She’d never felt this kind of excitement, never known this kind of desire. It was as if she was completely convinced that she was going to die if he didn’t make love with her. This moment. Now.
This time, she wouldn’t let him back away. Not if either one of them were to live out the night.
Somewhere, far in the recesses of his mind, Wyatt knew he should stop himself. It was up to him to say no. His responsibility. It was no more right tonight than it had been a week ago. Even though there were no cold medicines, no glasses of wine to blame this on, it still didn’t make what was happening right. She was his best friend’s sister, not some tumble in the back seat of a car to be enjoyed the way he had done once when he was young and dumb and didn’t know any better.
He knew better now and whatever he said to the contrary, he didn’t want to hurt Morgan.
And didn’t want to be hurt by Morgan.
But her skin felt like warm silk and her mouth was heated sin and he had an overwhelming weakness and desire for both. A warehouse of lectures couldn’t force him to stop, to abandon the path he found himself on.
He had no choice in the matter.
Not when there was this madness rushing around in his veins, not when his body pulsed and throbbed, demands wracking it.
Not when she tasted sweeter than any known substance on earth.
Always proud of knowing where he was at any given moment, Wyatt realized that he’d lost his way. And lost himself in her.
It was all a haze, yet somehow every single part was oddly crystal clear to Morgan. Every kiss an imprint, every touch a torch that continually ignited her, building the flame within her even higher.
When their bodies finally joined, when relief and excitement finally exploded, leaving contentment to slowly drizzle down over her like a soothing rain, Morgan felt so completely spent that breathing was an effort. Breathing evenly was out of the question. Her heart was racing faster than the speed of light, and she doubted if it would ever slow down.
And knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she would never be the same again.
But even as the afterglow clung to her body like a fine mist, reality began to rebuild a toehold.
Morgan turned her head toward Wyatt. Their eyes met and held. The glow receded. Morgan drew in her breath, feeling it rattle jaggedly in her chest.
What the hell had she just gone and done? How could she have allowed herself to become one of Wyatt’s legion of women? Where was her pride? Her honor? Her brains, for heaven’s sake?
The questions throbbed in her head almost as insistently as her desire had half an eternity ago. Morgan wanted to shriek just as loudly as she had that time her brothers had launched the ghost at her. To shriek and run away as fast as she could.
Instead, she pulled herself together like a queen under siege by the enemy and raised her head, her eyes reduced to twin stilettos as they bore into Wyatt.
“If you ever, ever breathe a word of this to anyone,” she warned, enunciating each word slowly, “I’ll cut your heart out.”
“Threat duly noted,” he replied glibly.’
Nodding, he rose and extended his hand to Morgan. To his surprise, she took it. He gently drew her up to her feet.
Quickly, their backs to each other, they got dressed in an awkward, heated, tense silence.
Finished, Wyatt turned toward her again. He couldn’t just let it go like this. Something had to be said, something had to be understood, although what it was he didn’t know, since he hadn’t a clue as to what he was feeling right now.
Still, he’d never just made love to a woman and then walked away. It wasn’t the way things were done.
“Morgan—”
The last thing Morgan wanted right now was the sound of his voice. If he was going to laugh or apologize or even just breathe, she might not be responsible for her reaction.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said tersely. There was no excuse for what had just happened, but she offered up one, anyway, more for herself than for him. “I haven’t been myself lately.”
The hell she hadn’t, Wyatt thought. She’d been more herself than ever. There was a fire and a passion about the way she made love that branded what had just happened. And spoiled him for anyone else, he realized suddenly. “That would explain the pleasure, then.”
She looked at him sharply. Was he going to gloat? “Whose?”
He wasn’t in the mood to fight. Tease, maybe, but not fight. Not just now. “Mine,” he allowed freely. “Yours maybe.”
She shrugged, trying to be as nonchalant as she didn’t feel. “It was all right.”
She sounded as if she were reviewing a third rate movie. He knew better. It wasn’t his pride, but the feel of the woman beneath him earlier that told him what she felt.
