Last Dance for Cadence

by Maren Smith

  “Be glad you’re still alive,” her doctor had said while she had lain in the hospital, sobbing because she was already at the maximum level of morphine and it still hurt so damn much.

  “Get mad at it,” her physical therapist had challenged that first day when she had first dragged herself up out of her wheelchair, back when their goal had been just to get her walking again and hers had been to dance.

  But that hadn’t happened.

  “It’ll get easier,” Mama Venia had told her.

  That hadn’t happened either. The challenges were different now, but that didn’t make them easier.

  Maybe she was supposed to be thinking about how she could be more obedient in future. Was she supposed to accept the shit-hand fate had dealt her, shrug her shoulders, say ‘oh well’ and just get over it? How did someone just get over having everything they’d ever wanted ripped away from them? How did they just get over suddenly needing help every minute of every day because they couldn’t even walk without spontaneously falling over their own uncooperative feet?

  How could anyone expect her to want to use a cane fifty years before she was ever supposed to have to? How could Marcus expect her to advertise to every single person she passed how weak and useless she now was, when she never had been before?

  Get mad, her therapist had said, and that’s exactly what Cadence did. She was always mad these days. Even when she sometimes didn’t think that she was, sooner or later she could feel it, bubbling up just under the surface of her right alongside the never-ending flow of these stupid, useless tears. Surely this wasn’t what Marcus wanted her to think about? Surely there had to be something more, something meaningful that she was missing that a truly submissive woman might instinctively just know.

  Try though she did, Cadence couldn’t figure out what that something must be. All she did know was that she was tired, so unbelievably tired, of getting mad.

  Outside, the sun was going down. Upstairs, a bath was being run. Someone was laughing. Someone was fighting. Someone, Buddy from the sounds of it, cried until another set of footsteps climbed the stairs and the low tones of their father gradually tamed the chaos. Children were tucked in, bedtime stories were read, hugs and kisses were distributed, and lights switched off. Then heavy footsteps came slowly down the stairs, weaving their way back through the house to her room.

  He came in, closing the door softly behind him. He took a decorative, cushioned chair away from the wall and set it down beside her bed. Sitting, he rested his elbows on his knees, folded his hands together and said, “Do you want to tell me what you’ve been thinking?”

  She had absolutely no idea what to tell him. She looked at his belt, her fingers feeling along the looped edge. “Three months,” she whispered.

  He cocked his head. “What was that?”

  “Three months. That’s what they gave him. He took away my life and they sentenced him to three months, which he got to serve one weekend at a time. During the week, he went to work like normal, they gave him a brand new partner and he got to dance. It’s everything I ever wanted and he stole it from me, but he still got to dance. It’s not fair.”

  Marcus exhaled, a heavy sound that culminated in an equally heavy touch as his hand came to rest on her shoulder.

  “I’m really very tired,” she said, feeling every bit as broken as she sounded.

  Taking his belt from her limp hands, he lay it on the bedside table. He started to roll her panties back up into their proper place, but stopped when she said, “Can you leave them down? I don’t want to be forgiven just yet.”

  She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the way he was looking at her, but in the end, he left her panties in a roll around her thighs so she could be ‘punished’ just a little while longer.

  “Do you need to use the bathroom?” When she shook her head, Marcus came around the bed, took off his shoes and lay down just behind her. He tried to put his arm around her waist. “Come here.”

  “I don’t want you to hold me.”

  “Too bad.” He pulled her to him anyway. She stubbornly remained on her stomach, but all she could feel all down the length of her left side was the heat of him stretched out beside her. His hand roved her back, caressing the curve of her spine. His breath brushed her forehead, stirring through her hair. “Do you regret it?” he asked. “Coming to Corbin’s Bend?”

  A sane person probably would have. Oddly enough, she didn’t, at least not right now. “Do you regret hiring me?”

  “If all we’re going to do is answer each other’s questions with more questions, then let me ask you this: You do know no one expects you to be strong all the time, right?”

  That could not have stung worse had he slapped her face. “I haven’t been strong one time yet.”

  “Don’t,” he said, his caressing hand shifting all the way down her back until it was there, resting flat with warning on the fullest swell of her left buttock. “Don’t.”

  “You wanted to hear what I thought,” she countered, feeling sick even as she laughed. “If you don’t want the truth, just tell me what you want to hear and I’ll be happy to lie!”

  “Don’t!” One minute his hand was a warning presence on her bottom and in the next, he had jerked up onto his elbow. Catching her chin, he forced her head up and around until their eyes clashed and held, despite her minute rebellion to pull away. “Don’t,” he said again, brushing her hair back from her face. When she began to cry, he groaned as if he could feel the pain of her defeat every bit as keenly as she was. “Don’t,” he whispered, and then he kissed her.

  He tasted like coffee, warm and heady, and in his soft lips she found only the sweetest tenderness. At least at first. He tried to stop after one. She could feel it in the slight trembling of his mouth, when he drew back his head just far enough to take a breath. She also felt it, that internal snap as desire and self-control abruptly parted ways. He kissed her again, only this time there was a fierceness underlying the tenderness, a hunger she could taste every bit as clearly as the coffee.

