She felt a shudder tear through him, more of the stone cracking, shattering, falling away. She hugged him more tightly, feeling herself shatter inside, too. Never had she realized how lucky she was, how blessed to have her family, her friends, her solid connection to this town, to her home. Aaron had never had what she had. He had always been alone—until now.
“I won’t go,” she whispered, so softly she could scarcely hear herself.
But he heard her. When he turned in her embrace and gazed down at her, she knew he’d heard. When he bowed his head to hers, when he pressed his mouth to hers, when he circled his trembling arms around her and clung to her as if she was his only hope, she knew.
His kiss was hard, urgent, needy. She wanted to assure him that she’d meant what she said, that she wasn’t going to leave him, that even wounded and dangerous, he couldn’t frighten her away. She wanted to tell him that his life was a miracle, that he’d grown up stronger than any other man she’d ever known, including those with two parents and all the security in the world. She wanted to tell him that it was his own fault she was here, kissing him. He’d been the one to make her brave.
But she couldn’t talk when he was kissing her, so she only kissed him back, hoping her kiss would tell him everything he needed to know.
He slid his hands up her arms. His fingers were warm and leather-smooth against her bare skin. She wasn’t sure if he was still trembling or if the trembling came from inside her, in her racing heart, her bristling nerves, the dark tug of sensation in her womb. His hands rose to her neck and then higher, to her cheeks. He ran his thumbs along her jaw and up to the corners of her lips, which parted as if he’d found latches there and flicked them open.
His tongue conquered her mouth. He was aggressive, almost rough, but she didn’t mind. His kiss was like the painting she’d created the other night, fueled by rage but ultimately beautiful and redemptive. His kiss was the storm in her painting, but she tasted life in it, hope, resurrection.
She wouldn’t leave him. She couldn’t. Not now.
Through his shirt she felt the flexing of the muscles of his back, the warmth of his skin, the ragged pumping of his lungs. He hauled her tight to himself, so tight she could feel his heartbeat against her breast, his erection pressing her belly through his jeans. He curled his fingers around the sleeveless strips of fabric at her shoulders and pushed them down her arms, exposing her collarbones and upper back. The zipper gave way between her shoulder blades, and her dress went slack. Aaron’s body was the only thing holding it up.
He was still kissing her, his tongue claiming her again and again as he shoved the dress down between them, to her waist, past her hips. His hands roamed her back and sides, the calluses on his fingertips scraping her skin. He wedged his hands between them, then tore his mouth from hers and leaned back. His eyes seemed to burn as he gazed down at her, his breath uneven as he watched himself caress her.
She watched, too. His hands were large, dwarfing her breasts, covering them, kneading the flesh and chafing her nipples until she shivered. She felt her knees weaken, felt her hips grow heavy with heat. He backed up and sat on the hammock, pulling her between his legs so he could kiss her breasts.
She choked back a moan. The only sounds were her gasps and his and the shrill chirp of crickets. As he took one breast and then the other in his mouth, he shoved down her panties, then cupped his hands around her bottom, spanned her hips, slid one hand between her thighs.
Her legs gave way as the heat sank deeper into her, molten and pulsing. A small cry escaped her, so soft she heard it only in her heart. He swung her around until she was lying on the hammock, then stood and tore off his clothes, his big, beautiful hands deft and purposeful even as his eyes continued to blaze. She had less than an instant to view his naked body, so tall, so lean and limber, so visibly aroused. All from his touching her. She’d hardly touched him at all.
She wanted to. She wanted to explore his magnificent body, every rippling muscle and sinew, ever supple contour. She wanted to slide her hands down his chest, dance her fingers over his skin, kiss the dark nubs of his nipples, make him feel what he’d made her feel. She wanted to trace his ribs, his collarbones, his shoulder blades, the ridge of his hipbones. She wanted to fill her hands with him, to treasure this strong, healthy, potent man who had done so much for her, who meant so much to her.
