by Dana Nussio
“What?” Her gaze shifted to the items on the counter. “Oh. You like the sweet stuff.”
How could it have been only a week since they’d been introduced in a body slam of circumstances and had commiserated over coffee at Java Jane’s? Now she couldn’t picture a time when she didn’t know Asher and Harper, when their lives weren’t connected with hers and Luna’s by either the truth or a lie.
“I don’t have any whipped cream, but hopefully this will satisfy you.” She coughed into her elbow. “Your sweet tooth, I mean.”
Their gazes connected, but she quickly looked away, ignoring the spike in her pulse. That sizzle between them never knew when to stop shooting off sparks. Now would have been a good time for a dousing to put out that fire.
Asher filled both cups and added an ample pour of creamer in his. When he held it up to offer her some, she shook her head. She kept the stuff for her staff in the kitchen downstairs, but she could offer no explanation for the bottle in her apartment. Had she been expecting him? Hoping?
After he put the bottle away, he carried both mugs to the table and sat.
“I finally told the rest of my family about Luna and Harper just a few hours ago.”
“What was your hurry?” She rolled her eyes as she took her first sip. “It took me a while to catch on the other night at the hospital that you hadn’t told anyone before Ainsley.”
Immediately, she regretted that she’d brought up that night, when it served as a reminder that the evening had ended with steamed-up windows on his truck.
She coughed into her shoulder. “How did they take it?”
“They said I should have told them sooner.”
“If you stalled until tomorrow, you could have avoided telling them altogether. Well...depending.”
“Yeah, depending.”
Could this conversation get more awkward? It was as if each lane change they made led only to another pothole. The air in the room seemed heavier than before, as well.
“But after last night, I knew I had to tell them everything.”
“What happened last night? There’s something else?”
“I found a card with a death threat in Dad’s hospital room. Someone, maybe the original shooter, promised to finish the job.”
“I’m so sorry.” She leaned in, tempted to touch the hand that he’d wrapped around his mug. Would he pull away from her compassion if she did?
“Thanks. The police were guarding his hospital room at first, but now we’ve hired round-the-clock guards. I also talked to Sergeant Spencer Colton about the threats to your business. I thought police should look at the possible connection to the incidents facing my family. He wants you to file a police report.”
“Thanks. I will. I appreciate the security service, too. I have to keep our girls safe, them and all the children at the center.”
“Are you scared?”
Willow couldn’t look up from her mug, her fuzzy image staring back at her from the shiny black liquid. His words matched the subject they’d been discussing before, but he had to be asking about only one mystery now.
“About tomorrow? Sure. Aren’t you?”
“Terrified.”
She lifted her gaze and met his again. Just like his one-word answer minutes before, this one was brutally honest. She couldn’t decide whether to feel privileged that he’d confided in her or scared she wasn’t strong enough for him to rely on.
Willow smiled, hoping to reveal neither of those impulses. “I was probably more afraid when I first received the news.”
“How is that possible?”
She tilted her head to the side. “I was still picturing some high-powered couple who might fight for custody of both babies if we found proof that they were switched.”
“Why would anyone try to do that?”
“The reason powerful people do all the inexplicable things they do.” She shrugged. “Because they can. I’m a single mom, still sometimes struggling to make ends meet. I’m an easy target.”
“That’s what you were thinking when you found out I was a Colton. Then you had even more reasons to be upset.”
She shook her head. “Don’t remind me.”
“Why didn’t you think I would go after custody of both girls? Because I was a single parent and not a part of a couple?”
“I did think that you would at first.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I got to know you and found out you weren’t the monster I’d always pictured in my mind.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“And any guy who’d propose marriage as a solution, well, it’s hard to stay worried about his motives.”
“Yeah, about that, I’m sorry for asking.”
“Forget about it.” Even if she couldn’t. Even if it still stung every time that she thought about it.
“It’s just that the thought of not being with Harper every day... Well, you get it.”
“I do.”
“But it’s more than that. While I was sitting with Dad last night, all I could think about was when we found out that Ace wasn’t his child. My siblings and I were focused on the scandal and the chaos, but Dad lost his son that day. After he’d already lost the child’s mother.”
“That must have hit so close to home for you. First Nora—”
He shook his head before she could get the rest out.
“It’s not like that. Yes, my ex will always be important to me. She was the mother of my child, after all, but we were never—” He stopped himself that time and shrugged.
“Yeah, I get it.”
From the beginning, their situations had been alike but different, their wounds from betrayal like a T in the road, two points meeting through the turn and continuing on their own rocky paths.
He was quiet then, sipping coffee that must have grown cold and staring at a place where only he could see.
“You know, I wasn’t happy when I got Nora pregnant. I wasn’t ready to be a parent.”
“Then you stepped up and became a great dad.”
