Into his arms.
Into his bed.
Of course, then she’d have to kill him. Or them. Or…oh, Lord, what was she thinking? She’d never been the possessive type.
“I…I really hate being the only one naked,” she said.
The corner of Stone’s mouth crooked. “Quit complaining and do something about it.”
Gratitude welled up inside her. He knew her so well. Knew when feeling grew too much, when it stung and burned and threatened to suck her under. He knew how to make her laugh, even when she was shaking inside.
“Typical male,” she shot back. “Completely helpless. I have to take off my own jeans, but you—”
“Do you know how many times I’ve imagined this? In my fantasies your hands are on my zipper, your hands are stripping my jeans away.”
Heat flooded through Deirdre, infusing her with daring, the need to please him. She placed her palm over his heart, drinking in the pounding rhythm, the racing of it, his need stripped bare. She slid her palm down Stone’s flat belly. Her finger dipped into the tiny hollow of his navel, then traced the prickly ribbon of dark hair until it disappeared beneath his waistband. His jeans strained over his arousal, and Deirdre explored the hard ridge through the denim. Her eyes widened, her breath caught. Was all of that him?
Stone growled. “If you don’t touch me I’m going to go crazy. Skin on skin, Deirdre. Your hand on my—”
His urging shattered on a groan as she opened his fly, folded back the denim from flesh warm and roughened with hair. She was melting inside, throbbing between her legs, as her fingers came in contact with the velvety tip of his sex.
Stone went still. She hooked her thumbs under the elastic of his black boxers, pushing jeans and shorts down Stone’s muscular legs.
She lay back against the shirts, pulled Stone with her, quiet desperation fueling her every move. She tried to blot out the ghosts, fill herself instead with what was real. Jake…the feel of his blunt-tipped fingers roving across her skin. His body, long and strong as he lay beside her.
He’d brushed his hair carelessly back into an elastic band before he’d returned to March Winds. She wanted it loose around his broad shoulders, wanted to delve her hands into it, bury her face in the fresh smelling waves.
She fumbled with the elastic until she worked it free. His gaze held hers, fiery hot as his hair tumbled down, making him look like a modern-day Samson to her Delilah. Invincible with all those rippling, tanned muscles. Primal, his face hard planes and angles. Fully aroused, his heart thundering as she flattened her palm against his chest.
She wanted him to pull her full length against him, until there was nothing between them, until they were both too far gone to stop.
She urged him down on top of her. Stone braced most of his weight on his elbows, only his hips settling in the hollow between her thighs. She instinctively clenched her legs together, but Jake all too persuasively moved as if he were already inside her.
Just do it. Deirdre told herself. All you have to do is open your legs and…
And he’d do what she wanted him to. Open her, take her, push into her and the worst would be over. She wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore.
It was amazing, the sensations Jake was building, making her feel soft down there, wet. That had never happened to her before.
But Stone eased his big body to one side, slid his fingers down to where she felt so strange, so aroused, so…
Oh, yes! Touch me…no, don’t…You’ll know how far gone I am…how much I want you…need you…If you find that out I won’t ever be able to take it back…hide behind the wall I built to keep me safe.
“Just…just do it,” she said, trying not to cry.
But Stone, made soft, hushing sounds against her cheek. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
It was like he knew how scared she was. His big hand eased over soft, dark down, his middle finger seeking out the sleek center where all her need pulsed. Her cheeks burned as Stone circled that tiny nub, seducing her, hypnotizing her, sucking her deeper into raw sensation.
“Trust me, Deirdre. Spread your legs for me, love. Just a little. There.”
She managed to unclench her muscles, edge her legs apart, giving him room. Room enough to touch her, room enough to make her fall apart.
“Just feel,” Stone urged her. “Let me show you…”
Stone groaned, and slid his finger inside her.
Deirdre stiffened, waiting for pain, expecting it to hurt…too scared to breathe. But Stone only angled his big hand so he could still tease the part of her pearled and burning under the callused tip of his thumb.
