Heart Signs (11 page)

“Yes. And it totally wasn’t necessary. I was out of line.”

“No, you weren’t. My wife’s gone. I loved her the best I could at the time and yeah, I’ll always wonder what I could’ve done differently. But I don’t need to put up signs to try to atone any longer. What is done is done. As much as I loved them, I have to find a way to let her and my daughters go.” He fisted his hand around the book, barely noticing when he bent back the cover. “I’m going to need help, Ror. I’ve never asked anyone for help before but I’m asking you.”

“Whatever you need. I’ll do my best, God help you,” she said, giving a watery sniffle. “But I’ll try.”

“Thank you. I can’t ask for anything more.”

“Yes, you can.” She cleared her throat. “You can ask me over to see your new bed. As friends,” she added hastily.

There was no stopping his grin. It filled his face, stretching across it until his cheeks hurt. “Are you busy next Friday?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, okay.” Disappointment shot through his system and erased his smile. “Well, then maybe the next—”

“The next Friday I have a date to go to a car show. Sorry, no dice.” He loved hearing the tickle of laughter in her voice again. Anything else seemed wrong. She was meant to laugh and tease and make love…

He shifted on the bed at the immediate twitch in his cock. One thing at a time.

“Well, then why don’t you tell me when you’re free and we’ll go from there?”

“You didn’t ask who I was seeing next Friday night. You might know him. He’s about six-foot-fifty and has enormous feet and an equally enormous—”

“I get the picture.” He laughed. “God, I can’t wait for next Friday night.”

“Me either. Anticipation’s the sweetest longing I’ve ever known,” she murmured. “See you, Sam.”

R
ory arrived
at Sam’s at seven-thirty Friday night, right on schedule. She clutched a bouquet of flowers in her mittened fist. Not even quite November and it was snowing like a bitch. More sleet than snow right now but the changeover was coming soon.

It hadn’t been easy finding nice flowers at the grocery store, but the idea had been a last-minute one. In her other hand she held two bags, one of which contained what Sam had requested—a pint of her favorite ice cream. Kind of late in the season for it, but she was game for anything.

She knocked on the door. Knocked again when he didn’t answer. The bubble of nerves in her throat turned into a sponge, keeping out all her air. Had he changed his mind? Did he think she expected sex?

A giggle escaped her frozen lips at the irony. How often did men balk at the possibility a woman would demand sex from them?

Regardless, she wouldn’t demand or even ask. Maybe sweetly cajole, depending on the signals he gave her.

Right now the signals he was giving weren’t good.

Music swelled on the other side of the door, something loud and…summery. She grinned. How sexy. A man who rocked out not to Godsmack or Staind but The Beach Boys.

“Yoohoo, Sam!” She knocked a little harder. “Freezing out here!”

He didn’t answer but the door next to his opened and the part-time guy from Sam’s shop stepped out and flashed her a grin. Handy they lived in the same building. “Hey, I know you.”

“Ditto.” She cleared her throat self-consciously, suddenly very aware of her bare legs. Her skirt came down to midthigh but skin as pale as hers probably stood out in the darkness. “Shep, right?”

“Right. So you’re looking for Sam?”

“I am. I think he’s home. I hear music.”

“Way to go, buddy,” he said under his breath, leaning around her to pound on Sam’s door. A minute later, it swung inward and Sam filled the doorway.

She stared, stunned into silence. Had he always been so big? Did he just seem more huge because she knew—
hoped
—she’d get to see all of him tonight?

Shep smiled and turned away. “You are one lucky bastard, man,” he called out as he skidded down the icy steps.

She glanced at Sam and realized he seemed transfixed by the sight of her legs. “I’m not really dressed for the weat—” she began, only to be tugged inside mid-word, mid-thought, mid-breath as he framed her chilly cheeks in his bear paws and pressed his mouth to hers.

Everything inside her stuttered to a halt. Tangled nerves smoothed. His firm lips molded to hers and he licked her seam, his tongue hot and tasting of smoke and…marshmallows? Surprise had her opening for him and then he was inside, caressing every part of her though he possessed only her mouth. He stroked her and she felt it in her trembling calves, her tightening nipples, even the hollow of her stomach. And then he drove deeper, playfully battling, and the nerves quivering to life in her pussy focused all her attention on the center of her pleasure.

“Hi,” he murmured, rubbing his thumb over her lips as he eased back.

She didn’t open her eyes but she smiled, still feeling him on her mouth.
In
her mouth. “Hi.”

