by Maggie Cox
Later, when he’d showered and dressed, he was on his way downstairs to the kitchen, intent on some breakfast, when instinct made him open his front door and glance outside. As the sharply cold air stole the breath from his lungs and made him shiver, he considered Rowan’s car parked outside her front gate with a little throb of alarm. What was she doing back so soon? The woman must have driven through the night to make it back at this hour of the morning. His brain obligingly registered the earlier sound of a door slamming and he cursed himself for ignoring it. All thoughts of breakfast suddenly banished, he shoved his feet into the well-used pair of trainers by the door, grabbed his black hooded jacket from the wooden coat peg, then covered the distance between his cottage and hers in less than a minute.
If she was sleeping then it was just too bad. Evan fully intended on waking her up if he had to, to find out just what the hell was going on. She’d told him she was staying in London for the weekend, so obviously something had come up to make her change her plans. He remembered the peculiar sense of foreboding he’d had when Rowan had told him she was going, and swore to himself to pay more attention to such feelings in the future. Raising the heavy iron door knocker, he banged it loudly twice, the harsh sound ripping through the early-morning stillness, sending a flock of seagulls screeching into the air; uneasiness lined his stomach like lead.
She couldn’t have been sleeping because she was still wearing her coat, he saw. Staring at her pale, unhappy face, the huge dark eyes underlined with smudges of grey and blue, Evan experienced a deep jolt of concern as she gazed back at him.
‘Rowan…why are you back so early?’
For answer, she stepped back to allow him entry, then turned and made her way silently into her almost emptied living-room. She’d taken the dust sheet off the sofa beneath the window and there was a half-drunk mug of coffee congealing on the newly sanded floorboards beside it.
‘I… Parties aren’t really my thing.’ Sounding as though she was in some kind of trance, Rowan shrugged half-heartedly and tried to summon a smile.
Evan tried to figure out why she was still apparently in her party frock—a pretty silk dress with intertwined rosebuds on a cream background, an item of clothing that gave her an undeniable air of delicacy and vulnerability. His hands curled into fists down by his sides.
‘Something happened.’ Moving towards her, he halted mid-stride when she flinched as though struck. His concern doubled. ‘What the hell happened, Rowan?’
‘I’m forgetting my manners. Can I get you a cup of tea? Coffee? Anything at all?’
‘Stop it! Why are you back from London so soon?’ Green eyes flashing his impatience, Evan had to physically restrain himself from going to her and shaking the answer from her, because by now not knowing was putting the fear of God into him.
‘You’re right.’ Her chin wobbled slightly and her teeth came down to clamp her vulnerable bottom lip. ‘Something did happen.’
‘Take your time; tell me about it.’
‘I don’t want to burden you with my sordid little tale… Go home, Evan. Just forget about it, will you?’
He wanted to tell her he was her friend—that he would do anything in his power to help if he could. But did he have the right when he had done everything to discourage such a friendship between them? He didn’t even stop to wonder at the fact his feelings of protectiveness were strong, bordering on passionate. All he knew was an urgent desire to bring hope and optimism back to her pretty face again. But what was this sordid little tale she didn’t want to burden him with? What the hell had happened when she’d gone to London?
‘Nothing connected with you could possibly be sordid, sweetheart.’
Her dark eyes stared back at him in obvious distress. ‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ She started to pace the floor, the heels of her strappy gold sandals making little tapping noises against the bare floorboards. ‘It turns out that my husband, Greg, had a girlfriend and a son somewhere else while he was married to me. Turkey, to be precise. The woman’s name is Anya and she is—was a schoolteacher.’
It took a couple of seconds for the full impact of her words to sink in. When it did, Evan’s brain absorbed the shock with a chill that turned the blood in his veins to ice. If he could have turned back the clock and acted on that odd little sense of apprehension he’d had when she’d said she was going to London he would have. Anything to prevent this dreadful, hurtful turn of events. She’d idolised her husband. Evan had seen it in her eyes, heard it in her voice when she’d spoken about him. Being bitterly acquainted with betrayal himself, it was easy to guess what kind of emotions she was going through right now. Torment hardly began to describe it, but torture came close…
‘How do you know? Who told you this?’
