His for the Taking

by Ann Major

  “It’s too awful.”

  “Maybe it will be easier to bear if you tell me.”

  Her lovely face crumpled. “I don’t think so.”

  “I let you down. Okay. I know. I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

  “I don’t know who you’ll really believe—me or the gossips.”

  “If you’d talk to me, it would give me more ammunition against the gossips, wouldn’t it?”

  When she sighed, he hoped that maybe he was getting through to her.

  “I’m such a fool,” she murmured as she laid her head upon his chest. “I always was where you were concerned. I shouldn’t listen to anything you ever say…especially when you hold me. I can’t think.”

  “I was the fool. I never should have married Lizzie just because you’d run off and my dad was dead and my mother was hounding me all the time about Adam. I should have left Yella, left them all, and tried to find you.”

  “Maybe it would have just made things worse. By then, I knew I was pregnant. My life was such a mess. I was needy and desperate and struggling to find myself and carve out a new life. I wouldn’t be who I am now if anything had been different. But all that’s over and done with.”

  Stroking her hair, he held her. “I hate it that you had to face all that alone. I’m here now, and what I want is for you to marry me instead of Greg.”

  “What? You don’t know what you’re saying. That’s impossible.”

  “Why? Noah’s my son.”

  “But you’re a Coleman, and I’m who I am. Marriage would mean we’d have to make a life together. We’ve been apart for six years, so we don’t even really know each other at this point. You had a three-month secret affair with a girl who was forbidden, and we had yesterday. What else do we have?”

  “Noah. Last night. Chemistry.”

  She blushed. “My mother ruined her life because her libido led her to make so many terrible choices. And there’s your mother, who hates me.”

  “She’ll either change her mind, or she won’t see much of me or her grandson.”

  “There’s Noah and how his grandmother’s condemnation of me might damage him. I don’t want what she and other people here think about me to make him see me as cheap.”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “Other children, other people, can be so cruel. You don’t know, since you never suffered the kind of cruelty I did while growing up here.”

  “I’d be giving him my name and my protection. That will count for a lot in the future, just as it counts for a lot to everybody in Yella.”

  “Other people would side with your mother, her friends, everyone in Yella, even Adam…. They’d make me feel like I used to feel. I want to forget the past—all of it.”

  “We don’t have to live here. And you’re wrong about Adam. He and I don’t agree on a lot of things, but he likes you. When he told me how beautiful and classy you were, nothing could stop me from racing back to Yella.”

  “Really?”

  “I was irresponsible as hell to leave my oil well. I came back solely to see you.” He held her tightly. “I’m sorry about the past,” he whispered.

  Very gently, he leaned down and laved the back of her ear with his tongue, causing her to flush beguilingly.

  “Stop! I can’t think when you do that,” she whispered, her voice soft and breathy. “And I have to think.”

  “No. You’ve been doing too much thinking. Feelings count, too, you know. I think we fell into bed last night because we both wanted each other so badly we couldn’t resist.”

  “In my life, lust has been a destroyer.”

  Slowly his fingers tucked her hair behind her ear. “Okay. I’ll admit to a tad of lust, but not to the destroying kind. I never got over you, Maddie Gray. Because I cared about you.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Only because, after what you’ve been through, you’re too afraid. I don’t blame you. But if you’d only give me another chance—”

  “You’re just lonely…because of Lizzie.”

  “I was hellishly lonely after you left…even after I married Lizzie.”

  “You haven’t had time to think this through. Don’t you see that it would never work?” She brushed at her throat with her fingertips as if suddenly she was too hot. When she tried to remove his hand, he wove his fingers through hers and brought her knuckles against his warm lips, his gentle kisses causing her to shudder.

  “We’ll have to find a way to make it work,” he said.

  When she glanced up at him, her beautiful eyes were aglow with fear and a wild, desperate hope.

  “Let me go!” she begged.

  Lowering his head so fast she couldn’t dodge his lips, he claimed the exquisite softness of her mouth. When his tongue slid inside, she rasped in a breath.

  “You have to break up with Greg,” Cole muttered hoarsely. “You have to know that such a marriage wouldn’t stand a chance when it’s me you really want…in bed anyway.”

  “I can’t care about that.”

  “You must, if you marry him wanting me. I could tell you a thing or two about marrying for the wrong reasons. About trying to make the wrong relationship work.”

  “Your argument doesn’t stand. You and I would be marrying for the wrong reasons. I had this perfect plan….”

  “You don’t think I had a few plans myself? Last night blew all our plans to bits.”

  “I won’t be bullied into a loveless marriage.”

  “Put like that, my proposal stinks. But your assessment is inaccurate. We’d be marrying for love—for the mutual love of our son.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “He’s mine. I want him to be legitimate. I’d think that would matter to you since your mother didn’t marry your father and people looked down on you for it.”

  “Oh… You do play dirty.” She stared at him, aghast.

  “When I have to. It’s very simple. Go back to Austin. Tell Greg about me. Say you’re confused, that you need time. In the meantime, introduce me to Noah as a good friend of yours, so we can start preparing him to accept me as your husband and his father. Then slowly we’ll sort this out…together.”

