Rock Me

by Cherrie Lynn

  It was the only thought at the forefront of her mind as he eased her back down to the bed and back down to earth. All the heat had rushed out of her body and suddenly, she was cold. She just needed him to hold her. Again, she couldn’t stop shaking.

  His weight came slowly down on her and she wrapped her arms tight around him, feeling at once deliriously happy and more than a little furious that he’d made her beg like that. Helpless tears leaked from her eyes as she leaned her face into his shoulder. Maybe he would hold her until she could get control, and he wouldn’t have to see her cry again. Was it too much to ask to maintain at least a shred of dignity around him? He’d about taken it all away.

  Bullshit, he didn’t have any condoms. She wanted to scoff. He probably had one in his wallet right now. But she didn’t really want to know if he’d lied to her.

  With some effort, she cleared her throat and prayed he wouldn’t hear tears in her voice when she spoke. “I can get up and make some coffee.”

  “That would be awesome.” He rolled away from her and pushed the hair away from his eyes, staring up at the ceiling. She took the opportunity to surreptitiously swipe at her cheeks with the sheet. Time to put on her big girl panties and deal with it. The consequences had been laid out for her from the beginning.

  “Do you mind if I jump in the shower first?” she asked, considering the mess they’d made.

  “Only if I can go right behind you.”

  “Sure.” He could be in there with her, if he wanted to. Jerk.

  The hot spray did little to clear her head as she rinsed away the last remnants of their interlude. But at least the water running over her face camouflaged the tears she finally let flow in earnest. Had to get them out of her system now. Get them out, get it over with. She didn’t have any idea where this was going, but it hadn’t hit a brick wall or anything. They had time. They were okay.

  So why was she near sobbing?

  She jumped and whirled when he entered the shower behind her, his chest brushing her shoulder. “Thought you were coming in later,” she said, hearing panic in her voice. He was looking straight into her eyes, which she knew were red and weepy. There was no hiding that, or the trembling of her bottom lip.

  Dammit. Caught.

  Brian slicked the hair back off her forehead, as he was apparently fond of doing, then put his hand to her elbow and gently moved it up to her shoulder. When he wordlessly pulled her to him, she hated herself for going so willingly, and for utterly breaking down when his arms wrapped securely around her, holding her tight to him as she sobbed.

  Chapter Eight

  Somehow, they fell back into an easy and amiable manner with each other, drinking coffee out on her patio under a flawlessly clear sky. Candace had not only put coffee on, but whipped up a batch of pancakes and made him the best damn omelet he’d ever had in his life, and he was stuffed. The morning was mild, and she wore a silky white robe he’d love to strip off her, but that time had passed. Still, she was beautiful, her hair damp and her face clean of what little makeup she ordinarily wore.

  He needed to stop these lightning-flash thoughts about how nice it would be to spend every morning with her. That way could only lay disaster. He didn’t want to take the one thing she had left before he had time to examine this feeling, to see if it could turn into something real. It was tough getting her to understand that. She was such an all-or-nothing go-getter. He loved that about her, but damn. She was a handful.

  And such a go-getter that she’d damn near gotten it this morning. One flip of his switch while he’d been poised at her entrance and he’d have been lost. The thought of having her tied up and at his mercy had almost been enough to do it. Imagining her gasping and sighing over his phone had compounded it. If she’d only reached down and run her fingertip along her clit where he could see, he’d have been a crazed beast. Seeing a woman touch herself was his trigger.

  Hell, they’d pretty much done everything-but over the past ten hours. Her virginity really shouldn’t have been that big a deal at this point. But it was. It was huge. If he’d lost control and taken her the way he wanted, he’d have left here feeling like a dog, because he would have hurt her. No question.

  She deserved something special. She deserved candlelight and roses, shit like that. A promise, at the very least. Something he didn’t feel he was in any position to give her.

