Touch Me (8 page)

Maybe it would have been a purely mental adoration. But when she’d invited him in, he’d muttered something about Lily still being mad at him and then he’d cupped one side of her face in his big hand, the look in his eyes warm.

Brotherly.

“Get going, kid,” he’d said, then briefly pressed the pad of his thumb against the fattest part of her bottom lip.

With that one touch, she’d awakened. Her scalp went hot and the warmth rolled over her head toward her feet. Tingles spread from her middle outward.

For the first time in her life she’d gone wet between her thighs.

The Rose who’d climbed into the car a girl climbed out a sexually conscious being, her devotion to Payne no longer cerebral.

She shivered now, remembering the overwhelming but bewildering excitement that had run through her then.

“Where’d you go, Rose?”

Starting at the sound of Lily’s voice, she looked up. Her sister was patting the baby’s back, a line between her arched brows.

Rose waved a hand. “To the past.”

Lily looked even more fierce, her mouth turning down in a frown. “If this is about that bastard Blake—”

“Maybe it wasn’t all his fault,” she said quickly, thinking that topic was safer than the man on her mind. “I’m sure it didn’t help that I added up columns of numbers when we were together in bed.”

“I take it you mean not when it came time to count sheep.”

“Nuh-uh.” She ran a fingertip along a vein in the granite. “Sometimes I practiced my times tables. The sixteens.”

“Rose.” Lily looked on her with pity. “That’s just…”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said.

“You should have known he wasn’t the right guy before you moved in together,” her sister said.

“Oh, it was the same with my first, too. Jerry Dyrtle.”

Lily tried burying her snort of laughter in the blanket swaddling Marcus. “Jerry Dyrtle?”

“He couldn’t help his name. It was spring semester freshman year. I met him in Intro to Accounting.”

“You did times tables with him too?”

“Ran through financial glossary terms,” Rose admitted on a sigh.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I had this one very hot guy for one night junior year. But…”

Lily was biting back her smile. “Do tell.”

“I was a little drunk. I believe I spent most of those hours cursing whoever thought it was a good idea to combine cheap white wine and orange sherbet and trying not to puke.”

“And then…”

Rose shook her head. “Blake. Sixteen times thirteen is two hundred and eight.”

It made Lily laugh again, though she tried to hold it back until it released in a snorting sort of cough.

“Oh, go ahead and let it out. Though I don’t think it’s quite fair since
you
had the advantage of being initiated by Payne Colson.” Over the years, Rose had tried hard not to think too much about that.

Lily’s eyes were still bright but her laughter stopped. “I never slept with Payne.”

Rose jerked back. “No?”

“No.” She glanced down at her son. “I’m not sure I feel comfortable confessing this in front of Marcus.”

“Of course.” Rose waved both hands. “We don’t have to—”

“I’m teasing.” She lifted the baby and bussed his tiny nose. “He’s good at keeping secrets.”

“Lil—”

“It’s was Gavin. It’s always, and only, been Gavin.”

“Your
husband
?”

“That’s the one.” Mischief tilted her smile. “And I’ve never done times tables, I promise you.”

“Or Payne,” Rose murmured, wondering about that all over again.

“Or Payne. There were reasons.”

Was one of them her and her impetuous, desperate attempt to give herself to him? Rose flushed with guilt.

“He didn’t push,” Lily said.

Rose took a deep breath. “Uh…here’s the thing. I might have pushed him.”

Lily’s expression didn’t look angry, just surprised. “What are you talking about?”

So Rose tried to explain. Ice cream, car rides, a rescue from jerks. Her intense crush. “And then you two were, um, fighting.”

Lily seated herself on one of the stools, Marcus still cradled against her. “I remember.”

“So one night I was staying over at Amalie Irwin’s house and she had hidden a bottle of peppermint liqueur in her closet…”

“And she lived not far from the Velvet Lemons compound.”

“So after a few swallows of the stuff, I snuck over there. The gates were open and I had Payne’s number, so I called him. He found me before I’d made it very far onto the grounds.” She recalled his puzzled expression, his concern that something was wrong.

“I sort of launched myself on him,” she confessed. “With my previous kissing experience a few experiments the summer before with that boy I met on the lake during vacation…well, I was enthusiastic, but not very practiced.”

