Fearless

by Maren Smith

  She had to hold onto this feeling—the fire and the hurt, the sadness and relief—to everything, including the strength she found in Noah’s arms as he pulled her up off the table and into his embrace. When her knees wouldn’t hold her, he sat, providing her with the comfort of his lap, holding her for what felt like hours.

  She had to remember this, because it wasn’t real and it wouldn’t last. And she was terrified she might actually be pregnant.

  She had nothing. She hated herself. Who would ever want a woman who came with baggage like this? Nobody, except more people like Ethen. Maybe she didn’t deserve any better.

  His hand roving up and down her back, Noah pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I…” he said

  Kitty closed her eyes. “I’m a good girl,” she echoed, dutifully but dead inside. She would have thought she was all cried out, but the tears started all over again.

  Patience personified, he rocked her as he asked, “What else?”

  “I’m safe.”

  “And?”

  “I’m loved.” Her breath hitched so badly, she could barely understand the words she was saying. “I-I don’t have to be afraid of anything.”

  “Do you believe it?” Noah asked when she was done.

  Tempted as she was to lie, Kitty shook her head.

  His hand never once stopped its comforting caress. “That’s all right, love. We’ve got time. One day, we’ll get there. I promise.”

  When he turned his head to kiss her on the forehead, if she closed her eyes, she could almost believe he meant all the unspoken things that kisses like that ought to mean when a man held a woman in his arms.

  Chapter 11

  Kitty was physically, mentally, and quite possibly spiritually exhausted, and so Noah prescribed a nap as a part of his aftercare and tucked her into bed. He left a cup of tea and cookies on her nightstand, told her she didn’t have to sleep, but she did have to lie there with her eyes closed for at least twenty minutes. Then he packed himself a lunch, made up a thermos of coffee, loaded his croc traps into the back of his pickup, hooked up his boat, and headed to work.

  The call he’d received was for a nuisance animal with a habit for basking in the middle of daycare playgrounds. His first stop was at the school, where he walked the fence line, locating two places where the animal might be getting in. Pliers, rebar, some extra twists of wire and quick-mix cement fixed that problem. Unloading his boat into the sluice that ran behind the daycare was his second step. Within half an hour, he had found several slides and flattened vegetation near the water’s edge. Setting his traps, he went back to his truck to break out the coffee and wait. While he waited, he occupied himself thinking.

  It had felt good holding Kitty on his lap, rocking and comforting away her tears. Had he fixed anything for her? No, he wasn’t that arrogant or naïve enough to think so. But holding her had felt… unexpectedly fulfilling. Kissing her had been rousing as hell, and it had only been sheer will that had restricted those kisses to nothing more intimate than her forehead. He needed to stop calling her love. Generic as that pet name was and, granted, he had used it on dozens if not hundreds of women from the elderly to the lovely, all the way down to sweet little infants, the word was taking on connotations it had never held before. Not with anyone. He didn’t know why he was surprised. Wounded things had always roused his protective side, and he’d never met anyone more wounded than Kitty.

  Still, he shifted behind the steering wheel, firmly ordering his lower half to knock it the hell off. There were more reasons than he had the fingers to count them for why he should make it a point to never again put himself through the sexual hell of doing to Kitty what he had done today. It might be the coffee he was drinking, but it was her smell he was savoring in his nose and on his tongue. That thin barrier of underwear might have prevented him from putting his mouth directly on her, but it had been saturated with her arousal. God, the taste of her. The heady aroma. The mewling need that had pricked at his iron-will with every muffled cry she had tried to stifle as he’d licked and nipped at her with his lips and teeth.

  The sun went down slowly, but only half as slowly as he relived going down on Kitty. Not that finger fucking her hadn’t been just as fine. Later tonight, he’d probably fall asleep rock hard because he couldn’t shake the memory of it—the tightness of her ass locking down on his thrusting fingers, the pulse of her heartbeat through the slickness of her walls. Her grunts and moans and the arching of her hips as she pushed back on the anal plug he’d used on her so fucking jealously. That should have been him. Under any other circumstance, it would have been.