‘Someone at the party who had worked with Greg. I never liked the man, and at first I thought—I thought he was just out to make mischief because I rebuffed his advances—’
‘Advances? Did he try something on you at the party?’ Unbeknown to him, Evan’s jaw had clenched hard at the very thought, his green eyes turning mercurially dark. Rowan shook her head dully.
‘No. I didn’t give him the chance.’
‘How do you know that what he told you was true?’
‘As soon as I got back home this morning I rang one of Greg’s best friends. Paul also worked closely with him. He didn’t want to tell me, but when I insisted on knowing the truth he finally confessed. It seems that the woman lost her job when she fell pregnant with—with Greg’s baby. He was supporting her as well as us. It’s such a mess, Evan! What shall I do? She relied on Greg. How is she managing without his help? I’d hate to think of the baby suffering in—in any way.’
Stunned, Evan just stared at her. The man she’d married had betrayed her in the worst possible way and there she stood—worrying about how his girlfriend was going to manage financially. He hadn’t wanted to be her friend in the beginning, but Rowan was a good person. The kind of woman who made you feel like a better person for knowing her. As different from Rebecca, his ex-wife, as the moon was from the sun. And Evan knew she would need her friends around her now her world had come crashing down around her ears for a second time.
‘I don’t think now’s the time to be fretting about how your husband’s girlfriend is getting by, do you? You’ve had a dreadful shock. You need time to get over that first,’ he said wisely.
Her shoulders crumpled beneath her long black coat. By the time her head dropped and huge, racking sobs shuddered through her slender frame, Evan had crossed the room in an instant and impelled her gently into his arms.
‘Rowan, Rowan…’ Cupping the back of her head with his hand, he absorbed the sensation of her small, curvy body pressed intimately into his with all the shock of being swept up into the eye of a hurricane. For a moment his stunned response simply staggered him. Then when he began to absorb the hungry, sensual demand coursing through his blood, his fingers slid helplessly through the impossibly soft strands of her hair, the sensation of her tears against his clothing making his iron resolve not to get involved crumble like dead autumn leaves.
‘How could he?’ Hiccuping, Rowan raised her face to his, her mascara-caked tears slipping down her cheeks, like a hurt child. Slowly Evan shook his head. He had no right to want her so badly when she was clearly distraught, but, God help him, he did. As he gently stroked her hair back from her forehead, his brows drew together in genuine bewilderment. ‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’
‘He’s such a bastard! How could he do this to me? How could he?’ Her tears fell fast and furious from her shimmering brown eyes, demanding answers Evan knew she would probably never discover. Her husband was dead. Nothing was going to change that irrefutable fact.
‘I loved him!’ She tore out of his embrace, staring at him as if nothing in the world would ever make sense again. In some crazy way, Evan mourned the loss of her innocence. People like Rowan didn’t deserve to be betrayed. He, on the other hand… Well. Perhaps he had
n’t always been as generous or as understanding as he would have liked. Maybe Rebecca had had good cause to treat him the way she had? Brushing the uncomfortable thought away, Evan stared back at Rowan with sudden, aching need consuming him.
‘Say something, goddammit!’ Fury was eating her up with a vengeance. As Rowan glared at the tall, handsome man regarding her so coolly in the centre of her living-room, his implacable expression completely excluding her from whatever was going on right now in his mind, she wanted to lash out and hurt somebody. ‘Don’t you know how much I’m hurting? Are you so bloody inhuman you don’t have any conception about how I feel? You with your arrogant glances and easy put-downs! Mocking me because I supposedly had the “perfect” marriage. Well, it’s not so bloody perfect now, is it? I hate you, d’you know that? I hate you!’ Hardly knowing what she was saying, Rowan started to cry again. When Evan suddenly closed the distance between them and hauled her hard against his chest, she gulped, her dark gaze colliding with blazing green in a torrent of wild emotion.
