Paper Rose

by Diana Palmer

  He leaned against the wall, still bleary-eyed and only half awake. She was beautiful with her body gently swollen and her lips pouting and her green eyes in their big-lensed frames glittering at him.

  She registered after a minute that he wasn’t himself. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked abruptly.

  He didn’t answer. He put a hand to his head.

  “You’re drunk!” she exclaimed in shock.

  “I have been,” he replied in a subdued tone. “For about a week, I think. Pierce and Colby got my landlord to let them in yesterday.” He smiled dimly. “I’d made some threats about what I’d do if he ever let anybody else into my apartment, after he let Audrey in the last time. I guess he believed them, because Colby had to flash his company ID to get in.” He chuckled weakly. “Nothing intimidates the masses like a CIA badge, even if it isn’t current.”

  “You’ve been drunk?” She moved a little closer into the apartment. “But, Tate, you don’t…you don’t drink,” she said.

  “I do now. The mother of my child won’t marry me,” he said simply.

  “I said you could have access…”

  His black eyes slid over her body like caressing hands. He’d missed her unbearably. Just the sight of her was calming now. “So you did.”

  Why did she feel guilty, for God’s sake, she wondered. She tried to recapture her former outrage. “I’ve been kidnapped!”

  “Apparently. Don’t look at me. Until today, I was too stoned to lift my head.” He looked around. “I guess they threw out the beer cans and the pizza boxes,” he murmured. “Pity. I think there was a slice of pizza left.” He sighed. “I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

  “Yesterday!”

  After all she’d been through, the thought of Tate starving chased all her irritation right out of her mind. She took off her coat and walked past him to the kitchen and started doing a visual inventory of the refrigerator. She made a face. “The milk is long since out of date, the bread all has mold and I think you could start a bacterial plague with what’s in the crisper here….”

  “Order a pizza,” he suggested. “There’s a place down on the corner that still owes me ten pizzas, paid for in advance.”

  “You can’t eat pizza for breakfast!”

  “Why can’t I? I’ve been doing it for a week.”

  “You can cook,” she said accusingly.

  “When I’m sober,” he agreed.

  She glowered at him and went back to her chore. “Well, the eggs are still edible, barely, and there’s an unopened pound of bacon. I’ll make an omelet.”

  He collapsed into the chair at the kitchen table while she made a fresh pot of coffee and set about breaking eggs.

  “You look very domesticated like that,” he pointed out with a faint smile. “After we have breakfast, why don’t you come to bed with me?”

  She gave him a shocked glance. “I’m pregnant,” she reminded him.

  He nodded and laughed softly. “Yes, I know. It’s an incredible turn-on.”

  Her hand stopped, poised in midair with a spoon in it. “Wh…what?”

  “The eggs are burning,” he said pleasantly.

  She stirred them quickly and turned the bacon, which was frying in another pan. He thought her condition was sexy? She couldn’t believe he was serious.

  But apparently he was, because he watched her so intently over breakfast that she doubted if he knew what he was eating.

  “Mr. Hutton told the curator of the museum in Tennessee that I wasn’t coming back, and he paid off the rent on my house there,” she said. “I don’t even have a home to go to…”

  “Yes, you do,” he said quietly. “I’m your home. I always have been.”

  She averted her eyes to her plate and hated the quick tears that her condition prompted. Her fists clenched. “And here we are again,” she said huskily.

  “Where?” he asked.

  She drew in a harsh breath. “You’re taking responsibility for me, out of duty.”

  He leaned back in his chair. The robe came away from his broad, bronzed chest as he stared at her. “Not this time,” he replied with a voice so tender that it made ripples right through her heart. “This time, it’s out of love, Cecily.”

  Cecily doubted her own ears. She couldn’t have heard Tate saying that he wanted to take care of her because he loved her.

