by Lori Wilde
Or not.
Now that she was getting to know him better, saw how down to earth he really was, maybe he’d prefer rustic. He was a cowboy at heart after all. Sensible. Practical. Earthy. A farmhouse. Yes. On second thought, definitely rustic.
Her favorite style.
In the corner of the room sat an electric guitar and on a small desk beside it an open college-composition-style notebook filled with musical scores and scribbled lyrics. She wandered over to take a look.
Read the first line.
One look. Her eyes. Her lips. Her soul. I’m gone.
Wow. Her heart keeled over. How romantic!
He stopped in the doorway, watching her.
She felt the strain in him all the way across the room. He didn’t want her looking at his work in progress. She was invading his privacy. Paige stepped away from his notebook, dropped her hands by her sides.
“You’re working again?” she asked.
“How did you know I ever stopped?”
Their eyes met and in unison they said, “Gossips.” Laughed. It felt good. Sounded natural.
“I was stymied for an entire year,” he admitted. “Couldn’t write a word.”
“Because of your breakup with Simone?”
He scraped a hand along his jawline. “Not so much Simone—that was a long time coming. More the breakup of the band. I’d been with those guys from the beginning of my career. We started in Snake’s garage when we were teenagers. Plus, someone stole my first guitar. The one my mom gave me for Christmas the year she died. It used to be hers. That was a kick in the gut.”
“That must have been really hard for you.”
“After the band broke up, I got a solo contract with our original recording label, but I froze. Couldn’t produce.”
“Considering the circumstances, it’s understandable.”
“I began to think that the band was the source of my creativity. That without them I couldn’t create music.”
“The creative block is what sent you to the Amazon?”
He nodded. “I was searching for . . . something . . .”
A beat passed between them, weighted and significant. A silent pause she couldn’t quite decipher.
She inclined her head toward the notebook. “Obviously you found your way again. The Amazon worked its magic.”
“No.” His head ticked back and forth like the black cat clock with a swishing tail counting off the seconds that once hung in Grammie MacGregor’s black and white, 1950s-style kitchen.
His gaze caressed her face, tender and searching, and it shook her in ripples, tiny little earthquakes from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.
“I was still blocked when I came back from the Amazon.” His voice was even but it held a riptide of unspoken words drawing her deeper into the mystery of him.
“But now you’re not.” She waved at the notebook. “What happened?”
His eyes were laser beams, sharp and unerring. “You.”
“Me?” she whispered so softly she could barely hear herself. “What do you mean?”
“I came home because Emma asked me to perform for her charity and it was time to try and get back to work, but I stayed in Twilight because of you.”
Her jaw loosened and her pulsed quickened, a trot, a cantor . . . What was he saying?
“The second our eyes met, the music . . .” He picked up the notebook. “This song sprang into my head. Full-blown. Ready to pluck and refine.”
Seriously? Her heart galloped, a wild mustang roaming her chest.
“I’ve never in my life experienced anything like it.”
“Like what?” Her palms were sweaty and she folded her fingers into fists, her mind whirling, a propeller of spiraling thoughts.
“One look in your eyes and it was as if a dam broke and all this music came flooding into my head. As if you were Euterpe ripping apart my creative blocks with your bare hands.”
“Um . . .” Paige scratched her chin, felt slightly intimidated. “Who?”
His smile was filled with the knowledge of a world she knew nothing of. “One of the Greek Muses. Euterpe inspires musicians and poets.”
He thought she was his muse? That was both flattering and bothersome. Was he hanging out with her simply because he believed she’d stoked his creativity?
So what if he was?
She knew this could be nothing more than a fling. Anyway, that’s all she wanted. What she needed. She’d never had a wild, reckless affair. Never cut loose and just followed her passion.
“If you think looking into my eyes unlocked your creativity, just wait until we have sex,” she blurted, shocking herself with such boldness.
He wasn’t offended. Not in the least. “Is that a fact,” he drawled, his voice deepening, lengthening.
“Never know until we try.”
“Hmm.” He raked a hand over his jaw dusted with beard stubble, his smile craggy and dark, his pupils dilated and intense.
There was a wildness to him that sent thrilling, rushing goose bumps over her arms, a delicious shiver tickling every bone in her spine.
“What?” she breathed.
“I’m trying to decide if it’s worth the risk.”
“What risk?” she squeaked.
“That together we’ll be too hot to handle.”
“Burn me, baby,” she begged. “Burn me.”
“Ah, Paige.”
“Don’t think. Just do. Act. Treat me like one of your instruments. Play me.”
“Like this?” He stalked across the room, scooped her into his arms.
She let out a startled squeal.
He hoisted her to his chest. Instinctively, she wrapped her arms around his neck. He was so strong, so brawny.
Cash peered into her eyes, and she felt the connection weld them in a way that yanked all the air from her lungs, left her stunned and shaking.
While she might have unblocked him, he’d also unblocked her. A block she’d denied and avoided, sexual and scary. Her one sexual partner had been a man who’d betrayed her in the biggest way. She’d been too afraid to branch out, try again.
Until now.
Until Cash.
