Jacob rolled the idea over in his head. The more he did, the more he liked it. “She might have something there.”
“Sure I do. It wouldn’t take much work. Just a little carpentry.”
She probably had no idea how adorable she looked when she was being enthusiastic, Luc thought. “What do you know about carpentry?”
Now she was talking strictly to him. In a way, this breached the gap caused by the words they’d had this morning.
“Enough. My brothers were always fooling around with power tools, building on to the house. Kevin and I worked on the room you slept in above the garage,” she told him proudly. “I’m a lot handier with a drill than I am with a skillet.”
Luc had a sudden image of her wearing only a tool belt and had to curb the grin that came to his lips.
“You slept over her garage?” Janice looked at him curiously. “When did this happen?”
Too late she remembered she wasn’t supposed to elaborate on the past and inadvertently throw a wrench into whatever tale he’d told them about her.
“Long story,” Alison said quickly, waving it away. “But I am handy. Probably half the people here are handy.” She saw the highly amused look exchanged between Luc and Jacob. “What? What did I say?”
“You obviously never told her about the house raisings we’ve had around here,” Jacob surmised.
“Well, there you go,” Alison declared, glad that was solved. “Now you don’t have to sell.”
But Jacob wasn’t completely convinced, even though he wanted to be. “Who’s going to run this so-called hotel?”
“Details, just details,” Luc told him easily. “They’ll take care of themselves in time. They always do.”
Translation, he’d take care of them, Alison thought. Something akin of pride filtered through her as she looked at Luc.
“Okay,” Jacob allowed. “I’ll hold you to that.”
“Jacob—” Janice began to protest.
He took her hand and brought it to his lips. “Let me work this out on my own. I think we might have the perfect solution here.”
Janice merely shrugged, knowing when to back away.
“That was pretty sharp of you today,” Luc told Alison in their room later that evening, after Jacob and Janice had gone to bed. “Coming up with turning the old house into a hotel.” He undid the buttons of his shirt as he talked, trying his best to seem nonchalant. Holding his breath as to her reaction. “I don’t think Jacob really wanted to sell it. Getting rid of it was Janice’s idea.” Making money always was. There but for the grace of God… “Now that you showed her there was profit to be made in keeping the old place, she’s not against keeping it anymore.”
As with any compliment, she shrugged it away. “Glad I could help.”
He saw the set of her shoulders as she turned from him. It was happening again. But this time he wasn’t going to ignore it, wasn’t going to hope it would resolve itself without any intervention on his part. He owed it to her to intervene.
His shirt hanging open, he moved around her until they were face-to-face. “Alison, I don’t want you to think that you have anything to be afraid of from me.”
The defiance that had always seen her through was quick to rise. “I’m not afraid of you.”
He hadn’t meant that to sound like a challenge of some sort. “Not me, exactly, but something about me.” He saw the denial begin to form. “Don’t lie to me, Alison. It’s there in your eyes. I just wish…”
She bunched her pajamas up against her, turning the doorknob to the bathroom. “Yeah, me, too.”
When she came out of the bathroom fifteen minutes later, Luc was on the floor. He’d made a pallet for himself beside the four-poster. She set her clothing down on the chair beside the bureau.
“What are you doing?”
He glanced in her direction. As if he hadn’t heard her come out. “Getting ready for bed.”
She ran her brush through her hair, trying vainly to keep her mind on what she was doing. She lost count after three. “It’s your bed. If anyone belongs on the floor, it’s me.”
“You’re right. It is my bed and I get to decide who sleeps in it.” He glanced at her, then went back to smoothing out the blanket. “My decision is that it’s you.”
Still holding the hairbrush, she crouched down beside him. Their eyes met. Her mouth curved. “This is ridiculous—you know that, don’t you?”
He smiled in response. “I make it a practice never to argue with a lady.”
The sigh that escaped her lips seemed to empty her completely. With her back against his bed, Alison eased down beside him. “It wasn’t you last night.”
He tried to keep it light, thinking it might make it easier on her. “Felt like me.”
“I mean…” She was diving into deep waters, waters she wasn’t sure if she knew how to navigate. “I wanted to make love with you. It wasn’t the alcohol. The alcohol only kept me from stopping myself.”
“Otherwise you would have?”
“Otherwise I couldn’t have.” There was a difference. And there was more. “You would have stopped it. I mean, you would have sensed something wrong and turned away from me. And I didn’t want that.”
“Is that what he did? Derek? Did he turn away from you?” How badly had her marriage scarred her? From the looks of it, pretty badly.
She nodded. “Eventually.” Alison dropped the hairbrush beside her. With her knees against her chest, she leaned her elbows on them and dragged both hands though her hair. “I can’t really blame him.”
No, and that was what set her apart, he thought. “Then why are you blaming yourself?”
The question roused her. Alison looked at him, confused. “What?”
“That’s what you’re doing. Blaming yourself for whatever it was that started all this.” And it was eating her up.
