Wild Hearts

by Sharon Sala

  The night air was chilly, the black sky ablaze with stars to infinity, the kind of night for making love, but she was almost too weary to stand.

  Trey met her at the porch, walked her in the back door and once again pointed at the washer.

  “Strip for me, honey.”

  “Don’t bother with my clothes, Trey. Just leave them on the floor and I’ll deal with them in the morning. Come wash my back and talk to me. I don’t want to cry again.”

  Trey locked up as she walked naked through the dark house. He heard her in the shower. The scent of her shampoo drifted out across the hall. He put up his weapon and began to undress.

  By the time he entered the bathroom, she was standing beneath the jets with her eyes closed and her arms braced against the wall in front of her, letting the water run down her back.

  “Coming in,” he said softly.

  She reached back and clutched his hand, needing an anchor. Her head was spinning. She had been trying to count the number of days since she’d left Charleston, but she kept losing track. In the short time she’d been home, life had given her a crash course in gratitude. Some would say she’d reconnected with Trey out of fear and grief. But she knew better. Her crash course in life hadn’t scared her into commitment. All it had done was to show her what had been missing.

  He slid his hands around her waist and then traded places with her. Now he was the one under the pelting spray and she was in the lee, just out of range.

  She watched the water flatten his hair like a silky black cap, and then drip from his eyelashes and down onto his cheeks. She might have thought he was crying except for the heat of passion in his eyes.

  “Make love to me, Trey.”

  He hesitated even as he pulled her to him. “You look so hurt. I don’t want to make it worse.”

  Her hand was splayed across her breasts. “The worst pains are in here, and I think only you can make those better.”

  His nostrils flared. “Standing up or lying down?”

  “Here and now,” she said.

  “We can do that,” he said. “Put your arms around my neck.”

  So she did, then responded to the pressure as he cupped the backs of her hips and lifted her up.

  “Put your legs around my waist,” he said.

  She settled on the jut of his erection with a grateful sigh. This was what it felt like to belong. This was what it felt like to be home.

  “Hold on tight, Dallas Ann. You are going for a ride.”

  And she did, riding him straight up to glory, wrapped in his loving arms. The pulse of the water jets was a tease to the blood pulsing through their bodies. And as he began to move inside her, her body became supersensitive to touch. Everything she felt turned her on, from the pelting flow of the water to the rough brush of his unshaven cheek against her breast, then the hard thrust of his body as he drove her need for a sudden and mind-shattering climax.

  Dallas lost focus on everything except what Trey was doing. Every kiss he gave her seared her skin, marked her soul. She wanted to catch fire in his arms. She could never get enough of this man. And when the feeling finally came upon her, she gave up to the blood rush and died the little death in his arms.

  Trey felt her climax coming and finally let go, spilling his seed until his body was weak and his legs were shaking.

  She unlocked her legs and slid down, then took a washcloth and washed every inch of his body until he was as clean as she felt.

  He turned off the water, and as they stepped out together he grabbed a towel to dry her off. She stood motionless beneath his care until he was satisfied.

  Then he kissed her healing shoulder and whispered in her ear, “Go take your medicine, baby. Your body has been through a whole lot of hell, and what we just did didn’t make it better. I sure don’t want you sick.”

  Dallas glanced in the mirror. So much had happened since the dog attack, and in such a short span of time, that it felt as if it had happened to someone else.

  She went through the house to get the antibiotics and took them in the kitchen, standing naked in the dark as she took them. Then she dug the loan paper out of her backpack and carried it with her to her room.

  Trey walked in behind her as she laid it on the desk and then, without saying a word, fell into bed as he crawled in behind her.

  He waited until she’d fallen asleep, then got up to retrieve the engagement ring he’d picked up earlier and went back to bed.

  She slept with the abandon that only total exhaustion can bring, and Trey brushed a kiss along the curve of her cheek that she didn’t feel while he told her a story she didn’t hear.

  “For six years, four months, three weeks and two days I went to bed thinking this moment would never come, and yet here you are, so beautiful, and yet so beaten and worn by what life has done to you that I can’t say this to your face without coming undone. I love you more than my life, Dallas Ann. Thank you for wanting to be my wife.”

  Slowly he slipped the ring onto her finger, and when it went all the way without effort, it felt like a sign.

  “Perfect fit, just like us,” he said, then stretched out beside her and closed his eyes.

  * * *

  Trey was in the kitchen making coffee when he heard her scream. He grinned at the sound of running feet as she came up the hall.

  She flew into the kitchen buck naked, holding her hand out as if it had turned to stone, her eyes wide with disbelief.

  “Did I forget this happened? Is this a dream and I’m still asleep? Talk to me, damn it! Am I engaged?”

