His Adam’s apple bobbed hard with his swallow.
“I never knew what a family was until I met Asher and he took me home to meet all of you.” Tears stung her eyes, and she tried to blink them away. “Your parents, your brothers and sisters…I don’t know what I’d do if I lost them. They’re the only true family I’ve ever known.”
Chapter 20
Loyal lifted a hand to swipe his thumb over one of the tears that escaped down Roxanna’s cheek. That sharp ache settled in his chest again, making it hurt with each breath he took. He wanted her more than he’d ever wanted any woman before, and yet what he wanted would hurt her.
Because he couldn’t promise forever. Not again.
Why not?
He hesitated for a brief second, but quickly retreated from that thought. “So, what does that leave us with? Friends?”
“I hope so,” she whispered.
“I don’t know if I can be friends with you,” he admitted. When her dark brows drew together, he added, “I mean, I won’t go back to being a jackass, but, my problem is, I can’t be in the same room with you without wanting to touch you and kiss you. I get hard just looking at you. Especially after the stables.”
As he spoke, her fists had smoothed out against his chest, no longer pushing, more like caressing—and suddenly, he couldn’t resist. He tipped her chin up and covered her mouth with his.
The electric spark was an instantaneous jolt, fizzing through his veins and hardening his body in seconds. Her soft gasp allowed him access inside her mouth, and he stroked his tongue deep. She slid her hands up to thread through his hair as she kissed him back with equal hunger. Closing the space between them, he gathered her into his arms.
He was fast losing his mind when her words echoed in the deep, dark recesses of his mind.
“The harm would be to me.”
Loyal tore his mouth from hers and buried his face in the crook of her neck. There was that scent again. Sweet. Sexy. Tempting as all hell.
He lifted his hands to cup her face as he leaned his forehead against hers. “I’m sorry. I keep doing that when I shouldn’t.”
“I know,” she agreed. But she didn’t push him away, even though his erection pressed against the juncture of her thighs. The thought of lifting her skirt made his fingers flex ever so slightly against her scalp.
“Where do we go from here?” he asked.
“I don’t know, exactly.”
Longing edged her voice, and he had to fight with everything he had not to kiss her again.
“Maybe we should start with dinner?” she suggested, her voice high and breathy.
“Good idea.” He moved his body back from hers, started to dip for that one last kiss, but then forced himself to completely step away. Turning his back to her, he discretely adjusted himself as he surveyed the small table. “I, ah, brought a bottle of wine, but given the circumstances, maybe alcohol isn’t such a good idea.”
“Probably not.” She cleared the roughness from her voice and asked, “Water or coffee?”
“Water.”
When she sat down with two glasses a minute later, he’d opened the containers and set out thick, wax-coated paper plates, napkins, and heavy duty plastic utensils. “Take your pick. Shrimp scampi with linguini, tagliolini with truffles, chicken alfredo, or baked ziti.”
“Nothing with rats or snakes?”
He glanced up to see her smiling and chuckled. “No. No rats or snakes.”
“What was the deal with that anyway?”
“I was curious about things you like or don’t like.”
Her eyebrows rose as she picked up her fork. “And that’s what you started with?”
He shrugged. “For me, it fit at the time.”
“O-kay.” Their gazes connected and held for a long moment before she dropped her attention back to the pasta. “Well, here’s one for you, I love Italian, and it all smells amazing. Do I have to pick one, or can I try some of each?”
“Go for it.”
He did the same as her, scooping a little of each pasta onto his plate. As they began eating, he found himself thinking not only of what she’d said about his family, but a comment she’d made about her mother rose in his memory.
“Would you be willing to tell me about your family? Or lack thereof, it seems.”
Dismay flickered in her eyes as she reached for her water. She seemed to debate in her mind as she chewed, then she swallowed her food and sipped from her glass. “It’s lack thereof, definitely, so I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version. I grew up in Wisconsin. My mom left us when I was nine, my dad buried himself in his work and traveling, and I was left with my super religious grandparents who never liked my mother and pointed out every day how I was just like her.”
She’d started out as if recounting simple facts, but at the end, her voice dripped with hurt and resentment.
“Sounds shitty.”
“It was. They didn’t understand me or what I do—never even tried. Who I was, who I am, was never acceptable to them.”
Her words sparked his guilt once more. For six years, he’d done the same thing as her grandparents.
“The day after I graduated high school, I packed everything I owned in my Jeep and moved here.”
“The same Jeep you drive now?” he asked with surprise. “That was what, ten years ago?”
“Yep. It was ten years old when I bought it, I’ve had it for ten years, and I’ll drive it another ten if I can.”
He’d seen her Jeep. He was shocked it was still running, but that was neither here nor there. “Why Colorado?”
“I visited once as a kid and loved the mountains.”
Something in her voice had him shaking his head. “I don’t buy that. What’s the real reason?”
Surprise flashed in her eyes that he didn’t accept her pat answer, but she looked down at her plate to stab a shrimp with her fork. “You wouldn’t believe me, so let’s just leave it.”