  Candace was silent as she sipped her coffee and stared out over the park across the street from her apartment building. Kids were running around and playing on the monkeybars and the rickety merry-go-round, challenging one another to swing the highest on the swingset. Brian could remember playing there with Evan and Gabby when he was little. The two of them had tortured him and kept him in tears. Now it was mostly the other way around.

  He turned his gaze from the place of much of his childhood torment and watched the wind lift damp tendrils of Candace’s hair and cast them across her face. She reached up to smooth them back and tuck them behind her ear, her hands slender and graceful, each tapered finger ending in a French tip. His fantasies of watching those fingertips slide over her nether regions went full-blown.

  Okay, if just seeing her make the most mundane gestures was getting to him, he was definitely in trouble. But he’d never minded trouble, and it always seemed to find him. It was practically an old friend, but it had never been as sweet as this.

  There was that damn word again.

  “What are you doing today?” she asked.

  It might have been a subtle hint to get lost. He didn’t think he’d ever hung around for this long with a girl the morning after, and he felt awkward, conspicuous. He was so reluctant to leave her. “I imagine I’ll go to work in a few hours,” he said.

  “You imagine?” She laughed. “Must be nice to be the boss.”

  “I highly recommend it. And I like keeping them on their toes, not knowing when I’ll drop in.” He grinned at her. “What’s up with you today?”

  He could have sworn her face darkened. “I have to get fitted for a bridesmaid’s dress. Crap. I never did call to…” She checked her watch and frowned.

  “Who’s getting married?”

  “Deanne and Tyler.”

  “Finally, huh. Well, good for them. They deserve each other. Let’s just pray they don’t reproduce.”

  Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped, and he got the biggest kick out of her split-second of dismay. Then she laughed. “That’s my cousin.”

  He shook his head. “I feel sorry for you. I always did for Michelle, too, for ever having to live with her.” He would also pity Tyler, the poor schmuck, if the guy wasn’t such an asshole himself. “I should go to the wedding. Jump up when the preacher asks for reasons the two should not be joined and yell, ‘Can’t you see? Their child will be the anti-Christ!’”

  She was still laughing and looking rather distressed about it, covering her mouth and ducking her head so that her hair fell forward.

  He reached across the small table and tugged the sleeve of her robe. “Come on, you have to agree with me. Admit it. I won’t tell.”

  “You’re bad. That’s my family.”

  “You won’t find me keeping quiet about mine. I have no qualms about telling them to their faces how I feel, either.”

  She sobered, the corners of her mouth turning down. “Mine is…” Her cell phone suddenly chirped from its position on the table, and he wondered if she would have continued even without the interruption.

  He’d forgotten about it until this moment, but Michelle had once told him she was concerned about Candace because of how stern and close-minded and positively medieval her parents were with her. According to his ex, they practically believed in arranged marriages. Candace’s older brother was no better, but Brian didn’t need to be told that. He’d gone to school with Jameson. If ever anyone deserved an ass-kicking more than Tyler, it was Jameson Andrews. If he bullied his baby sister like he did everyone else, it was no wonder she seemed so beat-down sometimes.

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nbsp; “Speak of the devil,” Candace mumbled. “It’s my mom.”

  He fell silent and sipped his coffee as she answered the phone, watching her expression travel the spectrum from calm to alarmed to outright panicked as the conversation progressed. Even before she hung up, he had a feeling he knew exactly what she would say, and his heart sank.

  Sure enough, as soon as she snapped the phone closed, she turned rounded blue eyes on him, sitting straight up in her seat. “She’s on her way to pick me up to go to lunch. She’ll be here in like two minutes.”

  “Guess that’s my cue to disappear.” Grudgingly, he stood. She shot up beside him and ran through the open patio door as if a rabid dog was nipping at her heels. He followed her into the living room.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry, but no, you can’t be here!” It was said as she rushed about, frantically grabbing empty beer bottles and the popcorn bowl from the night before off the coffee table. “Shitshitshit.”

