by Kim Law
And then the lame boy called her name and she laughed with glee and rushed off to him.
Zack turned to Holly. She was smiling at him the same way Kendra had smiled at the lame boy. Like he gave her the warm fuzzies.
He liked that smile.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
She nodded. “I’ve never been more ready.”
Chapter Twenty-One
They pulled into the driveway of Holly’s tiny cabin fifteen minutes later, and Zack cut the engine. They hadn’t touched or kissed since they’d gotten in the car. They’d barely spoken.
But now what?
Zack turned in the seat. The moon was full and he could make out Holly’s features perfectly. She was stunning.
And for right now, she was his.
Only, at that exact moment her phone buzzed in his pocket.
He mentally groaned. But he also knew he had to give it to her. Hopefully it would be good news.
He dug the phone out and handed it over. “It just buzzed.”
“Really?” She ripped it from his hands. Whatever else she might have been thinking was gone.
“I figured you didn’t get any signal out here,” he grumbled. He had not wanted to be interrupted.
She scoffed. “The only real dead spot on the property is where you parked your car that first day. The signal here is fine.”
He just shook his head, remembering her on that horse the first day. As well as the geese. He hadn’t known what he was getting himself into. He looked around as she checked her e-mail, wondering where the crazy geese were.
As if sensing him looking, he heard a honk off in the distance.
“Oh,” she whispered beside him.
“What?” He turned back. And then he saw her face. She was about to cry. “Oh, babe.” He reached for her.
Before she could say anything else, he had her seat belt unbuckled and pulled her crossways into his lap. He settled her over his thighs, wrapping both arms tight around her, and she dropped the side of her head to his chest.
“I can’t believe I got my hopes up again,” she moaned. “When will I learn?” She turned her face to him and buried her nose in his throat. Her arms circled his neck. And then her whole body shook as she began to sob.
“They’re wrong,” he told her. He stroked his hand up and down her back, desperate to make her understand. “I’m sorry they don’t see it, but trust me, they’re wrong. You don’t need them anyway. You could stand on the sidewalk in the middle of town and make a fortune all day long. Didn’t we prove that already?”
Her answer was simply more shaking sobs.
He knew his words weren’t likely to do much good so he simply held her until she was spent.
Several minutes later, she lifted her face. The sadness reflecting back at him was his undoing. Before he knew what he intended, he had his mouth open.
“I fell in love with a fellow law student ten years ago,” he said. That fact had nothing at all to do with Holly and her mirrors, yet still, it compared. As did the meeting with his birth mother. He found himself wanting to share all of it with her.
“It was fast and furious,” he continued. “I pictured us together forever.” His mouth twisted into a smirk as he thought back to Barb. That’s when he’d still believed in forever. “I brought her home to meet my parents that first semester. They loved her. I was certain she was the woman for me.”
Holly’s eyes had dried and the moonlight shone on her pale face as she watched him. He gulped around the knot in his throat.
“The end of our first year of law school, I bought a ring. She was ecstatic. I loved her, and I wanted her in every part of my life.” He gripped Holly tighter. She was soft in all the right places, and he concentrated, forcing his heart rate to slow. He still couldn’t think about that day without getting pissed off. “That was also the same time I’d gotten my adoption records unsealed.”
Wide eyes stared back at him.
“I hired a private investigator. Not that finding her was hard. Her name was Pam, and she still lived in the same run-down town she’d come from. Not far from Nashville. Still drinking herself stupid. I wanted to know what I was getting into, though, so I hired a guy to check her out.”
He took a breath before continuing, “I also wanted Barb to be there with me when I met her.”
“Did you?” Holly asked, speaking for the first time since he’d started. “Meet her?”
“Oh, yeah.” He quit talking as he sketched out the woman in his mind. Her eyes had been the color of his. Her hair too.
And she’d smiled like him.
Of course, when he’d met her, her smile had been more of a haggard grimace, but the PI had unearthed pictures from before she’d gotten herself so messed up. She’d been pretty once. Zack and his brothers had gotten their features from her.
He lifted his hand and stroked it down Holly’s arm as he talked. “I knew she had issues. The PI warned me. But I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that drugs might be more important to her than meeting me. That she wouldn’t be excited to see me. I was her son. Her firstborn.”
He stared off into the night. How stupid. Of course she wouldn’t be excited to see him.
“I take it she wasn’t?”
His eyes were so dry it hurt to blink. He forced himself to keep going, to admit what he’d never said to anyone. “I thought she’d tell me she’d hated to give me up. That she thought of me every year on my birthday.”
He heard Holly suck in a breath.
“I mattered to her in only one way, though,” he stated, his voice flat. “My wallet.”
“Oh, Zack.”
Her fingers brushed over his cheek, but he didn’t look at her. He was too embarrassed. He’d come from that woman. She was a part of him.
