Nick lay still, his hands on her hips, lifting her, helping her, until he could stand no more, then he bent his long legs and rolled her onto her back on the seat and thrust hard into her, once, twice, four times, before collapsing on her, sweaty, sated, fulfilled.
Beneath him, Holly smiled and closed her eyes. She felt wonderful, truly wonderful.
Chapter Three
“SO NOW WHAT HAPPENS?” NICK SAID AFTER A FEW moments, and Holly knew what he meant. Did she want him to drop her somewhere? Leave it to other people to watch her all night so she didn’t fall asleep? But he’d said he was going to take care of her. She didn’t answer. Instead, she let her body go limp against the seat, one arm falling toward the floor.
“Miss Latham?” he asked, moving back from her, trying to see her face in the dark. “Miss Latham?”
Holly still didn’t answer, just pretended to be asleep.
Nick sat up. “I wonder how much her father would pay in ransom?” he said softly.
When Holly’s eyes flew open, he snapped on the flashlight and they smiled at each other.
“Does this mean you want to go home with me? Have me, the motorcycle man, make sure you don’t sleep?”
Holly could feel her face turning red. She’d always been pretty enough that she’d never had to go after any male. They pursued her. Any man she’d ever been interested in had done all the chasing.
She couldn’t see his face, and in spite of what they’d just done, she didn’t know him very well. “I…” she began, then smiled. “The real truth is that I want to see what’s inside your barn.”
He laughed at that and Holly saw his eyes crinkle. His laugh was deep and rich and made her feel safe.
“Okay, barn it is,” he said, then opened the car door to get out. When the dome light came on, Holly pulled his shirt over her and watched him. His legs were so long she wondered how he’d been able to climb through the space between the front seats. He turned away from her while he pulled on his trousers so she had a good look at the back of him, at the muscles playing under his skin, tapering down to a lean waist. His rear end was beautiful: hard and firm—and his legs were well-muscled. Did he get them from hauling engines in and out of trucks? she wondered.
Smiling, still happy she was alive, she didn’t want to think about what she was doing, what she had done. She wasn’t a modern woman when it came to sex. More than one girlfriend had told her that she was a throwback to the Middle Ages. Holly was the kind of girl who didn’t allow a man to kiss her until the third date. Sex was months away. She’d listened to reminiscences of one-night stands, but they weren’t for her.
She’d never said so, but she thought her attitude came from having “fallen in love”—as she saw it—with Lorrie when she was so young. She’d loved him and there’d been no sex. Maybe she was still searching for that ideal. Maybe, in her mind, sex and love didn’t go together.
While Nick dressed, she pulled on her panties (she found them under the front seat) and slipped into the front passenger seat. When he got in the car and started the engine, she looked out at the road.
“I go home tomorrow,” she said softly. “My parents are expecting me.” She didn’t want to elaborate even in her own mind about what she was trying to say. Was she telling him that he was good enough to rescue her, good enough to have sex with, but not good enough to, say, be seen in public with?
But he seemed to understand completely. “Then we’d better make the most of tonight, hadn’t we?”
“Yes,” she said, closing her eyes for a moment and thinking she was a fool. She didn’t want to hurt him.
“Someone waiting for you?” he asked.
“Yes. Maybe. I think so. I haven’t—” She stopped because he’d pulled the car to the side of the road, turned on the dome light, and looked at her.
“Look, Miss Latham,” he said and held up his hand to stop her from saying anything. “If it’s all right with you, I’d as soon not be told your first name. If you’re worried that I’m going to fall in love with a society girl like you because of one night spent together, then I’ll pine for you for the rest of my life, think again. I broke up with a woman weeks ago and I’ve been celibate since then. What I need is a lot of sex with no possibility of the words ‘relationship,’ ‘commitment,’ and especially not ‘marriage.’
“My concern in all this is that if you spend twenty-four hours with me I’ll spoil you forever for your little blue-blood boyfriends who’d rather play tennis than make love.”
Holly blinked at him for a moment. “You’ll fall in love with me,” she whispered, exaggerating. “All men do.”
“Twenty-four hours from now I’ll pour you, exhausted, into your bed in your ugly new house and you will be the one who won’t be able to stop thinking of me.”
“Now why don’t I believe that?” she said, smiling.
“I accept the challenge,” she said, and held out her hand to shake his.
Picking up her hand, he turned it over, then looked up at her with blazing hot eyes. The next second, Holly fell onto him, the gear shift hitting her in the hip. His hands were under her shirt, running up her body onto her breasts, caressing, kneading.
The ringing of her cell phone brought her back to reality. Reluctantly, her heart pounding wildly, she pulled away from him and dug under the seat to find her big handbag and search for the phone. Her stepmother was calling, in tears of worry about her. One glance at Nick and she knew that the voices on the phone were loud enough that he could hear everything.
Nick started the car again and began driving as Holly talked to both her parents. That her stepmother was so upset was touching and her concern brought tears to Holly’s eyes—and apologies to her lips. Yes, yes, she’d been trespassing yet again. Yes, she’d been snooping through some rotten old house. With a glance at Nick, she told her parents she’d been so absorbed in looking she’d forgotten about the movers.
