The Edge of Heaven (38 page)

"You're sure?"

She nodded. The pseudo-cop looked at Rye. "That your truck?"

"Yes," he admitted.

"You need to come with me, so I can write you a little ticket. It's a permit-only zone, and I don't think you're a student, are you?"

"Not quite."

He was almost desperate enough to claim to be Emma's uncle. Had he really sunk to that level? To ever claim that relationship with her? If the cop had heard enough of their conversation, he'd really love that part. Rye was an ex-con sleeping with his brother's adopted daughter. Days just didn't get any better than this.

"Emma, please come with me," he said. She shook her head.

"We're not done," he told her. Shit, he sounded just like her old friend Mark, who'd made a threat just like that.

"You gonna go? Or am I going to take you in?" the officer asked.

"I'm going."

Straight to hell
,
it seemed.
Straight to hell.

Chapter 18

He kept calling. She kept hanging up, when she answered the phone at all. Melanie, Emma's roommate, talked to him several times when Emma wouldn't and claimed he sounded honestly sorry, worried, and as baffled as any man could be. He left long, apologetic messages on her voice mail.

In her saddest moments, Emma worried that she was acting like the kid he'd accused her of being.

Then he started with the flowers. Tiny, pale, pale pink roses. They were so pretty, she couldn't resist. The card said simply
I'm sorry.

Sorry about what? Because she'd humiliated herself in front of him? Or because he'd made love to her. Okay, he'd had sex with her, and she'd made love to him, and it had been... Oh, her whole body started trembling just thinking about it.

"That good, huh?" Melanie had said, when Emma had stumbled through her explanation of what had happened.

Yes, it had been that good, everything she'd ever dreamed it would be, except she'd blackmailed her way into his bed. If that wasn't bad enough, she'd told him she loved him. She'd told him she'd been waiting for him and even now, she couldn't get him out of her head or her heart.

Thankfully, he finally stopped calling. She sat in her room staring at her flowers. Four days later, just as they'd started to wilt, she got more, lavender colored this time. The card said,
Please talk to me.

She had terribly erotic dreams about him. If years of wanting him were bad, wanting him now—knowing what she was missing—was even worse. She relived every moment, every touch of his hands and the feel of him moving over her and inside of her. How was she ever supposed to forget him now?

More flowers came, soft yellow.
Please don't do anything crazy.

Like what? All she'd wanted to do was break his hold on her, move on with her life. Going to bed with someone seemed like a drastic step to take, but she'd been desperate. All this time, she'd been saving herself for him. Having sex with someone else meant giving up on that dream, giving up on him, which she had to do.

It had all made some kind of twisted sense to her a few weeks ago.

Flowers kept coming. His cards got funnier.

Emma,

I hope you're finding this amusing, because the clerks at the floral shop in the next town sure are. I drive over there, because I don't want everyone in town to know I'm sending you flowers. The florists know me by name now, and they've got a pool going as to what I did to make you so mad at me that even all these flowers haven't gotten me out of the doghouse. I need to see you. I need to talk to you. My birthday's next week. Grace is making me a cake with black icing (I think she's still mad at me for not coming to your party) and I know this isn't a conversation to have with an audience, but maybe we could go somewhere afterward. Please?

Emma folded the card and slipped it into the envelope. It was ridiculously small. He'd put the message in the tiniest print and scrawled it on both sides of the card to make it fit.

She missed him like crazy.

She had a million things to do, papers to write, projects to finish. Finals were only six weeks away, and she'd hardly done anything but fret.

"Doesn't look like he's going to give up anytime soon," Mel said.

"He feels guilty. He has this whole protective thing going with me, always has. But that's it."

"How do you know?"

"Mel, he's ignored me for more than two years."

"And now you've managed to get his attention."

"By doing something stupid."

"Emma, you've been feeling rotten for two years, and if there was anything you could have possibly done to get his attention, you would have. Well, you finally did it. Maybe not in the way you'd have liked, but he's paying attention. What are you going to do about it?"

She couldn't decide. Like a coward, she caught a ride with a friend who was going to Baxter the weekend of Rye's birthday, and then couldn't bring herself to go to her own house that day. The whole charade between them had turned into something like a divorce. They shared custody of the family. Today was his day to have them.

She lingered outside, watching and waiting from a house two doors down, and when the party broke up around seven, he came walking down the street to his truck, parked not far from her. She stepped out from her hiding place next to the shrubbery as he'd just finished loading up his stash of gifts.

He turned around and stared at her. "I thought I was going to have to hunt you down tonight."

"Hunt me down?"

He nodded. "I'm tired of being reasonable. I'm tired of trying to figure out what I did that was so wrong and begging you to talk to me."

"You didn't do anything wrong."

"I must have. You disappeared. I know you're not up on all the morning-after etiquette, but it's really rude to run out without saying a thing or giving the person you were with a chance to say anything. I had a lot I wanted to say."

