With painful slowness that sent her heart stuttering in her chest and squeezed the breath from her lungs, he captured his lower lip between his teeth and considered her with an absolutely feral gaze. Her pulse thrummed to life—double time, even—and heat flooded her face as the sexual promise in that look raced across her flesh like a touch.
“If you’re trying to distract me again, Radcliffe…”
He tilted his head at her, almost like she amused him, but the sexual tension didn’t ease. She became aware—as her nerves sizzled to life and begged her to push into uncharted territory—that she stood alone with a man. A large, powerful and intriguing man. Two consenting adults could do quite interesting things with an entire house of solitude.
“Are you distracted? I’m not doing anything, simply asking you how far you’re willing to go for answers.” The innocence he played with wasn’t in his tone, even if the words suggested an innocuous conversation. The overtones were so thick in his body language, her fingertips itched to touch him and see how far he’d go with his ploy.
She could retreat or attack.
Raising her chin, she stepped closer, within an arm’s span of him. “I can only help you if you let me. If you’re assuming you can scare me off by leering at me, you’ve got another think coming, McQueen.”
Instead of backing off, he moved closer. Not quite touching her, not even grazing her clothes with his, he bent his head to be too close. Her eyes fluttered closed, sure he was about to kiss her.
He didn’t, and after a moment she opened them back up to see him looking unguarded. The expression on his face said everything she felt—need, hunger, sexual tension—and his lips parted as if he only barely resisted her. She became aware, between one heartbeat and the next, that if she simply moved those last few centimeters, he’d kiss her.
The idea both terrified and thrilled her.
The conflicting emotions kept her still, breath ragged, until she found her voice. “What caused your divorce, Radcliffe?”
His nose barely touched hers, the briefest stroke of skin on skin and tenderness, and he backed off to brace his hands on the sink. “My mother. When forced to choose between my new wife and my mother, I chose the woman who needed me. I have work to do. If you’ll excuse me—”
He spun to leave her and she caught his arm. He went still for a second and then she gasped as he swept her into his arms like she weighed nothing more than a doll. Her hips were against his, her face at eye level with his, and the hardness she felt against her screamed the attraction she fought wasn’t one-sided at all.
“I warned you—don’t touch me. I won’t be responsible if you keep pushing me, Sheri. You’re waking a beast and he’s hungry.”
He squeezed her once, close against his body, and she wanted to melt into him.
Instead, he practically shoved her away from him. She stood, swaying at the need erupting in every nerve of her body. The slam and click of his lock told her he again shut himself in his office—his fortress of solitude—and she stumbled to a chair.
“Okay,” she finally managed when her hands stopped shaking. “The mother. I need to find out more about the mother.”
The silence in the kitchen didn’t answer her.
Chapter Eight
The cursor blinked, taunting him. The rush of words he’d barely kept up with the day before dried up in the withering heat of sexual frustration.
At least that was what he told himself as he blew up the bio picture of her off her website. The damned woman was under his skin, grating his nerves and distracting him with needs he’d long thought himself in control of. His body was a machine—he fed it, fulfilled its basic needs, and in return, it functioned as a vessel for his storytelling.
Right now, the vessel was too full of her—the teasing scent of her, the mystery of her backstory, the way she never quite said what he expected her to—to have room for anything else. He toyed with the idea of finding her, seducing her, taking the edge off the gnawing hunger and constant arousal she seemed to create by being in his house.
He discarded the idea. Part of him feared that one taste wouldn’t be enough. The craving for her could fast become an addiction, one he’d have to recover from when she inevitably found his life to be repulsive.
Found him to be repulsive.
The words were ones his wife had spat at him, quite probably fueled by angry disappointment. The knowledge that she’d gone into the marriage with dewy dreams of happily ever after and he’d cloistered her in a farmhouse far from the glitz and hubbub of the city didn’t remove the power from her declaration. Mama’s Boy, Pathetic Loser, Deadbeat, Impotent, Repulsive, Not Fit to Pretend to be a Man…all titles she’d thrown at him and he’d accepted and worn as armor against future entanglements.