  “No.”

  “I want to give Noah a stable life,” he said smoothly.

  “Do you think I don’t want that?”

  “Good. We agree on the fundamentals. We both want what’s best for our son, and we both want each other.”

  “You don’t love me.”

  “You don’t love me either, but I’m not whining about it. I’m asking you to marry me.”

  “You’re impossible…arrogant…entitled…”

  He smiled as he waited for her to finish cataloging his many faults.

  “But I want to marry you. I want to take care of you. I want to make up for six years of neglecting you and my son. Surely that makes up for two or three of my sins.”

  “You don’t love me,” she repeated.

  Maybe not, but no way was he letting her go again, not after last night. For better or worse, she was his. Just like Noah was his. She just didn’t know it yet.

  He didn’t like it that she’d intended to keep him from ever finding out about Noah, and he didn’t like that she’d planned to marry Greg, but he had to focus on what he wanted—Noah and her—if he was going to win her over to his point of view. He didn’t want another man being a father to Noah now that Cole was free to marry and claim his son.

  As he held her and stared down at her lovely face, his blood began to thrum as he remembered how she’d felt last night in his arms. Suddenly, he was tired of arguing. As always, he marveled that she could arouse him so easily, so quickly—and that he could do the same to her.

  “Maybe I don’t love you, but I like a lot of things about you. For one thing, you’re too damn beautiful to argue with and you’re making me unbearably hot,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Since everybody already thinks you lured me to my pool to go skinny-dipping yesterda
y, why don’t we go there now…and actually do it?”

  Her luminous eyes went so dark and shot so many sparks at him, he was afraid she was about to pull back her hand and take a swing at him. When she didn’t, when she simply stared at him with what became a charming, incredulous expression on her blushing face, he relaxed and grew even hotter for her.

  “Now?” she demanded. “We’re in the middle of an argument. You can’t be serious!”

  Relieved that she hadn’t said no, his hands twisted in her hair. He pulled her head back and her body flush against his own so that she could feel his erection. She gasped and cast a frantic look toward Bessie’s window.

  “Feel what you do to me,” he whispered, right before he kissed her long and passionately. “Believe me—I’m very serious.”

  “But we were arguing about getting married. You can’t just switch gears—”

  “Who’s switching? Obviously, everything we do together turns me on, which proves how much fun marrying you would be.”

  “Bessie’s probably watching,” she murmured, struggling to free herself.

  “So? If we’re going to be talked about, Miss Gray, we might as well give the old biddies an X-rated kiss or two to speculate about, don’t you think?”

  When he laughed, her lips quirked as she attempted to suppress her own smile. “Just because I can’t stay mad at you doesn’t mean I intend to marry you.”

  “I can’t stay mad at you either, which I take as a good sign for two people considering marriage,” he countered.

  She smiled a little.

  “Hey, do you have a picture of Noah?” Cole asked, feeling vulnerable at his sudden need to see a snapshot.

  She nodded slowly. Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she scrolled to her pictures. “Here,” she said, placing the device in his palm. “I can email any you like.”

  Noah appeared to be a normal, happy, rambunctious little boy in every picture. His tumbled hair was coal-black. The kid’s lively green eyes grabbed Cole’s soul and refused to let it go. He looked just like Cole had at the same age.

  He had a son who was everything a man could want in a child.

  In one shot, Noah raced exuberantly toward a swing set with two other boys about his same size. The untied shoelaces of his sneakers flying, he was clearly ahead.

  Competitive, Cole thought, remembering his days as a star quarterback in high school.

  “Does he know how to tie his shoes?” he asked.

  “Yes. But not all that well because too many of his shoes have had other types of fasteners.”

  “Then we’ll have to work on that,” Cole said.

  In another shot, Noah was on the yellow roof of a red playhouse with a smiling blonde girl who was missing a front tooth. His goofy grin and wide-eyed look of adoration tugged at Cole’s heart.

  “Somebody’s got a crush,” he whispered.

  “Her name’s Missy. And you’re right. I couldn’t believe it when he told me he brushed a spider off of her. He hates spiders with such a passion I knew she was special.”

  In another, Noah hung upside down from a tree limb like an impishly grinning bat while an admiring Missy smiled up at him.

  “Aren’t you afraid he’ll break something?” Cole asked.

  “Oh, yes. He already has.”

  She took the phone from him and flipped through the pictures until she found the one she was looking for. Then she handed it back to him.

  The picture was of Noah lying on a hospital bed. There were dark circles under his worried green eyes as he studied his suspended arm in its white cast.

  “What happened?”

  “He broke his arm at school while racing a kid down a hill on the playground. Not that a broken arm slowed him down. Within a day he’d learned to do everything one-handed. The only time he complained of pain was when the doctor twisted his arm before he set it. Oh, and he did wax philosophical when he was snuggling with me in bed one morning about how easy it was to break an arm.”

  “He sleeps with you?”

  “No. But he comes in a lot of mornings to cuddle before my alarm goes off.”

  His son was tough. But he was affectionate, too. Pride swelled inside Cole, and so did another, less easily defined but fiercely possessive and all-consuming emotion.