  It would have been cute to hear her curse like that under other circumstances. As it was, it seemed ridiculous. “Candace, you’re a grown woman. So what if you had a guy stay over? I can understand not wanting to rub your mom’s face in it, but Jesus, it’s not that big a deal. This is your place, not your upstairs bedroom back home.”

  “You don’t understand,” she wailed, high-tailing it to the kitchen to bury the incriminating evidence as deep in her trash can as she could push it. How Joan-Crawford-Mommie-Dearest could her mother be?

  “Nooo wiiiire hangerrrrrs!” he bellowed as he picked up his wallet and mobile phone from an end table, stuffing them both in his back pocket.

  “Dammit, don’t joke about it, Brian!”

  All right, he got it. He’d never met her mother personally, and she would take one look at him and faint. Some inked-up, pierced metal-head-looking dude corrupting her baby girl. He knew the drill. Hell, his own mom looked at him in utter exasperation most of the time. He’d seen the paternal head-shake more than once. Even his brother didn’t know what to make of him most of the time. And his sister? Forget it. But he’d never tried to hide who he was. He’d never been ashamed.

  “I’m out,” he called harshly, striding toward her door.

  “Brian?”

  The doorknob was in his hand. He should turn it and walk out of her life. It wasn’t as if a fucking husband had pulled up to the curb outside, just her fucking mother. “What.”

  Candace stopped her frantic clean-up efforts long enough to rush over to him. “Are you okay? I’m sorry. I had no idea she was coming—”

  “You know,” he interrupted, and she stopped and retreated a step from the cold blast of his voice. “I don’t see how you possibly think we could work out, when you’re too embarrassed for your mother to see me here.”

  “I’m not embarrassed, I—”

  “You are. Would you be quite so freaked out if I was some Ivy League preppy fuck? I doubt it.”

  “Please don’t think that’s what this is about. It isn’t, I promise.”

  After all that begging for him to pop her cherry. What would it have really been for? A revenge fuck? A way to get back at Mommy and Daddy for sheltering her all her life? Because she damn sure wasn’t ready to parade him in front of them and introduce him as her man, and judging by her actions in the past few minutes, she never would be.

  He shook his head. Opened the door. “You’re seriously deluding yourself if you think that.” And he was gone. He didn’t know if she made any move whatsoever to follow him, because he never looked back.

  Sylvia Andrews swept into the apartment as if she owned it, not even bothering to knock. She eyed Candace sitting on the couch, staring off into space, and crossed her arms. “Candy, you’re not ready,” she said by way of greeting.

  Candace turned blind eyes on her mom. “Hey. Sorry. Give me a minute, okay?”

  She stood and padded across to her bedroom, wondering how she was going to keep it together for the next few hours under her family’s scrutiny. Brian hated her. She couldn’t forget that last look he’d given her before he walked out the door, as if she was scum of the earth.

  She so was not ashamed of him. She’d be the proudest girl in the world if he were hers. But her parents had scared off more than one potential suitor, and she was so afraid of that happening now. Apparently, she’d already done it herself.

  “Well, hurry up, dear,” her mom called. “I never thought for a minute you wouldn’t be dressed yet. They’re only holding our table for twenty minutes. Are you ill?”

  He couldn’t understand. He hadn’t grown up in the environment she had. He was stronger than she was. Candace pulled her closet door open and stared listlessly at her wardrobe, wondering what she could wear that her mother wouldn’t eye too critically. Or outright criticize.

  “Candy!”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I asked if you felt okay.”

  “Fine, Mom. Sorry. I’ll hurry.”

  She rushed through dressing and reentered the living room. Her mother’s gaze traveled up to her hair and she sighed. “Your hair is damp.”

  “I’d just gotten out of the shower when you called. I didn’t have time to dry it.”

  “Well, the top is down on the convertible. Maybe that will finish it off.”

