After a soft kiss he whispered his answer. “Love. Love does that. It took me about forty seconds to understand something was different when we first met. It took me four more minutes to understand you were not going to fall at my feet like every other woman. It took me around forty-eight hours to understand why. It took me another forty-eight days to admit to myself that Hayes Rutherford the Fourth had fallen in love.”
“With a girl like me,” I said to finish his sentence.
He silenced me with his lips for another long, hot, wet kiss before he lifted his head just enough to hold my eyes. “No, that was the end of the sentence. That was it. That Hayes Rutherford fell in love. I didn’t think I was capable of loving someone the way I love you. I truly believed I was broken after what happened in my driveway all those years ago. Apparently, I wasn’t broken, I was just waiting.”
“Waiting,” I squeaked, tears in my eyes from hearing him say I love you.
He ran his finger down my cheek, brushing away a tear. “Yeah, waiting. Waiting for you. Waiting for the life we could share together if I stopped being a complete idiot and told you how I felt. Waiting to find out if you felt the same way. Waiting to continue our story. The one we started here two months ago.”
I nodded, my lips trembling instead of forming the words I wanted to say. “You love me?” I finally managed to voice the one question I had to know the answer to. My voice was wobbly and unsure, but I couldn’t take it back now.
He rested his forehead on mine and kissed me for a brief, heart rendering second before he spoke. “With all of me. I understand you’re probably scared, or even still mad at me for deserting you, but there’s a wonderfulness to this feeling I want you to experience. Do you feel it?”
I nodded my head slowly with him. It was easier than speaking. I couldn’t make the words be what I wanted them to be. “I do feel it. I’ve felt it since the first day you were here when I was convinced you were a dick.” He snorted with laughter, but his gaze came right back to mine and he stroked my cheek with all the love in the world.
“I was a dick, but the essence of you set me up on my axis and told me I didn’t have to be. When I accepted the idea into my heart that I could be who I wanted to be and still be successful, it was mind-blowing. That only happened because of you.”
I leaned my cheek into his hand to keep him from breaking contact. “You showed me a different side of Hayes than you showed the rest of the world. You showed me the flawed side and that meant more to me than any other way you could have tried to win me. I’m flawed in so many ways, Hayes.”
“We all are, beautiful,” he assured me, kissing my palm, “because we’re human.”
“But all I saw were my flaws, except when I was with you. When we were together, I forgot about everything other than how much you made me feel like my flaws didn’t matter. Never, ever, even in my marriage, did I feel that way.”
He winked and gave me a tender lip tilt. “So, you’re saying you love me too?”
I laughed softly, the joy in my heart overpowering for more than one reason. “I do love you. Even if you left me here to believe I’d never see you again. The pure joy of seeing you standing in my store today told me I wasn’t wrong about the way I was feeling.”
He cupped my face and kissed me, his tongue hot, wet, and strong against mine. “No, you’re not wrong, Mercy. I’m about to show you how right you are,” he whispered, his strong arms lifting me off the couch and carrying me to ecstasy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
MERCY
He stroked my face tenderly, his intentions obvious. He was ready for lovemaking after a long two months apart. “You’re the most exquisite woman I’ve ever been with, Mercy.”
I raised a brow while he suckled my nipple into his mouth. “Doubtful,” I moaned, but my body reacted to his teasing by arching upward.
He bit down on my nipple roughly and I cried out, my hand holding his head. I fought the tears that came to my eyes. “Stop,” I hissed. “I’m tender tonight.”
He gazed up at me from my breast, his eyes apologetic while he soothed the sting away. “I’m sorry, but that’s what happens when you cut yourself down,” he scolded. “I’ll have to work extra hard now to remind you of my love.”
He kissed his way across my belly and dipped his tongue into my belly button. “I can’t wait to be buried in you so deep I can’t breathe.” He moaned and rubbed himself against my leg instinctively. “My dick is straining at just the idea of being inside you again.”