  His gaze locked on Maddie’s face. She was the mother of his son. Was that why he felt a profound need to claim her?

  “I’ve gotta go,” she said.

  “It’s a nice day for a swim.”

  She shook her head. “There’s Miss Jennie to see about. She is the reason I’m here.”

  “Well, you call me if you change your mind. Since we never went skinny-dipping, I say it’s time you earned your bad reputation.”

  “You’re incorrigible,” she whispered with a grin, lowering her lashes as if she hoped that would lessen the sexual charge of their nearness.

  “Call me if you want to swim,” he repeated. He touched her arm, running his knuckles down the smooth skin, which caused her to shiver.

  “You come over here and try to bully me into a marriage. Then you have the gall to invite me to go skinny-dipping? Neither is going to happen!”

  Ten

  What was happening to her? What mysterious power did Cole have over her?

  Maddie felt both wet and hot beneath Cole’s devouring gaze as she slowly peeled her jeans and panties down the length of her legs.

  Sunlight poured through the thick canopy of leaves that surrounded them. The blaze lit up the soft scarlet blanket Cole had carelessly tossed onto the grass beside the icy green pool; the blaze lit her up, as well.

  How could she so easily succumb to whatever wanton suggestion he tossed at her? How could she do this when Noah’s future hung in the balance? Had she no will of her own? Was he right about their marriage being the best thing for Noah? He was certainly right about her wanting him.

  Quickly, Cole yanked off his own clothes and laid them on top of hers on a limestone rock. When he gathered her body in his arms, the exquisite shiver that went through her made her cling to him. His warm, rough hands slid down her shoulders and closed around her waist. Then he pulled her slowly down on the blanket and covered her with his powerful body so that his heat enveloped her.

  Cole’s hands stroked her gently until she was so hungry for him she lifted her legs and urged him to take her. Her whole body was tense and aching for release, but he made her wait, made her beg in throaty, pleading purrs while he stroked and kissed her. Finally, when she felt as though she might explode, he smiled as he slid his body lower down her length so that he could bury his face against her sex. She cried out in pleasure when his tongue caressed and then dipped inside those secret lips.

  “Take me,” she whispered. “Just take me.”

  “Patience, my love,” he murmured.

  Using his seeking mouth and velvet tongue as instruments of pleasure, he soon had her melting and yielding everything. Instead of feeling ravaged and abused, as she had for so many years, she felt cherished and adored.

  “You are beautiful,” he whispered. “The most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. You smell good, too.”

  She felt beautiful, vibrant and aglow.

  With a slow, delicate rhythm he licked her, skimming across her velvety interior until she was a quivering mass of nerves ready to fly apart at the slightest flick of his tongue. Only when the pleasure was unbearable, only when she was burning up and on the brink of release, did he stop.

  “Don’t!”

  “Don’t what?” he murmured.

  “Don’t stop.”

  “Who’s stopping?”

  Easing his body over hers, he thrust deeply inside her. Arching to meet that one forceful stroke, she came, crying out his name as a sudden gust of wind made the leaves above them swirl in an emerald-green blaze.

  “Mine,” he growled fiercely. “You are mine.”

  He crushed her to him even more tightly. Then driven by his own feverish urgency, he began to move
inside her, faster and faster, and with such force that he stole her breath. Strange how after his sweetness, she didn’t mind his violence and passion. His breathing grew harsh and ragged, and he whispered wildly erotic things in her ear as he carried her to another explosion that was wild and glorious and satisfying on a soul-deep level.

  Afterward, when he stared down at her, his green eyes were sensual and tender. Tears pricked against her lashes. How could she feel so safe in Cole’s arms?

  He ran light fingertips over her breasts, causing her nipples to peak again. Sated with sensual bliss, she smiled up at him as she snuggled closer.

  This isn’t reality, she told herself. I can’t seriously consider marrying him, especially since his proposal was only about sex and a desire to claim Noah legally. Austin, my job, Noah—they are my reality. Even if Cole were offering her the life she’d once dreamed of, experience had taught her she couldn’t count on him. Greg was steady…and real. He would be there for her. There was no disparity of wealth and social class dividing them. Cole was only a fantasy.

  Still, it was nice to be steamy hot and erotically satisfied in Cole’s hard arms as a warm summer breeze brushed her body. It was nice running her hands through his hair while she stared past a haze of greenery at the brilliant cobalt-blue sky. She hadn’t felt this pleasantly sexy in years, and she probably never would again. But she knew all too well that sex could be a destructive force.

  Later, she discovered he’d hidden her clothes and wouldn’t let her dress until she went skinny-dipping with him.

  “I’m determined to make you live up to your scandalous reputation,” he teased.

  As they swam in that crystal clear pool, the years seemed to fall away, as did the walls that had protected her heart. During the brief interlude when they splashed and cavorted in the stream, she felt young and carefree and completely happy—as she never had as a girl.

  Years ago, some ancestral Coleman had nailed rungs onto the thick trunk of one of the tallest cypress trees. When Cole began to climb, her heart leaped into her throat.