Lily appeared bemused. “What did Payne do?”

“Pushed me away, and pretty quickly at that.” She remembered the thunderous expression on his face. “Humiliated, I ran off, though he followed me all the way back to Amalie’s—I guess to make sure I was safe. Before I slipped back into her house he told me to never touch him again.”

“Oh, poor Rose.” Lily reached out and stroked her hair.

“You shouldn’t be nice to me. I broke one of the basic rules of sisterhood.” She glanced up at her sister. “Will you forgive me anyway?”

“Of course. That was ages ago, you were just a kid, and it’s probably the only rule you’ve ever broken in your life.”

Rose’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah, well, look how great it turned out.”

Lily gently put a sleeping Marcus back into the chair, then perched on the neighboring stool. “You’ve been agonizing over this for a long time.”

“I think I have.” Rose met her sister’s gaze. “There’s something else you should know. I just heard he’s still hung up on you.”

Instead of expressing concern or consternation, her sister went off into laughter again.

Rose stared. “It’s funny?”

Lily shook her head. “It’s B.S. I’ve heard it before and it’s not the least bit true. I’m his excuse and someday I’ll get back at him for that.”

“Excuse?”

“He uses my name to push women away. I think he pulled the idea out of his ass one day and he’s stuck to it because the ploy must work.”

At Lily’s certainty, Rose felt suddenly light. She could take full breaths again. “You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.” Then her sister studied Rose’s face. “Just as I’m sure you’re still crushing on that man.”

Embarrassed, she looked down at her hands. “That would be silly.”

“Hmm…” Lily tapped her fingertips on the granite, seeming to consider a new thought. “You know, ignoring this perfect opportunity would be silly.”

Rose lifted her head. “Perfect opportunity?”

“For a catharsis.” Leaning forward, Lily placed her palms over her son’s little ears. “I think you should go to bed with Payne.”

Rose’s spine snapped straight. “Huh?” Her voice sounded faint.

“Sex,” her sister said, with a waggle of her brows. “If reports hold true, he’s great at it.”

His
kiss
was great, Rose remembered. The tantalizing caress of his goatee had caused her center to soften and her nipples to harden. “I… He’s a player.”

“Which is why you won’t count on him for anything but pleasure. Rule-busting pleasure.”

“R-rule-busting?”

Lily squeezed Rose’s shoulders. “Breathe.”

Not when a thousand half-formed fantasies were racing through her brain. “Rule-busting?” she repeated.

“I think it’s exactly what you need to shake up your life.”

Her insides were shaking just contemplating the idea. But the classes she’d been taking recently in self-defense, flower-arranging, and now knitting hadn’t given her the jolt this notion did. “He wasn’t interested before. Maybe it’s the same now.”

Her sister cocked a brow.

And Rose thought of his mouth on her throat, the blazing blue of his eyes as he looked down at her. The brush of his hard erection against her belly. “Did you say catharsis?”

Lily nodded.

“Catharsis,” Rose whispered to herself. Liberation. From her adolescent fixation that had lasted for far too long. From her mathematical inclination during intimacy.

It would be a reset. A reboot. Rose, 2.0.

Under Payne’s hands, she would be Rose in bloom.

Every instinct she had knew that to be true.

“There’s no future in it, though,” she said. “It would only be temporary.” But maybe her transformation from a woman with petals tightly furled to a female in full blossom would be permanent.

“Temporary,” Lily agreed. “And also no problem if you go into it aware of that fact.”

Good Lord
, Rose thought, pushing her hands through her hair.
Is it possible? Could I have him?

Chapter Five

From the passenger seat of her piece-of-shit sedan, Payne slid Rose a glance. Her focus remained out the windshield, her attention on the winding route taking them from his place in Nichols Canyon to the Lemons compound off Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Her dark hair was smooth, her expression serene, but for the past couple of days he’d sensed something simmering beneath her calm façade.

More than once, he’d caught her looking at him from beneath her dark lashes, the small curve of her crooked half-smile alerting his instincts. Yeah, something was up.

