Kansas City Christmas (18 page)

Holly jerked when the bedroom door swung open.

Her breath came in deep, stuttering gasps as Edward stopped in the archway leading to the other rooms. The oranges and golds of the fire glimmered off his chest—his breathing was deep and uneven as well. His face was wreathed in shadows but she could feel the intensity of his gaze focused solely on her.

“I can’t fall asleep, woman.” Like a leviathan emerging from the shadowy deep, Edward stalked across the room, heading straight toward her. A surge of base female awareness heated Holly’s blood and opened her pores. But an equally instinctive reaction—fight or flight—had her twisting to uncurl her legs from beneath her and get to her feet before he came close. But it was too late. “Scoot over.”

“Edward?”

He came down on the couch beside her, his arms wrapping around both her and the blanket as he pulled her onto his lap.

Was this safe? Was she safe? She flattened her palms against his chest and pushed.

But he easily overpowered her and fell back onto the cushions, stretching her out across the top of him. With her arms trapped between them, she couldn’t catch herself. Her breasts pillowed and beaded against the impact with his harder muscles. Her legs tangled and fell on either side of his, opening herself to the press of a rock-hard thigh. As she helplessly rode the rise and fall of his chest, her blood turned to liquid heat and pooled at the tips of her breasts and deeper within.

He pulled the blanket loose and spread it across her back, capturing the nape of her neck and curve of her bottom in his hands as he rolled onto his side, spilling her between the back of the couch and the heat of his body. “This is what you want, isn’t it?” he growled against her ear. “Because it’s what I want. I can’t sleep a lick, knowing you’re out here by yourself, closer to the doors, the windows, the danger.”

“Sleep? You’re talking sleep?” Holly wedged her arms between them and tried to give her body some room to recover from the leaping, needy impulses that made her want to snuggle even closer.

“Shh.” He hushed her with his voice and stroked his fingers through the hair at her temple, trying to soothe her. “For now, Stick. I can’t relax, knowing that falling asleep would leave you unguarded.” He threw one heavy leg over hers, emphasizing his point. “But if I can hold you, touch you, keep you close—then some part of me will know you’re safe. Is that okay?” He tipped her chin, asking her to read the sincerity in his eyes. “I need that to be okay.”

What she read in his face instantly calmed her. The cells in her body were still simmering with an untapped awareness of every texture, every temptation of his body molded to hers. But she felt something deeper, more profound, that allowed her to take a deep, steadying breath. “You want to hold me?”

He nodded, his callused fingers gently moving against her face again. “If I don’t get any sleep, I won’t be any good to you.”

Holly reached up and matched the subtle caresses across his cheek and jaw. She smiled, gently soothing the unsettled beast inside him. “Holding me would be very okay.”

With a deep sigh, she felt him relax. He rolled onto his back, keeping his arms around her as she snuggled against his side and used the jut of his shoulder for her pillow.

They lay in comfortable silence for a few minutes longer before Edward spoke. She heard his voice as a rumble in his chest beneath her ear. “I see you already made yourself at home. I guess I like that there.”

She turned her head to see him looking at the rag doll ornament on the mantel. “Did your daughter make that for you?

“Yeah.”

“Tell me about her.”

She felt a tension come into his body as he began to talk. “Melinda was a special little girl, blond and beautiful like her mother.” Holly didn’t move as he began to stroke his hand up and down her back. “We found out while Cara was pregnant that she was going to be a Down’s syndrome baby and that we wouldn’t know what kind of mental or physical handicaps she might have until she was born.”

Holly’s arm went around his waist and she hugged him with her whole body. “I imagine you were given options about her birth.”

“Terminating the pregnancy or giving up the child was never an option for us. If any woman was ever meant to be a mother, it was Cara Fitzpatrick. I wasn’t sure a tough guy like me was up to the task, but from the moment I held Melinda in my arms, I became a daddy.”

His hand stopped at her waist and tears burned in Holly’s eyes. She blinked them away and pressed a kiss to his pectoral, urging him to continue. Edward’s hand began to stroke her again, this time sliding beneath her camisole to maintain skin-to-skin contact, as if he needed that human touch in order to speak. Each brush of his callused fingertips was like the kiss of a cat’s tongue, stoking the heat simmering inside her.

