Addicted to You (9 page)

“Rill? Where are you going?” she called out a few seconds later when she stepped over the threshold of the kitchen and saw him walking out of the house. He’d been so elusive for the past few days, catching sight of him suddenly took her by surprise. If he kept it up, she’d be more likely to see Sasquatch in these woods than Rill.

He paused in the process of opening the screen door. Katie’s eyes widened when she fully registered the image of him. He was wearing only a pair of boxer briefs. Smooth, naked skin gleamed with moisture. His wet hair stuck up in odd angles all around his head. His long legs were dusted with dark, crinkly hair. His skin wasn’t tanned, but Rill was black Irish, to be sure. His complexion carried the olive tone of some distant Roman or Spanish ancestor who had settled in Ireland.

Her gaze caught and remained glued on his crotch. He was turned in profile. His cock and balls were a heavy package barely constrained by white, stretchy cotton.

He just stood there, apparently as frozen to the spot as she was. It took her stunned brain several seconds to realize she’d been staring . . . and that he’d never replied. She pried her eyes off the compelling vision of his cock. His muscular abdomen was beyond flat; it was slightly concave below his ribs and powerful chest and shoulders.

“You haven’t been eating properly. . . . You’ve been starving yourself. I bought groceries today. I wish you’d let me cook for you,” she mumbled through a dry throat. She couldn’t think of what else to say, standing there in the presence of his flagrant male beauty.

Her skin prickled as he continued to pin her with his gaze, still not moving. He studied her with such intensity that Katie nervously glanced down at herself. She pulled her robe closed when she saw how exposed she was in her typical sleepwear—cotton boy short briefs and a tank top. Her nipples pinched even tighter beneath the weight of the extra layer of fabric. Perhaps her slight grimace at the sensation roused him, because he stirred.

“What I do and what I don’t do are none of your business,” he said harshly before he walked out and the screen door slammed behind him. She rushed after him.

“
What
. . .
?
Are you truly crazy, walking out there in the middle of the night, wet and mostly naked?” she shouted through the screen. He must have gone over the edge, she thought. The temperature really had dropped overnight. Where was he going? She heard a rattle of keys and burst onto the porch.

“Rill? You’re
not
driving anywhere. Have you been drinking?”

“No. But I’m planning on it,” he replied, a dangerous edge to his tone.

She stuck her hand out, trying to find the stair railing. In the distance, she heard a popping sound and a noise like a rustling paper bag. She jumped when the trunk of his car slammed shut, shattering the silence of the night.

“Rill?” she asked when she saw a large shadow moving in the blackness. He came toward her—fast. She backed up the stairs anxiously, bumping into the screen door. She turned around and opened it.

“I’ll make a deal with you, Katie,” he said when he caught the closing door and followed her into the house. She noticed he carried what looked like two bottles of liquor in a paper bag in one hand. Figured.

“What?” she asked, edging backward toward the lit kitchen.

“You stay the hell out of my way and keep your mouth shut.”

She came to an abrupt stop next to the stove and eyed him disdainfully. Well, it began that way, until she once again noticed his heavy cock straining against white cotton and followed the thin strip of dark hair that rose from beneath the low waistband of his briefs and kissed his taut belly button. The beguiling trail disappeared, but it teased Katie’s gaze upward to a powerful chest, where dark hairs were again in evidence, albeit not thickly, just above Rill’s nipple line. Katie had formerly had a preference for a hairless chest, but she decided then and there that the sight of a real man—such a flagrantly male specimen—had completely reformed her.

Well, Rill had.

She wanted to touch, to run her fingers through that crinkly hair, to make a tactile feast out of the smooth skin and hard muscle just beneath it.

When she realized she’d completely forgotten to be defiant in the midst of her drooling, she straightened and crossed her forearms beneath her breasts.

“That doesn’t sound like a ‘deal’ to me. It sounds like a proclamation. What do I get out of it?” she challenged.

