With Lily about to give birth to Zach’s child, marrying her had seemed the simplest way to protect the child and clear up the mess. At that point who he married hadn’t mattered. Nothing had mattered much.
And then there’d been Nell. And everything mattered again.
Steve shuddered. What was he doing staring at the moon outside the Toby when he had a daughter to get home to? Whether he would ever have more than that, like a woman who loved him…well, he wouldn’t mind a little Irish luck to help with that, no matter what his ancestry might really be.
Steve wadded up another sheet of yellow paper and sent it toward the fireplace. It went in like all but one of the others.
“I should have played basketball,” he mumbled. “I sure as hell haven’t done much in the way of problem solving tonight.”
Neither of them had.
Annette cleared her throat. “There’s one thing we haven’t talked about yet.”
His head came up, and those eyes pinned her. “There’s a lot we haven’t talked about.”
“On my list.” She swallowed and shifted in the wing chair in his living room. “One thing on my list. Whether Miss Trudi should stay in Bliss House. She doesn’t belong in a nursing home and she doesn’t want a retirement home. But say we do come up with a way to get the house restored to functioning status. What then? How long could she keep it that way? Could she afford it? Could she handle it physically? Does she want to devote the time and attention to keep up a house of that size and age—not to mention the grounds?”
“Good questions.”
“Now all we need are answers to them, along with all the other questions.”
She pushed her hair back, pulled in a deep breath, then glanced at him. She dropped her hands, and her inhalation hitched in the middle before coming out in a rush.
Steve wanted her.
She hadn’t doubted his desire for her when they’d dated. But she had never seen such intensity in his face. Did he hide less than he used to? Was that part of the change in him he’d talked about? Did she read him better now that she had cleared some of the static of insecurity?
And she wanted him.
She wouldn’t deny that. She just knew it wasn’t that simple.
Twice yesterday the wheel spinning in her head had stopped at Talk About It, so she’d driven here. And twice, by the time she’d arrived, the wheel had moved on to Don’t. The first time, he’d been outside with Nell, creating a snowman under the maple tree out front. He’d stilled, watching her car, watching her. The second time, no one was outside, yet she sensed he knew about that pass, too.
He hadn’t said a word about it since she’d arrived nearly two hours ago.
“I told myself I wouldn’t ask. I told myself it can’t change the past so it doesn’t matter,” she said. “And it can’t change the past, but it does matter. I can see your reasons for not telling me before the wedding, feeling you needed to protect me. Maybe even at the altar—the shock and your upbringing explain that. But you didn’t come after me. I keep hitting that fact these past three days, and I’d like to know if I’m right about why—you were angry at me.”
She had been so certain of her wounds for so long, she had not considered he might be angry at her, not until she’d come back to Tobias. And even then she hadn’t stopped to consider if he had any cause.
“Every time I thought about going after you, I saw the ring on that desk. You took off my ring and just…left it there.”
She opened her mouth then closed it. He knew what she had thought, and perhaps had some sense of what she’d felt. What had he been feeling? Shocked. Stressed by the wedding and Lily’s demands and suspicions about his parentage. He shared it with no one because Steve Corbett was the golden boy. The handler of all problems. Saint Steven. Even Steven. And his family’s approval—and what love he was given—was based on how well he adhered to the Corbett code.
No wonder he had craved unconditional love.
I hoped you wouldn’t think. I hoped that you loved me enough to trust me. To believe in me. Instead, she had left his ring on the desk.
She didn’t blame herself, and now she didn’t blame him, either.
“Why did you want to talk to me that Thanksgiving after Lily died?”
“To set things straight. There’s something about burying someone your own age that makes you want to settle accounts.” He spread his hands on his thighs. “Hell, maybe I hoped it would make a difference.”
“You could have told me as soon as I came to take care of Max.”
“No, I couldn’t. Not until I knew the person you are now. Because of Nell. I had a lot of time over the years to think about ways you might react. They weren’t all pretty.”
“Like?”
“Like you didn’t believe me. At least not without proof, like DNA tests. Or you accused me of protecting the Corbett name at the expense of your feelings. You refused to have anything to do with the baby. You insisted that the truth be broadcast so everyone would know you hadn’t been cheated on.”
“The first few years…” She flipped her hand, dismissing it. “Now it’s old news. How about you? You carry the label of getting another woman pregnant just before your wedding.”
“Prince Charming as a cad, you mean?” He shrugged. “I didn’t give a damn, especially after Nell was born. It was amazing. Astounding. The most… I held her in my hands.” He opened his hands, looking at them. “Literally, in my hands. One under her head and one under her bottom. That’s all it took to hold this life.”
Pressure in her throat and behind her eyes nearly caught her. “Why tell me at all, then?”
“What you said about needing to speak the truth. And something else. What you said to Nell when you were talking about opera. Losing him by discovering he doesn’t love you the way you love him. By counting on him and then having him let you down completely. You needed to know I never loved you less than completely. There wasn’t anyone else. And I suppose I wanted to ask a question myself. Why you believed it without waiting to hear what I said—even if it did come later.”
