“This is a beautiful house,” she began.
“Thanks.”
“But not where I pictured you living. It’s not really a bachelor pad.”
His smile was wry. “Yeah, it wasn’t intended to be a bachelor pad.”
“It’s a great family home. Did you buy it after you found out that Carter was yours?”
“No, I bought it four years ago. It was a surprise. And a Hail Mary play.”
“A Hail Mary play?”
“In football it’s a desperation play, and that’s what buying this house was for me. I was engaged and having trouble getting my fiancée to the altar.”
He finished his ice cream and set the bowl on the coffee table next to the logos.
Heddy had finished hers, too, and did the same. She had the sense that he wasn’t eager to talk about this but since he’d said that much she ventured a little further anyway.
“Was that the relationship you spun out of before you met Carter’s mom?”
“It was,” he confirmed on a sigh. “My first girlfriend. My first date. My first love. My first everything.”
“Ah, the all-important First.”
“Was your husband that for you?”
Heddy shook her head. “I met Daniel in college, so there had been a few boyfriends before that. Nothing serious—just teenage dating stuff, dances and what-have-you. Daniel was my first...” and only lover. But now that she’d started to say it she didn’t know how to finish, so she altered her course and said, “When I met Daniel I knew almost instantly that he was who I was meant to be with.”
“I know that feeling.”
“Daniel always said he felt the same way,” Heddy offered, hurting a little even as she recalled it.
“Audrey didn’t,” Lang said. “She didn’t say it and I’m sure now that she never felt it.”
Heddy hurt a little more for him. “That’s her name? Audrey?”
“Audrey Vincent. We met in ninth grade. We were both fourteen and we were inseparable from then on—weird as that seems now that I know what I know.”
“My aunt and uncle—Clair’s mom and dad—started going together when they were thirteen and never stopped, and they’ve lived happily ever after, so it’s not so strange.”
“Yeah, living happily ever after—that’s how I imagined it would be with Audrey. We were together all through high school, went to college together in Fort Collins and moved in together after college, which is when I asked her to marry me.”
“You called her your fiancée, so she must have said yes.”
“She did. Without hesitation.” There was a hint of disillusionment in his tone. “It was just after that that things... I don’t know. They seemed the same. But whenever I’d want to set a wedding date, she’d put me off. For two and a half years.”
“Was she busy getting her career started?” Heddy asked.
“She had a trust fund, plus I didn’t care if she worked at all, so no. She did work a few days a week in one of her father’s car dealerships, but it wasn’t anything she was devoted to. I would have understood something like that. But we were basically settled into mock-married life—she just wouldn’t take that last step to make it genuine married life.” He seemed lost for a moment in memories. Then he looked at Heddy and said, “How long were you engaged before you got married?”
“Daniel proposed at the end of our freshman year of college. We were married the next November,” she admitted, hoping it didn’t make him feel worse.
“So basically a six-month engagement?”
That seemed to put his two and a half years to shame so, implying that they’d been impulsive, Heddy said, “We were really young.”
“And how long were you married?” Lang asked.
“Five years. Our parents didn’t want us to get married until after college but we wanted to have a few years alone together before we started a family. And we wanted to start our family by the time we were both twenty-five.”
“And you had a three-month-old by the time you were twenty-five, so you were right on schedule,” Lang said as if he envied that.
“Then life hit me with a curve,” she reminded him, hoping to let him know he wasn’t the only one for whom something important hadn’t worked out.
“I guess I’d have to say that it was Audrey who hit me with a curve. After being engaged for so long I wanted to push forward, so I bought this place,” he said, getting back to what had begun this subject. “It came on the market all of a sudden and Audrey was familiar with the house—one of her friends had grown up here and she loved the place. I decided to surprise her with it, figured we’d celebrate by finally setting a date.”
That seemed like such a wonderful surprise. This beautiful house and a gorgeous, charming guy really wanting to get married... What was wrong with that woman? Heddy wondered. But she didn’t say it.
Instead she asked, “But it didn’t happen like that?”
“What it did was push her to the point of telling me that for a long time she’d liked the idea that I loved her more than she loved me.”
“Oh.” Heddy said, trying to imagine what she would have felt if Daniel had said that to her. And hurting again for Lang.
“It seemed so... At first I thought she was kidding,” he said, sounding stunned even now. “Maybe it’s male vanity or ego that caused me to miss something, but until she said that, I’d believed we felt the same way about each other.”
“When you look back, were there any signs that she didn’t?”
He shrugged. “She’d never cheated or even talked about wanting to date other people. She’d moved in with me. She’d said yes to the proposal. I guess maybe I might have been the first one of us to say the I-love-yous a lot of the time...” He shrugged again.
“But that night here...” he continued.
He shook his head and Heddy watched the emotions cross his handsome face.
