Without asking for permission, he bent her over the fluffy quilt. The height of the sofa arm was perfect. And as he had suspected, her pert bottom was a sight to see, presented in this position.
“What do you want me to do with my hands?” Her voice was muffled by her hair.
He scooped the thick tresses over her right shoulder so he could see her face. “I’ll take care of that.” He pulled her arms behind her back and held her wrists. With his other hand, he widened the stance of her legs and reached between her thighs to stroke gently.
Annalise gave a soft exclamation that could have meant any number of things. Her eyes were closed, her face turned toward the fire. He separated the plump folds of her sex and felt the slick moisture that readied her body for his.
It shocked him to realize that his hands were shaking. Badly. Was it arousal or the fear of messing this up? He wanted to show her how sexy she was, how desirable, how perfectly feminine in every way. If later, she chose to take the lead, he had no problem with that. In fact, the thought of Annalise Wolff dominating him in the bedroom had a certain skin-tightening charm.
But he sensed that at the moment she wanted to capitulate, to submit, to revel in the freedom of her sex. To experience the power of driving a man to the point of insanity.
In truth, Sam was almost there.
He fit the head of his shaft to her passage and teased her with it. She squirmed. Her face was flushed. At least the part he could see. Wondering if she would consent to play with him, he decided to test the waters. “I’m going to release your wrists,” he said gruffly. “I want you to stretch your arms over your head, link your hands, and rest them on the sofa. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” The low, slurred tenor of her reply tapped in him a primal response.
“Then do it.” When he let go of her wrists, she obeyed his command.
The vision of Annalise stretched out in front of him like an offering seared his brain…so vivid, he could see it even when he closed his eyes and sucked in a shaky breath. With both of his hands now free, he caressed her butt. Her ass was pale as the moon, curvaceous, perfectly proportioned to her healthy body.
A small mole, high on her right hip, fascinated him. When he bent and kissed the tiny beauty mark, Annalise sighed deeply. Once again, he positioned himself for entry. “You were beautiful as a teenager,” he whispered, fearful of bringing up the past, though beyond dissimulation. “But now you take my breath away. I want you. I’m going to have you. Again and again until you beg me to stop. You’ve bewitched me, seduced me, destroyed me.”
Slowly, he pushed into her, painfully stimulated by the angle of penetration and the caveman position. He wasn’t even sure if this was for him or for her. The fit was tight, her body squeezing his until his skin dampened and his eyes stung with the sheer pleasure of it.
“Talk to me,” he begged. “Tell me what you want.”
She glanced over her shoulder, a sultry, sirenlike gaze. “Whatever you have to give me, Sam. I want it all.”
He drove into her again and again. First slow, then fast, then slow again. His fingers splayed on her ass, plumping, caressing. “I wish you could see yourself right now. God, you’re amazing.”
She arched her back, and reared up on her elbows, forehead resting on her clenched hands. “More. Don’t stop.”
He reached beneath her and caressed the spot where her pleasure centered. Annalise jerked and moaned. Timing the stroke of his finger to the slide of his shaft, he took them both to the edge and hovered there. “Do you want to come?”
She said a word that once again destroyed her resolution.
Sam chuckled, but it was a breathless, weak sound. The air in his lungs had evaporated. Suddenly, his control snapped, and with a groan, he pushed all the way to the core of her and pumped recklessly as he gripped her hips and emptied himself into the warm welcome of his unlikely lover.
* * *
Hours later, he rolled over and glanced at the clock. Annalise was in his bed this time, in the room that was his whenever his visited his grandparents. The comfortable king mattress accommodated his lanky frame. He held her close, relishing the sweet, trusting way she rested in his embrace.
They had made love for hours, finally abandoning the living room and coming upstairs to collapse into bed. Sighing deeply with repletion and contentment, he succumbed once again to the warm embrace of much-needed sleep.