“Melinda was the embodiment of love. Had her grandpa wrapped around her finger, gave my mom a little girl to play with that she’d never had before. She accepted everything and everyone. The terrible hours and dangers of my job, the fact she was behind other kids her age in school. Cara was wonderful with her. She kept trying to turn her into a little lady, but I made her a tomboy. We practiced for Special Olympics events together—the preliminary events, she wasn’t quite old enough or coordinated enough to compete at the regional meets. She played a mean kickball and loved her art classes. She was always a happy, intuitive little girl.”

“Intuitive? How do you mean?”

He tunneled his fingers into Holly’s hair and kissed her forehead. That’s when she realized hers weren’t the only eyes that had filled with tears. “Melinda could read my moods. She knew when something at work was weighing on my mind. She knew when something bad had happened and I needed to snap out of it and have some fun. Sometimes…” His arms tightened almost painfully around her before relaxing. “I still hear her voice in my head. Encouraging me when I can’t see the daylight. Telling me the right thing to do. Lecturing me when I’m being stupid.”

A laugh vibrated through Edward’s body, and Holly smiled. “You loved her with all your heart, didn’t you.”

He nodded. “I’ve always had a thing for strong women. You know, the reason I’m not too big on the season is…” His arms tightened again. When they didn’t relax, Holly didn’t complain. “Her last words to me…”

His ragged, pain-filled breath tore at Holly’s heart. She wriggled her arms free and propped herself up on one elbow, crying herself as she caressed the lines of sorrow from beside his taut mouth. “What did Melinda say?”

His eyes crinkled and the tears spilled over. “She was lying there in the snow beside Cara’s body, her own precious life seeping away, and she said…‘Merry Christmas, Daddy.’ She was still happy, still trying to make me feel better, and she said, ‘Merry Christmas.’”

She kissed a tear from the corner of his mouth, kissed another from his cheek and wept along with him.

“Sounds like she was saying, ‘I love you’.”

“Yeah.” Edward’s gaze focused, tearing himself from the past and looking up into her eyes. He was with her now. With her in the warm, soothing dark on this couch. Putting the past to rest. Seeing
her
. Healing. “Yeah. She was saying, ‘I love you.’”

The intensity of the emotions he’d shared blended with the heat stirring between them and transformed into something else entirely. Healing took on a new form as he slipped both hands beneath her camisole and skimmed it off over her head. With little to cover, Holly rarely wore a bra and Edward’s hungry gaze seemed to appreciate that fact.

Aligning her squarely over his body, he pulled one breast into his mouth, the straining tip eagerly budding as he swirled his tongue around the sensitive nipple. Spikes of red-hot desire arrowed through her, landing straight in her womb and making her hips twist against his, seeking release.

Holly cradled his head between her hands, guiding his wicked tongue to the other breast. She pressed kisses to his hair and gasped as he pulled on her, igniting a liquid fire in her veins. “Edward…” His hips bucked beneath her and Holly’s thighs spread open. “Ed…”

He abandoned her breasts to capture her mouth and take her in a thorough, drugging kiss that reached into her heart and granted him whatever he wanted, whatever he needed from her.

The hands that had roamed across her back slid lower, dipping into the waistband of her jeans. Holly ran her hands over his chest, curling hairs prickling her palms and exciting her skin. As one hand slipped deeper beneath the denim to squeeze her bottom, the other came around to work the snap and zipper of her jeans.

“I need you, Stick.” He nipped at her chin. Tongued the spot and nipped her again. “I need you.”

“Yes.” The bulge inside his jeans pushed against her hip and she instinctively moved to cradle him. “Yes.”

His breath was hot and moist and erratic as he inched his way toward her breasts again. “Tell me to back off now, or this is gonna happen.”

Holly pulled his mouth back to hers and kissed him hard, squeezing him through their jeans. “Trust me, sweetheart, my answer is yes.”

With a sweep of motion and a creak of leather and a dozen more kisses, Holly was naked, pinned beneath Edward’s strong, male body. He’d paused long enough to cover himself, but now he was stretching her arms above her head, nudging her thighs apart with his knee, and she was loving it. Loving him.