Asher shook his head as if he couldn’t allow her to smooth out the jagged edges of his pain.
“I just keep thinking that my sweet Harper, the child I love more than I thought I was capable of caring about anyone or anything, might not even be...mine.”
As his voice broke, his misery clear in his damp eyes, Willow couldn’t stop herself from reaching out to him this time. She placed both of her hands around the tangle his fists had formed together. For several seconds, he stared at that connection before looking up again.
“You’ll still be a father to Harper,” she blurted before she could stop herself.
“Just like I’ll always be a mother to...Luna.” Her voice cracked as she spoke her child’s name, perhaps for the last time while still believing they were biologically linked. Her chest squeezed so tightly she was convinced that the pain would crush it. “We will. Somehow. No matter what.”
He stared back at her, searching for a guarantee, the thing she had no ability to give.
“I want to believe that.”
His raw whisper touched her in the deepest part of her soul.
“Then believe it,” she said.
For several seconds or minutes, Willow stared into his eyes, a guarded man’s wounds openly displayed for her, with hope lingering just out of reach. Then she did the only thing she could think of to soothe his pain.
Leaning in close, she touched her lips to his. Only when she tasted salt did she realize that she was crying. Or, maybe, they both were.
He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t commit, either, only staring back at her with shock and something she couldn’t define. She kissed him again, her mouth slightly open and connecting with the dampness just inside his parted lips.
When Asher slid his hands out f
rom between hers and uncurled his fingers, a lump formed in her throat. Had he refused the comfort she’d offered and needed as much as he seemed to? He surprised her, though, as he leaned closer. Those work-roughened hands that she’d been unable to forget since that first time he’d touched her glided up her arms on the outside of her robe until they came to rest on her shoulders.
His fingertips pressed into her flesh as he drew her to him. Then he closed his eyes and dipped his head to take control of the kiss, brushing his lips over hers several times before tracing the line between her lips with the tip of his tongue. She opened for him on a sigh.
He claimed her mouth with desperation, but she was no docile passenger on the journey, her need strong-arming her judgment, her patience stretched taut and then fraying. Asher painted a line of nips along her jaw, up the side of her neck and to that sensitive place behind her ear.
“You’re so amazing,” he breathed against her damp skin.
She wasn’t sure when she’d gone from kissing him while seated to standing and facing him. When had her robe wrestled its way open again, her bare feet becoming sandwiched between his boots? When had she begun to find those boots sexy, anyway? She didn’t care as she stretched up to meet him when he dipped his head to take her mouth again.
Her arms scaled his and wrapped around his neck as she fit herself intimately to him, each feminine curve finding its home in the unyielding planes and the impatient fullness of him. While one of his hands remained at the small of her back, anchoring her to him and making her certain of his desire, the other hand slid inside her robe.
His fingers skimmed the side of her nightie over the lower curve of her breast, her waist and her hip, awakening skin that strained for his touch. Then he slid his hand around her, splaying his fingers over the fullness of her bottom.
It wasn’t enough. Willow wanted more. She wanted everything that Asher Colton was willing to give.
When he broke off another heady kiss, she let out a frustrated moan. Asher smiled against her cheek.
“You’re killing me, Willow. I haven’t wanted anyone like this—well, in a long time.” He cleared his throat, straightening slightly. “Tell me to go home if you don’t want to do this. Just say the word and I’ll leave.”
“I don’t...want that.”
Immediately, Asher’s arms went up as if he was facing a police officer’s weapon, and then he lowered them to his sides and stepped back.
Willow blinked several times. What had just happened? She’d struggled to get the words out, but she’d said them, right? She’d said she didn’t want him to leave. Had he changed his mind? Then her own words repeated in her head. I don’t...want that. She swallowed. He’d misunderstood, she’d misspoken, or some crazy combination of the two.
“Sorry.” He didn’t meet her gaze as he backed up farther. “Um, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Asher, wait.”
He paused. “Look, this is embarrassing enough. Can we just—”
“Please, listen. That didn’t come out the way I meant it.”
This time he faced her and waited. “Well, what did you mean?”
“I was trying to say that I didn’t want you to go.”
He drew his brows together as if he couldn’t trust what he’d heard.
“What are you saying?”
She cleared her throat and lifted her chin. “I want you to stay.”
Chapter 19
Asher didn’t bother with words as he reached her in three long strides, his mouth taking hers before his arms had even closed around her waist. She responded to his kiss with a desperation that inspired him and terrified him at the same time.
Was this the two of them just trying to escape their fears over answers that tomorrow would bring and situations that would never be as easy to navigate as she’d promised they would be? No, he wouldn’t think about those things then, not with lovely Willow wrapping herself around him, inviting him in. There was no way in hell he wouldn’t accept her invitation.
“How about we relocate?”
“Sounds...good.”
He grinned at her breathless response as her fingertips pressed into his back.