  He had to stop thinking about it. It was done, he’d given her what she’d needed and he’d kept his damn pants zipped. That was Herculean, that’s what that was. He ought to be proud of himself. Someday maybe he would be… if and when the erection ever went away.

  “Get your mind off it, mate,” Noah told his lap. “This isn’t helping.”

  Plus, he had work to do. And that right there was dangerous enough, even without distractions.

  The sun had only been down an hour when he got out to check the traps. He knew better than that, too. Under any other circumstance, he’d have put the seat back in his truck, lowered his hat over his eyes and gone to sleep until about midnight or so. Or hell, even gone home, depending on how local the job was. But waiting in his truck when he had someone like Kitty waiting for him at home just did not seem like any way for a bloke to spend the night.

  Fate must have had a thing for hard-up men in sticky non-relationships, because against all odds, he found a salty in the second trap he’d set. It was only a little fellow, not even two-meters in length. Since the problem with the fence was fixed, he tagged it, re-baited his traps and went home. First thing in the morning, he’d return to check for something bigger and, if he had to, deal with the rest of it then.

  Noah found the house dark when he got home. The only light on, he noticed, was Kitty’s lamp in her bedroom. Not because she’d gone to bed, he realized, but because she hadn’t got out of it after he’d left. He sat behind the wheel almost a full minute after parking the car, not really sure he wanted to know if that was because she’d gone to sleep despite her protests (and maybe still was asleep) or because he hadn’t thought to leave instructions that allowed for her to get up again.

  He knew some submissives who needed that level of control. Up until now, though, Kitty had been pretty independent with her days. Deeply hoping he hadn’t left her to deal with bad ghosts alone, Noah went inside.

  Everything was so quiet he had halfway convinced himself that she’d fallen asleep before he reached her door, but that was proven wrong the minute he glanced beyond her threshold. Kitty was sitting up in bed, fully dressed under the quilt and hugging her legs. Chin resting on her knees, only her eyes moved when she saw him.

  “I didn’t mean for you to stay in bed all night,” Noah ventured. “You could have got up any time.”

  She didn’t answer, but picked up something he hadn’t noticed lying on the quilt between her feet and held it up. The pregnancy test. She’d taken it.

  He didn’t need to ask what the result was. The sag in her shoulders said it all.

  “I hope you like roommates,” she muttered. “I figure in about six months, you’re going to have two of them.”

  He honestly couldn’t tell if she was trying to make a joke or not, but it fell flat. She knew it too. Almost as soon as she’d made it, her face crumpled into a groaning cringe.

  “What the hell is wrong with me?” she asked before covering her face with both hands.

  Noah came to sit at the headboard beside her. When he put his arm around her shoulders, she curled against him. “Is there any chance at all that it isn’t his?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Not to him it didn’t. He was more worried about her, at this point.

  “He never shared me that way,” Kitty finally said. “I did fluffing sometimes, but Pony was the one he liked t
o pass around to his friends. Usually only if they had something he wanted more than he wanted her.”

  She was quiet. Noah was too. What could be said to comfort something that awful? Somehow ‘you’re well shut of him’ didn’t seem quite right, although it did feel true.

  “I can’t stay here,” she said softly, almost under her breath.

  Noah, however, heard it loud as summer thunder. He was off the bed before he realized he was going to move. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “Why not? If you’re afraid he’s going to come after you out here, I’d love to see the fucker try. I—”

  She looked at him, and in that dead-eye stare Noah suddenly heard everything she wasn’t saying out loud.

  “You’re thinking about going back to him,” he said flatly.