“You brought me flowers? That I crushed?” His rumble of laughter made her lids lift. She wanted to see his face. The soft light coming from the other room warmed his skin, making it glow. Flames flickered in his dark irises and she rose on tiptoe, desperate to kiss him again. “Rory,” he whispered, hauling her into his arms where she belonged.

Their lips met and clung just like the fingers she wrapped around his strong biceps. “Kiss me. Just kiss me.” He already was but it didn’t seem to matter. She couldn’t take enough of him inside her to quell the ache. She rubbed against him, wild in her need, helpless to fight it off any longer. The bags she held pressed awkwardly into their flesh and the cold container froze off her left nipple. She still couldn’t stop.

Her hands raced up his arms to his broad shoulders and she arched up to find him stiff and prominent where he met her belly. She couldn’t seem to get a solid grip on him because he kept moving and good goddamn, he was so tall—

“We’re melting the ice cream. It’s starting to drip.” He spoke against her cheek, his harsh pants heating her already burning face.

“Not all that’s dripping. Trust me.”

His groan blew hot over her ear and she shivered. “I’ll find out soon. You’re going to be spread out before me, all wet and open and warm and I’m going to spend hours learning every part of you. Where you’re ticklish, where you’re sensitive. Whether you go crazy when you come or if you go limp. How it feels when you take me in so deep there’s nowhere left to go.” He nipped her lobe. “And then, when you’re sure you can’t take anymore, when you’re begging me to stop, I’ll go deeper.”

Her hands fell off his shoulders as his teeth grazed her neck. “I’ll cast my vote for limp now,” she said, turning her head so he could reach more.

He chuckled and worked the flowers out of her grasp, along with the bag containing the ice cream. “These are pretty. Thanks. Carnations. Pink it looks like. Hard to see in this light. Let me get them in water and the ice cream in the fridge.”

She pushed her trembling fingers through her hair and followed him into the kitchen, her knees still loose and on the verge of giving out.

If he could do all that to her with a kiss, what would happen when they finally came together? Would she live through the overload to her senses?

“They’re pink and yellow,” she said when he flipped on the light and dumped the ice cream in the freezer. “I know they’re girly colors,” she added, worrying the handle of the bag she still carried. “I wanted white but they were out. Thought they’d help cheer this place up—” She broke off when he turned on the water and glanced over at her with a smile. “You know, that smile very effectively tells me when I’ve gone too far. So I’ll just stop while I’m ahead and say you kissed the fucking shit out of me, so what do you expect?”

“These are perfect. Thank you. Next time I’ll bring you flowers. What are your favorites?”

All she heard was
next time
. He could’ve threatened to set her on fire and the only words in her head would’ve been
nexttimenexttimenexttime
. “Mums. The fat gold and red ones people put on stoops. I always wanted a house with a porch and flower boxes and lots of mums.”

“I had that once,” he mused thoughtfully, arranging the stems in a coffee mug. He’d already neatly snipped the ends with scissors. “The house with the porch and flower boxes. Not the mums.”

“I bet it was beautiful.” She set aside the bag that contained not only the letters he’d loaned her, but one she’d written for him.

“It was. Someday I’ll take you by. It’s for sale now. Some family will make a really happy home there, I bet.”

The fact that she heard absolutely no pain or regret in his voice was exactly what set her off. Tears flooded her eyes and she rushed forward to press her face against his back. Her arms encircled his waist and she hung on, gratitude and sympathy and need geysering up inside her, incapable of being contained.

“Hey, hey.” He set aside the mug and turned, tipping up her chin with two fingers. “You told me you weren’t a crier,” he said, cuddling her so close that she felt completely surrounded by him.

“I wasn’t before I met you. I never cried. Never. But now it keeps pouring out of me.” She brushed her wet face over his neck and breathed in his reassuring scents of motor oil and clean male. “You make me feel things I’ve never…I can’t hold them back. You’re too honest. How can I pretend?” She knew she was babbling. Couldn’t stop. “You need to know what you’re dealing with.”

He only held her tighter. “Tell me.”

“I’m the good-time girl. The one who sleeps with her friends and buys the rounds of beer and springs for extra wings on Saturdays. I don’t fall in love. I don’t know how. And God knows, no one’s ever fallen for me.”

He didn’t say anything and she was glad. Because she had to get this out and if he spoke, it would only make it harder. “Sex filled in the holes. It gave me enough of what I needed to get by until the next time. Then I got that first order for your billboard and I laughed at it. Actually laughed. I thought you were a lovesick sap.”