He’d found sexual release since the dissolution of their unhappy union, but always with women who understood it was sex and nothing more. Ones who’d wanted to sleep with the author, have the hero in their bed for a night, and not expected the man to live up to the promise of forever. Something inside him quaked at what Sheri offered—not simple, not just release. She wanted to scrape off the mask, find the scarred man underneath and bare him to the harsh light of reality.
He wasn’t sure he could bear to remove the mask.
He’d written a character once, scarred by war and battle worn, who feared showing the world the man he’d become rather than the one he’d been—not feeling whole, broken both inside and out by the things he’d seen and had to do to survive. Somehow, Radcliffe would almost prefer to be physically scarred rather than to be so damned damaged he’d literally repulsed his own bride. That he wished he was a broken character in one of his own books pissed him off to the point that he punched his desk.
Instead, he sat staring at the blinking cursor and tempted to delete the whole damned file of the newest book in frustrated fury.
What right did she have to pick at him, to come here from who knew where and try to change him? What right did she have to push him and offer up her sexy little body like the gold at the end of some rainbow…impossible to attain, if temptingly close all at once? Opening a new file, he began to let the words of anger flow onto the page instead of battling each other in his head like angry rodents with only one scrap of cheese between them and starvation.
Who was she to try to rip the bandage off a wound he hadn’t even acknowledged for so long he’d thought it scarred over and buried in the past?
His world made sense, had symmetry, before she’d bounced into it with her perky little ponytail and equally perky tits. He might have been suffering from writer’s block, but wasn’t that preferable to a stiffie so hard he could probably hold up a tent with the damned thing?
Sex. It kept coming back to sex. Maybe if he tasted her, just enough to take the edge off—
It bordered too close to an addict, again, needing one more hit to go on.
He’d been in the office for hours, he acknowledged, and accomplished nothing more than a ranting page of angry babble about how much she’d grated on his nerves.
The fiancé. Preston, according to both the obituary and her own verbal slip. If she wanted to pick at scars, she had a few of her own he could pick back at and Preston seemed the key to her own hidden pain.
Standing, he poured himself two fingers of whiskey. Draining the glass in one gulp, he braced himself against the slow burn. Instead of cooling his ardor and anger, the beverage added lubricant to his already shaky control so he poured and downed more. Perhaps if he drank enough, he could forget her, at least for a while, and get some work done.
Hemingway said, “Write drunk,” after all.
Two more glasses, each a bit more full than the last, joined those first ones and then he lost count. Sitting cross-legged in the middle of his office, drunk before noon, he scowled at the bottle which offered up neither solace nor answers.
Because she had the answers. Only one way to get them. Snagging the bottle and bringing it with him, he went off in search of his roommate—to beard the lioness in her den, so to speak.
As if to add fuel to the fire that burned in his chest, she wore the paint-spattered shirt he’d found her in when she’d painted Mina. Instead of only the shirt, this time she’d worn shorts—as if she knew she wouldn’t be alone for the day. It taunted him with the flesh she’d hidden more than when he’d been able to see it. His mind supplied what the clothing hid, vividly.
He chugged the last of the fluid from the bottle. She seemed oblivious to his presence. He focused on her work—a very angry and bloody toothed squirrel if his drunken eyes didn’t mistake her furious paint strokes. She ignored him.
Throwing the bottle as hard as he could, he didn’t stop a satisfied smirk when she squeaked and ducked to avoid the shrapnel as the glass shattered on the far wall. No glass actually came near her, but the sound of it breaking satisfied some childish part of him almost as much as her squeal and jump did.
“What in the ever-loving hell do you think you’re doing?” Her hands propped onto her hips, flushed in fury, as she faced off with him. Gone was the controlled woman who planned and plotted and picked at him, replaced by a ball of angry emotions.