His mouth twitched. “I’ll try not to get a swelled head.”
She supposed he deserved better. “All right, it was more than all right” She’d be damned before she admitted that the very earth had moved, moved so much that she lost her bearings as to which was the sky and which was the ground. “What do you want me to say?”
He didn’t need accolades. One small admission was all he was after.
“That’ll do fine.” He bent down and picked up the flowered band that had fallen from her hair. Instead of giving it to her, he slid it slowly into place. “But what I’d like you to say is why.”
She touched the band, as if to assure herself that he had placed it correctly. She could feel her heart begin to speed up again. She wished he wouldn’t look at her that way. Wouldn’t touch her like that. “Why what?”
His eyes lingered on her lips. “Why did you make love with me?”
With, he’d said with, not to. And that was the difference, she realized. However insane, it had been a mutual act. An act she’d wanted to have go on forever.
She had to be losing her mind.
Morgan covered her face with her hands. What was she going to do? The one time she actually felt something wondrous, and it had to be with the one man on earth she didn’t want to feel anything for. The one man in the world who would take great pleasure in flexing his sexual muscles and then just walking away from her.
“Well?” he asked, still waiting for an answer.
“Why did I make love with you?” Morgan repeated the question, stalling for time as she tried to sound amused. “You caught me off guard,” she finally said.
It was a crock and she knew it and she knew that he knew it as well. “Is that how you react when you’re caught off guard?”
She knew it. He was laughing at her. He’d probably laugh about this, once he had the chance to. The way he’d probably laughed when she’d kissed him in the hospital parking lot in the rain five years ago.
“You jumped my bones before I had a chance to push you away.”
As if anyone could ever “get the jump” on Morgan unless she wanted them to. Wyatt cocked his head, looking at her. “Who jumped whose bones?”
Her eyes widened. Was he going to somehow turn this around so that it sounded as if she’d stalked him? “I did not jump your bones, I was defending myself.”
Wyatt laughed. “How? By ‘loving’ me to death? That’ll make a hell of a new page in the self-defense manual.”
She glared at him. Why was it that he made her tongue tangle like this? Did he enjoy humiliating her? “You’re impossible.”
Unable to resist, he slid the back of his hand along her cheek. This had to be one of heaven’s little jokes, to stir him this way about a perverse woman who hated his guts. “No, I think you just learned that I’m not. I can be had.”
All she wanted to do was get away. And all she could think about was the way his mouth had felt on hers. She had. to be going crazy. “It happened, all right? Don’t make anything more of this than it was.”
“All right.” Wyatt inclined his head obligingly. “And you do the same.”
Morgan picked up the first bottle she could lay her hands on. Her fa
ther, after all, was waiting. “I’m not making anything out of this at all. This isn’t even a footnote in my life.”
He smiled. She was certainly more than a footnote in his. “Then someday, Morgan, I’d love to get my hands on your bibliography.”
Whirling on her heel, her eyes flashed a dark blue as she looked at him. “You leave my ‘bibliography’ out of this, McCall. And while you’re at it, leave me alone, too.”
That would be, Wyatt thought, the best for both of them. “Whatever you want, Morgan.”
But somehow, he had a feeling that his conscience wasn’t going to let him follow that course.
What she wanted, Morgan thought as she hurried out of the cellar and up the wooden stairs, was for the last forty-five minutes or so to have never happened.
More than that, for Wyatt McCall to have never come back into her life.
By the time she’d reached the top of the stairs, Morgan felt she’d reasonably collected herself. At least her clothes, if not her soul, were back in order. The latter might never be again.
With a toss of her head, she crossed the large room where the reception was being held and walked up to her father.
“I believe you asked for wine.” Primly Morgan handed her father the bottle she had picked up from the floor.
She stiffened as Wyatt brushed by her with his own offering. He held it out to Jake.
“Ditto.” A bemused expression played on Wyatt’s lips as he studied the older man. If he didn’t know any better, he would have said that Jake had orchestrated this. But why?