“I’d also found out that I had brothers,” he admitted softly.
Her fingers stilled. “You knew Cody and Nick existed?”
He nodded.
“Before this year?”
“It was in the report from the PI. I’d planned to look them up after I met Pam.” He shook his head, refusing to let the anger have control. “However, she explained that she saw them on a regular basis. Drank with them, even. They wanted my money too. She swore they’d eventually come after it.”
“But . . .” Holly’s whispered word seemed to stick in the space between them.
He glanced at her and finished her thought. “They didn’t meet until last year.”
Her entire body sagged. “That’s why you didn’t want anything to do with them?”
“Bingo.”
“Yet you changed your mind.”
“After they appeared on my doorstep, I hired another private investigator. The first one had only gotten me dates and ages. This time I dug for more. Got confirmation of the story they told me. Then I knew that not only had I been played by my birth mother for money, but she’d also turned me against my brothers before I’d even had the chance to meet them.”
Holly sat quietly in his lap. When he didn’t continue, she prodded for more. “And how does Barb fit into all this?” she asked. “Did she go with you to meet Pam?”
Fucking Barb. He dropped his head to the back of the seat.
“We barely made it off the plane in Atlanta before she’d put my ring back in my hand. She had plans, she informed me. Those plans didn’t include a redneck family and a bunch of hillbilly drunks.”
“She dumped you?” Confusion etched across Holly’s brow. “Because of the woman who’d given birth to you? Even though you’d never met her until that day?”
“Piece of work, huh?” He’d met a few in his lifetime.
“She hurt you.”
Hell. Why had he started this conversation? And then he remembered Holly’s e-mail from Chicago. He’d wanted to show her that
she wasn’t the only one to be rejected. It happened to all of them. In all sorts of ways.
And they lived through it.
It might change her. But she would survive.
“She hurt me,” he admitted. “She dumped me not because of who I was, but who I had the potential to be. As if I were genetically predisposed to wind up like Pam.”
“But you would never be like that.”
He looked at her then. “How do you know?”
She blinked. “Because that’s not how you were raised. That’s not who you are.”
“But that’s what’s inside me. What if I am trash? Not good enough?”
“Bull.”
He shrugged. It was a long-running theory in his head. Thankfully, he’d managed to keep all signs of where he’d come from away from his life for the last thirty-three years. Hopefully that would continue.
Holly’s heart broke for the strong man before her.
He’d had his heart broken.
Twice, if she counted the worthless woman who’d given birth to him.
No wonder he was so hesitant to let anyone in. Brothers, women. Why risk the heartbreak?
She smoothed her palm over his day’s growth of whiskers, and thought about the fact that he’d shared his past with her. If she wasn’t mistaken, that wasn’t normal procedure for him. She would guess he tended to hide behind the scars built up from the years. First as a kid, then a man.
She understood that.
It was easier to hide than to share yourself.
And though he hadn’t said it, she could sense that what he’d sought ten years ago was what he still wanted today. Love. A family.
Whether he’d allow himself to risk it again, she had no idea.
But he hadn’t been wrong in going for it.
“She missed out,” she told him. “You’re a catch.”
He chuckled dryly.
There were so many things she could have said to back up her words, but she didn’t think he wanted to hear them. Just as she didn’t want to discuss the fact she’d had yet one more rejection concerning her mirrors. Some things were better left unsaid.
Tonight she just wanted to feel.
She wanted Zack to feel.
She put her lips to his.
He sucked her air into his mouth, but he didn’t move beneath her. His lips were warm, and she appreciated the time to explore them at her leisure. So she did.
She tasted him. And nibbled at him.
She tested out his mouth from corner to corner until she felt his hands tense against her back. He wanted her. That wasn’t a question. Nor was whether she wanted him.
The question was, could she protect her heart?
But the answer didn’t matter. Her decision had been made before they’d gone out tonight.
“Make love to me,” she whispered. Her mouth grazed across Zack’s as she spoke. His fingers spread over her back.
“In my bedroom, with all the windows letting in the moonlight. I want to see you in my mirrors.”
Finally, he could sit still no longer.
With an animal-like groan ripping from the back of his throat, Zack brought both hands to her face, holding her to him. He was almost too rough, but he held back at just the right moment.
“I don’t know where this will go,” he said. “I have my job. My work.”
“Shhh.” She closed her eyes and tilted her forehead to his. She knew that.
He’d had enough disappointment in his life, and she couldn’t see herself being the person to break through those barriers.
And that was okay.
She needed this as much as he did.
She needed to feel as special as she wanted to believe her talent was.
“I’m not asking for promises,” she replied.
He looked at her. It was too dark to read whatever was going through his mind, but she felt the power of it. He may not believe in forever, but this meant something to him. She meant something to him.
And that was enough.
