by JoAnn Ross
Finally, giving into the demands of his body, Gabe allowed his own release on a long, shuddering groan that echoed deep into Emma’s bones.
Afterwards, they lay amidst the cooling, tangled sheets, arms and legs entwined, his large body sprawled over hers. He felt heavy, but not uncomfortably so. As she twined her still-unsteady fingers through his damp hair, Emma wondered if Gabe could feel her body’s continued pulsations.
He could. The way her inner muscles kept clenching around his still throbbing cock was the sexiest thing he’d ever felt.
“Wow.” Her breasts were a pillowy cushion, soft and bountiful. He turned his head and kissed the fragrant flesh. “That was more incredible than in my fantasies of you.”
“You fantasized about me?” Why?
“Mais, yeah.” He shared a reminiscent smile. “There was this one summer, when I was filming up in northern Ontario, in the lake district. The temperature was in the ’90s, with a humidity just as high.”
“I never thought of Canada being as hot as the bayou,” she managed as his lips caressed a nipple.
“Neither had I. We spent seven weeks there making this movie about a guy who escapes from prison when the transport bus goes off the highway. He carjacks an SUV, takes the driver hostage and falls in love with her.”
“Ransom,” she murmured. It had been an edgy, yet romantic movie about two unhappy people who’d found each other at the impossibly worst time. Unfortunately, the screenwriter hadn’t gone for a happily-ever-after ending, instead having Gabe’s character killed in a hail of bullets.
When the Bijou’s lights had gone back on, all the moist eyes in the theater revealed Emma hadn’t been the only moviegoer who’d cried at the tragic final scene.
“That’s the one, all right.” He nodded. “There was this one scene, where she was cleaning the bullet wound he’d gotten during the breakout and the strangest thing happened.”
His gaze took on a faraway look as if he was picturing the moment in his mind. “I had this flashback to when we were here at the camp. When you were putting the ice pack on my stitches.”
The emergency room doctor had given Emma the gel pack, instructing her that keeping the wound iced would help keep down the swelling.
She lifted her fingers, traced them along the white scar which, rather than detract from his devastating good looks, only added to his rakish appearance, keeping his features from being impossibly perfect.
“That never should’ve been necessary. Someone should have done something to stop your father years earlier.”
Gabe shrugged his broad shoulders. “You know how it is down here. Everybody pretty much minds their own business.”
“A child being abused should be everyone’s business.” She smoothed a hand over his temple, and down his neck. The tightened tendons told her that he wasn’t as nonchalant as he was trying to sound. “If you knew a father was beating a child—”
“I’d want to kill him,” he responded on a deadly primitive tone that had goose bumps prickling on Emma’s skin.
It was as if a bucket of ice water had been thrown on the warm, afterglow mood. With a muttered curse, Gabe rolled off her, left the bed, and went into the adjoining bathroom.
Ten
Gabe leaned a hand against the wall as he flushed the toilet, watching the condom swirling down the drain. Just like his life would’ve done that night if Emma hadn’t come across him and his father beating each other’s brains out. From the time he’d grown taller and stronger than Claude Broussard, Gabe had thought about killing him. But, not wanting to end up in prison, he’d mostly stayed out of his way as much as he could.
Nate’s dad, who’d been Blue Bayou’s sheriff, had tried to get him moved out of the house, but then he’d been killed in the line of duty. Nate had helped out by giving him a key to this place, where Gabe had essentially lived on his own from his thirteenth birthday.
Although he hadn’t gotten drunk again since that long ago night of the showdown he and his father had been building toward all his life, Gabe suddenly wanted a stiff drink now. Jack Black, straight up, hold the ice. And keep them comin’ .
Shit. How old did a guy get before he finally escaped the ghosts of his past?
He’d never thought of himself as a coward. But as unpalatable as the idea was, while he’d spent his entire life struggling not to grow up like his drunk of an old man, he’d ended up a lot like his mother.