I ran my fingers through his hair until he moved lower, his forceful hands splaying my legs apart. “Don’t you ever need sleep?”
“Not when I have you in my bed,” he assured me, kissing his way to my triangle.
“But it’s my bed,” I squeaked when he lapped his tongue the length of me.
“Same difference. Now, be quiet while I eat,” he warned, his tongue teasing me into a frenzy.
“Shit, Hayes,” I moaned, my thighs quivering while he teased and taunted me. “I want to cum around you,” I cried, writhing under him, my eyes squeezed shut and my hips finding air. His tongue was gone and I was sliding by my ankles to the end of the bed.
When my eyes came open, he was hanging over me, his hips thrusting forward in one smooth motion to join us again. The moan that ripped from his throat when he slid into me lasted the length of him until he was buried so deep neither of us could breathe. “Jesus, Mercy,” he hissed, his hips thrusting even while he tried to stay still. “Where the hell have you been all my life?”
“Waiting for you,” I whispered, my hand on his cheek, his lips kissing my thumb. His hips took over the rhythm, stroking and caressing while his lips did the same to mine. His kiss was hot and wet, and with every pump of his hips, his moans filled my head with absolute abandon.
“You’re the only woman I’ll ever need,” he promised, pushing himself up on his hands to quicken his pace. He wrapped my legs around his waist in a desperate attempt to go deeper. “I want this to last, but I’m lost, baby,” he moaned, his words broken by our harsh breathing.
“I’m so close,” I cried, my legs tightening on his waist when he slowed his strokes. He grasped my ass and made love to me with the passion and hunger of a man who had found what he so desperately needed.
The first wave started and I arched upward. “God, yeah,” he cried, his hips bucking until he was buried all the way inside me. My walls squeezed him and I cried his name, waiting to hear his grunt of satisfaction as he let go and released. What I heard instead was my name cried plaintively when he came, his body twitching in total release and trust of what we were together.
Before I made it all the way back to earth, he had me in his arms, kissing my jawline and lips tenderly. “I got you,” he promised, holding me to him. “I love you, Mercy. I don’t know how this will work, but I will never love another woman. You’re mine and I’m yours, forever.”
I gazed up at him, his eyes a dim blue in the moonlight. I let my fingers stroke his beard while I searched his eyes for any hidden agenda, but there was nothing there but satisfied and sated love.
“I love you, Hayes. I don’t know how this will work, or if it even will, but I’ve never loved until you taught me how. For that, I will always love you.”
His lips landed on mine in an easy kiss of acceptance and all I could think about was the one secret that still lay between us.
Hayes
I hated the fact that it was Sunday. Sunday meant I had to leave her and drive back to an empty house and an empty soul. We had spent the weekend working around the camp alongside each other, and when she wasn’t making beds, she was in hers, with me on top of her, loving her senseless. My head was filled with her and I didn’t want to leave, but my responsibilities to the business were waiting. To that end, I would shower, put on clean clothes, kiss her goodbye and promise to be back next weekend.
I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, laughing at the satisfied and sexed up face staring b
ack at me. I was dopey in love and I was loving every single second of it. I pushed off the vanity and opened the side cupboard for a towel. I’d prefer she was in the shower with me, but she had to deal with a client. We’d shared a half a dozen showers this weekend and I can promise you, it wasn’t the hot water steaming up the room. I closed my eyes against the memory of making love to her up against the wall with the water raining down on us.
I rubbed my now hard groin. “Dammit,” I said, laughing. “I made love to her all weekend and I’m still hard. This woman.” I shook my head, but the smile on my face said it all. I was definitely keeping her to myself for the rest of my life.
I reached in to grab a towel and something fell out onto the floor. I threw the towel on the vanity and bent over to pick it up, stopping halfway down. “What the fuck?” I whispered, squatting and staring at the box without touching it. “EPT?” I turned my head at an angle to read the box. “Why does she have a box of pregnancy tests in the cabinet?”