“Why did you send both of us?” Morgan demanded, smelling a rat.
“Always nice to have backup, that way, one of you was bound to do as I asked.” Jake accepted both bottles and grinned. “These’ll do fine.” He looked from one to the other. “No trouble finding them?” Morgan looked past her father’s head. “None.” The look on Wyatt’s face was completely innocent. “Nope.”
Pleased, Jake nodded. “Good. Now go and enjoy yourselves.” Zoe was right. He dearly did love weddings. Almost as much as he loved his kids.
7
Making notes to herself on the yellow pad in front of her, Morgan reached for the mug of coffee on her desk. Then, realizing what she was doing, she pushed it away. No more coffee for her. She was too edgy as it was.
As if anything she found in the bottom of a mug was her problem, she silently mocked herself.
Morgan sighed and closed the folder she’d been working on. God, but she felt exhausted. In the last five days, she’d gotten barely enough sleep to keep a zombie going. Luckily her work wasn’t suffering, she thought, rubbing her hand along the back of her neck.
Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for her sanity.
She supposed it was her own damn fault for letting Wyatt get to her like that. It was turning her emotions and her mind into Swiss cheese. She might rant and rave at him, but here, in the privacy of her own thoughts, she knew there was no excuse for what had happened. She alone was responsible for her own actions and reactions, not some tall, dark, handsome man with a quick grin and an even quicker mouth. A mouth that had reduced her to a palpitating heap of desire.
Morgan silently swore. She should have found enough strength to walk away.
Or crawl away as the case was.
In the deepest part of her soul she’d known, a moment before it’d happened, that once she made love with Wyatt, she’d be plagued by this restlessness, this endless desire to have it happen again. Even though she knew “it” couldn’t. Shouldn’t.
Wouldn’t, she amended fiercely.
Morgan looked down at her hands. She was clutching her pen so hard, her nails were digging into her palm. Disgusted with Wyatt, but mainly with herself, she tossed the pen aside on her desk. It rolled and fell over the side.
Much like her, she thought. Right now, there were people in the case folders on her desk whose lives were far less messed up than hers.
Your own fault, you know that. Your own damn fault, Morgan.
Knowing didn’t make it any better. Didn’t alleviate the restlessness.
All it seemed to do was intensify the pain she felt radiating through her shoulders. She rotated them, trying to get rid of the ache that was shooting all the way up through the base of her neck into her head. Nothing seemed to be doing any good.
When she felt the hands on her shoulders, kneading the knots out, Morgan sighed like a wayward kitten that had found its way to a lifesustaining shelter in a fierce storm.
“Oh, God, Myra, that feels wonderful.” She had thought her assistant, the woman she shared the small office space with, was out to lunch, but obviously she’d made a mistake. Morgan could feel a little of the tension leveling off. “Don’t stop.”
“I won’t,” the male voice belonging to her masseur replied with an amused laugh, “but I warn you, I charge by the hour.”
Yelping, Morgan swung around. Her elbow caught the edge of her mug, knocking it over and sending lukewarm, chocolate-colored liquid on a quest to soak all of the files spread out on her desk.
“You!” She glared at him accusingly. “What are you doing here?”
Wyatt pulled out two tissues from the dispenser on her desk and quickly applied them to the liquid mess.
“Up until a second ago, I was massaging a pair of very rigid shoulders.” He pulled out two more tissues, sending the first two into the trash. “Now I’m mopping up your mess.”
Righting her now-empty mug, Morgan quickly pulled file folders out of the way of the oncoming trickle. “Which wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t sneaked up on me.”
He sent the sopping tissues after the first set. “I was massaging your shoulders,” he pointed out. “How sneaky can that be?”
“In your case, very.” Frazzled, Morgan tossed the folders on top of the stack in her in box. “Why—? What—?”
With a hiss of escaping breath, she stopped to collect herself. She hated acting like an imbecile, but after thinking about him almost constantly, to have him materialize behind her was completely unnerving. Taking a deep breath, she let it out slowly before speaking.