He took another step toward her . . . close enough for her to see the gleam in his eyes. She didn’t look down, but she was highly aware of his cock straining between them. It was a little like trying to stand on the beach and ignore a tsunami roaring toward the shore. She resisted an almost overwhelming urge to retreat when he leaned down and his face came less than a foot from her own.

“What do
you
get out of it? You stay out of my fucking way, and I won’t turn you over my knee and spank your ass fierce hard.”

Her clit twanged. Air burned in her lungs until she finally released it. The roots of her hair prickled in rising fury.

“I’d just like to see you try it,” she muttered darkly.

He smiled. It hadn’t been what she’d expected him to do, but suddenly that grin was there: slashing, compelling . . .

Dangerous.

She backed away, stumbling when her hip hit the edge of the counter.

“I’m not leaving,” she whispered.

He glanced down pointedly to the bulging front of his briefs, his smile already a memory.

“Do you see that? If you stay here, you’re gonna end up under me. Is that what you want? Is that what you came here to do, Katie? Destroy our friendship?”

“
No
. That’s not what I set out to do. But if it comes down to a choice between our friendship or you? Like I said,
I’m staying
. Go ahead. Fuck me. Your friendship means
shit
to me if you’re dead, anyway.”

Out of the corner of her vision she saw his heavy erection lurch next to stretchy cotton. Her clit throbbed between her thighs in full sympathy, but her muscles remained as unrelenting and tense as his. He hissed under his breath, his accent too strong for her to catch the words. One thing was for sure: whatever he’d said, it’d been foul . . . and it’d been hurled at her.

She didn’t move when he stormed past her. He slammed his bedroom door so hard the wood floor rattled beneath her bare feet.

“Well, there you have it. The lines are drawn,” she said out loud to the empty kitchen.

Even though she’d sounded brave enough, it was a lie. She just stood there, waiting for her zapping nerves to quiet and the clamor of alarm and arousal to shut off in her brain. When the adrenaline of their confrontation faded, guilt started to seep into her consciousness—regret for pushing Rill when he seemed so vulnerable . . . guilt for having officially spoken the words out loud to her onetime best friend’s husband.

Go ahead. Fuck me. Your friendship means
shit
to me if you’re dead, anyway.

She closed her burning eyelids.
I hope you can understand Eden. It’s true
. . .
I’m doing it for me. But I’m doing it for him, too. I can’t let him follow you. I won’t.

She waited, listening to the voices of her past, listening to her own conscience. Slowly, a sense of steadiness came over her, if not peace.

Somehow, she thought Eden would understand.

Six

Rill prowled around on the front porch, his gaze pinned to
the road.

Where the hell had Katie gone?

It was going on suppertime, and he hadn’t seen her since he’d rolled out of bed at eleven this morning. He’d made a point of avoiding her since she’d arrived in Vulture’s Canyon, so it wasn’t really a surprise that she wasn’t here. Every time she’d run out for an errand in the past several days, though, she’d left him a little message on a pink sticky note:
Ran down to check on Errol and pick us up some veggies
or
Off in search of some glass cleaner
.
This house would be so much brighter if there wasn’t an inch of grime on the windows.

He’d grown accustomed to those little notes when he’d reenter the house from one of his walks or when he’d venture out of his bedroom after hearing her car rev up in the front drive. He’d convinced himself that he couldn’t care less about where she was or what she was doing. The absence of a little pink note today told him differently, however.

What if his rude, surly behavior had successfully gotten rid of her?

The possibility wasn’t as gratifying as he’d imagined it would be.

He’d been so disturbed by the prospect of having finally chased her away that he’d hurried into the bathroom. He’d been relieved to see some of her toiletries arranged neatly on the counter. He’d inhaled the clean, fruity scent clinging in the air for reassurance.

The fragrance of Katie’s hair.