When he opened his eyes the second time, Annalise was gone. The stone of disappointment that crushed his chest was enormous. Yesterday morning, he had understood her need to flee. But last night he thought they had forged a tenuous understanding, a fledgling truce.
His mouth was fuzzy and his head ached. Reluctantly, he dialed back his expectations for the remainder of the weekend. Annalise was not like other women. And there was absolutely no way to predict her reactions from one minute to the next.
Perhaps all she wanted from him was sex. For any other guy at any other moment, that would have been a pretty sweet deal. But Sam and Annalise had a past, a connection, an undeniable chemistry. The potential was there to create something wonderful.
He was beginning, however, to have a sinking suspicion that she was determined never to let that happen. Was it because he had rejected her once upon a time? Or did she simply not want anything more from him than one naughty weekend?
* * *
Annalise hummed as she worked, her body aching pleasantly, and her cheeks heating as she relived each moment of the incredible night before. Sam Ely was a genius. Even with her limited experience, it was evident that he had devoted a lot of time to learning about women.
Perhaps she should have been jealous. His sexual expertise was no doubt the product of many intimate liaisons. But oddly, she didn’t begrudge any of those women their momentary connections to Sam. He wasn’t with any of those women now. He had moved on.
Despite the painful experience in the past when she threw herself at him and suffered an ignominious rejection, she and Sam had known each other for a very long time. They had a relationship. It might not be the stuff of romantic fiction, but it was something. Even if this weekend turned out to be all she ever had of him in a sexual way, the tentative resurrection of their friendship would be enough.
The essence of that thought rang false, but she ignored the warning signs. Sam wasn’t hers to keep. He deserved someone who wanted the things he wanted. A woman who could create a home and a family with him. Annalise was unable to do either of those things. There were still secrets between them. But that was okay. Because after this weekend, they would be something they hadn’t been in many years. Friends.
She pulled out her laptop and perched on a stool in the downstairs room Sam’s grandmother had used as a sewing nook. Colors and patterns buzzed in her head, each jockeying for favor. This was her favorite part of the job…choosing palettes, accents, lighting. Already she was falling in love with the farmhouse.
Sam was right. It was too far from the city to be practical as a main residence, but how wonderful it would be to get away on a warm spring weekend, a lazy summer month in August, a crisp, colorful autumn retreat. She could almost see the children playing outside, hear their high-pitched laughter.
Several ancient oaks provided the perfect spot for tire swings. In summer, the generous shade would accommodate impromptu picnics, as well. And the house was big enough for lots of company. Even the burgeoning Wolff clan.
That thought brought her up short. Surely she wasn’t weaving improbable daydreams about her and Sam. She hadn’t been lying when she told him she didn’t really like romance. Romance was what had led her to throw herself at him when she was twenty-one.
Romance made people stupid, and Annalise was not stupid. Besides, even if by some miracle she and Sam fell in love and managed not to drive each other nuts, the truth remained. She was not wife material.
His long-ago words still rang in her ears: Men like gentle, feminine women…soft, self-effacing. Perhaps he had
n’t really meant that. He said he’d been trying to let her down easy and keep her from doing something stupid with another man who might have accepted her artless invitation and tossed her aside afterward.
But even so, he’d said the words out loud, and their power lingered. Annalise wouldn’t change herself even if she could. She liked who she was. But she had to accept that there were some things her upbringing had cost her. And having a family was one of those.
“There you are. Have you had breakfast?”
Sam’s voice startled her so badly she nearly dropped her computer. She closed it and stood, clutching it to her chest like armor. “I had some toast and coffee.”
“Did you sleep well?” His topaz and chocolate eyes searched her face, his sculpted mouth unsmiling.
She squirmed inwardly. “Yes, thank you.” Good Lord. This was a man who had seen her naked, who had done exquisitely intimate things to her and with her. Why was the aftermath so damned difficult?
He lounged in the doorway, his hands shoved in the pockets of faded jeans. Another flannel shirt, this one gold with a navy windowpane pattern, strained across his broad shoulders. His eyelids drooped and his hair was mussed. He looked like a man who had been up all night.
