by Stacey Keith
“What if I barf? That’s going to look a lot worse.”
Cassidy put her hands up, but couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m standing clear.”
“I heard that a kid went on the Hammer once and stood up when he wasn’t supposed to and died,” Lexie said, dragging Mason to the back of the line.
“I’m pretty sure that’s an urban myth.” Mason looked back at Cassidy. “What do you think?”
“I think certain people have to be tall enough to go on that ride.”
Lexie craned her neck, searching for the “Must Be This Tall To Ride” sign. When she found it, she rushed over and cleared it by at least four inches. Her smile looked so gleeful, Mason and Cassidy both laughed.
Cassidy watched Mason and her daughter get swallowed up by the line of people waiting for the ride. Some of them recognized him at once and stared, hand-over-mouth, in disbelief. A kid wearing a Lone Stars jersey with Mason’s number on it exchanged a few words with him that Cassidy couldn’t hear, but the boy’s manner was polite and respectful, and by the time he turned back to his dad, his face was all smiles. It made her wonder what Mason had said, and her shy, nervous heart took another painful step in his direction.
Mason looked for her and when their eyes met, something unspoken passed between them. It made it hard for her to swallow or breathe or even think. Her nipples grew hard, proof of the effect he had on her, so that she crossed her arms in embarrassment. My God, what is happening to me, she thought. I’m falling to pieces, like that old Patsy Cline song. She darted a glance around. Probably the whole world knew at this point.
She watched as word traveled that Mason Hannigan was waiting at the back of the line. Lexie was clearly delighted when the crowd parted and she and Mason got whisked up to the front. Cassidy waved to her, craning her neck to see if the roustabout attached Lexie’s shoulder harness before positioning the lap bar. Lexie would have been so annoyed if she’d known how worried her mom was. But hey, that was her heart that was about to get tossed around up there.
“She’s growing up,” came her mother’s voice behind her.
Cassidy whirled around. “Mom!”
Priscilla held her arms out and Cassidy fell into them, surprised by how good it felt to get a hug from someone who probably knew how confused and unbalanced she felt right now. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for Maggie and your father.” Priscilla patted the back of her bright red up-do. “Okay, I might’ve snuck in early to have one of those fried Twinkies,” she confessed. “The devil’s own dessert, if you ask me. There’s no point in letting Maggie see me eat a Twinkie. All she’d do is lecture me about what they put in those things.”
“It’s Lexie’s first time on a scary ride,” Cassidy said.
“Nervous?”
“For a thousand reasons.”
She caught her mother’s probing look but pretended she hadn’t. The gondola containing Mason and Lexie clicked up, up, up, carnival lights flashing. By the time the rotating arm started flinging them around, Cassidy already felt sympathetically queasy.
“Did Mason let himself get talked into that?” Priscilla asked. “That is one love-struck young man.”
Cassidy went squirmy, along with queasy. The relationship—if she dared to call it that—seemed too new, too uncertain to be commented on, even by her mother.
It was too dark to see Lexie and Mason, but she could hear screaming as the two arms of the machine whipped past one another and the gondolas rocketed into the night sky. She’d been on her own emotional Hammer, she realized. Would Lexie get along with Mason, could she, herself, handle the whispers and the staring, would Mason just decide the whole single mom thing was too much trouble? Even more to the point, would her uncontrollable need for him cause her the kind of public humiliation she had already been through and feared the most? Then those parts of her that had been asleep for so long, parts that were now painfully awake and alive, might just shut down permanently, out of pure heartache. The thought of it sent a prickle of dread down her spine.
Mason and Lexie were practically on top of her before she looked up. Lexie’s cheeks were flushed with excitement, her eyes sparkling, and even Mason looked less green around the gills than she expected him to be.
“Grandma,” Lexie said, bursting with obvious pride, “We rode the Hammer!”
“What’s next?” Priscilla replied. “Skydiving?”