Since his own engine revved on equally high emotions, he smiled back at her. “If I’ve a desire to throw a bottle at a wall, I can. It’s my house.”
“Are you drunk?” She didn’t back down, not even faced with all six foot four of him looming in the doorway and throwing shit. He respected her temerity even as it further amped his own adrenaline.
“Probably.” The concession cost him nothing. “Tell me more about Preston.”
“You need to go lock your ass back in your office until you sober up, McQueen.” Turning, she faced her painting again, disregarding him entirely.
“You need to stop telling me what to do, woman!” He bellowed the words, his voice echoing through the house.
She didn’t budge, continuing to paint as if unaffected by his wrath.
He breathed deeply, searching for sanity in his boiling rage and not finding much of it.
Then he saw it. Her hand, where she held the brush, trembled. She wasn’t unaffected by him. She faked it.
For some reason, this was the only information he needed to move closer, to go within her space and growl near her ear. “You wanted answers, Sheri. Don’t hide now. I’m here. I’m willing to answer your questions. But first, you have to answer mine. Tell me more about Preston.”
“I don’t have to do a good golly damn thing, you drunken oaf. Back your ass up.” Her face was still flushed and her eyes glittered up at him, angry gems of color surrounded by jewel-bright amber hair.
“You’re hiding. You pretend to help others, some misguided attempt at penance for a death that wasn’t your fault.” He threw the words at her, darts aimed at her weaknesses, and she could either back down because his trajectories made their marks or attack.
She chose attack.
“You’ve got this bubble around you, just like you put a bubble around this house and these things. Nothing can penetrate it. You’re hiding too.” Throwing her hands in the air, she spun away from him.
He snatched her back, tugging her close to his hot and hungry body. “Are you scared? Afraid of trying to penetrate that bubble, Sher? Are you afraid of me, of what I’ll do?” He whispered the words, close to her ear, and she shuddered. It took so little from him to leave her shaking in response. With one hand, she reached back and cupped his cock through his jeans.
“I’m not afraid to try. Perhaps you should worry about how very not afraid I am.”
His breath rasped out of his lungs, fast and ragged. He shut his eyes against the emotions that rushed his system.
Whatever he’d expected her to do when cornered shattered beneath the illicit pleasure of her touch. She’d crossed a line, perhaps the invisible bubble she mentioned, and whether she knew it or not, there was no turning back. “Are you going for shock value, Sheri? I’m not going to back off because you’re touching me, so if that’s what you’re after…”
He left the words hanging, one half hoping she’d release him and run, slamming her door and putting a physical barrier between them. The other half hoped she’d turn and wrap her arms around him, inviting actual intimacy rather than this façade of a touch that still felt so good.
Her small laugh raked across his raw nerves. “Even now, you’re trying to use words to shove me away. Do you think I can’t see that?”
He swallowed and inhaled the sweet scent of her hair. He longed to wrap his arm around her waist, pull her closer and streak kisses up the length of her neck. To finally kiss her, like he’d been imagining since he met her. Instead, he exhaled and found more words. “I can’t compete with your precious Preston, Sher. I’m not a sweet boy who never did a thing wrong in his whole life and died an angel.”
Like a key in a lock, those words made her release him and spin away. Instead of the pain he thought his speech would bring, her face twisted in humor. “Is that what you think? You think I’m still mourning him because he was so wonderful? That I’m a dutiful fiancée who made the right choices and stood by him until the end?” The derision in her tone had him backing away from her, not sure where she was going with the conversation.
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I’m doing penance, all right, but not out of some twisted sense of survivor’s guilt or anything nearly that wholesome. I’m a weak woman, I made poor choices and I own what I did. I can’t fix who I am and the integral weaknesses in myself. I might not be able to help you. But I do help people, dammit.” Tears shimmered in her eyes and he had two choices.