  He wasn’t teasing. His face was almost grim. “I know,” he said. “You don’t believe it. But it’s true, just the same.” He searched her soft, shocked green eyes. “I loved you when you were seventeen, Cecily, but I thought I had nothing to offer you except an affair.” He sighed heavily. “It was never completely for the reasons I told you, that I didn’t want to get married. It was my mother’s marriage. It warped me. It’s taken this whole scandal to make me realize that a good marriage is nothing like the one I grew up watching. I had to see my mother and Matt together before I understood what marriage could be.”

  “Your childhood was terrible,” she recalled.

  “So was yours,” he returned curtly. “I never told you that I beat the hell out of your stepfather after I took you home to my mother, did I?” he added.

  She bit her lip. “No. I really don’t know what would have become of me if it hadn’t been for you. After Mama died, my life was a nightmare.”

  He toyed with his coffee cup, his eyes black with angry memories. “That night, while you were asleep, I unbuttoned your pajama jacket and looked at what he’d done to you. Afterward, I drove back to his house and very nearly killed him. If he hadn’t started crying and begging me to stop, I…” He let out the angry breath. “That was when I realized how I felt about you,” he added, his eyes meeting hers. “A man wants to protect what he considers his own. It started then, that night.”

  She was surprised by what he was telling her. “You…looked at me?”

  He nodded. His eyes narrowed. “You had the most beautiful little breasts,” he said roughly. “And they were covered with bruises. I wanted to kiss the bruises, take you into my bed and hold you, just hold you, all night long so that you’d be safe. I didn’t dare give in to the impulse, of course,” he added with the first touch of amusement he’d shown since her arrival. “My mother would have horsewhipped me.”

  She felt waves of surprised pleasure lance through her body. “I never knew.”

  “I was always known for my poker face,” he murmured. “But it was sheer agony to be around you. The older you got, the worse it was. It was inevitable that one day I’d go mad and take you.” He sighed. “The most hellish part of the whole thing was knowing that all I had to do was touch you and you’d let me do anything I liked to you.”

  She traced the mouth of her coffee cup. “I loved you,” she said quietly.

  “I know.”

  There was a world of pain in the words. She looked up into his black eyes and saw an answering emotion in them. “You never told me.”

  “I couldn’t. Until very recently, I wasn’t sure I could ever think in terms of marriage. And it wasn’t to maintain a pure bloodline,” he told her finally with a laugh that was pure self-contempt. “Leta didn’t tell you, because I made her promise not to. But one of my Lakota great-grandfathers married a young blond white woman at the turn of the century. He was a member of Bigfoot’s band.”

  Her lips parted. “The band that was decimated at Wounded Knee in 1890!”

  He nodded. “He moved to Chicago afterward. He hated his culture for a while, and became a detective, trying to hide his Lakota blood by living white. But eventually he regained his pride and made his background public. He married the doctor’s daughter who’d nursed him after the massacre and she gave him a son and a daughter. She could speak Lakota like a native and ride and shoot like a warrior. My mother has the name that was given to her after her marriage: Warwoman.”

  She was enthralled. “So the bloodline wasn’t pure.”

  He shook his head. “It was an excuse, like all the other excu
ses. I liked my life as it was. I didn’t want ties, especially the sort I’d have had with you.” He looked at her with pure raging desire. “I knew if we were ever intimate, there’d be no going back. I was right. I eat, breathe, sleep and dream you, especially now, with my baby growing in your belly.”

  She searched his eyes like a woman coming out of nightmare into pure fantasy.

  He stood up and shed the robe without a trace of inhibition, letting her look at him for the second time in their turbulent relationship. She was so intensely preoccupied that she hardly realized what he was doing until she was standing equally nude before him. He lifted her into his arms and brought his mouth down tenderly on the swell of their child before he carried her into the bedroom.

  There was only faint trepidation in her eyes, but he smiled as he eased down beside her on the king-size bed. “I’ll be careful,” he whispered, bending to her soft mouth. “There’s no rush. We have the rest of our lives to love each other.”