  “Well, you are naked,” Trey said, “and you have an egg customer down at the barn, and yes, ma’am, you are engaged to me with a promise to wed.”

  She slapped her hands across her breasts.

  “Oh, son of a bitch,” she muttered, and flew back down the hall to get dressed and then ran out the door to deal with her customer.

  Trey threw back his head and laughed, and he was still laughing when she came back with the money and a smile.

  He swung her up in his arms, kissing her soundly before he sat down at the table and pulled her into his lap.

  “You had a need to know this land was free and clear before you went to bed last night, and I had a similar need to officially put my name in the bright lights of your life before I closed my eyes. And then you passed out and I couldn’t sleep, so I engaged you to me. I didn’t think you would mind.”

  She started laughing and crying, and then she threw her arms around his neck and proceeded to kiss him on every inch of his face. After which she stopped, looked at the ring and did it all over again.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she breathed.

  “Just like you,” he said.

  “Oh, Trey, oh, honey, I am so proud to be marrying you,” Dallas whispered, and then buried her face against his neck and hugged him.

  “You’re not crying, are you?” Trey asked.

  “No. I’m just taking this all in. I came home to bury Daddy and thought I’d lost everything that mattered. Instead, I find out everything that mattered was just waiting for me to come home.”

  He saw her face, and just for a second, instead of the smile, he saw the terrified look from yesterday as she came running down the trail.

  “Life is precious, baby. I don’t want to waste another minute of it without you. So, now that you’re wide-awake and listening, will you marry me, Dallas Ann?”

  And just like that, everything that had been in turmoil within her slid into place.

  She touched her forehead to his.

  “Yes, I will marry you, and thank you for asking.”

  Epilogue

  Fall had come in all her glory to the mountain, turning the leaves to burnished gold and crimson red and citrus orange, sending animals into a shopping frenzy to shore up the larders in their dens with food enough to get them through winter’s cold.

  Life for Trey and Dallas had found its level, save for the unsolved mystery of her father’s death. The untidy
shrine she’d made of her father’s room was also gone, packed or given away, save for that precious stack of antique books from the ancestors who’d established this farm. She had everything that mattered stored close within her heart.

  The decision to keep the cattle had been Trey’s, so there was now a big stack of new hay in the far corner of the barn. The chickens still ruled the roost in their own coop, confident that food, water and heat would be furnished in return for the tidy sum of one egg apiece each day. The broody hen had finally abandoned the nest, disgusted with the ceramic egg that never hatched. And the day Trey came home with a cat for the barn, Dallas knew life had truly begun anew.

  She had her own plans for the future and was in the midst of working on a book she’d begun years earlier, about a forever kind of love. She had another book on the back burner about the mystery surrounding her father’s murder. She knew part of the story, but not the rest. It would have to wait until the mystery was solved.

  Once in a while she would get a text from an old friend back at WOML Charleston, still giving it the old college try to persuade her to give up her story. But that was hers to tell, in her words, in her own way, and not with a thirty-second sound bite on the ten o’clock news.

  The only thing still in limbo was laying her father’s body to rest, and when that day finally came it was just her and Trey at the grave site, holding hands as his casket was lowered into the ground next to his wife.

  “It’s a real nice day for this,” Trey said, and pulled her a little closer against him for her comfort.

  Dallas glanced up at the cold, clear sky and then at the beauty of the changing leaves around them. He was right. It was a real nice day.

  “Fall was Dad’s favorite time of year. He would love this,” she said.

  The grave digger came forward with a scoop of fresh earth and handed her the shovel.

  Despite her best intent, tears welled as she cast the earth down on the casket.

  “Rest well, my sweet daddy. You’ll never be out of my thoughts.”

  Then she handed the shovel to Trey.

  He shoved it into the freshly dug earth and then moved closer to the edge as he tossed in the dirt. He heard it land, but he didn’t look down. Instead, he was looking out across the countryside, remembering the ride he and Dick had taken the day Dallas first left home.

  “I miss you, man. I know you were worried about Dallas, but look how great she turned out. Remember I told you she could take care of herself, and that no matter how far she went, she would never forget the way home? I was right. She came back for you, but she’s staying for me. Rest in peace, my friend. God knows you’ve earned it.”

  Dallas was in tears when he turned to face her.

  “Hey, no more tears, love,” he said. “Let’s go home. Your job here is done.”

  They walked hand in hand back to the car, and while neither one of them said the words aloud, they were both thinking the same thing.

  The job would never be over as long as the killer was walking free.

  * * * * *

  Look for the next book in New York Times bestselling author Sharon Sala’s

  SECRETS AND LIES trilogy,

  COLD HEARTS

  coming in September from MIRA Books.

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  ISBN-13: 9781460380529

  Wild Hearts

  Copyright © 2015 by Sharon Sala

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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