  “You don’t think he has a right to know he’s going to be a father?” she countered. She hugged her knees again, a defensive reaction that made him instantly check himself. His body was squaring off against her. He tried to stop that, to find his center of calm. She was a grown woman, after all. She was entitled to her opinions, her feelings, and even to make her own mistakes, if that was what she—oh, hell no, mate, to fuck-all with that and who cared about calm? No way was he going to stand by while she got on a plane, flew halfway across the world where he couldn’t possibly protect her, and back into the cruel keeping of that son of a bitch!

  Except he couldn’t say any of that and to make sure of it, Noah covered his mouth with his hand until the urge had passed. “When exactly do you reckon he’s earned that right? You name me one time, just once, when that man has done something that’s been good for you. One thing that hasn’t broken you down or left a scar, physical or not.”

  She didn’t. He liked to think it was because she couldn’t, but that didn’t mean he was right. Or even appropriate. If she wanted to go, what right did he have to stop her? None, and for a hair-split second, in the very pit of his gut where he had never in his life ever felt such a chillingly-pierce sensation before, Noah knew exactly what it was going to feel like when she walked out of his house.

  He pointed at her. “No,” he said. He struggled for calm, but both his voice and his finger, hell, all of him, was shaking. “No,” he said again. There were a thousand other words jumbling through his head, vying one another to come spilling out between them. He needed calm and rational, a reason that would help her think straight and change her bloody mind—I really like you, love, please don’t go—not one of them knocked free in time to follow ‘no.’

  So, he left it at that and he walked away, fast, before he did something Ethen-ish. Something he would regret. His bedroom wasn’t far enough, so he left the house. The porch wasn’t far enough either, neither was the barn, although his workshop was where he ended up, facing the wood-plank wall where his half-made whip was dangling. Open hands braced against the weathered boards, the chaos of his thoughts churned themselves into a fevered maelstrom, all of it centered around She’s leaving you, mate, she’s going back to him. The guy who hurt her in ways Noah could hardly imagine, and frankly didn’t want to.

  What did that say about him? What had he done to all of a sudden make Ethen the better option? As if, Noah scolded himself, he could even consider himself an option. He wasn’t. He was a friend of a friend who was doing a favor for—God damn it! He didn’t want to be that, he wanted to be an option! What more, he wanted to be the option Kitty chose!

  But, honestly, why would she, that nagging voice in his head kept whispering. Why would she want to stay when they barely knew one another? At what point had he declared himself, or let her know he was interested? So he could what, that other voice in his head argued back, make her even more anxious about the dark intentions of the stranger she was staying with? No, he’d been right to be careful with her. He’d been right not to do anything that might be construed as him taking advantage of a battered woman. But now, look where that caution had left him?

  At what point had they ever sat down and talked about themselves, their childhoods, their hobbies or thoughts or dreams for the future? Or, her baby’s future, for that matter? Try though he might, the only real conversation Noah could recall apart from his setting the rules, her breaking of them, the punishment he’d given and the relief that had followed—apart from all that, so far their only conversation had been about the weather. Looked at that way, was it any wonder if she was considering moving on?

  And now there was the baby to consider. At least she’d accepted her pregnancy, putting it out in the open where they could deal with it. Except, none of these were his complications to deal with, were they? No, it was all on Kitty. She was an American, faced with having a baby in a country where she didn’t hold citizenship, couldn’t get employment, an apartment, or any kind of legal or financial aid. He’d bend over backwards to help her, she had to know that, but at the same time that didn’t make things automatically better? Australia was not an easy country to migrate into, although he supposed marrying her would solve a lot of problems…

  …not to mention opening up a slew of different ones.

  Noah wasn’t crazy. He knew he liked her, but he wasn’t sure he was ready for marriage. And he sure as hell wasn’t ready to marry someone he’d then spend the rest of his life struggling to convince he didn’t marry solely for citizenship or because she was knocked up.