  It was love, too. Every brief kiss, every light, caressing touch, was a testament to what he felt for her. In between soft kisses and tender endearments he coaxed her into the most exquisite intimacy she’d ever shared with him, so that each long, slow, sensual motion of his hips was like ballet. She felt him shudder with the effort it took to control the raging arousal that threatened to burst second by second.

  “Tate,” she moaned huskily, pulling at his hips.

  “No,” he bit off against her open mouth. “I want it like this,” he breathed. “I want it slow and sweet, deeper than it’s ever been, so tender…that you sob…when I end it.”

  She wasn’t certain she could survive it. The pleasure came slowly, in great hot throbs of sensation like waves crashing onto a beach. She clung to his arms and shivered from the tension that stretched her body under the exquisite stroke of his own.

  His hands were clenched beside her head on the bed, and he made a rough sound in his throat as he met her wide, glazed eyes.

  “Feel how deep I am,” he whispered hoarsely, his jaw clenching as he moved roughly over her. “Feel how deep, how completely I…fill you…” His eyes closed on a harsh cry. “Cecily…oh, God, I love you…!”

  She was sobbing, too, feeling as he did the great riptide of pleasure that went right over the banks of the sensual dam and broke in convulsive ripples against their straining, damp bodies.

  I’ll die, she thought as she cried out in a voice as alien as his sounded, as they shuddered rhythmically together.

  When she could finally give up the last sweet echoes of the massive ecstasy that had trembled in her most secret places, she wept. He held her, smoothed her short hair, comforted her with words and soft kisses as he, too, shivered in the aftermath.

  “That was…scary,” she whispered into his damp throat as he held her.

  “Absolutely scary,” he echoed, stunned by the violence of the climax. His hand contracted in her hair. “We didn’t hurt our baby, did we?” he asked, and sounded appalled at the thought.

  “No. It’s almost five months,” she whispered drowsily. “And it wasn’t rough. It was…” She shivered.

  “Profound,” he whispered for her.

  “Yes.”

  He wrapped her close in a frenzy of sudden fear. If he lost her…

  And that was the real fear, ripped from the camouflage of a dozen halfhearted excuses for keeping her at arm’s length. It was the fear of feeling like this and losing her that had kept him from her.

  “Tate?” she whispered, surprised by the convulsive sweep of his arms. “I’m all right. Really, I am!”

  His breathing began to slow, but the fear of it was still there. He was remembering Gabrini and how close he’d come to losing her in Tennessee that night. It had haunted him ever since, drove him to drink—he, who only rarely even had a beer. He was afraid of nothing on earth except losing this woman. His eyes closed and he held her firmly against him. “I can’t lose you, Cecily,” he bit off, without looking at her.

  “But, you’re not going to, ever!” she said, surprised. She pulled back and met his wild eyes. Her fingers touched his face gently. “I love you more than my life,” she said unsteadily. “I could never leave you!”

  “You ran,” he said harshly. “You left me.”

  “I didn’t think you’d ever love me,” she choked. “I only wanted you to be happy, don’t you see? I was getting out of the way—” Her voice broke as the memory of those agonizing weeks without him came back to haunt her.

  His eyes closed on a wave of pain, and he brought her bruisingly close. “It didn’t make me happy. My life was empty. Part of me was dead without you. And then to learn that you were carrying my baby, and in danger, and I couldn’t find you!” His mouth buried itself in her damp throat. “I love you so much,” he ground out. “So much, Cecily!”

  She felt the ripple go through his lean, fit body, with fascination. “You came after me, though. You saved me,” she whispered, still feeling the wonder of those husky words as she began to believe them. “I love you, too! I couldn’t stop. I don’t know how.”

  The breath he drew in sounded shaken. His hand smoothed gently over her soft hair. “I’ll be right with you when the baby comes. I won’t leave you, not for an instant.”

  “I’m very healthy and so is our child,” she said. “I’d tell you if there were any problems. There aren’t. Except…”

  He looked at her worriedly. “Except?”

  She smiled against his chest. “I’m sleepy.”