Her father, ever the practical man, took the phone and quietly bawled his daughter out. “Yes, sir,” Holly said meekly. “I’m sorry, sir.” When he’d finished, he put Holly’s stepsister, Taylor, on the phone.
“So what really happened?” Taylor asked.
As usual, Taylor was too close to whatever secrets Holly tried to keep. “So how are the wedding plans coming?” she asked, trying to distract her stepsister.
“I’ll tell you everything when you get here. Wait until you see the dress I chose for you to wear. Oh,” Taylor said, “Dad says to tell you that the movers will be there day after tomorrow at eight A.M. He says you’re to be there, and, by the way, he wants to know why the woman at the diner thought you’d run off with some guy on a motorcycle. Did you know that Dad knows the woman’s family?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. I guess Dad straightened everything out with the police.”
“Of course he did. But he was giving you until midnight. If you hadn’t been reached by then he was sending out the posse.”
Holly glanced at Nick’s profile by the dashboard light. If he hadn’t rescued her, her father would have sent people to find her. She wouldn’t have died in the pit after all.
When Nick glanced at her and winked, Holly smiled warmly. All in all, she was glad things had worked out the way they did. She turned her attention back to the phone. “I’ll see you in two days. Don’t pick out your dress until I get there.”
“Pick out my dress? Aren’t you quaint? You think I’m going to some bargain basement and trying them on? Daddy’s flying a designer in from New York.”
“Okay, so let me see the sketches. I have to go. I have something I must do. ’Bye, Taylor, and love to everyone.”
Nick had pulled into the driveway in front of a dilapidated old house. “It ain’t much, but it’s home,” he said.
She was staring at the house in the headlights, as always, trying to date the structure. Early nineteenth century, nothing in the least remarkable about it.
Nick got out and opened the car door for her. When she
looked into his eyes, she forgot all about dating a house. She had twenty-four hours with this man.
“That look won’t get you inside and fed,” he said.
“There are different kinds of food,” she answered, trying to sound sexy. But the next minute he had her bent over the hood of her car, her panties down around her ankles, and they were making love against the cold metal.
“Yes! Yes!” Holly heard herself crying out as he slammed into her.
His mouth covered hers to quiet her, and when he came, she was with him.
When he moved off of her, Holly had to hold on to him to steady her weak legs. Nick swept her into his arms, carried her up the stairs and onto the porch. He hesitated at the door. “The inside isn’t what you’re used to.”
“You can’t shock me. I go all over the U.S. looking inside old houses. One time I—” She broke off when Nick carried her into the house, stood her on the floor, then flipped the light switch.
It took her a moment to recover as she looked about the filthy house with its beer can tables and loose-stuffing chairs. “You don’t live here,” she said.
“That opinion is based on…?” He raised an eyebrow in question.
“What I know of houses. This place doesn’t feel lived in.” She looked at him. “So where do you live?”
Smiling, he took a key off a hook on the wall, put his fingertips to his lips for secrecy, then led her back out the door. He didn’t have to tell her he was leading her to the barn.
Eighteen seventy, earliest, she thought when she saw the barn. There were discreet lights placed here and there that came on as they approached. Holly’s trained eye saw that the dilapidated look of the barn wasn’t real. It was a solid structure, and someone had spent a lot of money reinforcing the building.
She wasn’t surprised to see steel doors inside the barn doors, and she almost wasn’t surprised when she saw the shop inside. The name Hollander was everywhere.
Her mother had been an only child, the sole heir of Hollander Tools, but the company was run by a board of directors set up by Holly’s grandfather. He’d started making precision tools out of a need and a love for them. He wasn’t about to die and leave his beloved company in the hands of a daughter who wasn’t interested, so he’d made sure that his daughter and granddaughter were well cared for financially, but he’d left them no control of the company itself.
Today, the only association Holly had with the company was to once a year attend a board meeting and be told that everything was going wonderfully well. The only time she’d ever used her connection to Hollander Tools was when she was thirteen. She’d called the president and asked him to please send her a full line of woodworking tools so she and Lorrie could work on his house. What had arrived had filled the old kitchen, the dairy, and the spring house.
Now, Holly looked at the truck—or maybe it should be, The Truck, since it was at the center of the magnificent workshop. Inside the cab was room for two people—slim people. Pipes ran through the glassless back window and out the side windows. The bed was full of machines and extra tires.
“So where do I put my nail file?” Holly asked, blinking up at him, and he laughed.
Companionably, he put his arm around her shoulders. “How about some food, a long bath, then some oral sex?”
“Sounds good to me,” Holly said, smiling, walking with him toward one of the glassed-in rooms where she could see a kitchen. The workshop was as clean as the house was dirty.
Minutes later, he set her to chopping vegetables while he broke eggs, put toast on to grill, and squeezed fresh orange juice. He made an enormous omelet and a foot-high stack of toast. They sat side by side at the bar, legs touching from knee to hip, and shared the food, eating from one platter, sometimes feeding each other.
“So how do you know Leon?” she asked. “Is he—?” Nick put a cheese-filled bit of omelet in her mouth to silence her.