“Your reason is not for me to judge.”
Her lips twisted wryly. “Well that’s a new one.”
“I’ll keep my word, Rox,” he promised.
Her head lifted at his shortened version of her name. He’d never used it before. Never felt comfortable enough to use it before.
His heart pounded hard as her gaze met his. It felt like he’d suddenly crossed a line and there was no going back. Not that he had any idea what the line was or what it meant.
After a charged moment, she simply said, “Colorado felt right. When I left Wisconsin, I had no clue where I was going, I was just getting away. Getting out. I drove west because it’s more miles to the ocean, but once I saw the mountains, I knew fate had brought me home, and I stopped driving.”
She knew fate had brought her home. He was starting to feel that way himself. “That’s not so crazy.”
“I didn’t say it was crazy, I just didn’t think you’d believe it.”
“I have family in Texas, my uncle and aunt and my cousins, but all the years I was there, it never felt right until I came back home.” After a couple more bites, he said, “So, you moved here and the rest is history. Do you still talk to your family?”
She shrugged slightly. “My dad, two times a year. He calls on my birthday, I call on his. Not my grandparents though. My leaving only proved to them I was exactly like my mom, and I have figured out life’s too short for their negative judgment.”
Cue another wave of guilt to crash at his feet. He vowed right then to make up for being a judgmental ass if it took him the rest of his life.
Whoa. That’s a little far out into the future.
In his head, he turned around and spotted that line he’d crossed earlier about a mile behind him. Desperate for a distraction, he asked, “And you haven’t seen your mom since you were nine?”
“Oh, no, I’ve seen her.”
He raised his eyebrows, and her indecision was evident as she chewed, swallowed, and sipped. Then resignation settled in.
“
I was in the middle of my first year of college when my mom tracked me down. We reconnected, and things were great at first. I thought I’d finally gotten my mother back, but she only stayed four years this time.” Her jaw clenched for a moment. “Just long enough to use me, clean out my bank accounts, and skip town again.”
His hand stilled as he stared at her in shock. “Your mother stole money from you?”
“Over ten thousand dollars.”
“Wow. That’s…unbelievably…low. I can’t even imagine.”
“Because no one in your family would ever do something like that.”
“We have our issues, but yeah, underneath everything, I’d trust any one of them implicitly.
“I will never trust her again,” she vowed.
Hurt was back in her voice, and he wanted to get up and pull her into his arms for a hug. But touching her even in comfort wasn’t a good idea. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
She shrugged. “I don’t care to ever see her again, but on the other hand, I don’t regret that she found me.”
“How do you not?”
“Because I found myself again. It probably sounds strange, but it was like she gave me permission to be me again.” She rested her fork on her plate while skimming her gaze over the shop spread out behind him. “Ultimately, she is the reason I have all this.”
“How so?”
“For years, my grandparents told me my abilities were nonsense. My dad didn’t want to hear about them either, so I stopped talking about the things I saw and felt, and eventually, I stopped listening, too.”
“Listening?” To her grandparents?
“To my intuition.”
Had he asked that out loud?
“To the little flashes that would come to me when I touched someone,” she continued, “or when I read their aura. All the emotions people wrap around themselves like an invisible blanket. I shut it all down and pushed it away and tried to be normal…tried to be someone they could love.”
Loyal had a hard time swallowing past the lump that lodged in his throat with those last whispered words. If she was trying to make him pay for his years of being an ass, it was totally working.
“Not that it mattered.” Another shrug underscored her words. “I guess I look too much like my mom, and every day they saw her instead of me. My grandma told me that’s why Dad stayed away so much. She blamed me for that, too, though it probably didn’t help that he and my mom named me after her as well.”
The hurt in her voice had him wanting to scream at her family for being so horrible to her even though he’d done the same damn thing. But he hadn’t known what they’d done. He hadn’t wanted to know anything about her at all. Now he wanted to know everything.
“They made that big of a deal of your middle name?”
She shook her head. “First name, not middle. My mother is Roxanna Kent, too. I’m the female equivalent of a male junior.”
“That’s unusual.”
“My mother is unusual.”
So was she. Unusual and unique in a way he’d never allowed himself to notice before. Never allowed himself to appreciate before.
Now that he wasn’t looking at her with his preconceived notion that all psychics were frauds, he could see an individual person with feelings and emotions and a life he would have never imagined. And he was shocked to realize all the feelings swirling around in his head and heart right now had nothing to do with wanting her so bad he was still semi-hard.
Desire still simmered on the back burner—it always had with her—but now he was finally getting a glimpse of the woman his brother and family loved so much, and he genuinely liked her. The more time he spent with her, the more he wanted to spend with her so he could learn as much as possible.
“How did your mother help you start your shop?” he asked.
“She didn’t directly help—that would involve being in my life. No, her help came in the form of encouraging me to open myself up again. Stop suppressing who I am, listen to my spirit guides, and channel the energy that flows around me, and through me. Reconnecting with my abilities led me here.”