“Audrey said she just didn’t love me enough to spend her whole life with me. That she’d been struggling with it, trying to feel more than she did, hoping it would come in time, but it just didn’t and she didn’t think it ever would.”
For a moment silence fell. Lang’s gaze was off in the distance. Then he shook his head again and shrugged once more before refocusing on Heddy.
“That was it,” he said with finality. “She gave me back the ring, moved out of the loft we were living in and I haven’t seen her since.” There was lingering shock in his tone.
Heddy recalled something he’d said when she’d told him about Daniel and Tina. “But it hit you hard.”
“Oh yeah,” he admitted. “First there was the wallowing part. Then there was the anger part. Then there was the partying like there was no tomorrow and meeting Carter’s mother—”
“And then you came to grips with it all but it had changed you,” Heddy concluded.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged. “Audrey left me knowing that I’ll never let myself be all-in unless I know damn good and well that the other person is all-in, too. Of course that isn’t how my family interprets the change in me. They think I shut myself off, that I keep people at arm’s length since Audrey.”
The kisses they’d shared popped into Heddy’s mind. She certainly hadn’t felt as if he’d kept her at arm’s length.
“They think I’ve built a wall around myself,” he added.
“But you don’t think they’re right?” she asked, hearing doubt in his tone.
He seemed to consider his answer before he said, “I think I’ve become careful.”
“Understandably.”
“I think I might have kept things a little superficial with everyone I’ve been with since Audrey.” His brows pulled together for a moment before he amended that. “Well, with almost everyone. Lately I’m beginning to
wonder if that isn’t changing a little.”
With me?
Heddy thought she had to be wrong in wondering that.
But he was looking at her with a warmth that hadn’t been in his blue eyes while he’d talked about his past.
“I don’t know,” he said then. “We’re all products of what we’ve been through, and something changes in us along the way. Maybe it changes pretty drastically in the recoil then relaxes a little so we end up somewhere between where we were at both extremes. But we’re still changed to some extent.”
Which was true for her. She’d been able to do things with Carter and Lang that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do for the past five years. But she still had some reservations....
Lang smiled and stretched an arm along the sofa back, pushing a wisp of her hair from the side of her face with an index finger. “I guess we can’t swing completely back to the naive happiness because we’re weighed down with what I believe is considered baggage.”
“So what does that make this house? Your deluxe leather steamer trunk?”
He grinned and glanced around as if he honestly did like the place. “Yeah, this isn’t too shabby a piece of baggage to have ended up with,” he agreed. “It took me a while to decide whether or not to keep it. But in order to improve my investment it needed remodeling and updating. Once the work was finished, and I’d picked everything out, it felt like mine. So I moved in. I guess you could say it’s the something-not-too-shabby that came out of the ugly. Kind of like your cheesecakes—although it seems like I got a bigger not-too-shabby out of a smaller ugly, and you kind of got a smaller not-too-shabby out of a bigger ugly.”
The way he put it made her smile. “I certainly hope my cheesecakes are not too shabby.”
But it was definitely not too shabby to have him stroking the side of her face, which was what he’d started to do after moving her hair aside.
“And now here we are,” he said in a lower, more intimate voice, “maybe the worse for wear but still kicking just the same.”
“To our credit?” she said, thinking more about how he’d recovered from what his fiancée had said and done to him than about herself.
She sat there peering into his eyes, somehow seeing even more depth in them, in him, now. She knew he was a Camden and that her mother put all Camdens into the same category of cad, but Heddy couldn’t help feeling that Lang was a good man.
He leaned forward enough to kiss her then, catching her midthought so she didn’t see it coming. But it didn’t matter because unlike when he’d kissed her by surprise before, this time she just instinctively kissed him back.
She wasn’t supposed to be doing that, she reminded herself. And since she hadn’t prevented it from happening again—the way she’d sworn she would—she knew she should at least try to break it off now.
But he had such terrific lips—warm and just soft enough...
And he was so talented at using them; parting them the perfect amount, positioning them over hers just right.
Plus he smelled divinely of the lightest, cleanest cologne.
And he tasted of the praline liqueur, sweet and heady.
And she just plain liked kissing him.
So she did. She went on kissing him, telling herself she’d only do it for a bit. Because how could she reject him when she’d just heard how horribly that silly, silly other woman had?
He cradled her head in his hand as he brought his other arm around to pull her closer, and she went willingly. Willingly and fully aware that no matter how she rationalized it, she was surrendering just because she ached to be held by him, to be up against that big, broad-shouldered body.
They opened their mouths wider and tongues met with vigor as thoughts of everything and everyone floated from Heddy’s mind and she drifted away on the pure sensations of being so thoroughly kissed by Lang once more.
She raised her hands to his chest—rock-hard and muscular—and wished that his sweater was thinner, that there wasn’t quite so much fabric between her palms and him. Wished that there might be nothing at all between them....