But he gave her less than a moment to appreciate his body. He joined her on the hammock, stretching above her, kissing her again and again, his hand between her legs, rubbing her, parting her, and she had only a chance to ring his waist with her arms as he plunged into her. His body stroked hers, hard and fast and deep, striking sparks inside her with the friction of his thrusts. She went with him, closing her eyes and letting the fire blaze through her, swift and wild. She climaxed in the heat, a piercing, almost painful convulsion that left her weak and weary and helpless.
It was too intense. Too fierce. She felt branded inside, scorched, stripped as naked emotionally as she was physically.
This hadn’t been the sweet generous lovemaking she’d fantasized about when she’d dreamed of Aaron. This had been cataclysmic, an explosion of fury and desperation.
But it had let her see Aaron’s soul. It had stripped his emotions naked, too, exposed him, revealed the pain and yearning that lived in his heart.
He couldn’t scare her away. Not with his words and not with this. She loved him, and she was going to stay.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HE CURSED.
His body was drained, utterly spent. The hammock had some give to it, and her hands were drifting vaguely on his back, so he knew he hadn’t crushed her to death. But he had to get off her.
In a minute. As soon as he found the strength.
As soon as he stopped hating himself.
She lay beneath him, so slender, so delicate. Her skin reminded him of pearls, smooth, with a mysterious luster. Her hair was softer than he’d imagined it, her mouth more lush, her body…
He felt an unexpected lurch in his groin. He was still inside her—empty, but the tight heat of her kept him hard. He could try moving a little for her, slowly, gently—and he’d be lucky if she didn’t smack him or scream in pain.
He despised himself for what he’d just done. Lily, the golden girl, the woman he’d been dreaming of most of his life, the glorious creature he didn’t deserve…He’d gone at her like an animal, unable to think, unable to slow down, unable to do anything but lose himself in her and pretend, for a few frenzied moments, that he wasn’t drowning in bitterness.
“Aaron?”
Her voice was muted, cool and soothing against his raw nerves. He lifted himself off her and stared out at the river, afraid to meet her gaze.
“Aaron, are you okay?”
Was he okay? He shifted, trying to keep the hammock from wobbling too much as he pulled back. She tucked her hand under his chin and steered his face around so he was forced to look at her.
Her beauty sucked the breath from him. He didn’t need her body; he could lose himself in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, his voice a hoarse rumble. “If I hurt you…”
“Hurt me?” She smiled faintly and shook her head.
“I was…” He closed his eyes. He’d been too fast, too rough. Maybe he’d managed to avoid hurting her, but it couldn’t have been good for her. “I’m usually better at this,” he finally admitted, aching with embarrassment.
“Better at sex?”
He nodded.
“I guess you’ll just have to show me how good you usually are.”
He opened his eyes and peered into her face, searching for a sign that she was joking. After such an abysmal performance, she couldn’t possibly want him again.
Another curse escaped him, partly from disbelief and partly from concern. “I didn’t use anything,” he murmured, a fresh pang of remorse seizing him. “Protection, I mean.”
“I’m on the Pill,” she told him.
Right. She’d be
en married. And given what a jerk her husband had been, she probably hadn’t wanted a baby with him.
Even so, Aaron was ashamed of himself for not exercising care. He wanted to protect Lily from everything: the heartache of her marriage, the trauma of thinking her father might have cheated on her mother, the difficulties of returning to town so different from the person she’d been when she left. And him. He wanted to protect her from him.
“Aaron,” she murmured, her hand still on his chin, her thumb moving gently over the day-old stubble of beard. “You’re reminding me of me, taking the blame for things that aren’t your fault.”
“This wasn’t my fault?” Her touch thawed him, consoled him, made his heart squeeze. He brushed a stray blond lock back from her cheek and was amazed all over again by how silky her hair was.
