his arms and carried her the final few steps to the couch. They tumbled onto the cushions, scattering clothes, ending up in a tangle of limbs and desire. He’d wanted her for so long that the mere touch of her bare skin worked on him with an impact that hovered just a fraction on the ecstatic side of torture. She writhed beneath him, her hips rising off the sofa, their bodies rocking in unison, slick with sweat, pulsing with seven months of mutual, unsatisfied yearning.

  He’d assumed he remembered what it was like to make love to her, but he’d been mistaken. Self-preservation had required that neither his memory nor his imagination could allow him to dwell on the enormity of his loss during the time they’d spent apart. He’d had sex with other women; he’d liked all of his partners, even cared about a few. He wondered what kind of an idiot he was that it had taken him so long to understand that he didn’t want or need other women. He wanted and needed Kate. Only Kate.

  He drove into her and she arched beneath him, her arousal feeding his as they raced together toward climax. Her orgasm was powerful enough to leave her shuddering in his arms, gasping for breath, her fingernails digging into his shoulders. Moments later he climaxed, and for a few seconds he had no coherent thoughts at all, only sensations of consuming, shattering pleasure.

  Making love to Kate had always been an amazing experience, he thought as he gradually sank back down to earth, but tonight they’d experienced a level of intimacy that had changed spectacular sex into something new, something that had left him emotionally filled as well as physically sated.

  When he could summon the energy to move, he sat up, giving her breathing room on the narrow couch. She sat up, too, and then twisted around so that she could rest her head on his shoulder. It was a while before she said anything, and when she spoke her voice was still husky from the intensity of the sex. “Last night, in the hotel, you asked me if I’d missed you while we were apart.”

  “I remember.” His hands stroked with lazy contentment across her breasts. “You didn’t answer me.”

  “Yesterday I wasn’t ready to deal with how big a
mistake we’d made when we split up. Now I am. The truth is I missed you every single day.”

  He looked down at her, smiling softly, his hands still cupping her breasts. “Nah, you just missed the great sex.”

  Her gaze held steady. “No, I missed you.” She gave a faint smile. “And the sex, too.”

  His gut tightened with a sensation he reluctantly identified as love. Even now, the thought of being this much in thrall to another human being had the power to make him squirm. For once, though, he overcame his instinct to retreat into the safeness of isolation. “You realize you’ve sealed your fate, don’t you? There’s no way I can ever let you go again. Not after this.”

  “That’s good news, because I was planning to stick around for a while anyway.”

  Instead of setting him on edge, the idea of having Kate around left him absurdly content. He trailed his hand down her body until his finger rested right on the tip of her tattooed dragon’s fire-breathing nose. “Puff tells me it’s been tough taking care of you without me around.”

  She smiled, her eyes laughing, too. “For once Puff isn’t exaggerating.”

  He hugged her, just because he could, and realized that she was getting cold again. Her favorite brightly colored throw had fallen from the couch onto the floor. He picked it up and wrapped it around her shoulders, then pulled on his own sweatpants. Instead of returning to the couch, he sat on the coffee table, which left him looking straight at her, their knees touching.

  He took her hands, needing the physical contact. “What happened to us last time, Katie? Where did we go wrong?”

  She thought for a moment before answering. “You were afraid to commit and I was afraid to trust. That’s it in a nutshell.”

  It seemed a pretty accurate assessment to him; such a simple explanation for such a cataclysmic outcome. “Why were you afraid to trust me? I didn’t as much as look at another woman when we were dating, Katie.”

  “Until a couple of weeks ago, I never admitted to myself how much the fact that I grew up not trusting my father affected my relationship with you. My suspicions about Dad’s integrity were never strong enough to provoke a confrontation between us, but some part of me was always afraid that if I ever relied on him to catch me, he would fail and I would fall.” She hesitated for a moment. “In a lot of ways, you know, you remind me of him.”

  “Jesus, Kate, that’s not exactly a compliment!”

  “Actually it is, because the similarities between you aren’t important in comparison to all the ways the two of you are different. You have the same drive and ambition as my father, and you’ve learned to cloak some of your intensity behind a friendly, low-key manner, just as he does. You have his charisma, too, not to mention his great looks. It took me those months apart to realize that’s where the similarities between the two of you end, thank God. You’re transparently honest and loyal. And kind, too. My father was…is…indulgent but he was almost never kind.”

  Luke raised her hands to his mouth, kissing her knuckles before folding her hands against his chest and holding them there. “You can always trust me, Kate, you know that, don’t you? I would never betray you the way your father betrayed your mother and the rest of his family. God knows I have a thousand faults, but I’ll never lie to you.”

  “I understand that now. I’m just sorry I put us both through so much to discover something so obvious.”

  For seven months, Luke had done his best to avoid thinking about Michael Rourke, much less talking about him. Avoidance had never worked too well and it was no longer even a semiviable option if his relationship with Kate was going to flourish. “We have to talk about Michael,” he said, and his voice sounded harsh despite his best efforts. “We’ll never be able to move on unless we do.”