She caught her breath, rocked instinctively against his hand, driving his finger deeper, feeling as if she were going to fly apart. Wanting to…
“Come on, Deirdre, let it happen. I’m going to bury myself inside you, and you’re going to come the way you’re supposed to. All that passion, all that fire…you’re going to come for me.”
He grabbed her, rolled them both over so his back was against the gazebo’s floor, and she was straddling him.
Oh, he felt so good, so hot and hard and male. Her body softening and melting into curves and hollows, yielding in ways she’d never imagined. His hardness cradled in the hollow between her thighs scared her, thrilled her, made her wonder…would it hurt the way it always had before? Would she tighten up and—
She could feel him, trapped between her slickness and his body. All she had to do was move just a little, pull back, so he could push himself inside her.
Once she managed that, Stone would take care of the rest. She could just…just zone out if things got too intense, too terrifying. Like the other times.
“Look at me!” His eyes were fierce as her gaze found them. “It’s up to you, Dee. Take me. Or don’t. It’s your choice.”
“Don’t…don’t make me—I can’t…Will you please just…just do it.” Oh, no! She was going all cold inside, closing up like a fist. She closed her eyes, felt tears leaking out. “I’m ruining everything.”
Stone went still. His arms surrounded her, drew her gently down onto his chest.
“I…I’m sorry,” Deirdre said brokenly. “Just finish. It’s hardly fair for you to get…well, this far and—”
“Is that what some selfish bastard told you? When we come, I want it to be together,” Stone said, wiping away her tears. “You and me, both falling apart, both stripped down until there’s no one else between us. Just you and me, Deirdre, and the way I love you.”
Love? Not possible. Deirdre told herself. Stone hadn’t meant it the way it sounded. Make love…that’s what he’d been trying to say. A pretty euphemism for “screwing your brains out.” It was a good thing she and Jake understood each other so well or she might have been misled into thinking he meant something far more important, far more terrifying.
But she and Jake Stone understood each other. They both needed plenty of room in between them to be separate. Safe. Neither one of them would ever be able to tolerate that joined-at-the-hip, crazy-without-each-other feeling of being in love. That was for the lucky few like Finn and Cade. The most Deirdre had wished for, hoped for, was that she and Stone could bridge the distance between them for just this one brief, precious space of time before they both moved on.
Deirdre rolled away from him until she sat with her back to him, trying to hide how bereft he’d left her. If she couldn’t make love to Stone, who could she make love to? Nobody…ever….
And yet, what was it Stone had said? Something that had jarred her? Something unexpected?
When we come, I want it to be together. You and me, both falling apart, both stripped down until there’s no one else between us….
“Wh-what did you mean? No one else?” Deirdre asked.
“The man who made you afraid. He was there, Dee, between us. I could feel you thinking about him, trying to close him out.” Stone flattened his hand against her back. She knew the moment he felt her scars.
&nbs
p; He skimmed his hands over the raised white lines. “Good God, your back. Did he…did he do this to you?”
Stone turned her toward him so gently, and yet she almost cried out, so cold after being enveloped in so much heat. “What’s his name?” Stone demanded, his voice dead cold. “Tell me his name so I can kill him.”
A shiver of something primitive raced down Deirdre’s spine, and she wondered what it would be like to have a man like Stone know everything about her, defend her, love her. What would it have been like when she was sixteen and scared to hear him say those same words?
But the scars from that night were far uglier than the faint white lines from the surgery the night her family had fallen apart.
“I think Finn would object if you killed the father of those babies of hers. Besides, it wasn’t Cade’s fault. I just fell off a plane onto a toolbox. The scars are from the accident you read about in Mom’s letter.”
“Emma’s father…didn’t do this.”
“No.” Deirdre looked away.
Stone hooked his finger under her chin, forced her to look at him. “Maybe it would have been easier if he had.”
“Wh-what?”