Still nothing. Just his hand moving up and down her back.

“But you kept sending them, and they kept getting more and more personal, like you didn’t care if you ripped your heart out and hung it up on a peg for everyone to see. It was so beautiful and brave and I didn’t even know if I had a heart, never mind know how to share it. If I’d ever had one, it was so scarred over I didn’t think anyone would ever be able to find it. But you did. You found it before we ever even talked that first time.” She jerked back in his arms and stared up into his face, refusing to analyze what she saw there. This wasn’t about him. It was about her coming clean. “My aunt told me I fell in love with you before we ever met,” she whispered, scarcely able to force the words out. “And she was right.”

He looked at her without saying anything for so long that she began to shake. She shouldn’t have told him. It was too soon. She’d ruined everything.

God, she’d lost him before they’d even had a chance.

She had to try to take it back, to explain. To somehow make the night light and fun again, without this heavy pressure she’d just set upon him. Telling a man she barely knew that she loved him was madness. It was hormones. She hadn’t had sex in a while and everything was getting all scrambled in her brain. Once she got back outside into the fresh air, she’d realize she was blowing everything out of proportion.

“Sam, I—”

He picked her up so fast that her head snapped back over his arm like a broken doll’s. She clamped an arm around his thick neck and hung on while he toted her back down the hall as if she weighed nothing. Lighter than air. More see-through than the panties and bra set she’d picked out optimistically, just in case.

When he laid her down on a blanket on the living room floor, she was sure he could see every nerve and synapse inside her, firing to life. She’d become transparent to him. And from the look on his tight, strained face, he wanted her that way.

He knelt beside her and reached up to do undo the buttons on his shirt. She didn’t move, hardly even breathed, so afraid she’d do or say something that would make everything stop. Only her restless fingers sifted through the sand just beyond the edge of the blanket. Lots of sand, heaped all around her oasis of terrycloth in the center.

Wait a second. She lifted her hand and scooped the white grains into her fist. “Sam? Where’d you get all this? How—”

“You made me think of the beach the first time I saw you. I could see firelight in your eyes, could smell the toasted marshmallows and the smoke. You were summer and freedom and everything I hadn’t had in so long. Everything I hadn’t allowed myself. I’m going to allow myself tonight.” He tossed his shirt aside and she glimpsed his broad chest in the flickering light from the portable woodstove she’d noticed out of the corner of her eye. “You’re going to be my ocean and I’m going to drown myself in you.”

She moistened her dry lips. He hadn’t answered her question but it didn’t matter.
That
had officially rendered her speechless.

He reached out to close his big hand around hers, trapping the sand between their fingers while his gaze skipped across her face, his expression almost molten with lust. “I hope you’re ready.”

“Oh yeah, I’m ready.” She slipped out of his grip, scattering sand as she grabbed his wrist and brought his hand between her legs. “And look at that, I even came prepared. One tidal wave, at your service.”

Sam didn’t laugh, just held his fingers lightly against the heart of her while he fumbled open his jeans with his other hand. The jerk of his zipper lowering sounded thunderous over the cheerful music of Jimmy Buffett. Her heart was pounding so fast and loud she was surprised she could even hear the song.

He rose to shed his jeans and boxers, yanking them down and kicking them off his legs. Between the shadows created by the fire and the angle, he looked positively massive. Especially the part of him that curved so far outward she could almost lean up and take him in her mouth without moving closer.

She swallowed and tried to stop staring at his cock. This was an emotional moment. Surely being so caught up by such relatively trivial things as penis size wasn’t appropriate. But oh God, she couldn’t wait to be laid wide open by him. Because that’s what it would be. He might go slow—and hell, she hoped he did, she’d probably shatter otherwise—but there was no other way to describe what joining with him would be like.

“Your turn,” he murmured.

Her gaze remained glued to his huge, sexy body while she reached up to unbutton her coat. No wonder she was hot. She sat up and he helped draw it off her arms before setting it aside carefully on the arm of the couch. Her V-neck sweater came next, followed by the skirt she wiggled down her thighs and tossed into his waiting hands. When she wore only her lacy bra and panties and her calf boots, he motioned for her to stand.

She shook her head. Her body was still a little too full for firelight. Especially right now, when she’d maxed out her capacity for vulnerability. “I’m good here, thanks.”

“Up,” he instructed, his voice warm and insistent. “You’re on my beach,” he said when she dug her hands into the sand and held her ground.