  “It’s really difficult for me to talk about him.” Her cheeks flushed dark red. “Going to bed with Michael is one of the few things in my life I’m truly ashamed of.”

  “Did you imagine you were in love with him?” Luke prompted when she didn’t say anything more.

  “Never,” she said quickly. “Michael wasn’t about being in love. He wasn’t even about sex. Not really. It was about revenge, and restoring my sense of self-worth. It was a terrible revenge to take, but I fell in love with you almost as soon as we met and I was never sure you felt the same way. Yes, you were friendly and fun to be with and the sex was great, but there was a barrier between us that you never, ever took down. It felt sometimes as if I was throwing my love at a brick wall and watching it bounce back at me, untouched by a human hand.”

  “God, Katie, I never meant to be so unreachable.”

  “The odd thing is that you weren’t unreachable at first. The opposite, in fact. You were so much more approachable and open than anyone in my family and I loved that openness. Then everything began to change. It was as if the more time we spent together, the further you retreated. In the end, when our relationship was coming apart at every seam, there seemed to be nothing left at the center of me except a great big gaping hole where my self-esteem used to be. Having an affair with Michael was my desperate last-ditch effort to fill that hole. Although God knows how sex with a man I didn’t much like was supposed to achieve that particular miracle.”

  His grip on her hands tightened. “What happened before we broke up was my fault, as well as yours. Not Michael, but everything that led up to him.” Luke had never before allowed himself to admit as much. “I know I wasn’t always there for you and you’re right that I had commitment issues. Intimacy scares the hell out of me. I love my family, but their demands can get overwhelming. I’ve learned to cope by keeping part of myself walled off in a safe place where they have no access. There was an invisible line in our relationship that I had no intention of crossing, and when I felt myself getting too involved or needing you too much, I pulled back. Hard. It scared the hell out of me when I saw how close you were getting to places I’d been guarding since I was a kid.”

  “Are we going to do better this time?” For the first time, Kate turned away, unwilling to meet his gaze. “I don’t believe I could handle another breakup like the last one.”

  “We’re going to do much better this time.” Luke was surprised at how strongly he believed that. “This time we’re going to be terrific. I love you, Kate.”

  “You’re laughing.”

  “Because I never could say those words to you before. Why the hell not? What’s so difficult about telling the truth? I—love—you—Kate. I need you. I want you to be with me now and when I’m old and gray and have nothing better to do than potter around the yard nagging you to come and admire my vegetable garden.”

  “I love you, too. And I’d be happy to admire your vegetable garden anytime. Even before you get old and gray.”

  He stood up, pulling her into his arms, wondering if the grin plastered all over his face looked as sappy and wonderful as it felt. “You’re beautiful, and I love you, and if you don’t get some sleep soon, you’ll keel over where you stand. You look exhausted and I sure as hell feel exhausted. Let’s go to bed, Katie.”

  She stopped in her tracks, her smile vanishing. “Maybe we should sleep down here tonight….” She shivered. “I don’t want to go upstairs.”

  There was real dread in her voice and he realized how crazy it had been to imagine they could put off talking about her father’s invasion of her home until the morning.

  “Why would you want to sleep on the couch when you have a great bed upstairs?” He asked the question although he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

  She didn’t reply and he tilted her head back so that he could see her expression. What he read on her face confirmed his guess. “Your father came into your bedroom.”

  She gave a reluctant nod of assent. “I woke up and…he was there.”

  “How did he get into the house without waking you?”

  “I suppose he used a key. He’s always had a spare key, ever since I moved into the house, and I guess tonight proves he still has i
t.” She shrugged. “I never changed the locks after he disappeared—there was no reason to. He must have let himself in while I was sleeping.”

  “How did he look? Did he seem changed to you? To me, he looked as if he’d lost a few pounds, but that was about it.”

  “I never actually saw him, only heard him.”

  Luke frowned. “I don’t understand. He came upstairs and went into your bedroom, but you never saw him?”

  “I couldn’t see him because it was already pitch-black when I woke up. He’d doused every light. He’s been in this house dozens of times so he knows the main electrical panel is in the laundry room, right off the kitchen. Apparently he flipped the circuit breaker to cut off the electrical power before he came upstairs. He even got rid of my alarm clock, which is glow-in-the-dark and battery operated. Presumably he wanted to make sure there wasn’t the faintest glimmer of light anywhere.”

  Luke frowned. “Why the hell would he do that?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. To inspire fear, maybe?”

  “Total darkness is disorienting—literally you can forget which way is up,” Luke said. “But would your father want you to be disoriented? Presumably he had a message to deliver and wanted you to pay attention.”

  “Something about his whole visit is bothering me. I tried to put my finger on the problem while I was waiting for you to arrive, but all I could come up with was how out of character it was for my dad to do something like this. But that’s ridiculous, because clearly I have no idea what his true character is. Anyway, after his phone call in Virginia, this visit tonight isn’t out of character at all. It’s just more of the same, except worse.”

  She had grown paler as she spoke, but her voice remained steady, and Luke was so full of admiration for her courage that he ached with the weight of it. “What happened when Ron realized you were awake?”