Mason leaned down to kiss Priscilla’s cheek, a sweet gesture that made Cassidy’s heart throb with gratitude. “First, combat training with hand grenades, then skydiving.”
Lexie looked at her as though she weren’t completely sure Mason was joking.
“There won’t be any hand grenades,” Cassidy told her firmly.
“Now listen,” Priscilla said, joining arms with her granddaughter, “I’ve got a real hankerin’ to go on that Drop Tower, but I need a brave girl like you to go with me.”
Cassidy handed Nora the Unicorn to Lexie. “The Drop Tower? You hate those rides as much as I do. Last time, you said—”
“Doesn’t matter what I said last time,” Priscilla insisted. “All I need is the right partner in crime. So what do you say, Lex?”
Lexie gave Mason an apologetic smile. “It that okay, Mr. Mason?”
“Of course.” Mason tugged on Lexie’s braid again and then watched her walk away with Priscilla.
Now it was just the two of them, alone, with the blaring music and the racketing generators and the screams and the concessionaires calling out from the midway stands and the burnt motor oil smell coming from the machines. But when Cassidy looked into Mason’s eyes, she had to remind herself where she was.
“I have a confession to make,” he said with a hint of amusement in his deep voice.
“What’s that?”
“When I look at you, I feel like I’m still on that ride.”
* * * *
“That was for our benefit, wasn’t it—your mom kidnapping Lexie?” Mason asked as they walked past a family trying its luck at the clattering Skee-Ball games.
Cassidy tried to picture her mother on any ride that went faster than a senior citizen navigating a parking lot, but came up blank. “If I know her, she probably got my dad or Maggie to do it. No way is she going to mess up her hair.”
“What a family you have, Cass. Lexie, too. I wonder if you know how lucky you are.”
Cassidy smiled up at him. She knew. She also knew that right now, in just this moment, happiness had curled around her like a warm cat. The fairgrounds were a blur of lights and sounds and smells, but the moments that reached her the most intimately were the ones of incidental contact—Mason’s hand on her waist, guiding her through the crowd. His knee brushing hers when they sat down to eat. The time when they were laughing, and tenderly, he lifted a few tendrils of hair away from her face.
An hour ago, they’d stopped to talk with some of Mason’s old teammates from his Cuervo High days: Tommy Lavelle, a former running back who’d married Angela Hooten; Rodney Kemp, who worked in a real estate office at nearby Port Lavaca; and Austin Greeley, who fixed cars in Beeville. Angela actually mouthed the words, “Way to go” to Cassidy behind Tommy’s back, which made her toes curl inside her boots because she felt so intensely shy and proud all at the same time. It pleased her to see that everybody managed to act perfectly normal. No one asked for autographs or even talked about football.
Afterwards, she and Mason petted baby lambs in the 4-H tent. They ate roasted corn on the cob, turkey legs and a slice each of Peggy Blackburn’s blue-ribbon olallieberry pie. Peggy’s pies were tart and sweet, bursting with fat blackberries that she grew in her own backyard. Cassidy dabbed a corner of Mason’s mouth where the juice ran and then felt herself flush with embarrassment. What was she thinking, touching him out here where everyone could see?
When Mason couldn’t talk her into
going on any of the “white knuckle” rides, he finally asked, “Well, what’s the scariest ride you will go on?”
“Do bumper cars qualify as scary?”
“No.”
“How about the baby rollercoaster?”
“That’s not a ride. It’s a lawnmower on train tracks.”
They stopped in front of a big wooden façade with pictures of ghouls painted on it. A double door slammed open, saloon-style, belching out a car full of noisy teens that lurched to a stop in front of them.
Cassidy said, “I know it’s not what you’d consider scary, but I love haunted houses.”
Mason gazed down at her with the restless, almost brooding expression she’d seen on his face earlier. Every cell in her body hummed with an awareness of his masculinity, his physical strength, the penetrating quality of his dark eyes.
Her fingers ached with the need to touch him.