She shook her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then tell me,” he urged. “Tell me what I’m talking about, Alison.” When she began to get up, he caught her hands in his, holding on. “I need to know. Let me in, Alison. I swear I won’t hurt you.”
The fight, the defensiveness within her, was beginning to wane. “I know you won’t. At least, you won’t mean to, but…” Biting her lip, she looked off.
He sighed. “Have it your way. I won’t pressure you, Alison. We’ll do this at your pace.” With that, he lay down on the floor and wrapped the comforter around himself, his back to her.
Alison sat there beside him, looking at Luc’s back for a long time. Thinking. Wrestling. Maybe it was because she thought he was asleep that she even had enough courage to whisper, “I was too afraid to say anything. When it happened, I was too afraid.”
He turned around slowly, not sure if he’d imagined hearing her. One look at her face told him he hadn’t. Without a word he took her into his arms and just held her.
Alison felt something hitch in her throat. Tears, fighting to block her words. But suddenly she needed to get rid of them. Needed to have someone hear. And maybe tell her it was all right.
“I was…I was eleven.” Every word felt as if she was running razor blades along her tongue. “My father had just died and I guess I was really scared. Scared about the future, scared about Kevin dying, too. He was like another father to me. I’d already lost my mother three years earlier so I was one parent short, and then Daddy died….” Her voice caught. It took a moment before she could continue. “So I was scared. That was when Uncle Jack started coming around. Right after my Dad’s car accident. To see that everything was all right. To help out.”
Luc tightened his arm around her, somehow knowing what was coming. Wishing that holding her would make the words come out differently.
“Kevin and Jimmy thought he was a great guy. So did I. He wasn’t my real uncle, just my father’s best friend. Uncle Jack had always been around, so we didn’t think…I didn’t think…” She took a deep breath. It shuddered its way into her lungs. “W
hen he touched me, I got so scared.”
Anger flared. “The son of a bitch—”
She couldn’t let herself acknowledge Luc’s comment. She’d break down if she did. So she caught her lip to keep from crying, forcing the words out instead. “But he said it was all right, that it was just because I was so pretty and he loved pretty girls. He said that what he was doing wouldn’t hurt. That he’d never hurt me—”
Words he’d said to her, Luc realized. How had that affected her? Had it triggered more painful memories? “Oh, Alison, I’m so sorry.”
She shut her eyes, tears squeezing through the lashes. “I stopped eating, stopped going to school. Kevin didn’t know what to do with me. He thought it was because Dad was gone. And then one day, he heard me crying. I was in the closet. Praying and asking God to forgive me for making Jack do what he did. I’d never seen Kevin so pale. He made me tell him. Everything.” Her control shredding, she looked at Luc. “Kevin’s the only one who ever knew all the details. I thought he was going to kill Uncle Jack with his bare hands. Two of his friends had to pull him off.”
There was nothing Luc could do but stroke her hair and hold her. He’d never felt so impotent in his life. Or so furious. “What did the police have to say?”
She shook her head. “Kevin didn’t call them. He didn’t want to put me all through that, telling strangers about what had happened. Being cross-examined by someone Jack would pay to twist everything back to me. It was all moot, anyway. Jack disappeared right after that. Nobody ever knew what happened to him. Everybody talked about what a great guy he was and that they couldn’t understand what made him take off.” Her head resting against Luc’s shoulder, she blew out a shaky breath. “I thought it was my fault. What he did, his leaving. All of it. My fault.”
That was ridiculous. Luc bit back the retort. Instead, he kept his voice calm, mild, all the while empathizing with the rage Kevin must have felt. “How could it have been your fault that that worthless scum molested you?”
She closed her eyes, remembering with a clarity that was almost frightening every single feeling she’d experienced. “Because if I hadn’t been there—”
He raised her chin until she opened her eyes and looked at him.
“He would have preyed on another little girl. Those kind of people are sick, Alison, no matter how nice they seem to be. They’re like those shiny red apples that are rotten inside when you bite into them. Nobody suspects anything until they go beneath the top layer.”
“Maybe,” she allowed.
“Maybe nothing. You weren’t to blame. Aren’t to blame,” he emphasized fiercely, then lowered his voice. “Did you ever tell your husband?”
That, too, was her fault. “No.”
“Didn’t he suspect anything was wrong?” He couldn’t see how the man could have possibly remained in the dark, not when he himself had suspected something was wrong almost from the start.
There was a sad smile on her lips. “When I wouldn’t have sex with him while we were still going together, I told him I was saving myself for the right guy. He was thrilled that it was him. He wasn’t so thrilled afterward, though. He thought I was using sex as some kind of a bargaining chip. He lost patience with me pretty fast. Told me I was frigid, that there was something wrong with me. I shouldn’t have married him.”
“Why did you?” he asked softly.
At the time her reasoning had seemed right. It was only now that she saw how flawed it had been. “To prove to myself that I was all right. That I could move on. I thought that if I was married, those dreams wouldn’t haunt me anymore.” Another miscalculation. “They just got worse.”
