“Want some?” she asked, holding up the carafe.
He shook his head, the image of maternal Poppy still not enough to slow the pulse of sexual attraction that started beating anytime they were in a room together. It throbbed in his blood and drummed against his breastbone like a deep bass note. It shimmered in the air, moving the atoms like a sound wave.
Poppy’s face went pink and that guileless, enchanting bewilderment crossed her face. He wanted to tell her he couldn’t understand it, either; that he had no more power over it than she, but how would bringing it out in conversation help matters? He was determined not to take her back to bed, so he stayed silent and watched her struggle against the attraction’s influence.
Bastard that he was, he found the effort it cost her gratifying.
She returned the carafe to the burner, then picked it up again. “Maybe Linus and Charlie want some coffee,” she said, taking a step toward the family room.
“Don’t go in there,” Ryan warned, remembering why he’d escaped from them in the first place. His brother had brought Poppy’s cousin to the house for dinner and they were clearly more than friends. “One moment Linus and I were talking about the time-waste that is a car’s power seats—it takes fifteen seconds to move from the fore position to the aft, you see...”
Poppy was laughing.
“What?”
“You two carry on the most inane conversations. Not long ago I overheard you talking about krill.”
He frowned at the comment. “It’s how men relate to each other. Through sports, cars and inanities.”
Her smile poked that small dimple into her left cheek. “I didn’t realize it was so different than how women relate to each other. Or how a man and a woman relate to each other for that matter.”
“Yeah?” He found himself strolling toward her, so he shoved his hands in his pockets to keep from touching. “Have you been spending time recalling just exactly how we’ve related?” That seductive note in his voice was completely beyond his control. Damn.
Her smile died as her long eyelashes dropped. She looked up at him through them and her fingertip brushed his forearm as he came to stand beside her. “Well, it didn’t seem absurd in the least to me.”
His hands bunched into fists as lust poured another pail of burning heat into his blood. What was he doing? What was she doing with that flirty glance? Her finger stroked him in another secret touch.
Damn, damn, damn. He thought he could hold himself back, but he couldn’t be responsible for the both of them. Still, another round in the sack was too risky. If she wasn’t so bright and buoyant, if he thought somewhere beneath that fresh face there might be a single cynical bone...then maybe.
But he didn’t want to be the one she built pretty dreams around only to have him toss them aside with some fucked-up March bullshit, or when April arrived and he beat feet down the mountain. His grief over Tate had siphoned everything out of him and he only had a shallow pool of caring left for anyone.
Not enough caring for Poppy. She deserved a well of emotion, a man who had a lake’s worth of love to lavish on her. His shriveled heart hadn’t anything like that inside it.
Her head bent and as her fingertip drew another circle on his flesh he stared at the part in her hair, the exposed, pale line of her scalp just another sign of her vulnerability. His belly tightened.
The least he could do was step back.
So he did.
The corners of her soft mouth turned down, but she didn’t comment on the distance he put between them. “So...you were telling me about Linus and Charlie.”
Ryan cast his mind back, trying to clear the haze of want from his system.
“Something about cars?” Poppy suggested in a helpful tone. Mischief sparked in her eyes, as if she were perfectly—happily—aware she could discombobulate him, too.
“Right. Power seats.” Ryan cleared his throat. “One minute we were conversing like normal men and the next my brother had your cousin on his lap and his tongue down her throat.”
Poppy’s brows rose. “I see.”
“Well, I didn’t want to see. Clearly Linus is coming off a dry spell.”
She leaned against the countertop and picked up her coffee to take a sip. “During dinner, I got the impression there was a bit more to them than a booty call.”
He stared at her. Booty call? Did Poppy even know what that phrase meant?
With a little smile, she shook her head at him. “Honestly, Ryan, I haven’t been living in a nunnery. I’m up on all the cool-kid lingo.”
“Yeah. Fine.” She was the ultimate in sophistication. She and her one other lover besides himself.
“Charlie told me privately that Linus wants to bring her back to L.A. They’re talking...future.”
Whoa. Ryan couldn’t wrap his mind around it. “Really?”
Poppy shrugged. “I admit I have my reservations about a mountain girl tying herself to a flatlander, but I don’t think Linus will hurt her.” She hesitated. “I think he might even marry her, Ryan.”
He frowned, trying to see his brother as a husband, realizing it shouldn’t seem so strange. The younger man was twenty-nine, after all. Time didn’t stand still for everyone. “Our parents would probably like that.”
“There might be children.”
Ryan forced himself to imagine that, too. He’d never given it a single thought, he’d been so engaged in his own emotional war these past years. But there could be other small Hamiltons. Little girls. Little boys. Would a child of Linus’s look like Tate, with his freckled nose and crooked grin?
The question gripped him for a moment and he sucked in a breath, waiting for the inevitable sharp-edged anguish....
That didn’t come.