Mason Hannigan was King of the Alpha Males, yet humble in a way that surprised her. In the fundamentals, he’d never changed from the boy she knew in high school, the one who opened doors and pulled out chairs and never rushed her into a sexual relationship, even though she’d dreamed about him constantly and had drawn his initials and hers inside big flowery hearts before balling up the paper in red-faced shame and sailing it into the trash.
But now things were different. She was different. True, she wasn’t a kid any longer, but it was more than that. Except for her one time with Parker, she hadn’t been with anyone since. Ten years of keeping a tight lid on her sensuality, of turning down dates with men whose only crime was not being Mason. Ten years of telling herself it was all for the best, that Lexie needed her, that men were a distraction, that good mothers didn’t. Meanwhile, her sex drive was driving her out of her mind.
Maybe no one had inspired her to pry that lid off until now. But as she tilted her head back to look at Mason, she could feel the walls she’d painstakingly erected fall away and a kind of dreaminess steal over her, as though she were moving through water, and nothing was real or important anymore except her and him and this wild urgency to discover where those feelings might take her.
Mason swept one arm out to indicate a rattling, paint-flaked gondola. “Your chariot awaits.”
She climbed in and he got in after her. The ride operator tipped his baseball cap at Mason, gave her a wink, and then threw the lever for the ride. Two plywood doors flew open and the gondola jerked forward, or maybe it was her heart that jerked forward. They passed into a dark room with flickering black light.
“You’re going to be so scared,” she said. “Just wait and see.” But it was hard to even concentrate because his denim-covered thigh was about half an inch away from hers, and they kept bumping into each other.
The next room echoed with the sound of diabolical laughter. It wasn’t so much the laughter that gave her the creeps as it was a story she’d heard about locals breaking into the haunted house and really scaring people. What if they were here? She inched closer to Mason, close enough to smell his woodsy aftershave. Suddenly, a mechanical clown popped out of a hidden door. The effect was silly, but a ripple of pleasure and relief at Mason’s nearness washed over her. “I know it’s stupid, but I hate clowns.”
“My childhood nightmare was guys in hockey masks. Good thing I can’t skate and I don’t play hockey.”
But he could, she thought loyally. Mason was smart enough, talented enough to do anything. The gondola slid through another set of doors where a trio of zombies pawed at them from about ten feet away, although one did have brains dripping out of his mouth and the eyes looked real enough. Cassidy thought about the mischief-making locals and squeezed closer to Mason. Where their thighs touched, all her nerve endings stirred and tingled.
The gondola gave a rusty wheeze and then wobbled to a stop. “The scariest thing about this ride so far is the fact that we’re stuck,” Mason said.
Cassidy barely noticed. All she saw were his muscular forearms, so different from her own, and the big capable hands that rested on his knees.
Her nearness must have affected him, too, because he went quiet.
They were alone for the first time in their lives, protected by walls, away from prying eyes. Maybe the black light played tricks, but she could tell to the second when that same realization moved across his face, and all at once her heart started pounding so hard she thought it might smother her.
Mason’s eyes were hot, hungry, keen. Cassidy had no idea where she ended and he began but made a sound of desperate yearning just before his lips descended to hers.
Desire for him came roaring out of the place she’d kept it locked away for so many years, a wave of living fire. It burned through her veins and muscles and laid waste to whatever shyness she may have felt because her tongue met his tongue in a dance of delirious longing.
Mason wrenched off her hat and dropped it on the floor of the gondola. His hands grabbed fistfuls of her hair, pulling her closer. She wanted to be closer, wanted him inside her, but all she could do was let him pull her roughly onto his lap. He was already hard. She could feel him through her jeans, and a mournful cry, a cry of thwarted longing, sounded in her throat.
“Cassidy,” he muttered against her lips, “Baby, you’re killing me.”