His brow had crinkled when he’d had that thought, because he couldn’t recall why he’d immediately recognized the scent. He hadn’t been close enough to her to breathe it as deeply as the memory that flashed at the edges of his memory. His nose had been surrounded in silken coils. . . .

He’d suddenly reverted back to wishing she’d left. She was ruining everything. He wanted his life—or lack of a life—back. Didn’t he?

Fact was, Rill couldn’t decide what it was he wanted.

He’d considered going down to the diner. Sherona would make him something tempting. Maybe if she gave him that warm, inviting smile, he wouldn’t refuse the offer this time.

Yeah . . . that was what he should do, he decided. He should drive down to the diner. This time he wouldn’t politely refuse Sherona’s overtures. Why should he? He’d let her take the edge off. There was a tight, uncomfortable pressure in his balls, a sensation that wasn’t being adequately assuaged with his own hand.

It wasn’t just his cock that was bugging him, though. He felt edgy, like he wasn’t at home in his own skin.

It was all Katie’s fault.

He wandered into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich, forgoing sex and home cooking without ever making a conscious decision to do so. Afterward, he took a long, strenuous walk. He rambled around a lot in the forest. His hikes distracted him. Navigating the sometimes-challenging paths cleared his head. The fragrance in the forest today had been rich and peaty.

When he returned, he went to the side of the house to the woodpile. A definite chill had entered the air. Fall had finally arrived. He only dimly recalled last autumn in Vulture’s Canyon. It’d been as though he’d been color-blind. Today, the vivid colors of the trees blazed against the clear, cornflower-blue sky, the vision scoring his consciousness.

He hauled a load of firewood into the house and stacked it near the fireplace. Last year, he’d rarely lit a fire. It was too difficult, and it wasn’t as if he’d been capable of enjoying lazing around by a cozy blaze.

Where the fuck was she?

He tired of pacing on the front porch, looking for her car in the drive. He entered the kitchen and pulled a pot out of the cabinet and filled it with water in preparation for making pasta.

He’d tried to call her three times over the course of the afternoon, but she apparently didn’t have her phone turned on. Either that or these hills obliterated the signal. Phone coverage around here could be spotty at times.

It would be getting dark soon. Katie may fancy herself a hotshot driver, but she’d grown up a city girl, used to wide, perfectly paved roads, multiple lanes and well-lit streets. The twists and turns on the narrow forest roads and the pitch-black hills reminded him of driving in Ireland, which could be downright perilous for those not accustomed to it.

She’d likely get herself killed playing speed racer on the forbidding, dark hills.

Thinking about car crashes made him think of Eden, of course. He thought of what Katie had said several nights ago about his wife hating Vulture’s Canyon if she ever saw it.

Katie’d been right. Eden would have hated Vulture’s Canyon. She would have been very polite to the residents, but privately found them ignorant and strange. Why in the world would they stay in a place like this? He recalled her saying something similar of the people of Malacnoic, the village where he’d been born. Her face had been shadowed with amusement, but also puzzlement. Eden couldn’t understand how people would choose to isolate themselves from culture and facilities of higher learning.

When it came to Malacnoic, Rill shared Eden’s opinion. Vulture’s Canyon wasn’t much better, but at this point in his life he’d learned to appreciate the value of a place where you could lose yourself. One couldn’t forget the past in a place like Los Angeles, where reminders and regrets were constantly leaping up to pummel you in the face.

The pasta was finished and drained. He tried to call Katie a fourth time as he paced around in the front yard. Maybe she was purposely ignoring him. Probably pissed at him for his frigid hospitality and rudeness.

Good.

He’d go inside, have a drink, eat his supper and then call Stanley and Meg Hughes. True, he didn’t particularly want to talk to Katie and Everett’s parents. He respected Stanley and Meg a lot, thought of them as family since they’d welcomed him into their home during his college years at UCLA. It’d be awkward, talking to the friendly couple after so many months of isolation.