The knowledge of that rocked him. Tate, he thought again. Tate. Tate. Tate. Instead of torment he heard a child’s laughter, saw a trailing pair of shoelaces, smelled bubblegum-scented shampoo and felt...warmth. Tate.
A soft touch returned his attention to the present. Poppy stood at his elbow. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t know. After years of existing on the unsteady knife’s edge between despair and deep grief, the cessation of it left him in an unsettling limbo. He glanced away from Poppy, saw that sometime since sunset one of those mountain mists had settled around the house. It pressed against the windows, hovering like a multitude of expelled ghosts.
Should he celebrate their banishment or rush to the doors and let them back in? Because who was he without his specters? Without his pain?
“Ryan. Ryan.”
His focus took a long time to return, as if he’d been very far away. Poppy had her arms around him and he realized she must have been saying his name for quite some time. He was stiff in her grasp, but as he came back to the present he wanted nothing more than to hold her against him, to absorb her delicate sweetness, to slide into her heat.
When she went on tiptoe, her clothes abraded his. Her arms wound around his neck and the soft notch of her sex nestled against the place where he was growing hard. Throbbing. Alive.
“I’m bad for you,” he said, even as his hands moved to cup her ass and press her closer against him. “I’ll take you to bed and gobble up all your good cheer and it won’t change a thing besides leaving you without it.”
“I can make more good cheer.” Her fingers pushed into the hair at the back of his head to bring his mouth against hers.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” he said against her lips.
“Must have to do with your troll-like looks.”
He bit her lower lip in retaliation, and felt that telling melt of her body against his. If only he believed it could be something so surface for her. “Poppy, really, you don’t—”
“I’m very annoyed with people thinking I don’t know what I want or
telling me I shouldn’t do what I want.” She put a little space between them. “Give me some credit for knowing myself.”
It was him she didn’t know. If she did, she wouldn’t offer to share her wholesome goodness with him. The first time they’d gone to bed together he’d managed to excuse himself because they’d clearly agreed to a single session, stranger-to-stranger. The second time, he’d been in the clutches of his raw emotions, unable to battle back the lust.
But now...now his good sense and his conscience were fully operational and they were telling him, in no uncertain terms, that he couldn’t have her again.
Even if he wanted her so damn much.
He stared down at her, torn. In this room, the sexual attraction was as alive as the two of them and it had no compunction, only need. God, and he had need, too. He wanted another experience in Poppy Time, badly enough his hands were shaking. With a little sound of frustration, she lifted into him again, taking his lips, licking into his mouth with her hot little tongue.
He groaned, clutching at her hips. Then he heard a new sound in the distance. Lifting his head, he groaned again. “Linus and Charlie. They’re still here. They have the TV on.”
“Linus and Charlie,” she repeated, clearly still kiss-dazzled.
“My brother? Your cousin?”
“Oh.” Poppy’s eyes drifted closed and she rubbed her body against his stiff cock. “We should say good-night or something.”
They should get out of this room before he took her on the table. Grasping her wrist firmly in hand, he towed her in the direction of the family room. “Let’s go.”
“To your bed,” she insisted, tugging back.
Whoever said he was a hero? Hadn’t all the recent Marches proved exactly the opposite? “To my bed,” he confirmed, kicking his conscience to the curb while continuing forward. At the threshold to the family room, he paused, hoping from this distance they wouldn’t notice his blatant arousal.
Glancing over, he took in Poppy’s thoroughly kissed state and battled a renewed urge to tear the clothes off her. He wrenched his gaze away and instead focused on Linus and Charlie, who weren’t aware they were standing behind them. The other couple’s attention was focused forward, on the large TV over the fireplace. He just had to do the host thing, Ryan decided, call out a quick “good night,” and get Poppy down to his suite.
A woman was front and center on the flat screen, in one of those arms-baring dresses that female TV reporters wore these days no matter what the season. She asked some question and then the shot switched to another woman, this one with platinum hair and Jessica Rabbit tits. Ryan froze, recognizing the voluptuous female.
She’d been born Suzanne Waddell, had matured into normal proportions, but then thanks to a combination of plastic surgery, ambition and a certain remarkable flexibility, had gone on to make millions in porn as Suzee Wad.
He told himself to move. To yell to Linus to switch off the TV. To run the forty feet across the carpet to do it himself or at least grab Poppy by the hand and race her away from the room.
But his muscles refused to move and his mouth couldn’t seem to form words. A high whine began buzzing in his ears, so loud it drowned out what the woman on the screen was saying. It didn’t matter, because next they showed a head shot of him, and then some moments of the film Suzee had directed last March in that opulent hotel room in Vegas. Her co-star was a shadowy figure, and the network tastefully blurred out the salient portions of his anatomy for their TV audience.
But you could view the uncensored version on the internet. Suzee had been using it as an advertising tool for her memoir, titled, coyly, Wad’s Up?
Hot and cold ran over Ryan’s skin as horror, embarrassment, shame and anger coursed through him. Finally, it freed his frozen muscles and without even knowing he did it, he dropped Poppy’s hand. With the television still recounting the sordid story, he stalked to the wet bar across the room, where he poured himself four fingers of tequila, tossing half back in one go.