She hadn’t asked him a thing about what Randa and Patrice had said about Lily. Not that he wasn’t damn glad about that—how the hell would he have responded?—but her silence on the subject only made him wonder what the hell was going on inside that busy brain of hers.

Well, he had plenty to occupy his own. He’d been spending a couple of hours a day at the new yard and was just starting to match up the inventory with the existing data base. They’d located the records that supposedly cataloged the boxes of parts that he was certain would prove a gold mine if only he could get them sorted, identified, and marked.

Rose had pitched in to help, lugging cartons and wielding a shop rag and generally getting her hands dirty, though he’d told her it wasn’t part of her job description. She’d only shrugged, but surely she had to be sick of dealing with his messes.

Which was why he couldn’t understand her volunteering to act as chauffeur on a Sunday, when she should be taking a well-deserved day off. But here she was, dressed in a pair of red print shorts that, ridiculously, were edged in white pom poms. She wore them with a loose red T-shirt and a pair of distressed, ankle-high, round-toed boots that almost looked like something to wear for construction or combat. The incongruous combination of flirty outfit and rugged footwear only served to make him more aware of every feminine thing about her: the smooth skin of her legs, the shiny sweep of her hair, the lushness of her lips.

Scowling, he shifted on his seat, his big frame cramped by the narrow confines of her tin-can car. “We should have taken my Jeep.”

“I can’t drive a stick,” she said.

“You didn’t need to drive at all. Ren would have picked me up. Reed, because that SOB owes me, big time.” It was he who had reintroduced Rose into his life.

“You’re crabby today. Didn’t you sleep well?”

When he didn’t answer she flicked a glance at him, eyebrows arched over her smoke-colored eyes.

As if he’d tell her that somehow that sweet fragrance of her hair had transferred itself to his sheets. It was on his towels. In the down of his pillows. He couldn’t even jack-off in the privacy of his own home without feeling as if she was there, witnessing the rough strokes of his hand and the spurts of semen erupting over his fist.

That morning he’d groaned out her name as he came.

The night before, too.

“Are you hurting, Payne?” she asked, her voice now filled with concern. “I have pain relievers in my purse.”

“You don’t have anything in your purse that can fix this,” he muttered, and stared out at the tangle of vegetation on the side of the road. February, and it looked like summer. “I still don’t understand why you agreed to come to lunch today. You have to have better things to do.”

She shrugged. “I could stand to get out and meet people. Since I haven’t lived here in years, I’m essentially new to the area.”

Which reminded him he didn’t know exactly why she’d left Seattle. She’d mentioned wanting a life change, but those were prompted by an event, right? Looking her way, he opened his mouth to inquire, then closed it. His questions might invite her questions which might circle back to the Lily lie.

Let her keep her secrets.

Noting her phone and attached earbuds set in the console between them, he snatched it up without asking permission. Tucking the small speakers into his ears, he tapped the audio book app.

The duke had turned bolder.

His tanned hand trailed down Annalise’s pale, smooth belly. The springy curls at the apex of her thighs was no protector of her virtue. Through the fine screen of hair he could see the flushed lips of her sex. He touched her there, opening the delicate folds so her arousal bathed his fingertips. She squirmed on the sheets and he flattened his hand over her mons, feeling the jut of her pearl, hard and pulsing, against his palm.

“Be still, darling,” he ordered. “Or I’ll have to punish you.”

Suddenly Rose snatched the buds from his ears and dropped them and the phone into her own lap. “Do you mind?”

No. Because another ten seconds of listening to her romance novel might have him making his own demands.
Is that how you like it, Rose? Do you want a man to take over your body in bed?

He wasn’t going to get personal.

At the compound, he breathed a sigh of relief. Their group looked to be in full force, eight of the Velvet Lemons kids along with the significant others who had lately entered their lives. That included Reed’s fiancée Cleo and her two sons, Bing’s Alexa, and Walsh was there with Honey and her twin siblings, Lucy and Jeb.

Tribe, indeed.

Each member of the Velvet Lemons band had their own house on the property. A castle-like structure where Mad Dog Maddox lived, the modern monstrosity that Hop Hopkins had built, and the Western-styled home where Payne, Ren, and Cami grew up. As usual, Cilla had set up a buffet in the outdoor kitchen and dining area near there.