“Scars you can see are easier to deal with than the ones on the inside, the ones nobody else knows are there.” Stone slipped her T-shirt over her head, covering her so tenderly her throat ached.
“Stone, let’s just…just admit defeat and get dressed. Head back up to the house and I’ll make us some coffee. Leave what little dignity I have left intact. It’s not your fault I couldn’t—You were a terrific lover, really. I just—”
“He raped you.”
Deirdre’s stomach plunged. “What?”
“That bastard raped you, didn’t he?”
CHAPTER 13
“RAPED?” DEIRDRE ECHOED. She clambered to her feet, crossed to the far side of the gazebo, trying to put as much space between her and Stone as she could. “I went up to Sullivan’s Point of my own free will,” she said, her voice sounding brittle even to her own ears. “I knew what kids did up there. Sort of, anyway.”
“Is that what he told you?” Stone asked, shoving his legs into his jeans. “The lowlife sonofabitch.”
She crossed her arms tight across her chest, the T-shirt skimming her thighs. “Well, it was true. It’s just…thinking about things and doing them are a lot different. Even with a guy who claimed he loved me. He was going to drop all of his popular friends, all the perfect little homecoming princesses and marry me. We’d travel all over the country while I sang. Maybe even then I knew it was a line of garbage. I mean, I wasn’t ever exactly the type of girl who made men start thinking of white picket fences.”
She glanced over her shoulder at Stone. God, the man was beautiful, bare-chested, jeans slung low on his hips. He’d zipped them up but hadn’t bothered with the button at the top of the waistband. His feet, silhouetted against the dark-gray painted floorboards were long, narrow, exquisitely shaped like the rest of him. She saw a strange expression dart across his face, as if he felt he should jump in with some worthless comment to reassure her. In the end he obviously thought better of it and didn’t say a word.
“When the make-out session went further than I was ready for, I got scared.” Deirdre continued, remembering the metallic taste of panic, the terrible realization of how helpless she was, how far from home. And that no one on earth knew where she was.
Stone’s thick, dark brows dipped low as he scanned her face, and for an instant Deirdre felt transparent, as if he could see the whole ugly scene through her eyes, the steamed-up windows, her torn blouse, her face, white with shock.
“You were a virgin.” It wasn’t a question.
Deirdre forced a raw laugh. “Yeah. Who would’ve believed it? Nobody at Whitewater High, that’s for sure. Everybody thought I lived by the musician’s credo—sex, drugs, rock and roll. And I let them. Didn’t all musical genius come from being an outsider? I mean, think of all the greats—Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix. Hey, even Judy Garland was drugged up and crazy. And Janis Joplin wasn’t exactly pushing pompoms and making cupcakes in home ec when she was in high school.”
Stone regarded her intently. “I suppose not. Of course, they’re all dead.”
“Live hard, die young…the price of genius and all that. Except it’s a little harder to go down in a ball of selfish flames when you have a child who needs her mother. Know what the real joke was?” Her voice cracked. “I thought he loved me. Mr. Football Star. Gorgeous, rich, the king of the school. He and his friends must have been laughing their asses off.”
“So that’s why you went postal when Drew Lawson started hanging around Emma,” Stone said, raking his hair back from his face with one large hand.
Deirdre shuddered, bone deep. “Drew is so much like him I can’t look at the kid without feeling sick. It all floods back, you know? The night Emma was conceived. Just the thought that anybody might hurt my baby like that—God, Stone, I get so crazy I’d do anything to protect her.”
“I wonder if Drew knows how lucky he was when we interrupted the two of them up there on Sullivan’s Point. All things considered, you showed remarkable self-restraint. If Emma had any idea what happened to you she’d understand why—”
“Oh, yeah, Stone. That would be terrific.” Deirdre grabbed her own jeans, dragged them on, her panties lost and forgotten somewhere on the gazebo floor. “I can just imagine that hellish chat. ‘Hey, Emma, here’s a little factoid for that family tree project you’re doing in English class…’” She slammed her hand against the railing. “Forget it, Stone. No way.”