  She didn’t want to think about the last time someone had kissed her like this, but the need to experience it once more, to be purely physically wanted, consumed her right along with the passionate devouring of his kisses.

  Afraid to trust it, she unfurled slowly, reaching for him, her fingertips drifting up his chest to grip his shoulder, pulling him down to her even as she turned over, minute shifts of submission that helped to tuck her underneath him until she was lying full on her back.

  He released her chin and his hand began to wander, only now instead of caressing that slow path up and down her spine, he was wandering her front, pulling up the hem of her night shirt until he could strip it entirely away. He laid her bare to his touch and his hands remained never more than a hairsbreadth from her skin, sweeping down the gentle slope of her neck, tracing the line of her collar bones and the hollow in between them. He explored her with care, finding the hills and valleys of her breasts, the tightening peaks standing stiffly for the attention of his fingers first and then his mouth as it followed the course his hands had set. He knew her ribs, caressed and kissed his way down the trembling plane of her belly, her navel and hips.

  “Tell me if it hurts,” he said, peeling her panties down her legs and off her feet, discarding them on the floor.

  She’d sooner swallow her own tongue. She simply parted her legs, urging him to settle all the faster between them before helping him strip out of his shirt. That too was tossed carelessly aside, and then she was his again. His mouth locked with hers. His skin was a furnace against her and his hand, cupping her sex directly now, feeling for heat and slick readiness, parted her most intimate folds as he sought and found the treasured nub hidden there.

  Her breath caught when he stroked, and then he was moving down, and for the first time in a long lifetime of bitterness and hurt, Cadence forgot to think about anything beyond his mouth, his tongue, and his hands. She forgot how it felt to be broken and reme
mbered instead the sensual sting of a man’s wanting. She remembered what it was like to dance, if only in the sheets of this bed. To follow his lead as he brought her right to the shivering edge of completion, only to restrain her from the fall, to back her from it, then bring her close again and again, until the desperation had her arching and crying out, writhing to pull him right into her skin with her.

  And then he was. That first slow, grinding thrust as he sank himself all the way up inside her filled and stretched her in all the best ways. His burning hips aligned with her own as his mouth once more claimed hers. When he began to move, her whole body moved with him.

  He was so careful of his weight, even when she urged him not to be.

  He was so thorough, leaving no part of her untasted, unkissed, uncaressed.

  And when she finally came, every inch of her locking down in wave after wave after devastating wave, it was his arms that caught her when she fell apart. It was his breath that she breathed, his heat that she burned in, his kisses that consumed her. His hands that softly, one caress at a time, pieced her back together once more.

  “Tell me if I hurt you,” he whispered, his teasing lips scaling back the intensity only to rebuild it. Gently, tenderly, he rose over her, filled her, and made her dance with him again.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Dad.”

  Marcus snapped his eyes open, for one half second in time, completely lost. The room was dark, lit only by the living room light down the hall, which was just enough for him to realize not only was he not in his own bed, but the slumbering armful of hot femininity sleeping curled up beside him was not Stacy.

  “Dad.” Buddy poked his back and Marcus rolled over far enough to see his son, at the same time, pulling the sheet up high enough to cover any naked bits of Cadence that might otherwise be glimpsed.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “Carla’s on the phone. She sounds funny. I think she’s crying.”

  Marcus got out of bed, checking his watch and grabbing for his clothes, half falling over and half herding Buddy back out of the room so he could close the door without waking Cadence. Where the hell was the phone and why hadn’t he heard it ringing? Yanking on his pants, he rubbed his eyes and checked his watch again. This time, he got his eyes to focus enough to read the time. Two a.m. That put a little steam in his step. No doctor ever got a good, ‘hey, let’s just chat’ phone call at two in the morning.

  Picking up the kitchen cordless, Marcus tucked it between his shoulder and his ear and dropped onto a stool at the bar to wrestle his socks and shoes on. “Carla? What’s happened?”

  “I fell off my porch,” came the immediate sobbing reply. “I’ve been lying here for almost an hour, screaming my head off, but no one can hear me. I don’t think my leg’s broken, but I can’t get up.” Carla was sniffling, warbling, and she did sound odd, Buddy had been right about that. But there was something in her voice that caught Marcus’s attention. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but there would be time enough for him to figure it out once he got there.

  “Front porch or back?” he asked, getting his last shoe on and tied.

  “Back.” Carla sniffled again, beginning to calm down now. “I feel really shtupid.”

  That not only caught his attention, it stopped him where he was. Sitting up straighter, he picked the phone up off his shoulder and held it in his hand. “Have you been drinking?”

  Another sniffle. “One or two…teeny, tiny little…wine bottles…I don’t know.”

  Marcus caught himself before he sighed. He did, however, roll his eyes since the only one there to see it was Buddy, propped up against the kitchen table with his head resting sideways on his folded arms. “I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

  “Marcus?”