Her prim response amused him. His lips quirked, and he cocked his head, studying her with an intensity that seemed to strip the clothes from her body. “I think we need some exercise.”
The color in her face deepened as her thighs clenched. “Well, I…uh…”
“Outside,” Sam clarified. “In the fresh air. The temperature has come up considerably. Gram and Pops have all sorts of winter gear in the mudroom. How about it?”
She glanced out the window to the world of white. Suddenly, nothing sounded more appealing. “I’d like that.”
In twenty minutes they were bundled up in layers of warm clothing. Fortunately for Annalise, Gram had left behind a pair of yellow galoshes that were close enough to the right size to keep her feet warm and dry.
The first bite of cold air as they stepped outside took her breath away, but when they rounded the house to the side sheltered from the wind, where Sam had scraped a partial path, it wasn’t bad at all. The sun shone down valiantly, doing its best to melt the snow. Annalise lifted her face to the sky and inhaled the smell of wood smoke drifting from the chimney.
The farm was somnolent, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Sam’s grandparents had sold off all the livestock years ago when they decided they no longer wanted the responsibility of actually running a dairy farm. Any farmhands had long since been let go. Though the barn was in good shape and the outbuildings were sturdy, the place was a ghost town. Only the house itself showed any signs of life.
Annalise turned to Sam. “Do you think you’ll ever turn this back into a working farm? You’ve talked about how much you loved it as a kid. It seems a shame to use only the house.”
He shaded his eyes with one hand and looked out across the fields that had once supported acres of corn and herds of cows. “I’ll bring the horses back, at some point. And maybe lease the land so it will be producing as it should. But I doubt the farm will ever be what it once was. Unless one of my children takes an interest in agriculture.”
The way he said the word children hurt something deep in her chest. “How many do you want? Kids, I mean.”
He shrugged. “That will depend on my wife, I guess. But at least three. Maybe four.”
Four? Annalise felt faint.
When she was silent, he continued. “I have the means to support a big family. And I want a noisy house, not like where I grew up. By the time I was eleven, Mom quit making me go to a babysitter after school. I got off the bus and let myself in with a key we kept hidden under a rock in the backyard. She always left me snacks ready…lemonade in the fridge, fresh fruit and cookies. But I hated the silence when I went inside.”
He visibly shrugged off his preoccupation with the past. “I don’t want you to think it was a terrible childhood, ’cause it wasn’t. My mom is a great person, and she did the best she could with a rambunctious son who was pretty mischievous. I had plenty of friends in the neighborhood. So I spent a lot of time at their houses.”
“Tell me something, Sam,” she said, touched with compassion by the picture he painted. “How can you be so sure you won’t end up divorced like your parents? The statistics aren’t in your favor.”
He picked up a stick and hurled it into the distance, an almost palpable sense of frustration in the jerky motion. “For one thing, I’ve learned the difference between lust and love. And how important compatibility is. That’s where people go wrong when they marry too young. They ignore the fact that attraction and wild sex are not a sound basis for long-term commitment. I guess I can’t be one-hundred-percent certain, but the reason I’ve waited this long to get married is so I can be sure of as many variables as possible.”
“Sure how?” Annalise kicked at a stone with her boot. This was an odd place for a serious conversation, but at least out here they weren’t likely to strip off their clothes and attack each other. Just the thought of it made her layers of clothing far too warm.
“My parents weren’t a great match from the beginning. I’m going to pick someone who shares my values, who wants what I want.”
“No offense, Sam, but you said that your dad’s workaholic nature was partly to blame for the divorce. Aren’t you like him in that way?” She wasn’t being mean. It was a fair question.
He unzipped his coat partway, pulled the hood back and ran his hands through his hair. In the bright sun she could see glints of red in his thick chestnut waves. “It’s true,” he said. “I work long hours. But that’s because I can. If I had a wife and kids at home, things would be different.”