“I don’t pretend it would be easy, but—”
“There are no ‘buts’ about this one. If Emma ever found out the kind of man her father was it would destroy her. I’ll never tell her. And that’s the end of it.”
Stone looked at her so intently Deirdre felt more naked than she had minutes before. She hugged the soft cotton of her shirt tight against her unbound breasts.
“Who did you tell?” Stone asked. “Your father? Cade?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Deirdre snorted in disbelief.
“And here I thought private eyes were students of human behavior. Announce in the hallowed halls of Linden Lane that I’d sneaked off to Sullivan’s Point with some boy and he forced me to have sex with him?”
“It’s called rape,” Stone insisted.
Deirdre still couldn’t get the word out of her mouth. “One word back home would’ve lit off an explosion to rival Hiroshima. If Cade had ever gotten the real story, Adam sure wouldn’t have gotten any other girls pregnant, ever. And the Captain would have murdered the kid with his own hands.”
Deirdre made a face, still recoiling from the scene she’d avoided at such grim cost to herself. “Things were bad enough for me already, Jake. My brother and father going to jail for the rest of their lives would’ve topped the whole sordid mess off perfectly.”
A McDaniel should be resourceful, able to take care of herself.Admitting how miserably she’d failed would have made her seem weak, so pathetic—the tough girl who couldn’t even fight off a boy in the back seat of a car. Why heap on the final humiliation by telling the Captain how helpless she’d been, how scared. What had it mattered anyway? By then it was already too late.
She started, surprised when Stone touched her, gently laying his hand on her arm. She wasn’t used to being touched. Only Emma and Finn and occasionally Cade daring to slip past her natural aura of reserve.
Her gaze leapt up to Stone, her first instinct to draw back, but something in those mesmerizing tiger eyes held her still, made her ache, willed her to surrender her fierce independence for just a moment in time as Jake gathered her into his arms.
Heat from his naked chest seeped through the thin cotton of her shirt, banishing at least some of the chill. Her hands slid around him to link together at the small of his back, the sensitized skin of her inner arm seeming to melt into his tautly muscled waist.He dipped his chin down, leaned
his forehead against hers.
“What happened to you in that car seventeen years ago wasn’t your fault,” he said, his eyes so close, so intense they seemed to fill her world. “You told that little bastard no. You were raped, Deirdre. Do you hear me? Raped.”
The word cut a jagged path, tearing at everything she’d believed, a lifetime’s worth of guilt, shame and self-loathing.
“No wonder you can’t relax when I touch you,” Stone said. “He hurt you.”
Did Stone’s voice break? The words sounded so thick, so strange in his throat. He stroked her hair, threaded his fingers through the feathery, chin-length strands. It should have felt so delicious, Stone’s big hands touching her that way. She should have let herself be pulled under by contact so sensual, so enticing, feelings women all over the world took for granted.
Soft, silken skeins of sensation binding woman to man, the way nature meant it to be. Pleasure. Pure, unadulterated bliss, slowly immersing two people so deeply in each other they became one in some mystical alchemy called love.
But Deirdre had lost that brand of magic. No, it had been taken from her. Stolen. And she could never get it back. The innocence. The dizzying excitement. The leap of faith that would let her surrender herself completely into her lover’s hands.
Grief settled in a lump in her throat. “I’m sorry, Jake,” she said. “For both of us. Tonight could have been so different if only—” She hesitated. “There’s something broken in me, you know? I can’t…”
“That son of a bitch hurt you, Deirdre, but he didn’t break you. You’re too strong inside to let him do that.”
“I don’t have much patience with revisionist history. I was there, on that gazebo floor with you when…well, everything fell apart.”
“Maybe it didn’t end the way we both wanted it to. But you were so close to letting go, Deirdre. You can’t deny it. I could feel you turning all hot and wild in my arms. Then, just a heartbeat before the point of no return, you pulled yourself back from the edge.”