  The smallness of her slightly slurring voice prevented him from hanging up. “What?”

  “Why don’t you want me? Why doesn’t anybody want me?”

  Biting back a groan, Marcus rubbed his face and drew a deep breath. Striving for patience when all he really wanted right then was to hang up the phone and send Buddy back upstairs so he could, in turn, crawl back into bed with Cadence, Marcus sighed again. “I’ll be there in ten,” he repeated and hung up.

  “Did Cadence have a nightmare?” Buddy piped up the instant he put the phone back in the charger.

  “No, why?” Marcus stood up, pulling his shirt on while he went in search of his wallet and keys.

  “Sometimes you let me sleep with you when I have nightmares.”

  Marcus glanced at his youngest, but he wasn’t ready to have this conversation. “I have to go to work, Buddy. It’s nowhere near time to get up, so get on back to bed.”

  Buddy didn’t move. “Do you like Cadence?”

  He really wasn’t ready for this conversation either. “Sure I do.” He deliberately kept his tone light and distracted. “Don’t you?”

  “Sure I do,” Buddy echoed, copying his father in both word and tone. “I like her just fine. I even like her with my pants on.”

  Marcus pointed down the hall. “Bed.”

  Buddy made a face, but he went and even called out a soft, “Good night, Dad,” as Marcus got his traveling kit from his office and then headed for the car. He glanced down the hall toward Cadence’s room, wondering once if he should wake her to let her know where he was going but discarding that almost instantly. She needed her sleep and in all likelihood, he’d be back well before dawn.

  He shook his head as he got in his car and tapped the automatic garage door opener. He was willing to bet everything he owned right now that Carla had tipped the bottle one too many times and that’s why she’d fallen off her porch. He’d never seen her drunk before. Heck, he’d never even seen her drink, but between their confrontation at the pizza parlor and that one telling whine—Why don’t you want me?—he was pretty sure he was going to spend the next hour muscling a clingy, seduction-minded woman with arms like an octopus into bed, wrapping a bad sprain and prescribing two aspirin for the well-deserved hangover she was likely to suffer in the morning.

  He shook his head.

  Why don’t you want me?

  How was one supposed to tell a woman he just plain wasn’t interested? There was nothing wrong with Carla. She was pretty, smart, vivacious, and from the moment she’d arrived in Corbin’s Bend, she’d pretty well set her hat for just about every available dominant she met. She felt needy. She felt…desperate. To be perfectly honest, every time she got close enough to flirt, all Marcus found himself thinking was it was his turn to be her fixation. Lately, he’d been wishing either a single dom would move in or she’d give up and move out. She didn’t interest him. She didn’t fire him. The woman who did was lying in a tussle of sheet and blankets, with his seed drying between her thighs, his whisker burn chafing her soft skin, and her entirely too kissable lips swollen from the passion they’d shared.

  The entire drive to Carla’s house, all Marcus could think about was hurrying up so he could get back to Cadence. Looking Carla in the eyes while he unequivocally informed her that a relationship between them was never going to happen wasn’t going to be pleasant and wasn’t going to feel good. But he already had the woman he wanted, and she was waiting for him at home…all he had to do now, was make her want him every bit as much.

  * * *

  Cadence woke up with sunshine streaming in through the windows and arguing whispers streaming in through the crack of her open bedroom door.

  “You’re on my foot!”

  “Michael, I can’t see!”

  “Ow! Buddy!”

  “You made me spill the juice!”

  “Well, why not? You already spilled the milk!”

  “Shhh! You’re gonna wake her up!”

  Cadence lifted her head. Realizing she was naked at the same time she realized they had reached her bedroom door, she bolted upright far enough to grab fistfuls of both blankets and sheet—good Lord, what had happened to this bed?—and
just barely got all the important bits of herself covered before the door swung all the way open.

  “Good morning, Cadence,” Daniel said, carefully making his way to her bed with a steaming mug of coffee between his hands. Michael followed him, just as carefully laden down with a tray that boasted a bowl of cold cereal, a glass of milk, another of juice, overcooked toast and undercooked eggs.

  “Oh wow,” she said, looking at those the hardest. “Thanks, guys. You shouldn’t have.”

  “I know I’m not supposed to use the stove,” Michael said, easing the tray down on her bedside table. “But Dad called and said I should bring you breakfast, so I cooked them over the toaster. I was very careful.”

  Quickly accepting the coffee before Daniel either spilled it into her bed or burned himself, Cadence looked at Michael. “Called?”

  “Yeah, he had to go to Carla’s last night.”

  Carla’s. That instant stab of…it couldn’t possibly be jealousy. Cadence had never been jealous of anyone a day in her life, but there was no other way to describe the cutting, twisting sensation that wrenched in her chest at the very thought of Marcus and that…that…witch from last weekend.

  She had to clear her throat twice before she could make herself sound even remotely disinterested. “Why did he go there?”

  Michael shrugged. “I don’t know. Buddy said she called really early though. Like, three in the morning or something. She sounded funny when she asked for Dad.”