But she chased that thought from her mind the minute it appeared there, reminding herself that she wasn’t even supposed to be kissing him.
And kissing him and kissing him and kissing him.
There was more zeal to it than there had been before, more heat, more hunger. So much more that Heddy’s nipples became tiny knots and other things—long-sleeping things—slowly, lazily, began to awaken inside her.
And suddenly she was aware of not just an inclination to have her hands on him, but of an even stronger inclination to have his hands on her.
It was as if her breasts had a mind of their own and somehow swelled into closer contact with his chest.
But her hands were in the way.
So she slid them around him, to the wide expanse of his back, her fingers splaying against him and doing their own part in bringing her near enough so that her oh-so-tight nipples brushed his chest.
He released her hair from its clip to fall free for the first time since she’d met him. Then he threaded both hands through the long strands at the back of her head, holding it steady against an even deeper onslaught of kisses that were rapidly intensifying and feeding the need in Heddy for even more.
She found the hem of Lang’s sweater and snaked her fingers under it to finally reach skin. Warm, satin-over-steel skin.
And just when she was thinking that nothing had ever felt so good to her before, he took her lead and trailed one of his hands to the bottom of her sweater, slipping it underneath.
Goose bumps erupted all along the surface of her skin at that first touch and she nearly shivered with delight. Like the first sip of water after a long, long draught, she drank in the feel of a man’s hands on her—even just on her back—and ached for even more.
Their tongues were doing a fevered dance as Heddy explored every mound of muscle in Lang’s back, massaging and memorizing the tone and texture of it all, while he gave hers a very, very fine massage as well, holding her even tighter to him.
His hand on her back felt huge and strong and powerful and incredibly, incredibly good, turning her insides to mush and making her yearn for him to touch her breasts in the same way.
As if he could hear her thoughts, his hand veered off course, coming from her back to her waist, then moving upward along her side, closer and closer to her breast....
She pulled her shoulders back, extending an invitation. An invitation that he took, bringing his hand forward and finding just one of the two parts of her that craved his attention.
But he only touched her on the outside of the bra that she willed to just disappear.
He did the next best thing, though: he snuck a hand in under the band and finally gave her what she wanted, what she wanted more than she knew until she got it—the wonders of his bare hand on her bare breast.
A tiny half sigh, half moan escaped from her throat as the sumptuousness of that sensation set in, as he cupped her breast in his palm and pressed his fingers tenderly into her soft flesh.
Her nipple was a tight knot in the center of his palm, asserting itself there as he began to work magic. Then he found it with gentle fingertips that carefully pinched and pulled and circled, and took her up another level of desire, of need.
He didn’t neglect her other breast, giving equal attention there. Equal pleasure. And melting Heddy from the inside out as their mouths continued to play a sensuous game.
And still she wanted more. Just when she was enmeshed in the wonders of his touch, she somehow started to think of tearing his sweater off. Of tearing her own sweater off. Of being skin-to-skin with him. Everywhere. Because yes, she went on to think about jeans flying. About being able to see for herself if he looked as great out of clothes as he looked in them. If he l
ooked as great as he felt...
It was only the thought of being naked herself that made a twinge of inhibition rear its head, keeping her from actually tearing off his sweater.
It was a very brightly lit living room. And while that made it all the better to see him, the thought of being seen herself gave her pause.
And into that pause came a little sanity, too.
And the reminder that she had promised herself that she wouldn’t even kiss him tonight.
A promise she’d made for good reason.
Yes, Lang had been instrumental in showing her that she really had moved through some of her grief. It was a huge step to find herself able to be attracted to him. So attracted to him that, yes, there was a part of her wanting to just let herself go.
But to allow that attraction to get out of hand?
The newly sane part of her made her ask herself if she wanted her story to be that after five years of grieving she’d followed in her mother’s footsteps by falling for a Camden, only to have him leave her in his dust?
The answer, of course, was no.
And exactly what Heddy had sworn wouldn’t happen because she wouldn’t put herself in that position.
In this position—in Lang’s arms, more and more of her turning to jelly with every minute that their kiss went on, that his hands were on her breasts...
And as much as she wanted it to continue, it was sanity that prevailed and she knew she couldn’t let it.
Maybe for just another minute...
For just another minute she kissed him with all her might. She let her breasts nestle into his hand, absorbing every feeling, every thrill, savoring it all.
For just another minute she let herself have this moment, this experience, with this man....
But even though another minute became another minute and she still wanted another minute, she forced some control.
“Okay... No... We shouldn’t be doing this,” she whispered in a ragged voice when she’d ended the kiss.
He dropped his forehead to the top of her head. “I know...” he said as he slowly, firmly dragged the heel of his hand across one nipple and nearly drove her out of her mind.
It's a Boy! Page 13