“What are you doing here, Wyatt?”
He shrugged, claiming a tiny corner of dried desk for himself by leaning a hip against it. “‘I was just in the area, and I thought that we might have lunch.”
Morgan didn’t need to know that he had driven twenty miles out of his way to be here. Because he’d wanted to see her. That was strictly his problem. Caused by her, granted, but still his problem.
It all sounded very suspicious to Morgan. Wyatt had some ulterior motive for being here. He had to. It made her nervous to speculate just what. She hated the way he made her so unsure of herself.
Morgan frowned. “I eat at my desk.”
He glanced at the damp marks on the desk that he’d missed.
“That would be my guess.” Then he flashed the smile that had originally set her five-year-old heart fluttering. The same smile that had upended her life these past two weeks. “Why not make an exception just once?”
Her eyes narrowed as she remembered what she couldn’t force herself to forget. “I already have.”
The smile spread further. “I’m talking about lunch, Morgan, not dessert.”
Since she couldn’t make him leave, she turned her back to him and looked at the computer screen. It could have contained her first lesson in Mandarin Chinese for all the sense it was making to her right now. Wasn’t it enough that he had ruined not one, but two of her brothers’ weddings for her? Did he have to show up where she worked to haunt her, as well?
For form’s sake, she punched several keys before asking, “Why would you want to have lunch with me?”
“To talk,” he said seriously.
She scrolled down on the document she wasn’t reading. “And if I don’t want to?”
He couldn’t carry on a conversation with the back of her head. Wyatt turned her chair around so that she faced him.
“Morgan,” he said patiently, “not a day in your life has gone by when you didn’t want to talk.”
A put-down, it figured. She squared her aching shoulders, trying not to wince. “If you came to insult me, you could have saved it for the wedding Saturday.”
He grinned. “I’ve got plenty to spare.” Wyatt looked around the small area. It was made smaller by all the files peering out of the boxes that were lining the walls. He’d never been here before, but it made him think of her. Organized chaos.
There were two framed photographs on the side of her desk, neatly set apart from the mess. There had been a large family portrait taken last year if he remembered correctly. Hank had sent him a copy. Beside it was a small, framed snapshot of a golden-haired boy. Intrigued, Wyatt picked the latter up.
“Put it down,” Morgan told him. Not waiting for him to comply, she took the photograph from him. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to touch things that don’t belong to you?”
His eyes slid over her. The word touch vividly brought last Saturday to mind—last Saturday, the cellar and a woman with silken skin so exquisitely soft, his very soul had ached.
“No.” The single word shimmered between them, more of a promise tied in a memory than an answer. He nodded at the photograph, then picked it up again, putting his body between her and the frame. “Who is he?”
She smiled despite herself. “That’s Josh.”
He heard the smile and turned to look at her. There was affection in her eyes. Did she know how beautiful she looked like that? “One of your friend’s kids?”
If only, she thought. “Josh is nobody’s kid.” The words sounded so harsh, it squeezed her heart. “At least, not yet.”
She thought of her last visit just this past week. It had seemed so hopeful. And yet a part of her felt sad. Sad because the happier the boy was, the less need there was for her. And she missed him.
“If things go right, though, he’s going to be adopted.” Her eyes brushed lovingly along the photograph, remembering the day it had been taken. He’d tried so hard to be brave, to be happy. He’d said he knew his mommy and daddy wanted it that way. “He lost both parents in a car crash a little more than six months ago.” The shiver came without her realizing it. “I was the first one on the scene. I called the accident in and then went to see if there was anything I could do. But both adults in the car were dead. I found Josh in the back seat, whimpering, holding his mother’s hand.” Her voice broke, and she flushed. It hurt just to talk about it. She remembered how frightened Josh had been. How much he’d cried. “He wasn’t hurt, just very scared. I held him until the paramedics came.”
A Match for Morgan Page 8
