“Let me in, Brynn.”
Without a thought of refusing, she moved aside for him to enter. As the door shut behind him, he cupped her face with one gentle hand and scrutinized her intently. “Are you dreaming?”
Maybe she was. If so, she didn’t want to wake up—not while he was touching her as if he cared and gazing at her with the old, blood-stirring warmth. “I think so,” she whispered. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”
Contrition darkened his eyes. “No, no,” he uttered in an imploring way. “This is real.” He held her face with both hands then, his thumbs stroking, his gaze skimming her face, her hair, her mouth. “More real than anything else in my life.”
A warm welling of hope rose in her, and with a groan that could have come from him or her, they met in a kiss. And, oh, the sweet, sultry flavor of that kiss! It filled yet intensified a voracious craving. Her fingers slid into his hair; his hands coursed down her back, pressing her body to his.
But even as passion flared between them, she knew passion wasn’t enough. Not anymore. The craving went much deeper now—as deep and profound as the pain he’d caused her.
As the kiss drew to a close, the frown in his eyes spoke of an anguish that mirrored her own. “I’m sorry, Brynn,” he said, his forehead nearly touching hers, “for not letting you explain. It was just so damn easy to believe you hadn’t trusted me. You had every reason not to—the lies I told you about my writing, the photos in my room of the victims…”
“I should have come to you, right away, when Trish and Lexi told me about all that. And I should have told you about my meeting with Antoine. But when he said he had proof against you, I wanted to prove him wrong. I didn’t want you to be hurt by their ridiculous accusations—”
He cut off her words with another kiss—hard, urgent, driven by emotion. But then the pace slowed, and the kiss broke into short, sweet quests, each one ending with a needful search of each other’s eyes.
“I love you, Brynn,” he swore. “I have always loved you. All I need to know is whether you love me.”
Her feelings for him rose from a thousand different corners of her being in one tremendous groundswell. She loved him more than she could ever say. But…
Fear knotted the muscles in her throat and, in a strangled whisper, she choked out, “You’re wrong.” The look on his face and the subtle stiffening of his body—as if bracing for a blow—nearly broke her heart all over again. “There’s something else you need to know, Cade.”
The stiffness didn’t leave him, and wariness veiled all other emotions. “The secret you didn’t want to tell me?”
Swallowing an ache, she nodded, then gestured toward the bed. “You’d better sit down.”
He looked as if he wanted to refuse, but slowly he walked to the bed and sank down onto it, his posture erect, his gaze locked with hers. “Tell me.”
She took only a moment to fortify herself for whatever reaction he might have. “When I was fifteen, I was…um…arrested.”
His brows lifted, but in interest more than condemnation. “For…?”
She drew in a deep breath, squeezed her hands together and twisted them. “Armed robbery.”
He stared at her, clearly stunned.
“I drove the getaway car.”
He sat perfectly still for a long, long moment, and the silence built up around her until it pulsed through her ears like a death knell.
And then he laughed. A short, disbelieving bark at first, followed by a longer barrage, and capped off with a rich, rolling boom of mirth that astounded her. Bewildered her. Her perplexed stare only made him laugh harder. “Armed robbery?” he repeated between gasps. “You drove the getaway car?”
“You think it’s funny?”
He let out another laugh, managed to quell it, then shook his head, wiping his eyes. “No, no, it’s not really. It just took me by surprise, that’s all.”
One hell of a surprise.
Cade didn’t believe he’d ever been more stunned—not even when Trish, Lexi and the old lady jumped him. Here sat the sweet, demure, eminently moral woman he loved more than life itself, looking soft and cuddly in her kitten-print nightie with her schoolgirl braid curling over one shoulder, confessing that she’d been collared for armed robbery.
She apparently didn’t see the humor in it. In fact, she looked a little miffed that he did. He understood why, of course. Armed robbery was a serious crime. Serious enough for Doyle Fontaine to have used in some way against her if he’d had the chance.
Cade leaned forward, resting his wrists on his knees, intent on knowing every detail. “Tell me what happened.”
She paced as she explained. The explanation itself wasn’t all that surprising. She’d gone to Daytona Beach to visit her grandmother for the summer and gotten involved with a group of bored rich kids.
“I knew they talked kind of crazy, but I thought they were kidding about robbing that convenience store!” she cried. “And when they told me I could drive, I was flattered that they trusted me with that brand-new Firebird. I had no idea they were carrying guns.”