Feel guilty for hurting her or lance the wound. He’d never been good at guilt.
“Are you any different than me? Really? You’re still hiding from life. Whatever choices you made are in the past and—”
Her hand smacked down on his chest and she backed him up step by step as she fired back. “Aren’t we our choices? Aren’t they a reflection of who we are? Preston was sick, yes. A good fiancée stays by her man when he’s sick and I did. Even while I could almost smell him dying from the inside out, I pasted on a smile. I wanted to run. Inside? Watching him die made me want to scream and scream and never stop. I got a job that last summer, the summer when he was so frail he wasn’t even a shadow of the man he’d been, more a living skeleton. I got a job with the county fair and I met a carnie who wanted nothing more than an easy lay with a local girl he’d never see again. He charmed me, smiled at me, was healthy and strong and everything that Preston wasn’t. Do you know what I did?”
He shook his head. He’d run out of space to back up, the wall at his back and a woman full of fury and fire pinning him to it.
“I let him kiss me. For one moment, I wasn’t the fiancée of a dying man who had to be strong, be supportive, be constantly positive. I was just a girl in the arms of a boy who was stronger than me and made me feel cherished.” The tears spilled over, splashing onto her cheeks as they flushed red in her anger. “I avoided going to the hospital for a couple days, the guilt for allowing that kiss—only a kiss, mind you, but betrayal in my mind of the emotional and physical commitment I’d made when I accepted his ring. And do you know what happened in those few days?” Her finger jabbed into his chest and he didn’t move. “He died, Radcliffe. He was good and wonderful and he died. Everyone comforted me, everyone was so worried about how I’d go on, and all I could think was that I’d cheated on him. I didn’t deserve their sympathy any more than I’d deserved Preston. So there. You have my big secret. Are you happy? Does all of it suddenly make sense and click into place?”
Capturing the wrist of the hand that poked him, he still didn’t speak. He simply stroked his fingertips across her wrist. He kept stroking, looking deep into her eyes, and w
aited for the fury to dissipate like a storm cloud.
Once she breathed steadier and shifted her weight, he stepped forward, into her space. “It does answer a lot of questions.”
Her choked laugh might have been part sob.
“However…” He backed her up a step, turning the tables on her. “You’re not dead.” Her pulse sped up under his fingertips and he bent his head to nuzzle at her neck. Placing one soft kiss below her ear, he listened to her breath shudder out on a sigh. “But, Sher?”
“Yeah.” She whispered the word, a soft tremor quaking her frame.
“If you grab my dick again, expect more than an argument.”
With that, he turned and left her while he could still make himself go.
Chapter Nine
Sheri stared at the squirrel painting in disgust. Other than making a random-looking creature that was complete cartoony crap and that she’d never be able to sell anywhere, she’d accomplished nothing since he’d left her shaking in reaction to his drunken temper tantrum.
She should have been afraid of him. She’d stood and told herself that after he’d thrown the bottle, she should have been afraid of his violence, but nothing in her believed he’d hurt her, even in a whiskey-soaked rage. Instead, she’d wanted to go smack him. She’d literally shaken in her refusal to meet his fury with her own.
Then he’d touched her and she’d ignited. She’d pushed back as hard as he pushed her and ended up telling him something she’d never told anyone.
Maybe because he was behaving so badly, so inappropriately, he allowed her to confess what a truly horrible person she really was. How very awful she really was and how simply unfixable she was—driving her to help others who, comparatively, could actually enact change and fix the bits that were damaged in their hearts so they could learn to love and live again.
Wishing the room he’d assigned for her studio had a door—and wondering for the umpteenth time why his childhood bedroom didn’t have a door to start with—she moved to the corner and lifted the sheet covering her recent work. While he’d been holed up in his office writing like a madman, she’d been on an equally creative bender in between avoiding the dark corners of her own mind and going cabin-fever crazy.
While You Were Writing: Watkin's Pond, Book 2 Page 6