“Mmm…”
His eyes snapped with displeasure. “You don’t believe me?”
“I think you’re pretty set in your ways. Are you expecting this paragon of a wife to stay home with the kids?”
“I hope she’ll want to…since finances won’t be an issue. The two of us will share responsibility for child-rearing, but it seems to work best when one parent stays home to give the kids security.”
She couldn’t argue with that. Her mother had not been around, and her dad, though she loved him dearly, wasn’t the cuddly type. The Norman Rockwell existence Sam described was very appealing. As long as he acknowledged that his wife would surely have dreams outside of simply being a mother. Somehow, she thought he would. Despite any evidence to the contrary, Sam was not a chauvinist.
“Well,” she said, feeling depression settle like a pall over the day, “I wish you luck.” Any last glimmer of hope that Sam might care for her in a deeper sense withered and died. The two of them were not compatible. They fought like cats and dogs. She’d be a lousy mother. Even if she were willing to put her career on hold and give him multiple babies, the picture would fall apart rapidly.
When he wasn’t looking, she scooped up a handful of snow and shaped it into a ball. Pool wasn’t the only game she knew how to play. She wandered a few yards away, ostensibly to look at an old doghouse covered in snow.
Sam was gazing up at the eaves of the farmhouse, probably wondering about things like dry rot and bats and other homeowner headaches. Taking careful aim, remembering everything her brothers had taught her, she reared back and flung the sphere of snow as hard as she could.
Thwack! It couldn’t have been a more perfect bull’s-eye. The snowball caught the side of Sam’s neck, disintegrated from the force of the hit and slid messily into the open collar of his shirt.
“Hey,” he shouted indignantly. “No fair.”
The childhood rejoinder made her grin. “You’re the one who said we needed exercise.” Rapidly, she scooped up more handfuls of snow, creating her ammunition and using the doghouse as cover.
Sam’s glare promised retribution. He amassed an arsenal as well, only instead of huddling behind a pitiful barrier like her abandoned pet shed, he stacked his snowballs on a wi
ndowsill and climbed up beside the house to stand on an old stump. Now he had the advantage of higher ground.
When he turned to put one last projectile on his growing pile, Annalise shot to her feet, threw three snowballs in quick succession and crowed when every one of them hit the intended target. Sam’s hair was coated in white, and he had to wipe snow from his mouth.
Revenge was swift and targeted. Too late, she remembered that Sam had pitched for his college baseball team. A hailstorm of snowballs descended on top of her, ricocheting off the roof, the walls and the corners of her shelter. At least half of the shots arced perfectly over the small building and landed smack on her head. She huddled into her coat, pulled the hood down tight and waited him out.
Inevitably, he ran out of ammo. Now it was her turn. Standing with impunity, she mimicked his blitzkrieg, pelting him unmercifully. This time she played dirty, aiming for his masculinity. The snow was too wet and she was too far away to do any real damage, but watching Sam hop and curse and try not to fall off the stump had her laughing until tears ran down her face.
Unfortunately, she, too, eventually ran out of steam and snowballs. Ducking back down, her heart pounding, she waited for the answering volley. Nothing happened. Surely he had managed to make a new pile of ammo by now. Dead silence reigned, broken only by the faraway raucous cry of a crow.
What was happening? Why wasn’t he firing back? Tentatively, she peeked around the corner of the doghouse, expecting any moment to be hit in the face with icy, wet snow.
The stump had been abandoned. No sign of Sam anywhere, though messy footprints led in all directions. Surely he wouldn’t have gone back into the house without her. Inside her gloves, her fingers started to go numb. And the knees of her pants were getting wet. Where in the hell was he?
Without warning, snow crunched behind her and what felt like a shovelful of snow slithered down her back. She yelled in shock, flailing wildly and knocking Sam’s head with hers in the process. He had made a wide circle, sneaking up behind her in a creditable ambush attack.
All Grown Up Page 11