“Dreams?”
“Of Uncle Jack.” She shuddered even as she said it. “Of his hands reaching out for me, or his breath surrounding me. He smoked. To this day, I smell a cigarette, I start to choke.” She looked down. “I’m sorry, you don’t need to be hearing this.”
He wasn’t going to have her turning away from him. Not after she’d just shared her darkest secret with him. “But I do. How can I help if I don’t know?”
She turned into the safety his arms provided. “And how are you going to help?”
“By being there when you feel you need someone. By being there even when you don’t.” He looked into her eyes, silently making a pledge to her. “By doing whatever you need to get you through the night.”
And then he kissed her.
Chapter Fifteen
This time there was nothing to hide behind. No excuses, no false courage to take the fall for what she felt.
This time, as she felt the pull that Luc’s touch along her body generated, felt the yearning begin within her, there was nothing to protect her. Nothing to point to and blame her actions on.
The desire was of her own making.
As was the passion.
Alison knew what awaited her, and even though her fear of the devastating fear still hovered somewhere just beyond, it was not as deep, not as thick, not as solid as before. A glimmer of white light shone through it, showing her the way. Whispering promises of salvation.
He deepened the kiss. She felt his tongue touch hers, felt his arms tighten around her as he brought her even closer.
A euphoria overtook her, too large to be ignored, too wide to be contained. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she leaned her body into his, absorbing the warm, comforting feel of it.
Absorbing it and reveling in it.
She was like sunlight in his hands, like moonbeams and dreams. He couldn’t quite believe that it was happening twice.
There was a difference to her this time from the last. This time, there was no wild push to reach journey’s end; she seemed to be savoring the steps it took to get there. Luc felt his heart swelling, quickening. He wanted to give her the moon, to give her every pleasure ever created beneath it.
Slowly the layers peeled away. Layers of clothing, layers of protection that kept them safe from the world. Insulated from one another.
Neither one of them wanted to be safe tonight, unless it was with the other.
He didn’t ask her this time if she was sure. He knew—sensed—she was. This time there was no part of him that stood back, waiting for a sign that she wanted to pull away, that she was regretting what she’d allowed to begin. There were no shackles, no checks. All there was was a purity of yearning. Of innocence revisited, because, despite everything, she was innocent in what a man and a woman could do when heaven and earth were right.
He wanted to show her how it could be. To pleasure her and to leave her with feelings that were strong enough, stirring enough, to block out all of the bad that had happened to her. Block it out as if it had never happened at all.
He made love not only with her, but to her. To every part of her, however small.
He kissed her fingertips, drawing them one by one slowly into his mouth until he heard her whimper with desire, with anticipation. He pressed a kiss to each palm, to her arms, to the expanse above her breasts, circling each slowly so that he tantalized her and tortured himself before his tongue finally touched each peak. Moistening. Suckling.
Making sensations scramble helter-skelter through her, bouncing here, there. Everywhere.
Alison arched against his mouth, freely giving herself up to him, to the pleasures that were battering so urgently at every part of her. She grasped the blankets beneath her as his mouth went lower, laying claim first to her belly, then christening the path that led him further on his quest.
When his tongue came in contact with the very core of her, she bit down hard to keep from crying out. The cry echoed within her body instead.
And then, when the first of the climaxes hit, she spiraled completely up to another level. Damp with perspiration, she could only cleave to a hope that there was more. A greediness overtook her.
She couldn’t get her fill of him.
She’d never known it could be like this. Never suspected that she was capable of feeling these sort of sensations, and be f
illed with a desire to give back at least a small measure of what she was experiencing. She wanted him to feel as insanely happy as she was right at this moment.
There was a unity here, a unity that took her breath away and made her want to sing and sob with joy at the same time.
Her breath coming in short, shallow snatches, Alison caught hold of his shoulders, urging him up to her, wanting to see his eyes, touch his face.
Wanting him.
The first time had been wonderful, but this, this broke through a door, destroying its locks, bending its hinges so that it could never again be closed.
Never again close off the light and keep it from reaching her again.
He’d set her free.
Luc felt as if his heart had stopped. There were tears in her eyes. Had he hurt her? Had he done something after all that brought all those terrible memories back to her?
“Alison…”
“Shh.”
She placed the tips of her fingers to his lips, silencing him. This wasn’t the time for words, only feelings. Only actions.
And then, because he wasn’t expecting it, she managed to rise and twist so that she switched places with him. He became the one on his back, he was the one under sensual assault as she at first timidly, and then with more and more surety, put into practice what he had taught her.
How to make love.
Arrows tipped in fire shot through him, searing him wherever her tongue touched him. Nearly sending him over the brink.
The feel of her lips—eager, curved, sensual—rained fleeting openmouthed kisses over his hardened torso, quickening his pulse throughout all the points where it beat. Making him crazy.
Men Made in America Mega-Bundle Page 43