‘Hit me.’
‘What?’ Her heart started to race.
‘I’m him. I’m Greg—the bastard who two-timed you with another woman. Who fathered a child with her… I’m him. Hit me, Rowan. Get rid of some of that anger on me.’
‘No.’ She tried to wrench her arms free but Evan held her tight, his face very close to hers, so close that she could see every ridiculously long eyelash and each tiny groove fanning out from his incredible eyes.
‘I betrayed you. I said I loved you, but I lied, Rowan. I lied…’
‘No. Please…’ Her voice was a whimper. Her heart hurt so much she thought she would die from the pain.
‘Can’t you see the truth when it’s right in front of you? You weren’t enough woman for me, Rowan… I had to seek my pleasure elsewhere…’
‘Bastard!’
Like a flash-flood, rage rose up inside her and made her shake. With almost superhuman strength she wrenched herself free and started to pummel Evan’s chest with her fists, her words pouring out in a torrent of hurt and anger and fury. ‘I hate you! I trusted you, I loved you and you let me down! I’ll never forgive you! Never, never, never!’
Her hands hurt. Hitting Evan was like coming into contact with pure, cold, intractable steel, yet not once did he even flinch at the blows that kept raining down on him. Finally, when she was too weak, too distraught, too spent to care, Rowan sank against him, weeping afresh into his T-shirt. When his hands eased her coat from her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, Rowan kept her face pressed close into his chest, breathing in the intoxicating scent of the man: soap, heat, and…sex. In a mixture of wonder and curiosity, she raised her head to look up at him. What she saw there should have made her feet hit the ground running. She was destroyed. The man she had loved had led a secret double life with another woman, and her whole past with him now appeared like some terrible illusion, with Rowan as the casualty. His betrayal had gone straight to the core of her femininity and womanhood, leaving her sense of herself as a desirable woman annihilated. Right now she needed something to take the rawness out of that dreadful hurt. Right now she would take whatever Evan Cameron was offering and regret nothing afterwards. Not one damn thing…
‘Yes.’ Sliding her arms up around his neck, she emphatically answered the silent question simmering in his compelling green glance. ‘Yes.’ Her voice diminished to a whisper, a mere husk of her normal volume as she saw his mouth descend slowly onto hers.
His taste exploded on her senses. Suddenly they were devouring each other, kissing with fury and passion, pain and lost hope, finding solace in the rawness of desire, too hungry to properly undress, too eager to explore each other slowly with finesse and sensuality. Instead they would answer their bodies’ urgency with this deeply primal heat and ask no untidy questions. Not now…maybe not ever.
Finding herself somehow on the sofa, Rowan helped Evan drag her tights and underwear down her legs, kicking off her shoes as he hastily eased the slim gold straps over her heels. Then she lay back against the soft, plump cushions as he undid his black leather belt and straddled her. For a moment it looked as if he might say something, but then he seemed to change his mind and he claimed her mouth in a hard, consuming kiss instead. When she finally had a chance to breathe, Rowan’s limbs seemed devoid of all strength, seized as they were by a deeply delicious trembling that wouldn’t be stilled. Making husky little pleas of longing into the side of Evan’s neck, her arm sliding across his back, she shamelessly urged him down against her. He needed no second bidding. In an instant, he’d unzipped his jeans and peeled off his T-shirt. Rowan’s hungry eyes drank their greedy fill of the sight of his wide, muscular chest and hard, flat stomach with abdominal muscles ridged like finely honed steel, and she sucked in a suddenly frightened breath. She let it go on a gasp as Evan slid his hand sensuously up the inside of her thigh and commandingly urged her legs apart.