  “Oh.” He smiled back. That wasn’t a problem. He drew the sheet over them and began to relax. She sighed and he kissed her forehead. “Deep thoughts?” he murmured.

  “I was just thinking how glad I was that I waited for you,” she said. She kissed the shoulder her cheek was pillowed against.

  “I’m glad you did, too,” he whispered. “The way we made love was almost sacred, that first time. Was that when we made the baby?”

  “Yes,” she murmured drowsily. She touched his chest with drowsy content, loving the muscular warmth of it. “I always knew you’d be in a class all your own as a lover. I was right.”

  He kissed her forehead tenderly. “I’m glad. But if you want it again, you’re going to have to marry me,” he added on a chuckle, moving one leg lazily against hers under the sheet.

  That brought her wide-awake. She lifted herself to look down into his dancing black eyes. “What?”

  “You heard me,” he said. “I’m not going to be seduced and abandoned. You’ve ruined me. Now you have to marry me.”

  She burst out laughing. “You don’t look ruined to me,” she murmured dryly, letting her eyes feast on the long, muscular length of his body from his strong neck down to his powerful legs and in between. “You look absolutely perfect.”

  “Flattery won’t work,” he assured her. “I tell you, I’m ruined. You have to marry me to save my reputation.”

  She hesitated, aware that he was devouring her with his eyes, from her swollen breasts to the slight swell of her abdomen.

  “I want to. But I’m not sure.”

  “I know that,” he replied. “Tell me why you keep holding back.”

  “You’re a loner,” she said simply. “The baby and I would impose restraints on you, on the way you live.”

  He shrugged. “He’s already imposed them,” he said with a grin. “I told Pierce Hutton he’d have to find someone else to undertake the dangerous missions. I’ll remain head of security, but I’m through with commando missions. I hired Colby,” he added with a smile at her surprised expression. “It’s the sort of work he loves, and he’ll have fewer risks than he does in the job he has now. It might save his life.”

  “I like Colby.”

  “I like him, too, now that I know he was only a friend.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “How do you know?” she asked suspiciously.

  He grinned. “Among other reasons, because you were starving a few minutes ago.”

  “So were you
,” she pointed out.

  He chuckled. “I’m always starving for you.” He stretched lazily and pulled her down on his chest, ruffling her short blond hair. The smile faded as he searched her soft eyes. “I wanted you when you were seventeen,” he said huskily. “But I was responsible for you. I couldn’t take advantage of what you felt for me.”

  She traced a pattern on his collarbone. “Did you know how I felt, all that long ago?”

  “Yes.” He smoothed a lean hand over her bare back. “I ignored it at first. But that day I brought you out to Oklahoma…” He laughed mirthlessly. “You didn’t realize that I almost had you right there in the front seat of the car, did you?”

  “No.”

  He heard the fascination in her tone. “If we’d been in a less public place, I couldn’t have stopped. It was dangerous to tease me, but you didn’t know it.”

  “What a waste,” she murmured sadly.

  “Not at all. We both needed time to adjust to the changes it would mean in our lives, Cecily. All I had was the illusion of heritage and a job that could have cost me my life any day. I thought it was what I wanted.”

  “It wasn’t?” she mused, smiling.

  His arm tightened around her. “I wanted you. I found dozens of reasons not to have you, because I didn’t want to be,” he searched for a word, “owned.”

  “People can’t own you,” she replied. “But you can belong to people.”

  “Same thing,” he murmured drowsily. “I learned early that if you let your feelings show, you can be tormented for them. My father…my stepfather,” he corrected, “knew that I loved my mother. He punished me by hitting her, until I got old enough and big enough to stop him.”

  “Matt feels bad about that.”

  “I know he does. But he didn’t know about our relationship. My mother did all of us an injustice by trying to protect us from the truth.”

  “She was only trying to spare you heartache and embarrassment.”

  “Of course she was. But you don’t do people any favors by lying to them, regardless of the reason.”

  She smoothed her cheek against his warm, muscular chest. “Where are we going to live?” she asked, changing the subject.