Without asking where to go, he scooped her up in his arms and headed for the closed door of the only room he hadn’t visited in her apartment. Her bedroom.
“Always the gentleman cowboy, aren’t you?” she asked as he turned the knob.
He pushed open the door, twisted and carefully tucked a shoulder so she wouldn’t hit her head.
“Not always. A few minutes ago, I was considering pulling you down on top of me on the floor.”
“But you really would have stopped and headed right out that door if I hadn’t...”
He studied her for several seconds, her question surprising him. Then he nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
From her smile, he would have thought he’d made the most profound statement in the world. In the shadowy room, he lowered her to the bed, where she sat and flipped on the table lamp next to it.
As he sat next to her and reached for his boot, he paused. “Still sure?”
That her only answer was a nod didn’t make him feel confident, but after he slid off his boots, she reached for the hem of his T-shirt and shimmied it up his chest and over his head.
“Guess you are,” he said.
She cleared her throat. “Maybe a little less talk and a lot more action?”
“Wouldn’t want to disappoint a lady.”
He dipped his head and took her mouth again, and he was lost. Each taste, each touch only made him crave another. And then one more.
He pushed the robe off her shoulders and down her arms, letting it pool around her hips, before tracing his fingers along the spaghetti straps of her nightgown. Her eyes fluttered closed as he followed the line of the garment’s neckline to its modest vee at the center.
He dipped his fingertips beneath the cloth, the silk no match for the smoothness of her lovely tawny skin. Nor, he was surprised to discover, could memories of gymnastic sex from his past compare to the moment when he slid his palm beneath the weight of her breast, floating his thumb across its peak. He swallowed Willow’s sigh.
Asher closed his eyes, trying to dissect those feelings over the haze of his own relentless need for her. Was this time different for him? Did she matter more to him than the others had? But he lifted his lids in time to catch sight of her pulling the flimsy nightgown over her head.
Whatever he’d been thinking about before fluttered away as he stared at the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen bare, let alone touched. And he planned to take his time in saying a fine, leisurely greeting to all those spots of skin as she introduced them.
Slow must not have been on her agenda, however, as with the next intoxicating kiss, she pressed him back on the bed and draped herself over him. He was about to explode, still half-dressed.
He rolled with her to his side to correct that problem, but her hands slipped in to cover his belt buckle first. His front teeth sank into his lower lip, and he gripped the comforter, but he managed to avoid taking over as she worked the buckle and the button of his jeans. A slow hiss escaped him as her fingertips “accidentally” grazed him as she worked.
He wasted no time in standing to shuck his jeans and boxers, while she wiggled out of her panties next to him. He reached for his jeans again and the wallet inside but stopped just as he opened it.
“Damn. I don’t have—I stopped carrying—”
Instead of answering, she leaned over to the bedside table and opened the drawer. From it, she produced a box of condoms. He glanced from the box to her face that had deepened in color and then back to the box.
“I’m a single mom. It’s important for me to be responsible if, you know, anything ever happens.”
“Well, good thing one of us was thinking ahead.”
&nb
sp; “You might need to blow the dust off that package.”
He chuckled before taking a good look at it. She hadn’t purchased them with him in mind, but he was strangely relieved that the box hadn’t been opened. He turned away to cover himself and then stretched out next to her.
“We don’t have to be in a hurry.” He didn’t care if his body clearly disagreed.
Again, Willow seemed to have a different idea, kissing and curling herself around him with a need like the one he was trying to contain in himself.
“Please. It’s been so long,” she breathed against his neck.
“I’m here to please.”
Yet her words troubled him as he brought them together, and they began to move in tandem toward an ecstasy they could seek and find in each other. Willow couldn’t know how right she was. It had taken him so long, in fact a lifetime, to get there, but he suspected that in her, he had found home.
He hadn’t believed anything could frighten him more than the next day’s test results could, but his temptation to want more from Willow than any agreement or handshake type of marriage told him just how wrong he was.
* * *
For the second time that night, a sound pulled Willow from her sleep, this one from somewhere nearby. As she blinked against the harsh light of the lamp, she reached for the other pillow and the man who’d held her close as she’d drifted off to sleep. Her hand landed in the depression where Asher’s head had once rested.
She sat straight up in the bed, her upper body uncovered, bedsheet puddling around her hips. Asher stood across the room, fully dressed and balancing on one foot while stuffing his other in a boot.
Immediately, she reached for the sheet and tucked it under her armpits, though she wasn’t sure why she bothered when he’d already seen and sampled everything she could hide. Had he been trying to sneak out while she was sleeping like some guy after a one-night stand? Even if, technically, at least so far, this was a one-nighter?
“Heading out soon?”
Asher startled and then turned back to her. He appeared to note the sheet under her arms, and then his gaze darted to the side.