  Right. She would look like the bride of Frankenstein by the time they got there, while her mom would somehow look immaculate with nothing more than a quick pass of the brush. Right now she was flawless in her perfectly tailored peach pantsuit, carrying a Louis Vuitton the size of a briefcase. Candace ran to the kitchen to grab her own purse and headed toward the door. “I’m ready.” She held open the door for her mother, trying to turn her face away as Sylvia walked past. It was too late.

  “Really, are you all right? You look on the verge of tears.”

  She was. Right on the cusp, about to fall. And maybe there really wasn’t any reason to hide. Maybe her parents wouldn’t have any objection to Brian. He came from a wealthy family, surely had a sizable inheritance. A shame that it was really the only thing that mattered to her family, but that’s the way it was. If she could get their blessing, she could then go and see if she could get his forgiveness.

  “I had a, um…I had a date last night that didn’t go so well.”

  They were almost to the parking lot where her mom’s car sat, and the clack-clack-clack of Sylvia’s Blahniks ground to a halt. Candace stopped to face the music. “You told me you were with Macy.”

  “I was, for a while. Then I ran into, um, this guy I know, and—”

  “Who?” That one word was practically an inquisition.

  Candace took a deep breath, praying, praying… Oh, crap, it was useless. Looking into her mother’s expectant, icy blue eyes, she couldn’t even say his name. “He’s one of Michelle’s exes.”

  For a split second, Sylvia looked relieved. “Scott Chandler, maybe?”

  “No.”

  “For heaven’s sake, who, Candace?”

  “Mom, promise you won’t get mad at me, okay?”

  Just like that, the relief was gone and her mother blanched three shades whiter. Candace’s heart deflated. “Not Alexander’s boy. What are you thinking? What was Michelle thinking?”

  “What’s so wrong about him? I mean, he’s different, but—”

  “Different? No. Different I could accept. Maybe. But that boy’s been nothing but a stain on his family name for years. We finally got her away from him, and now he’s moved on to you? Well, at least you said the date didn’t go well. We don’t have to worry about you seeing him anymore. Thank heavens.”

  We finally got her away from him?

  Sylvia took her arm and steered her toward the car again. “At least you have Deanne’s wedding to look forward to. There will be several eligible bachelors there, if you’re looking. Do you remember Stephen Davis, who we introduced you to at Deanne’s graduation? I was so impressed with him. And he seemed to like you. He’ll be one of Tyler’s groomsmen. He’s coming in from Yale.
Isn’t that wonderful? Candy, I want you to find someone like that, someone with a real future. Maybe Deanne will pair you with him in the recession, and you two can get to know one another better.”

  Candace kept her jaw resolutely closed, but ice slid down her spine. Indeed, she remembered Stephen Davis who had been at Deanne’s graduation with Tyler. He’d also been the one she’d told Brian about, the only other guy who’d ever had his hands on her body, and not with her permission.

  She had another flash of remembrance. That guy had been obnoxiously arrogant, but somehow he managed to charm the pants off any and all parents. Hers had loved him from the moment Tyler introduced them. Her mom had been giving her that nudge-nudge-wink-wink look even then.

  Candace smirked. He hadn’t been able to charm her pants off. And he’d reacted violently.

  But she already knew better than to try to explain to her mother what had happened with that guy. Sylvia would turn it around and make it her fault, somehow.

  She could hear it now. What did you do to tempt him? You were probably dressed like a whore, like all you girls are fond of doing these days. Her mother had actually uttered words to that effect once, about a girl who’d accused a family friend’s son of date raping her. Candace didn’t see why she would be any different.

  “I like Brian a lot,” she said, without much hope. “One date didn’t go exactly well toward the end, but we had fun. If he wanted to see me again—”

  “Absolutely not, and if I have to call Alexander to tell him to keep that boy away from you, I’ll do it. Poor man. Evan turned out so well…oh, why couldn’t he be the one you liked?”