He rode her desire with a hard bit, skimming her lips with his teeth, his tongue. Innocent as she was, Cassidy knew his mastery came from experience, but none of that meant anything now. She was being consumed from the inside, her sex glutted and swollen with unspent need. The hands clenching her bottom were as hot as branding irons, pushing her against him, and still he wouldn’t stop kissing her. Her own hands needed to feel him everywhere at once—his thick dark hair, his granite shoulders, his hard chest. All her pent-up feelings were rampaging like bloodthirsty marauders, her own zombie apocalypse that had nothing to do with the room they were in.
She had no idea a man could be so big. He throbbed dangerously against her inseam and God help her, she ached for him, wanted him bad enough for the wanting to bring tears to her eyes. Now his hands were on either side of her face so he could plunder her mouth more forcefully. Easy, confident Mason Hannigan was no more. He, too, had unleashed a beast. She sensed how he fought for control, that for him, too, the years had been long and many. He strained against her even as she pressed against him, but there were clothes in the way, and in her delirium she couldn’t be sure the car wasn’t moving again.
“I didn’t know,” he muttered hoarsely. “Jesus, baby, I just didn’t know.”
“Please don’t stop,” she said.
And then she was drowning again, as her craving for him drew her deeper into the vortex. His tongue tested hers before coming back to trace her lips with a slowness that devoured her self-control. She tried to summon the words to tell him how badly she wanted this, wanted him, but then she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye.
Dizzy, breathless, she lifted her head to see what it was.
They had come to a stop outside, directly in front of the ride operator. Behind him stood a crowd of people, no doubt curious to see Mason emerging from the haunted house.
If that wasn’t enough to throw the icy cold water of shame and humiliation on her, there was one person in particular who made Cassidy wish the earth would just open up and swallow her right there.
It was Parker’s sister, Kayla. And her eyes were murder.
Chapter Eight
Cassidy pulled away from Mason, her mind registering what her body could not. She felt like a record being played at two different speeds. Part of her remained in the grip of blistering passion. The rest wanted to run like hell.
The worst, most humiliating thing possible was happening to her. And she would have agreed to anything, made any promise, just to be able to crawl away with what was left of her dignity. Since her legs were too shaky to hold her, she slid off Mason’s lap and sat beside hi
m in the gondola, but her insides were shriveled with embarrassment. People were staring at her—the whole town, or so it seemed. By the end of the night, the whole town would know because Kayla would make sure of it.
“Well, this is awkward,” Mason said low enough that only she could hear.
“I wish I were dead.”
He started to say something, but then stopped when he saw her face. “Wow, you really are upset.”
“I have to live here, remember? I have to live with all this…”
“All this what?”
“Judgment.”
Mason’s hand, big and warm and strong, sought hers in an obvious show of support. Heat surged from the point of contact. It met her flush of embarrassment head on and created a swamp effect that she could feel all the way down to her boots.
“So you hate it when people judge you,” he said. “Who doesn’t?”
“I was a teen mom, remember? One night, one dumb mistake, and the whole world got to judge me for it. Now I have to deal with it all over again.”
It was the truth, but the truth put too baldly, and Cassidy wished she could take the words back.
“Look,” he said, “We’re going to deal with this together. I know a thing or two about facing criticism, believe me. Try answering to an entire press corps after you’ve lost a season playoff.”
Cassidy gulped some air into her lungs. She braved a glance at all the nosy people standing around. Some, like Kayla, had a toddler propped on one hip. Others like Matthew Willis simply glared. She remembered that before coming to Cuervo, Matthew had been a preacher, a disgraced preacher because he’d had an affair with the wife of a church deacon. What made him think he could stare daggers at her now?
“You with me on this?” Mason whispered.
“I think so,” she whispered back.
“Just follow my lead. Except that I’m going to need your hat.”
“My hat?”
He made a noise of discomfort, which caused her to look down. Through his jeans, every inch of him was clearly outlined. No hat would cover that. She wanted to keep staring, but she had to act normal now.