I worked up the courage to pick it up and noted a double pack was now a single pack. My heart paused in my chest, forgetting to beat when the realization set in. “Okay, maybe she just thought she was pregnant and forgot you can’t have kids, Hayes.” That was a logical explanation. Since there was a test left that meant the first one was negative. I heaved out a breath. “Or the first one was positive and she didn’t need the second one. What the hell do I do now?”
I grasped the box in my hand and opened the bathroom door calmly, stalking to the kitchen where I could hear her preparing lunch. When I stepped into the room she glanced up, a smile on her face. “Hey,” she said, perplexed. “I thought you were taking a shower.”
“I was,” I agreed, “but when I went to get a towel, this fell out.” I tossed the box on the island and her eyes widened. “There’s one missing.”
She lowered her butter knife slowly and laid it on the cutting board. “That’s because I used it.”
“And it was negative, which you should have already known.”
She shook her head in an imperceptible movement of fear. “No, it was positive, which I wasn’t expecting considering what you told me.”
My heart stopped beating and shattered into a million pieces at the same time.
“The doctor estimates that I’m due September eighteenth, which means I conceived around Christmas Eve.”
“I wasn’t here on Christmas Eve, oh and I can’t have children,” I ground out, forcing the tears back.
“Hayes, you were here on Christmas Eve, at least until two a.m., and you spent the majority of those hours making love to me, dick down without a condom, so don’t tell me you weren’t here.”
“Mercy,” I said sarcastically. “Dick down with no condom or not, I can’t have children,” I said, throwing my hands up in the air. “Nada, none, never, so who the fuck is the father, because it sure as hell isn’t me! Who were you dicking around with after I left your bed? I didn’t take you as the kind to whore around with multiple men at once.”
A tear ran down her cheek and she swiped it away with her shoulder. “No one. You’re the only man I’ve been with in four years.”
I had no intention of listening to her lies. I was angry, hurt, and heartbroken at her betrayal. “Are you kidding me? Nice try, sweetheart, but I wasn’t born yesterday. What did you think you were going to do? Pass the kid off as a Rutherford? Like I wouldn’t catch on to your game when I literally had surgery to prevent this?” I stood there shaking my head. “Fuck,” I whispered, my hand in my hair. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Hayes,” she said, coming around the island, but I held my hand up, turned, and walked away.
What killed me the most was knowing the look on her face in that kitchen would be the last look I ever saw on it. Tears streaming down her cheeks and her face twisted into a mask of horror and pain that was mirrored on my own.
My brother paced in front of me like a caged animal ready to pounce. “What the fuck were you thinking, Hayes?” he asked for the third time since he’d picked me up.
I leaned back in the dining room chair and crossed my legs at my ankles. I was feeling no pain and could patiently wait for him to leave. If I didn’t answer him, eventually he’d tire and walk away. But he didn’t, so I had to use my pickled brain to force him to leave.
“How did you find me, Caleb?” My words slurred just slightly on his name, telling me I’d definitely had enough to drink.
He stopped pacing and leaned on the island in my kitchen. The scene reminded me of the one earlier today at Cashmere Camp when I walked away from the one woman I had hoped to spend the rest of my life with.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “maybe it was the sixteen phone calls I got telling me my brother was at a dive bar on the edge of town. But then I thought, no, that’s not possible. Hayes Rutherford has had enough bad press lately. He wouldn’t create more problems for himself. They must be mistaken. Lo and behold, I drive to said dive bar and find your SUV in the parking lot. Now I ask you again, what the fuck were you thinking?”
“Screw you, Caleb. I’m an adult. I’m free to go to a bar anytime I please without my little brother policing me.”
“Absolutely,” he agreed, his head nodding, “but not looking like you do. You’re wearing your suit from Friday, you smell like sex, or at least you did until you drank a bottle of whiskey, and you look like you were run over by a truck. What happened out there?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, my voice clipped to hold the sloppy drunk tears at bay.
He handed me a bottle of water. “Hydrate. You’ll thank me in the morning.”