“We made love. It was something we both wanted.” She seemed to search his face. Even in the night’s descending shadows, he could see the tiny frown lines creasing her forehead. “We did both want it, didn’t we?”
“I’ve wanted to make love to you from the first instant I saw you,” he said. “But that’s not what happened here.”
“What did happen?”
I was hurting. I was angry. I was hostile and resentful, and you wouldn’t leave when I told you to go. “I don’t know,” he confessed in a broken whisper.
She took a minute to digest his answer. She had every right to be insulted, yet apparently she wasn’t. Her frown faded and her eyes sparkled, lit from within. “At your mother’s house,” she said in her sweet, healing tone, “I said I was falling in love with you.”
“To get her to tell you about your father.”
“No. I said it because it’s true.” She raised herself to kiss him, a tender kiss that told him she didn’t need to hear him say he loved her, didn’t need him to pay lip service to meaningless sentiments, didn’t need him to apologize or rationalize or explain.
She loved him.
He had never been in love before, not with Cynthia, not with any of the other women he’d known over the years. He’d never seen love up close. He wasn’t sure how it worked. He didn’t believe he carried the gene for it. Some people seemed to understand it, but he’d never experienced it, never witnessed it in his own home, never felt the staggering force of it.
Yet now, as Lily gazed up at him, her eyes steady and her mouth curved in a confident smile, he felt its force. More than the sex, this frightened him. It overpowered him. Something was breaking apart inside him, something that hurt and felt good and scared the hell out of him.
“I love you, Lily,” he heard himself say.
THE MOSQUITOES drove them indoors. He gathered up their clothes and ushered her into the cabin, letting the screen door clap shut behind them. She squinted in the glaring light of the kitchen, but when she would have taken her dress from him, he instead clasped her hand and led her down a short hall to his bedroom. It was tiny, barely big enough to accommodate its furnishings: a narrow bed, a tall bureau and a chair. He dumped their clothing on the chair, then pulled open a drawer and removed a T-shirt for her.
Better than her dress, she thought with a smile as she shook out the folds. The shirt was white, with “Riverbend Hot Shots” across the front in bright red. She pulled the shirt over her head; the soft cotton fell to her knees.
He donned a pair of gray gym shorts. “I’m starving,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
He seemed almost bashful, spinning away from her and retreating to the kitchen. Whenever his gaze met hers, she felt a connection between them, something humming with energy, like an electrical circuit. But then he would turn from her, as if the current burned him.
Maybe it did. Maybe she ought to be careful around it, too. She’d never felt it with Tyler. He’d been romantic and glamorous and pretty much irresistible to a twenty-one-year-old small-town girl from Indiana. But she’d never felt so bound to a man, not the way she felt with Aaron.
She drew in a deep breath before joining him in the kitchen. He was hunched in front of the open refrigerator door, and when he straightened he was holding a bowl of grapes and an apple. He set the grapes on the table, then carried the apple to the counter, where he proceeded to slice and core it.
“Can I help?” she asked.
“There are glasses in the cabinet to the left of the sink,” he told her. “I don’t know what you want to drink.”
“Water would be fine.” She couldn’t handle anything stronger.
He nodded and continued slicing the apple.
A minute later the plate of apple wedges joined the grapes, a jar of peanut butter and a knife, a box of crackers and two tumblers full of water on the table. It was an odd sort of meal, but it was perfect.
He gestured her toward a chair, then sat facing her. She watched him lift an apple wedge, spread a thick layer of peanut butter on it and hand it to her. “Thanks,” she said. She hadn’t eaten apples and peanut butter since she was a child. She’d forgotten how delicious the combination was, the clash of tart, juicy fruit and salty, gooey peanut butter.
He fixed a wedge for himself, leaned back in his chair and bit into it. Her view of his chest was tastier than the apple she was munching on. She remembered the first time she’d glimpsed his torso, when he’d lifted his shirt to wipe the sweat from his face. She still wanted to touch him, slowly and thoroughly. She wanted to run her fingertips along the ridges of muscle and bone. She wanted to press her lips to his skin, rest her cheek against him and listen to his heartbeat.