He crushed his mouth against hers, hard and demanding, ravenous with need. But underneath the raw masculine power ran a tremor of tenderness that settled her doubts and fears. He would not hurt her. She felt the truth of it to the very marrow of her bones.
It was crazy. Mad. But a madness born of trust and confidence.
In his mouth, his arms, she found a place she’d forgotten. Safety. Reliability. Strength. Roots. The place that had been torn from her by her parents’ divorce and her father’s illness and untimely passing.
Home.
When he kissed her it felt as if she was returning home after years of wandering aimlessly through the world, not even knowing she was searching.
And now finding it all the same.
It was not the home of parched, sandy West Texas soil. This home was not a physical place. It was an internal place. A place of time instead of space, where she felt of one piece. Whole. Complete. A place of quiet sustenance. A nurturing place. A sheltering place.
A secret, sacred place of the soul.
In this place, this home, waited buried treasures of wonderment, peace, vision, and freedom. Freedom from demands and responsibilities, worries and noise.
In his kiss, she found this place, this home, but more than that, Paige found . . .
Herself.
Paige Hyacinth MacGregor as she’d never been before. Confident in her sexuality. Fully comfortable in her own skin. Acutely aware of her feminine power.
He removed his mouth from hers, but he continued to hold her tightly in his arms. She could hear the hard thumping of his heart against her body, felt the vibration of his life force flowing into her.
This was what she wanted. Him. Tonight. Fully and completely.
Cash eased her onto the mattress, slipped his arms from around her, stepped back.
Looked down at her with such wistfulness it took her breath.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“You are so beautiful,” he murmured with the reverence of a faithful man in church.
She had never thought of herself as beautiful, but the expression on his face convinced her that he thought so. It touched something deep inside of her. Stirred a need she hadn’t known was there.
He kept touching buttons, pushing envelopes, surprising her with the things she discovered about herself through the lenses of his eyes. It was heady and a bit disconcerting.
“Come here.” She held out her arms to him.
He shook his head. “Paige, I want you so badly I can’t breathe, but I’m not sure you’re doing this for the right reason.”
Baffled, she sat up on her elbows. “I want to have sex. You’re hot. I like you, and you like me. What’s wrong with that reason?”
“Are you using me to bury the past?”
Was she? “Maybe. Who knows? Who cares? What does it matter?”
“I just don’t want you to do something you’ll regret later.”
“I’m regretting not ripping your clothes off,” she grumbled. “And giving you too much time to talk. That’s what I’m regretting.”
He laughed, a solid sound that filled her lungs with happiness.
“Are we going to do this thing or not?” she asked, terrified he was going to back out.
He came toward her, head lowered, eyes glistening in the muted light from the bedside lamp. That feral jungle cat again. Lithe. Dangerous. Sexy as ten kinds of sin.
She gulped, thrilled, chilled, delighted. He crawled onto the mattress. She fell back against the pillows, stared up at him.
His jaw tightened. Eyes darkened. Breath slowed. He did not speak.
Her heart skipped a beat. Then two. Three.
“Last chance,” he said. “You can still back out—”
She didn’t let him finish. Just grabbed the front of his shirt in her fist and pulled him down on top of her.
Chapter 14
Romantic: A period in musical history during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries where the focus shifted from the neoclassical style to an emotional, expressive, and imaginative style.
Paige wasn’t just any woman. She may claim she didn’t want anything from him, but she was little more than a virgin. If they slept together it would mean something significant to her. He would only be her second lover.
Who the hell was he kidding? If they slept together it would mean something significant to him.
And that wild thought spun the illogical notion through his head. What if he could be her last lover?
Whoa! Hold the freaking phone. He’d known her a week. One measly week and this was what popped into his head?
His chest muscles tightened, a vise squeezing the air out of his lungs as she pulled him down.
They were pressed together, pelvis to pelvis. He peered into those bewitching eyes. Buzz! The contact hummed like a high-voltage electrical line.
She lowered her lashes and sent him a foxy grin. His heart twitched strangely as if yanked by marionette strings.
What if, what if, what if she was The One? The One he feared did not exist. The One that stirred feelings he’d spent a lifetime avoiding.
Oh shit.
What if he finally stopped roaming, stopped searching for that unobtainable something missing, and opened himself up to what was standing right in front of him? What if he gave up sacrificing love for the sake of his career? What if there was something more important than music? What if everything he’d ever believed to be true was wrong, wrong, wrong, and there was a whole other way of being?
Wow.
He blinked, blindsided by that avalanche of realization.
Who was he going to be for the rest of his life?
The aloof, brooding stranger who didn’t truly belong anywhere or to anyone except the music? Was he forever going to be the guy who let the belief that you couldn’t have both a committed relationship and big career success hold him back and keep him from taking a chance on love?
Love?
What was he talking about? He was having a moment. That’s all this was. Desire. Passion. And a passing moment of wanting it to be more than that.
Focus on the sex.
Good plan. He dove into the feeling. Wallowed in it. Burning hot passion.
For Paige.