“Because it was what I feared the most.” That understanding had come in last night’s deep, sleepless dark.
He turned toward her. “That I would be unfaithful to you? Had I ever given you any reason—”
“Not just unfaithful. Lily. She was everything I wasn’t. She was willowy and blond, knew the right fork and how to shop without looking at a price tag. She was part of your world—Wilbanks to your Corbett. While I was Cinderella, the girl who lived among the cinders but was all dressed up for a dance with the prince because of magic.”
“You were everything I wanted.”
“I was terrified, Steve. Of being a wife. Of being a Corbett.”
“You are everything I want.”
She gasped. Heat and longing were like a fireball that passed through her.
He stood, holding his hand out, steady and open. Not a dare this time, but a declaration.
She was shaking her head, but she put her hand into his, palm to palm, and let him draw her up. “Steve…”
“I screwed up, and you screwed up, and we screwed up. We can see it and we can let ourselves and each other off the hook, even though we can’t take back what happened. That will always be there. But this isn’t the past. And it’s not the future. It’s now. It’s the present, and that’s what you left me, remember?”
He swooped in to kiss her, touching only mouth to mouth. Then not even that, as he ended the kiss.
He backed up a step, and another. There should have been pressure on her arm, but there wasn’t. Because she was following him, and then she was beside him.
Upstairs they walked down a hallway into a simply furnished bedroom with a dark green bedspread across an acre of bed.
They sat side by side on the edge. For long moments they held each other. Then he stroked her hair and dropped kiss after kiss along her hairline. By some alchemy the sweetness of those kisses turned to fire in h
er bloodstream.
If he had laid her back then, taking her fast and hard, she would have met him gladly.
He didn’t.
Still sitting beside her, he unbuttoned his shirt with deliberate, almost solemn motions. Pulled it from his waistband and dropped it to the floor. With the same deliberateness, he removed his shoes and socks, then started on his jeans.
A tear slid down her right cheek. Then another. A thread of moisture traced her right cheek, while the tears in her left eye welled and welled, yet did not fall.
He was offering himself to her. Physically, yes, but more. Exposing his nakedness without asking her to keep pace. Acknowledging beyond words how the events seven-and-a-half years ago had left her exposed.
Stripped, full evidence of his desire apparent, he stood beside her and bent to kiss her lightly on the lips. He took a packet from the bedside table and prepared to protect her in the way she needed protection.
No one had known how she had failed him because he held it all inside—which had been her failure.
No more.
She took his face in her hands and kissed his bottom lip. Then touched her tongue there. He groaned, igniting sizzling all along her nerve endings. She kissed him, open, hard, full, long.
She twisted, and he picked up the motion and amplified it, dropping to the bed just beyond her. Leaving her room to reach between them and touch him, rediscovering that broad line of muscle and sinew across his shoulders, the flat of his belly, the slope to his hips, the thrust below.
Her clothes were a nuisance she was satisfied to let him dispose of while she otherwise occupied herself. He muttered a protest when she bent to lick first one then the other brown disk on his hair-dusted chest. But she judged he didn’t really mean it, because his body told another story.
Besides, he was turning about the fair play for all he was worth, touching everywhere. Some of it was to rid her—finally—of all her clothes, but not the slow, thorough strokes that had her panting and shivering. Then his mouth on her breast, flicking his tongue over her nipple, then sucking, so her back came off the bed. He slid his palm up her thigh.
“Yes,” she said to the question his body asked.
He found his place between her legs, and she opened to him.
He looked into her eyes and slowed, pushing deeper inside her with maddening patience while the colors sparked and flamed in his eyes. At last he stilled. With reverential hands, he cupped her head, dropping one soft kiss after another on her mouth, her chin, her eyes, her brow, while the effort not to stroke sheened his face. She knew the strain of his effort to rein back by the tension of his muscles, by the rasp of his breathing.
Having him inside her was so right…and not yet right enough.
She lifted her hips to him, feeling the power and heat as a rolling explosion through her bloodstream, then experiencing it again when a groan rumbled through him.
He raised up on his arms, bracketing her head, trying to hold on to his control, to be contained. She balled up a fist and tapped the inside of his right elbow, knocking out his brace so he collapsed onto her. She wrapped her arms around his neck and for good measure wrapped her legs around his thighs, bringing him deeper.
“Annette—”
“Show me, Steve. Show me I’m everything you want.”
He wasn’t contained at all. He was around her and inside her and with her. Praising her, urging her, kissing her arched throat, rubbing the sweet friction of his chest against the taut tips of her breasts.
She was pushing against something. Trying to break through. And he was her only way out. Harder and faster. Straining and stroking. Pounding to be released. To…yes…yes.
“You are,” he said. “Everything.”
And a universe shattered into joy-sharp shards sparkling like crystals of ice raining around her.