When she’d swallowed, she said, “Do you stay here often? What did those guys on the motorcycles want? Did you—?”
Again, he stuffed her mouth full.
“Okay,” she said, swallowing, “I can take a hint. You could tell me—” He kissed her this time.
“I am what you see,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Girlfriend kick you out because she was starving for communication?”
He smiled, eyes twinkling. “Something like that. You want that piece of toast?”
She held the last piece of toast behind her back. “There’s a price. Tell me one thing about you few, if any, people know.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m a great listener. Tell me anything about yourself and I’ll listen.”
“That’s not the kind of information I wanted.”
He put his hand out for the toast and she gave it to him. “So what were you doing in that pit?”
Holly wanted to play the same game of secrecy as him, but she couldn’t. She’d probably never see this man after tomorrow, so maybe she could talk to him a bit. But about what?
When she said nothing, he took her by the hand and led her to the bathroom. There was no tub, but there was a big shower and he turned on the water. In the next moment he began to unbutton his shirt that she was still wearing.
Holly took a step back. She knew it was an odd concept after all they’d done together, but showering together seemed too intimate, too personal, to do with a stranger. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. We don’t really know each other and—”
He leaned back against the countertop and Holly could see his beautiful back in the mirror. “Don’t know each other? Let’s see, I know that your family cares very much about you, but that you’re almost afraid of your father. I know your sister is a snob and that you’re terrified of being thought to be the same. I know that right now you’re torn in half because you’re extremely attracted to me, but you don’t know how to tell me that I’m not the kind of guy you could introduce to your family. How am I doing so far?”
“Too good,” Holly said with a grimace. “How’d you know all this?”
“I told you, I listen. The one thing I haven’t put together is about this man in your life, the one the woman in the diner was going on about. Why wasn’t he on the phone to you? Isn’t he worried about you?”
It was her turn to stop him from talking. She flung her body onto his and put her face into this throat. “You’re right. No talkee, just—”
He kissed her, cutting off her sentence, then he grabbed her shirt and pulled downward sharply. Buttons went flying across the tile, and in the next minute they were naked and inside the shower. Holly wanted to continue kissing, wanted to make love on the shower floor. Who would have thought that old-fashioned being-listened-to could be an aphrodisiac? Even though he’d said that all he wanted from her was sex, he’d cared enough about her to listen, to remember, and to think.
He was kissing her left ear and down her neck. “So tell me, Miss Latham, what was inside that pit with you?”
“Snakes,” she said, running her soapy hands between her legs, “long, hard, slippery snakes.”
“Could have fooled me,” he whispered. “I would have sworn it was a family of”—he sucked on her earlobe—“skunks.”
Laughing, Holly rubbed her hips against his. “So how about that oral sex?”
“Not until I clean you up,” he said, his soapy hands sliding inside her.
She leaned back against the shower wall, her eyes closed, and gave herself over to the pleasure of his hands. He slid his soap-covered hands over her body, caressing her. At one point he lifted her foot, balancing it on his knee, and ran his fingers between her toes.
Never had Holly felt such sensual pleasure and she couldn’t help but wonder if such pleasure was a product of his class. She’d never say to anyone, or even think out loud, that there were classes in the free American society, but there were. In her expensive boarding schools, there had always been the knowledge of what class a person belonged in. For all that Holly??
?s mother had been an heiress, it was her father, with his illustrious ancestors, who’d put her high on the list of people to know.
The waitress at the diner thought she’d been telling Holly something she didn’t know, but Holly knew firsthand how marriages to…to people like Nick worked out. Her stepmother had eloped with a beautiful man who owned a car repair shop. Minutes later she was pregnant, and her rich, blue-blood family had disowned her. Four years later, her husband had been killed in a car accident, and Marguerite had been left with a young daughter to support. She’d been waitressing when she’d met James Latham.
Now, as Nick’s hand caressed her, she understood how a woman could run away with a beautiful man on a motorcycle. Until now, she’d been contemptuous. Self-righteous even. A girl at one of her schools had been caught having an affair with the swimming instructor. Holly had been disdainful. How could the girl have been so foolish? she’d wondered. How could she have hurt her family like that? The young man had a pregnant wife!
But now, Holly began to understand. Did all of “them” have sex lives like this? All the boys she’d ever known had…had…. Well, they didn’t shower together, and they didn’t bend a girl over the hood of a car.
Nick put her foot down and leaned over her face. “You’re thinking,” he said. “If you can think that means I’m not doing a good job.”
“Not really thinking, not actually,” she said as he kissed her neck. His big body was pressing her against the wall.
“What are you not actually, really thinking about?”
“No wonder you people have so many children,” she said, then froze in horror at what she’d just said. “I didn’t mean—I—”
“I have seven brothers and sisters,” he said, seemingly unoffended. “And at least a million cousins. Cousins everywhere.” He was running his hands down her body. The hot water was beating down on his back, splashing onto her face. His hands went round her thighs, parting them, sliding upward, his thumbs beginning to enter her. “Three families live in one house that constantly needs repair. We grew most of our own food.”