She hoped he would show her how good a lover he could be.
She hoped he’d meant it when he said he loved her.
He had to have meant it. Why else would he seem so ill at ease, avoiding her gaze, concentrating on the crackers he was shaking from the box, saying nothing? Some men used the word love so cheaply it was meaningless. Aaron wasn’t that kind of man.
Still, the silence between them felt awkward. She scrambled for a subject they could talk about. Basketball? His summer program? The weather? After the day they’d both lived, everything seemed trivial.
Everything but what they’d experienced in the past hour. Everything but the love and fear and doubt spinning in the air around them.
“Whose name is on your birth certificate?” she asked.
His eyes flashed at her, the silver in them like mercury, fluid but opaque. “Unknown.”
“Unknown?”
“It says, ‘Father: Unknown.”’
She plucked a grape from the bunch and bit into it. Its sweet tang bathed her tongue. Across the table Aaron continued to watch her. At last he was no longer refusing to look at her. “Have you ever thought about hiring a detective?” she asked.
He laughed. “Right. That would go over really well in Riverbend.”
“Your father could be someone from outside town,” she suggested. “Then no one in town would be offended if you used a detective to track him down.”
“It’s someone from town.” He devoured a cracker. “Someone your father knew, since he was the guy’s agent, running money to my mother.”
She sighed, hoping Aaron wouldn’t hate her for what she was about to say. “I can almost sympathize with your mother. I can understand why keeping her word is so important to her. She has so little in her life. Her word is one of the few things she has.”
“She has a son.”
“A son is a person, not a possession. She doesn’t have you. You’re not something she can keep, the way she can keep her word.”
“Yeah, well, she’s managed to hang on to me pretty well. Here I am.”
“Because you love her. You told me that, in spite of everything, you came home to help her because you love her.”
He smeared another apple wedge with peanut butter and took a bite. He chewed slowly, his gaze still on Lily. “If I hadn’t come back, the town would have had to take care of her. As it was, her insurance didn’t cover everything. The Community Church held a pancake break
fast to raise money. They helped pay for her physical therapy.”
“That’s what community is all about,” Lily said, proud of her neighbors for rallying around Evie Mazerik when she’d needed their assistance. “It must have made it easier for you to come home to a town that would do that for your mother.”
He nodded. “There are good people in Riverbend. There always were, even when I was a kid.” He gazed into the distance for a moment, remembering. “Some folks treated my mother and me nicely. Most of them saw us as the town trash.”
“No one ever—”
“Don’t kid yourself, Lily. Lots of people talked about us. But some people didn’t.” He reflected for a moment. “The Steele sisters, for instance. Ruth and Rachel always treated me with dignity.”
“They’re wonderful,” Lily agreed.
“And Coach Drummer. I told you—I wound up staying in Riverbend as much for him as for my mother. He’s always been like a—” Aaron stopped abruptly and glanced away.
Lily had been about to pop another grape into her mouth. But she realized what he’d been on the verge of saying, and its obvious logic stunned her. Coach Drummer had been instrumental in getting Aaron to settle in Riverbend after his mother’s stroke. He’d lined up his old job for Aaron. Eighteen years ago Coach Drummer had brought Aaron onto the varsity basketball team as a sophomore when other equally talented sophomores had been relegated to the junior-varsity team. It had been so sudden. Here was a team with standouts like Jacob Steele and Mitch Sterling, big, older boys who’d always been committed to the school and the team, and abruptly Aaron Mazerik, the town troublemaker, a kid who’d spent time behind bars, had been added to the roster.
Coach Drummer had been like a father to Aaron.
“Aaron?”
“No,” he said sharply.
“Isn’t it just possible—?”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Coach would never do that. He loves his wife.”
“My father loves his wife, and you thought he had done it.”
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