Like her, he’d run away from Blue Bayou. Now, having also run away from Hollywood, he was right back here where he’d begun. Which meant that he’d spent the past decade running in circles.
Dragging his hand down his face, he took a deep breath and left the bathroom.
“Sorry about that,” he said as he sat down on the edge of the mattress and ran a hand down her tangle of hair. “Guess the topic just hit a little too close to home.”
“That’s okay,” she said with that unwavering loyalty that he now realized he hadn’t fully appreciated when he’d been younger. The corners of her lips tilted in a faint, reassuring smile, but her eyes were as grave as they’d been that night.
“I’m glad you didn’t kill your father, Gabe”—she smoothed a caress over his knuckles which, that night, had been bruised and bloodied—“not for his sake, but for yours.”
“The bastard wasn’t worth doing hard time for, that’s sure enough,” Gabe agreed. “But if you hadn’t come along when you did, I’d probably be in prison and he’d have been in the ground ten years ago.”
And not a soul in the parish would’ve mourned Claude Broussard’s passing. Gabe hadn’t felt so much as a twinge of regret when Nate’s wife, Regan, who was now the sheriff, had called to tell him about the accident.
“You hungry, chère?” He didn’t want to talk about his father anymore. Didn’t want to think about him. “Since the power was on when Nate stocked the fridge this morning, things shouldn’t have spoiled, and we’ve got plenty of wood for the stove. How does some crawfish jambalaya and dirty rice sound?”
“Wonderful.”
“Bien. So, we’ll have ourselves a little supper. Share some conversation.” He nipped at her bottom lip and ran his hand down the silk of her bare back. “Then we’ll go back to bed.”
Her answering smile could’ve lit up the bayou for a month of Sundays. “That’s the best idea you’ve had yet.”
Deciding that things were definitely looking up since he’d come back to Blue Bayou, Gabe paused in the act of buttoning up his jeans. “I don’t suppose you’d like to save me the trouble of ripping off your clothes later, by just stayin’ naked?”
That soft, lovely color he was beginning to love bloomed in her cheeks. Who would have suspected that a sexy, multi-orgasmic woman who could turn him every which way but loose, was capable of blushing? When choosing roles, Gabe had always been drawn to contradictions in character; Emma was a gorgeous, walking, talking tangle of intriguing contrasts.
He vowed by the time he left the bayou, he’d have explored every one.
“I am not eating without clothes on,” she insisted.
He shrugged, even as he decided that Emma was going to make one bang-up dessert. “I had a feeling that’s what you’d say. Though it’s a damn shame, because you sure do pretty up the scenery, tite chatte.”
He retrieved his duffle bag out of the car. Since he was a great deal taller than her, the oversize black and gold New Orleans Saints T-shirt hit Emma about mid-thigh. He heaved a deep sigh of regret when she put her panties back on.
“Spoilsport.” He knew he should’ve just ripped the damn things when he had the chance. He liked the idea of Emma bare-crotched and bare-assed, available to him whenever he felt the urge to touch her. Take her. Pleasure her.
And she would be pleasured, Gabe vowed. In more ways than she’d ever imagined. Again and again.
Just thinking about all the ways he was going to have her, all the things he planned to do to Emma, with her, had sweat breaking out on his forehead and a har
d-on of Herculean proportions straining against his jeans.
He was considering giving into the rampant testicular urge to drag her back to bed when his stomach grumbled.
If he was going to spend the rest of the night ravishing the delectable Emma Quinlan, he’d need to keep his strength up.
Food first.
Then, one hunger satisfied, he was going to claim her. Physically. Emotionally. Completely.
Emma was surprised at how well she and Gabe worked together. He gathered up the ingredients, assigning her the job of peeling the boiled crawdads while he started the rice.
“There was another time, up in Canada,” he said, as he heated the oil in a large, cast-iron skillet, “when this actress and I were rollin’ ’round the bed, supposed to be makin’ love.”
“I seem to recall a lot of that,” Emma said.