“Hell,” he heard Linus exclaim, and the TV went dark.
Then his brother was there. “I didn’t know you guys were in the room,” he said, placing his hand on Ryan’s shoulder.
He shrugged it off. “Get Poppy out of here. Make her go upstairs.”
“Ry—”
“Just get her away,” he said in a low, raspy voice. “Get her away from me.”
Linus glanced over his shoulder to where Poppy still lingered by the entry. “Maybe you should explain the situation to her.”
“And say what?”
“And say the truth,” Linus said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my return to the mountains, it’s that being honest is the only path to being happy.”
Being honest with Poppy would mean earning her disgust. She was too unsullied, too bright for the decadence he’d lowered himself to last year. He shouldn’t ever kiss her again. He wasn’t good enough to touch her with his hands.
And she wouldn’t want him to, if he was up front about what had happened last March.
Ryan absorbed that thought as he swallowed down the last of his tequila. Then he squared his shoulders. All right. He’d be honest.
Because it was the thing guaranteed to save her from himself.
* * *
RYAN HERDED POPPY toward his suite, aware he was about to kill the fascination they had for each other. Well, the fascination she had for him. He’d still think she was the sweetest and sexiest woman he’d ever run across. But once he shared the video with her, she’d pack up her belongings and her son and escape the lake house. Then he’d see out March as he always did...miserable and miserably alone.
Crossing the threshold into the sitting room, as he dialed the overhead light to a low glow, a delicate scent assailed him. It was decidedly floral, but also included notes of black pepper, honey and mint. Looking around, his gaze lit on the probable source, a pottery vase centered on the coffee table by the couch that was filled with trumpet-shaped flowers on slender green stems, the blossoms white, yellow and deep pink. The scent drawing him, he moved forward and traced the edges of one fragile bloom with his finger.
“They’re freesias,” Poppy said.
He touched another and its clean scent wafted upward. “I’m not familiar with them.”
“They grow from bulbs and like the daffodils, make a short appearance in spring. I found a patch against the side of the house and couldn’t resist bringing some inside. In flower terms, they symbolize sweetness, friendship and trust.”
All of which he’d lose from Poppy once he showed her that salacious video. His fingers curled into fists and he glanced over, catching her wary expression.
He steeled himself against those big gray eyes. “There’s something you need to see.”
“All right.”
He ran his hands through his hair, then forced himself to move to the other side of the room, where he switched on a lamp. The TV in the entertainment center went on next. It was connected to the internet and mere seconds were required for him to locate the link to the video.
Yeah, he could have played it for her on his laptop, hoping the small-screen dimensions would diminish some of the squalidness. But the point was to use the ugly, unvarnished truth to push her away.
“Okay,” he said on a deep breath. “You should sit down.”
Her stocking feet were silent on the thick carpet. Over his shoulder, he saw her settle on the deep green velvet sofa. She tucked her knees to her side and he thought she looked like a dainty fairy curled up in a garden. As he watched, she shivered a little and he took quick steps to the fireplace, where he flipped on the gas flames.
Then there was nothing left but to allow last year’s March mistake to play.
Taking a seat at the opposite corner of the couch, Ryan refused to look away. Months ago, wh
en it had first hit cyberspace, he’d forced himself to watch the whole thing. Seventeen edited minutes of sex in a shadowy room. Tonight it seemed to go on as long as the entire lost weekend he’d spent in that hotel.
Through all of it he was naked.
Through most of it Suzee was wearing a jeweled bra and matching G-string that he’d been told were later auctioned off. Not for a second did he believe the $75,000 they garnered were donated to charity.
She’d also sold a pair of boxer briefs that she’d claimed were his from that same interlude, but since he wouldn’t be caught dead in Calvin Klein, he’d known that for the lie it was.
When the video ended—final image the red-and-yellow cover of Wad’s Up?—Ryan closed his eyes, waiting for Poppy’s indictment.
Which didn’t come.
As the silence continued, he opened one eye. She hadn’t moved.
He couldn’t abide the quiet. “Last year’s bright idea was to survive March with a month-long bender in Las Vegas.”
Poppy’s nonexpression didn’t change.
“I think I ran into her the last three or four days. It’s a bit hazy.”
“Not for her,” Poppy said. “She’s clearly looking at the camera several times.”
“It was hers. I wasn’t aware she was filming.”
“Mmm.” Poppy picked a piece of nonexistent lint off her sweater. “I guess that means if I ever see her in person I’ll have to smack her silly.”
Ryan drew back. “That’s all you have to say?”
She seemed to consider. “And that I believe she could mix cement with those hips.”
The comment startled a half laugh out of him. “Poppy...”
“You’re mostly just lying there, Ryan. Do you expect me to condemn you for a video in which you appear just one click away from comatose?”
Take My Breath Away Page 23