He pictured her as a trusting, naive fifteen-year-old, fresh from Smalltown, Georgia, impressed and intrigued by the older teens with expensive toys and too much time on their hands. “Were you convicted?”
“No.” A flush reddened her cheekbones and a shadow filled her eyes. “The judge dismissed the charges.”
Cade narrowed his gaze at her pained expression. “That’s a good thing, right?”
“There was nothing good about any of it! My brother, seventeen at the time, slugged the guy who owned the Firebird and threatened that if he didn’t tell the judge I was duped into driving it, he’d kill him.”
Cade shrugged and nodded. Made good sense to him.
“So John was arrested for assault, and my father was so afraid of what might happen to us…” she paused and bit her lip “…he bribed the judge.”
Bribed the judge.
To Brynn’s ears, the words echoed with the terrible finality of a bomb dropped. She stood frozen in agony beside the bed, waiting for the enormity of all she’d told Cade to sink in. Cade, a United States marshal, sworn to uphold the integrity of the justice system. He hadn’t known all these years that she was one of the very people he held in highest contempt—a criminal who walked away unscathed because of money and dirty dealing.
Not that she’d ever felt unscathed. After making such a horrendous mistake by trusting the wrong people, she’d spent all the subsequent years second-guessing her own judgment, afraid to trust too much in others, and determined to make no further missteps. She’d also focused obsessively on succeeding in business so she could pay back her father.
Another tragic irony was, when she finally had succeeded, he’d refused to take a penny from her. She considered that to be part of her punishment. Cade’s final condemnation of her would be more punishment. And she deserved it.
But, oh, how it would hurt!
His brows converged, and she braced herself. But then she realized his frown was one of careful thought rather than disapproval. “John told me about this,” he murmured.
“What?” She drew a step closer without realizing she’d moved. “Did you say…John told you?”
“Yeah. Back in college. Not about your part in it. Just his. The assault charge and how your father mortgaged the house to pay off a judge. But…don’t you know the rest?”
“The rest?”
“According to John, your father gave the money to a defense attorney—the guy who’d convinced him the bribe was necessary. But then the attorney took off with the money. Didn’t even show up in court.”
“That can’t be true.” He had to be mistaken! After the charges were dismissed, she’d overheard her mother telling her aunt about the bribe. Soon the whole community had buzzed with news of the armed robbery and whispers of dirty dealings that let Brynn off the hook. Disgraced and ashamed, her mother had insisted they move away.
“Call John,” Cade u
rged. “Ask him.”
Without hesitation, Brynn did just that.
“Yeah, the shyster ran with the cash,” John confirmed. “Dad made me promise not to tell Mom. Or you, since you’d tell her. Mom never would have let him live it down.”
Brynn felt as if her head was spinning. She could barely comprehend what her brother was telling her. “You mean to tell me that Dad preferred having Mom and I think he’d committed a felony by bribing a judge?”
“Dad didn’t realize you knew anything about the so-called bribe. But, yeah. He preferred having Mom think he’d slipped the cash under the table to the judge to save his children rather than admitting he’d lost their life savings to a con man. No one likes being known as a chump. It’s embarrassing, being made out for a fool.” Brynn could almost picture John’s shrug. “I guess it’s a guy thing.”
She shook her head, astounded. “But if Dad hadn’t bribed the judge, why were the charges against us dismissed?”
“Those other kids had a long rap sheet. We were squeaky clean. And Dad argued a good case.”
She shut her eyes, overwhelmed by the implications. The bribe had never happened. The charges had been legitimately dismissed. No one could arrest her father or brother for the mistake she’d made. She was free—utterly free—for the first time in eighteen years!
She hung up the phone in a daze, and strong, virile arms encircled her. Gratefully, she turned into Cade’s embrace. “Do you have any idea how relieved I am? I’ve spent half my life worrying that my father and brother would be arrested, or disgraced…and that people like you would despise us.”
He lifted a brow. “People like me?”
“Yeah. You know, salt-of-the-earth types. The ones who always want to see justice done. The good guys.”
Cade felt a smile growing in his heart, one he was sure would permanently remain there—if, and only if, she answered his original question in the way he believed she would. And though that same belief had kicked him in the teeth many times, he wasn’t afraid to embrace it. To have faith in it. In her. In them.
He pulled her down onto the bed, against the pillows and into a lingering kiss. He then prodded in a hoarse, hopeful whisper, “Anything else you want to tell me?”