“The couple were hot for each other, sure enough. But the time I’m talkin’ about was when it was like I got zapped by a time machine and instead of bein’ with her, it was like I’d ended up back here, with you.
“Jus’ thinkin’ about how pretty you looked, and those soft little sounds you made when you came, I got such a boner, me, that Clint had to call a break in action so we wouldn’ end up with a triple-X rating.”
“Things like that happen,” she said with a brief, knowing nod. “To men.”
His lips quirked in a smile as he added some flour to the oil, whisking the roux with smooth, deft strokes she couldn’t help but admire. Although Emma had grown up in a part of the country known for its Cajun and Creole cuisine, since her mother’s cook had never let her in the kitchen, her own culinary skills were self-taught and marginal, at best.
“Been with a lot of horny men, have you, darlin’?”
Hearing the laughter in his voice, Emma refused to look up from peeling the red-shelled crustaceans. “One of the first things you learn in massage school is not to take a male client’s erection personally.” She cringed inwardly as she heard her mother’s prim tone coming out of her mouth.
“Sounds reasonable,” he said easily. “Though, fair warning, Emma—any erection I get around you, you oughta take real personal.”
The decadent smile he flashed her way was rife with sexual promise and sent a shiver of primitive awareness shimmying up Emma’s spine. Carnal fantasies, each more kinky than the previous one, tangled hotly in her mind.
He turned down the heat beneath the pan and began dicing a fat yellow onion. “Nate left beer and wine in the fridge. Why don’t you get something for us to drink while I finish peeling those mud bugs?”
Having been caught up in a fantasy of being dragged by rough-handed brigands before Jean Lafitte, Emma was momentarily disoriented to find herself in the camp kitchen, rather than in the pirate’s private quarters.
“What would you like?”
“Now there’s a tempting question.” He put such blatant sexuality into the growled response that for a fleeting moment, Emma was back on the pirate’s private galleon, naked, on her knees, forced to satisfy his every erotic demand.
“We seem to have Voodoo Beer,” she reported in an uncharacteristic stammer. “And Chardonnay.”
“I’ll take the beer. For now.” The timer he’d set for the rice dinged. “Then perhaps I’ll drink the wine off your lush body for dessert.”
As she opened the wine with the corkscrew she found in a drawer and unscrewed the cap of Gabe’s beer, Emma couldn’t decide whether to take his words as a promise or a threat.
The wine sparkled in the candlelight like sunshine on water. The robustly spiced jambalaya and dirty rice could’ve easily been served at one of the finest New Orleans Cajun restaurants.
While the south Louisiana culture could admittedly be accused of being chauvinistic from time to time, cooking had always been a rite of male passage for Cajun men, dating back to when they’d had to feed themselves during those long, lonely months at their camps when they’d supported their families by hunting and trapping.
As if by mutual, unspoken agreement, they kept the conversation casual over dinner. Gabe entertained Emma with anecdotes about the movie business, while she caught him up on the local gossip.
“Remember Dorothy Pettijohn and Pearl Duvall?” she asked as he cleared the table. She’d offered to help, but he’d refused, insisting that he’d rather she just stay in one place so he could enjoy the scenery while he worked.
“Sure. God, they must be at least seventy, by now.”
“Seventy-three,” she confirmed. The two women had lived together in a little house on Bayou Pettijohn for as long as Emma could remember. “They went off to Canada last year for a vacation and came back married.”
“Good for them,” Gabe said as he poured the coffee he’d turned on before they’d sat down to supper.
“A few people were scandalized.” Emma’s mother being one of them. “But most just figured it was their business.” She smiled her thanks as he placed the heavy mug in front of her. “Turns out the ceremony took place on their fortieth anniversary.”
“That’s a helluva long time for any couple to be together,” he said.
“Isn’t it?” Emma remembered how happy they’d looked when they’d returned home from Toronto. Their faces, lined and weathered from seven decades of living, had been glowing. “I hate to admit it, but I envied them. Just a little.”