Except, as he stared into her eyes, and he saw his own image reflected in that sweet mirror, the passing moment grew, expanded, prodded, provoked. Kicked his persona like an aluminum can.
Cash Colton.
Everything about him was predicated on his musical talent. Even his name. Lorena had named him for her favorite musician, Johnny Cash. From the time he was born, he’d been carrying a tune, tapping out beats, feeling the rhythm of sound pumping through his blood sure as the oxygen he breathed.
How could he throw away his very identity? Without music, he was nothing. Music was the only thing that sustained him. The only thing he’d ever been able to fully count on.
Well, until last year when the music had stopped. After the band broke up and his Gibson was stolen.
The music had gone silent and he hadn’t heard it again until he’d looked into Paige’s eyes. She was the catalyst. The thing that had brought him back to himself.
And that’s where he was getting strung up. That’s why he was confused. Paige and the return of his creativity were intricately linked. He was grateful to her, no doubt. Was he confusing gratitude for love?
That must be it. Had to be it. You couldn’t have feelings of love for someone you’d only known a week.
But man, was he lusting after her big-time.
“Cash,” she called. “Kiss me.”
Who could refuse that plea from those honeyed lips? Not he.
He kissed her, amazing himself by how gently he took her mouth. She wriggled beneath him, wrapped her arms around his waist, pressed him closer.
She reached for the buttons of his shirt, worked them with surprisingly nimble fingers for a woman inexperienced at sex. He laughed at her eagerness, the earnest expression on her face. Once she had his shirt opened, she slipped her hot little palms over his bare torso, and spread out her fingers.
He groaned at her fiery touch, the sound raspy and harsh in the darkened room. She pressed her tongue against his throat and flicked him with a daring lick that stirred every part of his body.
Simultaneously, she pushed the shirt from his shoulders, exposing his skin to the air and leaving him in his jeans and cowboy boots.
“My turn,” he said, taking the tail of her shirt in his hands and pulling it over her head.
Giving him a heart-pounding view of her plump breasts encased in a white lace bra.
Angel.
She was angelic. Heavenly. Garden of Eden.
He peeled back to revel in this moment, fully take it in. The pulse at her throat throbbed visibly, quickened under his stare.
Her eyes crinkled at the corners and her lips tipped up into a smile that hit him hard as a blow. It was such a beautiful smile. She was so beautiful. Beautiful and kind.
Cash cupped her breasts cradled by that bra, felt the lush flesh fill his palms. He straddled her, both knees sinking into the mattress at her hips. He lowered his head, pressed a million openmouthed kisses over her forehead, cheeks, nose, mouth. Sliding down her jaw to her chin, throat, collarbones.
His fingers adeptly reached around her back to unhook her bra. Gently, he slipped it down her shoulders.
She stared up at him, breathing hard, hands moving to cover her bare breasts. Seemingly suddenly shy.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he reassured her. “You can say stop at any time.”
“Go,” she whispered. “Go.”
He went. Kissing her gorgeous breasts. Spending his time there. Nibbling and suckling. Feeling her whimper and wriggle. All he wanted was to give her pleasure.
Erase her bad memories. Replace them with light and laughter.
They shared languid kisses, deep and long and sweet. Kisses both innocent and carnal. Like teenagers in the backseat of an old Chevy on some lonely lovers’ lane at midnight. They embraced each other in heated hugs, wild with solidarity and sedition.
She thrilled him in a way he had not ever before been thrilled. He loved her with his mouth, his tongue, his teeth. Sliding down her body, over those lovely breasts, lingering at her rounded belly, resting his head, and breathing deep.
When he reached the waistband of her jeans, he paused, checked in to make sure this was what she wanted. She raised her head, met his eye, nodded.
He stripped off her jeans and her panties in one smooth motion, working the garments over her thighs, knees, ankles, feet, and dropping them to the floor. He stood at the end of the bed, legs splayed, looking down at her.
“Wait,” she said. “You get undressed too. I want to see you. All of you.”
She crawled toward him, reached the end of the bed, reached for his waistband. Drew him to her as she frantically undid the snap of his jeans, worked down the zipper.
Her eagerness spurred him and he shucked his jeans in a twinkling. Whisk. Whoosh. Naked.
They gazed at each other, rapt. Awed.
His feet were rooted on the floor at the foot of the bed. She was on her knees at the end of the mattress. Her curvy body illuminated in the silvered moonlight shining in through the window. She was a goddess. Pristine and powerful.
Breath stalled in his throat, reverent and rousing.
His shaft was stone. Growing harder at the sight of her. He wanted to tell her how incredible she was, but words were meaningless. Incomprehensible sounds. A guttural glop on the back of his tongue.
He took her in his arms.
She melted into him. Liquid and lyrical.
Their mouths met, crashed, crushed. Head-on impact of need and desire. A fire. Stoked and fed. Flaming high and hot. A blister. A blaze.
He was overthrown. Toppled. Ego gone. Dissolved.
Cash wanted one thing and one thing only. Her pleasure. Whatever she wanted, he was her servant. Sent to deliver her happiness above all else. He felt it. Knew it. And, in that moment, utterly believed it.