She pressed tender kisses along his neck and jaw. “Only that I love you.”
The sun rose with an awesome heat from somewhere deep in his heart. He felt it cast a powerful beam into every nook and cranny of his past, his present and his future.
“Oh…” she added with a brush of her mouth across the corner of his smile, “and that I love you. And, of course, the fact that—” she nipped at his lips “—I love you.”
He didn’t deepen the kiss, as she’d expected. “Enough to come home with me to Colorado?”
Home, with Cade. To his Colorado mountains. Excitement stirred within her. “Plenty enough for that.”
“To stay?”
Her love for him leaped and blazed. “Yes, to stay.”
“To…marry me?”
Her breath caught at the magnitude of his question. Marry Cade. She’d always been afraid to hope for such profound, permanent bonding. But that had been the old Brynn. She wasn’t afraid anymore. Happiness dazzled her in a wondrous rush, and she met his gaze with joyous certainty. “Yes…to marry you.” She was already imagining a future of passion and devotion and maybe even a mountain-side inn.
They joined in a poignant kiss, Cade firmly resolving to satisfy her every desire.
Intending to start immediately, he slid his hands beneath her nightie. “If my guess is correct,” he said in a husky murmur as he captured her breasts, “you were sleepwalking when you called my name.”
She moaned in pleasure at his caress and slipped her hands beneath his robe. “You do realize that I walk in my sleep only when you’ve got me riled up?”
“Since I hope to keep you riled up for many years to come—” he lifted the interfering nightie over her head and tossed it aside “—I prescribe intensive therapy every night for the rest of your life.”
She sighed at the exquisite press of her naked breasts against his hot, sinewy chest. “Whatever you say, Doc.”
Epilogue
THE JUDGE READ the sentence, and Doyle Fontaine barely flinched, but only because he was in shock. Life imprisonment. He couldn’t believe it. How had his careful planning gone so wrong?
In a disbelieving daze, he watched two huge, cold-eyed officers of the court descend upon him. How he hated letting Cade Hunter and John Sutherland triumph over him this way!
He’d seriously underestimated them. A week after his arrest, they’d somehow learned his models’ secrets—Jo’s liaisons during her marriage, Viv’s occupation before her marriage, and the illegal gambling activities of Kayla’s policeman daddy. Without those secrets to hold over their heads, Doyle had lost all control of them. They’d been more than happy to testify against him in court, and to sue him in civil court, too.
His models’ betrayal had been only one of many disappointments, though. He still needed deep-breathing exercises every time he thought about Brynn’s recent marriage to Cade Hunter, which had won prominent mention on the local six o’clock news. It made Doyle sick, seeing them in the courtroom holding hands, whispering secrets, smiling into each other’s eyes. He’d never seen Brynn so happy, with a dreamy glimmer in her hazel eyes and serious glitter on her left hand. Hunter looked more cocksure of himself than ever, if that was possible.
Trish looked happier, too. She and John Sutherland had been making eyes at each other in court for weeks now. The four of them left together fairly often— Trish, John, Brynn and Cade. Lexi was probably back in Athens running the inn. She’d be pleased as punch to do that on her own.
Sometimes it was a burden, his ability to read people so clearly.
Especially since he, Doyle Fontaine, the most talented artist of the twenty-first century, was being led away in chains to a life behind bars.
But not even that was the worst of it. The real tragedy happened earlier this week, right after the press had picked up on the fact that he’d priced his paintings at top dollar. According to the Atlanta PD, a smoldering cigar butt triggered the sprinkler system in the evidence room, and the paintings they had confiscated had been ruined. Every one of his masterpieces—including the one he’d given Brynn!
With a disgruntled sigh, he trudged along between the guards to a holding cell, where they released him from the cuffs, shoved him onto a cot and closed the door with a final clang.
He’d just have to look on the bright side. If he could get the supplies he needed, he’d have plenty of time to paint. And he wouldn’t have to put up with whiny, nagging women, either.
Instead of Buttercup on the Beach, he’d paint Bob Behind Bars. Cecil in his Cell. Lawrence in the Laundry. Sergio in Solitary. Yogi in the Yard…
ISBN: 978-1-4268-7786-5
SEX AND THE SLEEPWALKER
Copyright © 2003 by Donna Fejes.
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Donna Sterling, Sex and the Sleepwalker
Sex and the Sleepwalker Page 20