“No shame in that.” He took a drink of coffee, eyeing her over the rim of the earthenware mug. “By the way, in case you were wondering? That picture of me with that actress on that tycoon’s yacht was a cut and paste. I don’t fool around with married women. And I don’t screw around on women I’m with.”
Unlike some people. The unstated words hovered in the air between them.
“Nate sorta filled me in on what’s been happening with you.”
“It’s not exactly a secret.” Her fingers tensed on the mug’s handle. She forced them to relax. “Given that Richard’s in prison.”
“For embezzling from your daddy.”
“Yes. The ironic thing was that he’d married me to get in good with my father in the first place.”
“Now, that’s hard to believe.”
“It’s true.”
Strangely, it didn’t hurt now because it hadn’t hurt then. Not really. Oh, Emma’s pride had been wounded. But her heart had remained unscathed because while she’d been promising to love, honor, and respect, her heart hadn’t been hers to bestow on her husband. Because she’d given it to Gabe years ago.
“He told me, the day he left me for Chandra, that he’d never really loved me.”
“I’d call the guy a prick, but he’d give a bad name to penises everywhere.” Gabe leaned back on the hind legs of the chair. “So, did you love him?”
“I thought I did.” She’d almost managed to convince herself that she had. “I certainly wanted to.”
“So, why did you marry him if you weren’t sure?”
Because I finally gave up on you. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Was it the sex?”
Emma nearly choked on her coffee. “What?”
“The sex. I guess it was pretty good, huh?”
She was amazed to discover that she could laugh about something that had been so painfully embarrassing. “It wasn’t anything to write home about.” She dragged a hand through her hair and pretended a sudden interest in the well of darkness outside the window. “I wasn’t his type.”
“Chère, a woman like you is definitely the type of every male who has even one workin’ nut.”
Emma felt the heat—the bane of redheads—flood into her face. “That’s nice of you to say—”
“It’s not nice. It’s the truth.”
“I wasn’t very good. You know,” she said at his arched brow, “with the how-to part.”
What was it about Gabe that had her telling him things she’d never told anyone but Roxi. Couldn’t she just keep her mouth shut? Apparently not. She kept pointing out her flaws. Her big butt,
her lack of sexual expertise, next she’d be telling him about the D she’d gotten in high school geometry and the bad perm that had caused her hair to break off at the roots two days before her wedding.
A rich, deep, sexy laugh exploded from him. “Emma, darlin’, if you were any better at the how-to part, I’d be laid out on a slab down at Dupree’s funeral parlor after dying from havin’ my head blown off by that last climax.”
She thought about the way he’d shouted her name as he’d come with a force that had driven her deep into the mattress and decided that even Gabe wasn’t that good an actor.
“It was good, wasn’t it?” she murmured.
“Better than good. It was gold-medal, world-class sex, and if I were a more generous man, I’d drive myself up to that prison and thank your dickless ex-husband for not bein’ man enough to handle a woman of your vast sexual needs.”
She might have laughed. Or argued. But for some reason, the hot and hungry way he was looking at her made her almost believe him.
“It was a good thing, in a way,” she said, taking another sip of the chicory flavored coffee. “I’d gotten complacent, working as a bookkeeper down at Nate’s construction company. I’d thought about opening my own business for a long time, but Richard didn’t believe two careers were good for a marriage.”
“Sounds like the guy was intimidated by strong, confident, sexual women.”
“That’s the same thing Roxi said.”
“You should listen to your friend, you.”
“Well, once he left—taking our joint bank account with him—I decided to open Every Body’s Beautiful. We began as pretty much a typical fluff and buff operation, then I started expanding services. One of our most popular packages is the Rose Body Booster. It’s an aromatherapy treatment that includes a rose petal massage. We get a lot of requests for that at Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. And just last week we did an entire bachelorette party.”
Gabe tilted his chair back on its rear legs. “Maybe I’ll sign up for one while I’m here. Just the idea of getting naked and having you rub rose petals all over my body makes me hot . . . But you know what makes me even hotter?”