  What he did know was, whether they’d had a decent conversation yet or not, he wasn’t ready to let Kitty go. This was more than her being broken or him doing a favor for a friend. This felt different from anything he’d ever experienced with any woman he’d yet known. Every shred of gut-feeling he had was screaming that this went deeper than it had a right to go for a time period as short as theirs had been, and he knew—knew—to the depths of his marrow if he didn’t do something to change her mind, he would not only lose her, but he would regret it to the end of his days.

  Noah hit the wall, the heel of his hard palm shuddered it. Frustrated, he hit it again, four times in rapid, banging succession, shaking the whole damn barn, the whip hanging from its hook, and himself. His palm stung, but the hurt was good. It was grounding. He closed his eyes, breathing deep and struggling for control. He didn’t often lose his calm like this and he certainly wasn’t proud of it, but he swallowed back the rising chaos of feelings he wasn’t prepared to deal with just yet, and focused.

  When at last he opened his eyes again, he had the start of a plan firmly in mind. No way was he going to stand by while she groveled her way back into Ethen’s good graces. Considering what that sadistic bastard had already done, he didn’t want to know what Ethen was capable of doing to a baby. That right there was going to be Noah’s number one reason on his list why she should stay. He’d work out the other reasons on the walk back up to the house, because if Kitty was still awake, then they needed to have a serious talk. He had to make her see reason. Failing that, he had to make her tell him why she had to go, at least then he’d know exactly what the problem was.

  Firm as he was in his decision, Noah only got as far as shoving off the wall and turning around. That was when he saw Kitty. She hadn’t gone to bed; she’d followed him out to the barn. Standing in the open doorway, her face was a mask he didn’t know how to read. Probably because he’d hit the wall and scared her, who knew how close to Ethen he must have looked when he’d done it. But try though he did to find hints of it, it wasn’t fear that he kept glimpsing as she crept a few steps closer. Hands wringing, the mounds of her small breasts rising and falling a little too fast as she breathed, she came to stand bare inches before him. So close that the tips of her breasts nearly grazed his chest on every shaky inhale and her hands, clasped so tight in front of her, almost brushed his stomach. Just a gnat’s wing of empty air remained between him and her non-existent touches. His body didn’t care; he burned already in both places, his blood beginning to pulse and roar as he breathed in her shallow exhales and bathed in the body heat he imagined was building in the ribbon’s space of distance s
he’d left between them.

  It would have been such an easy thing to reach for her, catch the back of her head and pull her mouth straight up to his. Forget calm, lists and rational reasons, he’d let his kiss do his arguing for him. Except he already knew he’d never be able to stop at one. Or a dozen, for that matter. Or the crushing grip he’d fold her in when his restraint finally snapped and he couldn’t help but grab her by the ass, before pinning her with the wall at her back and nothing but his hard body flush up against her front.

  Trembling, she reached for his hand. The size difference between them was startling: his fingers were huge, calloused and squarish compared to hers. His palm as she turned it upward was red from where he’d punched the wooden planks. Her hands were so much smaller, soft and pale, with fingers as soft as butterfly wings when she caressed the tender redness.

  She did not look at him, but bent and kissed the mark of impact, then turned her face to press her cheek into his palm.

  Her face was already in his hand, so it was a tiny matter to turn her mouth to meet his. Her breath caught, moist lips parting on a sigh as his claimed them. Compared to the storm inside him, it was a gentle kiss. Little more than a taste, really. Kitty deserved better than to be fucked in a barn.

  Noah tried to pull back, already licking the flavor of her from his lips. Her fingers touched his cheek. He saw the tip of her own tongue dart out, savoring him in turn and she opened her eyes. The midnight depths of her gaze had deepened with stormy desire.

  He rolled his shoulders. Time to stop. But she inched closer, lifting her chin, and the next he knew, her mouth was beneath his again. Noah shook through the battle for gentleness as the softness of her lips opened to him. Wet and willing, yielding to the flick of his tongue, tapping for entrance. She gave it; there was no pulling away from that either and for the second time that night, Noah lost a measure of control.