She put her mouth to his again.
Zack didn’t just let Holly kiss him that time. It was his turn to take control. He dipped inside her with determined strokes, holding her steady against him. She was sweet and hot. She was heady.
And he could gladly drown in it.
His tongue dueled with hers, stroking and teasing, before he moved away and traced along her jawline. He cupped the sides of her head, his brain registering the soft skin and silky hair at the same time, the textures alone enough to drive him to the brink. Then he tilted her face so he could slide his mouth down over her throat.
His teeth scraped along her skin and she began to wiggle. His tongue lapped. She groaned. The faint hint of salt filled him as he suckled his way to the base. She was intoxicating.
She was hot in his hands, and scalding where she ground against his dick.
When his fingers stroked over her cheek, she angled toward his hand to capture his thumb between her teeth. She sucked him inside her mouth.
“Holly,” he pleaded. She only sucked harder.
He groaned against her throat. Then he dipped his mouth toward the rise of her breast. He wanted to strip her bare.
His erection grew painful, but that didn’t stop him. He pushed up against her.
And he had the momentary thought to take her right there.
Instead, he lifted his mouth from her body, his breaths coming in harsh gasps, and watched her in the moonlight. His thumb was wet from her mouth. He trailed it over her bottom lip and down the center of her throat. He kept going until he reached the spot right between her breasts.
It was warm there.
It was heaven.
As he studied her, his words came back to him. He’d told her he wasn’t making promises, but he worried that had been a lie. He wanted to make promises.
He wanted to love her.
He wanted to make certain she never kissed another man in her life.
Then she shifted, lifting up so she could bring her leg over until she straddled him. He lowered his hands to her thighs. The desire to crawl underneath her skirt was strong, but he forced himself to hold back. Too much too soon, and it would be over. He intended for both of them to have a night that would be hard to surpass.
That wouldn’t happen if he went off like a teenager in the front seat of his car.
“We need to take this inside,” he croaked out.
She nodded, but her movements didn’t indicate she planned to get out of the car anytime soon. Instead, she scooted forward, seating the vee of her legs around his very prominent bulge. She was wet and burning. That couldn’t be missed, even through the material of his pants.
“Holly,” he warned.
Her hands moved to the front of his shirt. “I need to touch you,” she told him, her words urgent. And then her fingers went to work.
She fumbled, but she didn’t relent. In seconds his shirt hung open.
Her eyes glowed as she paused long enough to take him in. That was a look he could get used to. Then her hands flattened on his chest.
It was as if a thousand needles pricked him at once, and he surged up, lifting her with him. And then the horn of his car blared.
He dropped to the seat and let out a breathless groan. Off in the distance he once again heard her geese honk. He laughed. “I think your geese are protesting my being here.”
She pressed her lips to his chest. “Then I’ll have to get rid of my geese.”
He tilted his chin up so he could draw in air as he tried to slow things down. Holly was still running her lips over him, though. She struck him as a woman on a mission, and he struggled to remember why he would possibly want her to stop.
The horn sounded again and he was reminded.
His car wasn’t made for him
to do what he wanted to do to her.
As she continued greedily sipping at him, he fumbled for the door handle, and practically tumbled them both to the ground.
Somehow he managed to keep her in his arms, and they made it to her front door. She slipped two fingers between her breasts and proudly produced a key, smiling wickedly as she handed it over to him. He merely groaned out his frustration. He wanted his hands inside the front of her dress.
Then they were in her house, with so much light from the moon spilling in through the kitchen windows that he didn’t need to turn on a lamp.
“Hurry,” she whispered. Her mouth once again found the skin of his throat.
Her legs were tight around his waist. And he hurried.
Seconds later, when he entered her bedroom, her words from the car came back.
With all the windows letting in the moonlight . . . I want to see you in my mirrors.
It was like a carnival fun house in the room. Blue light streaked through the glass, reflecting off the mirrors to angle and hit others. Her bed beckoned from the middle of the space. Everywhere he looked, he could see the two of them reflected back.
He took his time now, knowing he wanted to experience this moment to the fullest, and moved slowly through the room. He didn’t stop until he found just the right spot. They were in front of a vertical mirror positioned a couple feet off the ground. It rose up at least four feet.
“Unzip your dress,” he commanded.
She lifted her head and looked at him. Her eyes were hazy with lust, her lips full and lush where they’d been grazing on his skin, and he almost forgot what he’d said. He licked his own lips, wanting desperately to taste hers again, but managed to drag his gaze away instead. Once it landed on the mirror behind her, he remembered. He wanted to see her skin reflected back at him. And he didn’t want to put her down to do it.
Her head turned to follow his and she caught his eyes in the mirror. She let her gaze trail down over their reflection. The look on her face was hot. Naughty. Then the corners of her mouth curled up.