A couple of weeks ago, those words would’ve sounded so hokey. They still sounded odd, but he no longer felt the need to cut her off at the knees because of his self-righteous anger over her belief.
“Is your mother a psychic, too?”
She set her fork down and wiped her mouth before setting her napkin on her empty plate while pushing it aside. “Honestly, I don’t know for sure. She’s one of the few people I can’t read.”
The last time she’d said that had been about him. He’d assumed it was an excuse because she was afraid he’d be able to spot her scam, or that maybe she wasn’t talking straight because she was drunk. But now he recalled her saying the same about her mother that night, too.
So, did that make him special, or not special enough?
Whichever it was, being in the same category as the thieving mother she despised turned his stomach. Until a couple weeks ago, he’d put himself in that group. Now he wanted out.
Done with his meal, Loyal took his plate and hers and rose to toss them in the garbage. “Have you ever asked her?”
He caught her shrug when he turned back to the table.
“Well, she acts like she is, so I’ve always assumed so.”
“Acts?”
As if realizing how that had sounded, she grimaced. “Like I said, I can’t really read her. But, she has to be, otherwise where else would I have gotten it from?”
“Is being psychic hereditary?”
“It can be. Anyways, it wouldn’t matter if I asked her or not, because I wouldn’t believe a word that came out of her mouth.”
He had a gut feeling the woman was just really good at being an evil bitch who took advantage of her daughter who only wanted someone in her family to love and accept her. No wonder she’d fallen for his. Oddly enough, Merit flashed in his mind, and how just once, he wanted their dad to ask him for something—anything it had sounded like.
But then Roxanna stood up and leaned over the table to put covers on the leftovers. The second his gaze traced the curve of her hips, his younger brother was instantly forgotten.
She stacked the four containers on top of one another then set them back in the bag. “You’re going to be eating Italian for a week.”
Normally, he didn’t eat leftovers. He never ordered so much that he had leftovers. “You got a fridge in the back?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll have lunch tomorrow.”
She swiveled around on her boot heel. “We?”
“I’m a genius when it comes to numbers, Rox, but something tells me I’m going to need more than one night to straighten out your books.”
The moment the words were out of his mouth, his mind went straight to his warning—or promise?—in the hall outside the ballroom the night before. Judging by the fiery blush on her cheeks, her mind went to the same exact place.
You’re going to beg me to do it again and again.
Lord help him, he might be the one who ended up begging—even knowing full well how much he could hurt her.
“So, let’s get to it, shall we? Show me where I’m working,” he said a little too brightly. Because somehow they had to be only friends.
He wasn’t sure how the fuck that was going to work, but for her sake, he’d try.
“The computer is all ready in the back room,” she said as she moved past him, food in hand.
He followed her, his gaze locked on the sexy roll of her hips and the back and forth swish of her shiny brunette curls. He already knew they were long enough to wrap around his wrist. One little tug would give him full access to the smooth line of her throat, and then he could skim his lips lower.
Just thinking about it took him from half to full mast by the time she reached the back room. In an attempt to buy some time to talk himself down, he paused at the beaded doorway of the gypsy-looking room on the right.
Chapter 21
Roxanna closed the fridge as the sound of the beads hanging in front of her reading room clinked together in that musical harmony she loved so much. She went to the doorway in time to see Loyal step inside.
Her stomach got all fluttery as she crossed the floor and passed through the beads. With only the salt lamp and the tiny star-lights on the ceiling, it was too dark. Too intimate. Too seductive. She flipped on the lights, but they were muted by design, so it didn’t help as much as she’d hoped.
“So, this is where the magic happens?” he asked without looking at her.
“It’s not magic,” she bristled automatically. “I’m not a witch.”
“I don’t know.” He lightly trailed his fingertips over the top of her satin covered table. “It feels like I’ve been under your spell since the night of the fire.”
She didn’t respond to that. What could she say after their earlier conversation?
Likewise. And by the way, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t care if you can’t do forever, I’ll take now.
She could say all those things, but she wouldn’t. If she wanted to ensure she didn’t lose the rest of his family, she couldn’t.
Then why did she still want to so damn bad? Why had she been thinking about taking back her ‘just friends’ decree from the moment they sat across from each other at the table?
Loyal’s gaze travelled slowly around the room, taking stock of her space. The decorating had been specifically designed for comfort, relaxation, and to facilitate a positive energy flow. One of the walls was painted to appear as if there was a huge bay window overlooking the Rockies. As much time as she spent in the room, that gorgeous view was for her own benefit as much as for clients.
She wondered what he saw as he looked around. Did he like the warm colors and soft light? Could he feel the affirmative energy, or would he only look at her crystal ball and tarot cards on the side table and consider the cliché psychic trappings as another layer of her fraudulent enterprise? They had been given to her as a gift from clients and were for decoration only; hence their placement on the side table near her chaise lounge. But he wouldn’t know that, and she didn’t feel the need to explain.
Love Loyal and True Page 15