Everything about the woman was driving him wild. Her scent took him prisoner, infiltrating his blood so that he felt drugged with it, crazy for her. Her huge dark eyes with their wonder and their raw, undisguised need turned him on like nothing he’d ever imagined. But that was until his hands settled on her body, her slender, silky curves beneath the wispy scrap of material that passed for her dress arousing him to fever-pitch. Self-control at the point of no return, Evan slid his fingers gently into the soft triangle of golden hair at the juncture of her thighs, pleasure throbbing through him at the sensation of her hot, sweet moistness. She was small, but he never doubted for a moment that he couldn’t love her to the hilt. As he withdrew his fingers to replace them with his erection, Rowan moaned deeply and moved her hips towards him. From then on, Evan was lost. There wasn’t a single place on his body that he didn’t ache for her. He was deluged with sensation. As he filled her with a deep, slow thrust, he thought he would explode with the sheer, rapturous gratification of it and, bending his head, he captured her lips with his mouth, greedy to enhance their sensual coupling with all the tastes that made her uniquely Rowan.
The man delivered everything his body promised. As she raised her hips again, to accommodate him more deeply, Rowan’s eyes closed to fully experience the profound joy of feeling his sex inside her. Had she ever known this much gratification with Greg? Her connection with Evan seemed so irrevocable…somehow inevitable, as if they were made to be together like this. Had he felt that too, from the beginning? When his fingers closed around her breast, squeezing and stroking her nipple beneath the clothing that covered it until she thought she would go mad if she didn’t feel his mouth there, he seemed to pick up on her need almost by osmosis. Words were unnecessary. Moving deeply inside her, he shoved aside the material of her dress, hearing the material rip but paying no mind to it, then claimed first one softly swollen nipple, then the other, cupping and stroking her breasts as though he couldn’t get enough of the feel of her soft, satin flesh. In contrast, his own body was hard and heavy, slick-muscled and beautiful, thought Rowan…a male portrait come to life…
‘Ohhh…’ Rowan’s dark eyes glazed as a new feeling built and grew inside her, then spilled over into ecstasy as hotly velvet waves convulsed unstoppably through her. As he thrust deeper inside her, Evan’s gaze was frighteningly concentrated while he watched her come apart in his arms, then followed with his own shuddering completion. Blinking back the hot salt tears that suddenly sprang to her eyes, Rowan stared up into that unfathomable green gaze of his and knew she had lost a part of herself for ever. The old Rowan was gone. With Greg’s betrayal there was simply nothing left of the girl she had been, and she knew a deep, piercing sadness at the loss.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered.
‘Yeah.’ Evan’s smile was sensuous and slow and more knowing than she cared to admit. ‘I know…’
She must have rubbed her skin raw by now to wash away the taint of his touch, Evan thought savagely as he waited in her empty front room for her to emerge from the bathroom. But even though th
e idea had the power to wound him, he believed he understood it. Her trust had been ripped away by her husband’s betrayal. Crushed underfoot like something soiled. And now Evan had compounded the feeling by making love to her…though how either of them could have prevented their passionate joining, he didn’t rightly know. Something far more powerful and profound than mere desire had been guiding them, inevitably urging them together as sure as night followed day.
Glancing round the empty room, Evan immediately hated the idea of Rowan staying in the house alone for the rest of the day. She was hurting and sad, and in his opinion shouldn’t be left to brood. He would suggest an outing: a long, exhilarating walk on the beach, or a hike through the countryside, perhaps? It wouldn’t solve anything but he was damn sure it would make her feel better. Evan was intimately acquainted with the benefits of exercise on the mind as well as the body. He knew he’d overdone things in the past, but he’d learned from his mistakes and wouldn’t ever let himself get so depleted again. Miraculously, he hadn’t had the shakes for a couple of mornings now. Perhaps his own recovery wasn’t as far away as he had first imagined?
The sound of the bathroom door opening and shutting again with a decisive thunk suddenly commandeered his full attention.
Dressed in jeans and a baggy checked shirt about two sizes too big, her face pink and scrubbed clean of make-up from her shower, Rowan threw Evan an uncertain glance as she entered the room, nervously tucking her soft brown hair behind her ear before speaking.
‘Would you—would you like a cup of coffee or something?’
‘I’m not leaving you on your own here today. Go put on a sweater or a jacket and we’ll go for a walk.’