He entered her slowly and Holly arched at the almost instantaneous heat that burst into flame at the spot where their bodies joined, groaning with delight as she adjusted to take more of him. “Are you all right?” He quickly withdrew, grunting at the effort it took to hold himself back. “I’m so out of practice. If I hurt you—”

“Damn it, Edward.” She pulled her hands free and forced him to look her in the eye. “You did not hurt me. You
will
not hurt me. Not with this or anything else. I’m one of those strong women you talked about. The ones you can’t resist? I want you in me. Now.”

He smiled.

“That I can do.”

He took her in one long stroke and Holly convulsed around him. By the time he’d pumped his release inside her, she was crying out his name, shouting out her pleasure and welcoming him straight into her heart.

S
OMETIME DURING THE NIGHT
, Edward roused himself from the clinging delight of Holly’s naked body. His first intention had been to retrieve the blanket that had fallen to the floor so he could cover her. But now he found the blanket hanging from his hand while he watched her sleep.

As the glow from the firelight warmed her creamy skin, he checked her from head to toe, looking for bruises or any other kind of injury or discomfort he might have caused her. He touched a dark spot here. No, just a shadow. He brushed a pink abrasion on the swell of her breast, wishing he’d taken the time to shave before he’d left the mark of passion on her.

He dipped his nose into the sugary vanilla warmth of her hair, breathing in her scent as he draped the blanket around her. He didn’t have any problem keeping her warm on a winter’s night with the shelter of his body, but he thought he should do something a little more tender, show her a little more finesse, than that bull-in-a-china-shop rut she’d shared with him earlier.

Despite her claim that she was a strong woman—and in countless ways, she was—Holly was also a woman who had stitches in her head and a hugely compassionate heart. She’d cried at the tragic beauty of Melinda’s short life, had shared his sorrow and listened and kissed away his own tears.

And then, when the emotions became too much—while the barriers were down and he could no longer filter his reactions through the mores of polite society, she’d given him her body. She’d offered herself like a balm to his ravaged soul, and he’d taken everything she was willing to give. Edward had buried himself so deep inside her that he lost himself. He hadn’t felt the pain then, hadn’t felt the sorrow. He hadn’t been able to feel anything beyond his need for this sweet, smart woman.

He owed her far more than sexual release, far more than his thanks.

With a sigh that whispered across his skin, she settled more closely against him. Content. Secure. Trusting.

Her thigh accidentally brushed between his and Edward jerked, wanting her all over again.

“Satisfied that I’m in one piece?” Her drowsy voice was as intimate as a caress.

“Relieved,” he answered honestly, surprised to discover she was awake. Maybe that touch hadn’t been so accidental, after all. He began to think he’d been had. Drawing light circles against the soft skin of her back, he raised a riot of goose bumps and she shivered.

“Brrr.”

“Serves you right.” He smiled against her hair. “Spying on me when I’m trying to look my fill of you.”

The long, tall vixen sat up, letting the blanket pool around her hips and exposing every lean, perfect curve to the dappling touch of the firelight. Edward wanted to touch, too. She pulled his hands from her waist and lifted them right up to cover her breasts.

“Seen enough?”

All he could do was shake his head as she straddled him.

The embers between them fanned back to life and burned with equal intensity the second time around. In a glorious conflagration, he thrust himself up inside her and she cried out with a passion that made him feel like a whole man, a talented lover and one lucky son of a gun.

This time, when they finished, he led her to his bedroom and tucked her under the covers on a proper mattress. When he reached for her, she came willingly into his arms.

Edward lay awake in the dark, long after Holly’s soft snore told him she’d fallen into a deep sleep.

He was fighting hard to fix his armor back into place, listening for sounds around the perimeter of the house that might indicate anyone who shouldn’t be there. He tried to get the tough guy back who could spot the bad guys and keep them at bay long before they got close to the people he cared about. He tried to figure out how strong he could be when she wasn’t around to drive him to an AA meeting or listen to his sorrows or talk him out of his fears.

He could call his sponsor, make an appointment with a counselor. Those questions he could answer.