"Sorry. I couldn't..." she said. "I just couldn't stand to face you."

"Well, you're going to face me now." He opened up the passenger-side door and said, "Get in the truck."

She got in. He took her back to his house. She studied it without the alcoholic haze that had hampered her view or her memory of the time before.

"The house looks nice. You're almost done, aren't you?"

"Almost," he said, taking her hand and helping her out of the truck. Almost like they were on a date.

Emma closed her eyes and tried to steel herself for what was to come. For more of his guilt and his outrage over her whole stupid plan.

He unlocked the front door and flicked on the lights. She stood there in the foyer looking all around. He still hadn't stained or varnished the floors or painted or papered the walls, and it had been two months.

"Having trouble making up your mind what you want?" she asked.

He'd shrugged off his coat and hung it on a peg on the wall, and now he was reaching for hers, drawing it off her shoulders and hanging it up as well. When he turned back to her, he was smiling.

"I know exactly what I want, Emma. I just haven't let myself have it." There was heat coming off his body and a world of possibilities in his eyes.

"I was talking about the house," she said.

"I wasn't."

Oh.

"And you know what?" he said. "I'm getting really tired of not letting myself have what I want."

Well...
What was she supposed to say to that?

He was coming closer, too. Not that there was anyplace to go, really. She took a step back, which brought her against the wall.

He turned off the lights he'd just turned on a moment before, and she really didn't understand. Not until he put one of his hands on the wall just to the left of her head, the other by her right shoulder and leaned into her, until she could very nearly feel the imprint of his altogether impressive body against hers. It was just a breath away, a whisper.

What was he doing?

She'd expected to get lectured about her own safety and waiting until she was older and in love. With anyone
but
him. She hadn't expected him to touch her at all.

"Was that it, Emma? The wanting part? Could you possibly think I didn't want you that night?" He was smiling in the most understanding way.

She was near tears. "I didn't give you much choice in the matter."

"I can say no." He came nearly close enough to touch his lips to hers. "I do it all the time."

"Oh, right—"

"And the revolving door line? That really wasn't very nice."

"You have a different woman every six weeks," she reminded him.

"Not in my bed," he said.

"Okay, in theirs—"

"Nope."

"Rye—"

"I told you, I'm really tired of not getting what I want, especially now that I know what it's like. That my body knows. Now that I know you want me just as much. Tell me that, Emma. Tell me you want me half as much as I want you."

"More," she said. "I must want you more because—"

He shut off the words with a kiss, a ruthless, ravaging, wild kiss. It was like someone opening the door on a furnace—an instantaneous blast of pure heat. He brought his body fully into contact with hers, pressing her against the wall and attacking with lightning-fast hands.

They were everywhere, working furiously over the buttons of her blouse and tugging down the straps of her bra. Undoing the button at the back of her skirt and tugging the blouse up until he found skin, tunneling up under her skirt until he got his hands inside her panties and found even more skin.

It was like going from zero to sixty in about three seconds flat.

All of a sudden, she remembered everything she'd tried so hard to forget, that glorious, hard body of his, and his wicked mouth, the slight roughness to the skin of his hands, a working man's hands. He surged against her. She put her hand between his legs and rubbed the hard ridge nestled against her belly.

He groaned and ripped his mouth from hers long enough to say, "Help."

She unbuttoned his jeans and unzipped. He shoved them and his briefs down, pulled down her panties as well.

"Rye?"

"It's been two months, Emma."

It had been, and if she was any judge of the situation, he was desperate for her.

His hands went beneath her skirt once more. Palming her hips, he lifted her feet off the ground and urged her thighs apart. It left her completely open to him. He settled himself between her thighs, her firmly against the wall. She wrapped her legs around his waist, for balance in her precarious position at first, and then because it was the only real leverage she had to pull him closer.

She was wet, just like that. He teased her, letting the full length of his erection slide along her slick, wet heat. It was so very wicked, knowing one subtle little shift of his body and hers, and he'd be right there, right where she wanted him.

"Rye," she groaned.

"Does this feel like a man whose arm you had to twist to get him here?"

"No." She laughed.

"Tell me that little shot of yours is still working."

"Shot?"

"Birth control, Emma."

"Oh. Yes." She'd gotten an e-mail last week to remind her it would be time to come in for another one in a few weeks, so she was still good. Still safe. And in just a minute, he would be inside of her.

"Rye," she said again.

"I'm coming. Promise." He grinned against her mouth. "Open up for me."

She thought he meant her mouth, but that wasn't it. He lifted her just a fraction of an inch higher and gave a little thrust of his hips. There he was. Right there. It was still a stretch. He still made her feel so full, overwhelmed almost. Like she just couldn't quite take him, but in the end, she did.

He slid home, gave a very contented-sounding sigh, his face right next to hers, his gaze locked on hers. For a second, they hung there together, time frozen around them, while they were as close as two people could be.