“Caleb, I only had four shots,” I spat, but I brought the bottle to my lips anyway.
“Which is four shots more than you normally have on a Sunday night.”
I sucked the water bottle dry to avoid more discussion with him, at least until my mind could catch up to his questions and think of good answers.
What the fuck happened out there?
Even I didn’t know.
“Hayes, something clearly happened,” he prodded gently.
I rubbed my temple and swallowed back the bile. “Yeah, something happened, okay? She told me she’s pregnant.”
He grasped the edge of the island and sucked in a breath. “What the actual fuck?”
I held out my hand as if to say, I know, right? “I just walked away, Caleb. It literally tore me apart inside.”
“Wait,” he said, waving his hand in the air, “you really do love this girl, don’t you?”
“With my soul,” I agreed, and his brows went up. I was too drunk to pretend I wasn’t brokenhearted anymore and it all came pouring out. “What I have with Mercy transcends the physical. It’s a soul thing. When I’m with her it’s not about the physical attraction or release. It’s about the emotional connection we share. It’s about how I knew more about her in the first four minutes I was in the store than I’d ever known about any woman I’d ever dated before. I’ve never had anyone in my life like her. I love her, and that’s what’s killing me the most right now. This has nothing to do with the fact that she’s pregnant and everything to do with the fact that it’s not mine.”
He lowered himself to a chair and rested his elbow on the table. “How do you know it’s not yours?”
I threw my arms out to the side in sarcastic laughter. “Dude, you know I had a vasectomy years ago. It’s not mine.”
“Dad had a vasectomy after you were born, too. They had one boy and one girl and they were happy, yet here I sit.”
I waved my hand at him. “Wait, what?”
“Yeah, I’m what they call a post-vasectomy baby. It happens, dude. When were you checked last?”
“Right after the surgery and the sample was clear. The doctor told me I was good to go,” I answered slowly, hope building in my heart, until realization dawned. “No, not possible. Why didn’t I get any other woman I slept with pregnant if I wasn’t sterile?”
>
He patted the table and swallowed. “I want to lodge the complaint that I’m super uncomfortable here, but I’m diving in because you’re my brother and my best friend, and I love you. You’re hurting and that’s hard to watch, so let’s work the problem. Did you wear a condom every time you were with Mercy?”
My fingers went into my hair and I locked them in. “No. I never wore a condom with Mercy.”
He paused and shook his head as though he was making sense of my words. “Let’s forget about the fact that you didn’t use a condom with this woman because that’s,” he did the mind-blowing sign with his hands. “Did you always wear a condom with the other women?”
I nodded, his body zigzagging in my line of sight when the alcohol kicked hard into my bloodstream. “Every time without fail, religiously.”
“It stands to reason then that you didn’t get anyone else pregnant because you were using another form of birth control. Why didn’t you with Mercy?”
I held up my hands, palms up. “It never crossed my mind. I knew I was sterile and she wouldn’t get pregnant. I don’t know. We just lost ourselves in each other and it never crossed our minds. I don’t know what to do now.”
“Explain,” he encouraged, motioning for me to keep talking.
“I’m dying inside, Caleb. I want Mercy in my life forever. I want to wake up next to her, lay down next to her, and spend Christmases, birthdays, and every day in between with her. I want to grow old with her. She’s the first woman I even considered using my stored swimmers to have a child with. What does that tell you?”
He blew out a breath. “That tells me you have a real problem on your hands, but there’s a solution.”
“God, I hope so,” I begged, my heart so heavy in my chest I slumped forward, resting my head on the table. “I hope so.”
He patted my shoulder and then squeezed it. “Tomorrow is Monday. We’ll make you an appointment and you can go in and get tested. If they don’t find any little swimmers, then she was dicking around on you and you’re better off without her. If, on the other hand, they find you still have little swimmers, then you have some apologies to make.”
The Secrets Between Us (Billionaire CEO Romance) Page 22