Steve piled pillows behind his back as he sat in his bed looking forward to…ah, this moment. The moment Annette walked out of the bathroom wearing his shirt and only his shirt. It joined all the moments of the previous hours.
“Come here.”
“That sounded like a Corbett, giving orders.” But she smiled and sat on the edge of the bed beside him.
“Hey, watch it. I’m not a Corbett, but Nell is.”
“Oh, you’re a Corbett all right.” He slid his hand up her thigh under the shirt, but she stopped his foray with a hand on his wrist, her eyes turning serious. “How are you going to tell her? That you’re her biological uncle, not her father.”
When he didn’t answer, she searched his face. “Oh, Steve… You can’t not tell her. I know she’s young, but before she’s much older, you have to tell her.”
“What good will it do?”
“Steve, which hurt you more—knowing that Ambrose wasn’t your biological father or knowing that your mother kept that a secret from you? Nell loves you so much, she’ll know you love her.”
“There’s already so much she’s had to deal with—the divorce and her mother’s death.” He stroked her hair and kissed her temple. “If she starts digging when she’s older, she’ll find out Lily had drugs in her system when she ran her car off the road. And her passenger was a known dealer. Why add any more that I don’t have to? As long as everybody in town thinks I’m her father, why—”
“Because you know it’s a lie. Keeping secrets is like poison, Steve. No matter how well you think you have it bottled up, there’s always the danger of it spilling out. I’m sure your mother believes she has her secret locked up tight. But you found it. You don’t think Nell will be as much of a digger as you are?”
“She’s just a little girl.”
“I know.” She touched his cheek. “When would you have wanted to be told?”
Early. When he was too young to take it in too deep. So he already accepted the fact of it before he dealt with the pain.
She was good. She was really, really good. She left him no place to hide from the truth.
“I don’t mean to give you a hard time about this,” she said as she stood.
He circled her wrist. She cooperated as he guided her onto the bed, bridging his lap as she knelt. “You’re giving me a hard time, all right.”
“Is that a fact?’ The shirt covered her from her collarbone right down to his lap.
“A hard fact.” He bent his knees, pulling away the sheet and bringing his thighs against her derriere.
She rested back against him. Without taking her eyes from his, she started unbuttoning the shirt. “Guess we’ll have to do something about that.”
He reached under the tail of the shirt, cupping her hips, drawing her down the descending slope of his thighs to the part of him straining to meet her.
“Steve—”
“I made good use of my time while I was waiting for you.” He nodded toward the freshly emptied condom packet on the nightstand. “I had a feeling…”
He adjusted. She leaned forward.
And then the feeling was ecstasy.
She lightly kissed his jaw, then edged carefully away.
“What are you doing?” he asked, drawing her back with one easy movement.
“It’s getting light, and I should go. Max might be wondering—”
“Max isn’t wondering. He might come after me with a shotgun because he’s not wondering. But I guarantee he’s not wondering.”
“Nell—”
“Is taken care of until after lunch. And—” he reached his other arm behind him to the nightstand, easily finding the large box “—look what I have here.”
“Do you always keep the giant economy size?”
“Bought it special. You had to know I was hoping.”
She kissed him. “You believe in the tooth fairy. And want cute little rodents to help you. Your hopes aren’t grounded in reality. They’re…”
He kissed her. And both their hopes were soon being realized to their fullest.
He started awake to the phone ringing. Annette was still curled in his arms. The firs
t surge of joy at that shifted as his mind kicked in.
It was after ten. He wasn’t supposed to pick up Nell until one, but if something had happened—
He snatched up the phone.
Something had happened, but it wasn’t with Nell. Negotiations with the company that collected garbage had fallen apart overnight. Both sides were asking for him. He hung up with a promise to be there as soon as possible.
“Let me tell you about my glamorous life,” he said, as he rolled over and took Annette’s warm, soft body into his arms for one final second.
Even in Tobias, parents worried, so when the knock came at the back door Sunday afternoon, Steve said, “Nell, don’t open the—”
But Nell, encased in her snow clothes in preparation for a rescue mission on her sinking snowman, opened the back door a split second after the knock and long before he could hoist himself off the couch. The negotiations had gone all Saturday night and into the mid-morning hours, but they were done.
Now maybe he could catch up on his sleep…if he could figure out what to do about Miss Trudi and Bliss House. Not to mention how to keep Annette here.
“Hi, Annette! Wanna help me make my man hard?”
He relaxed into the couch and let the laughter come. He could imagine most people’s reaction to that comment, but Annette took it like an old pro.
A minute later, the back door closed behind Nell, and Annette came in still wearing her coat but having left her boots by the door. She put down two bulging shopping bags with a thud that attested to their weight.
“Before you turn me in to child protective service, I can explain that comment of Nell’s,” he said.
Nell had been distraught when she came home after an extra night at her friend Laura Ellen’s house to discover her snowman had shrunk. He’d suggested she put a thin coat of slush over him just before dark, so the colder night air would freeze it and he would be somewhat protected…and hardened.
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