That was new. So many things about him were new.
Including the fact that he was sexy as hell.
That was new, for her. As a child, as a young girl, Nick was . . . Nick. The person she loved most in the world after her father. Always there, always dependable, always fun. With a natural authority that made her feel safe and protected. The two men in her life, looking after her. Her father, with his understanding of the law, his status as a well-respected judge—nothing in society could harm her while he was around. And Nick—always strong and tough, with quick reflexes, always alert for trouble. Nothing in life could hurt her while he was around.
It was only now, alone, that Elle understood what a privileged childhood she’d had. And Nick had been a big part of that.
Nick wasn’t her brother. She had no idea what feelings you could have for a brother because she’d never had one, but she instinctively understood she never thought of Nick as one. Nick was her friend, her protector.
She thought he’d always be there. How foolish. It hadn’t even occurred to her that someday he’d fall in love and leave. She didn’t know if he’d fallen in love, but he’d certainly left.
He’d definitely had women. Tons of them. She’d never seen male genitalia in person but in her Dreams . . . Nick was the epitome of maleness. She’d seen him with women, she’d seen him in bed pleasuring himself—
She swallowed, hoping she wasn’t turning red. She’d always been an open book to him. Please God, let him not understand that she was remembering the violently arousing image of him having sex with other women and with himself.
Sitting across from him, she totally understood why women fell for him. As a girl, her feelings had already started turning. But now she was a woman, and what he evoked in her was sexual desire—of a scale and intensity she didn’t know how to handle.
Nick shifted in his chair, huffed out a breath. “Well,” he began. “I guess I’d better be—”
“Where did you come from?” she blurted.
“What?”
“Where were you today? Or yesterday? When you decided to come?”
“Are you asking why I came?”
“No.” And she wasn’t. Why he came was clear, to her at least. They were linked by a thread that had become thin and stretched over time but still held. She’d needed him desperately and he came. That was bedrock for her. She didn’t even question it.
He wasn’t answering her question. She tried another tack. “I can’t let you leave without feeding you. Dad would . . . Dad would have been appalled.”
His hard look softened. “Honey, it doesn’t look like you have much food in the house.”
Elle swallowed, lifted her head. “Dad was very, very ill the last couple of weeks. I didn’t have time to do any food shopping.” She pulled her cell out of her pocket. “I can call Foodwise, though. Jenny would gladly send us a meal. Promise you’ll stay at least to eat.”
There were still a couple hundred dollars left in the checking account. The undertaker’s bill would come later and plunge her into the red, but for the moment she had more than enough to cover a meal. Two meals, even. She didn’t even think of ordering a pizza or a burger and fries. Nick deserved better than that.
He dipped his head. “Okay.”
Elle beamed at him. He wasn’t leaving right this minute. She still had time with him. There was so much to memorize. The lines beside his mouth, brand-new, that disappeared when he smiled. How the tendons in his neck stood out when he turned his head. How she could see his pectorals through his shirt.
How utterly handsome he was.
How he heated her blood.
She had to memorize this effect he had on her, because it wasn’t coming back, not without Nick. She knew herself that well, at least. This was her one shot at feeling sexual desire and it would leave when he left.
Everything about her was aroused. Her skin was supersensitive. The small hairs on her forearms and on the nape of her neck prickled against her sweater. Even the lightest touch against her clothes seemed to burn her skin. It was hard to breathe, as if oxygen had suddenly mutated into a liquid. She had to concentrate to keep her lungs filled.
The biggies. Her breasts, never large, now felt immense and heavy. Her nipples brushed against the cotton of her bra. Between her thighs—that unmistakable feeling of heaviness and heat and emptiness she had when she woke up from ordinary dreams of Nick.
The changes in her body excited her and scared her. Excited her because, well, heat and pleasure were novelties. She’d been cold and hollow for a long time. These tingling sensations, as if her body were waking up after a long sleep—they were wonderful. They also scared her because as far as she knew, only Nick could make her feel this way.
But he was staying for dinner, or as much dinner as she could muster.
Take this second by second, she told herself. Enjoy every second.
She watched him as she dialed the number. Jenny herself answered. She had a soft spot for them. Once, when she was a young girl, long before Elle had been born, the judge had kept her out of trouble. Jenny herself had told her; the judge had never said a word.
“Hey, hon.” Jenny’s smoky voice, as always, was warm. Elle could imagine her leaning against a wall on a cigarette break, short gray hair brushed back, her long, lean, elegant frame slightly slouched. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t make the funeral. We had to cater two luncheons. I’m really sorry, honey. If I’d had advance notice . . . but that’s not the nature of funerals, is it?”
“No, it’s not.” Elle smiled. Trust Jenny to say the exact right thing. No doubt in the days to come she’d have thousands of people apologizing for not coming, though in most cases it was simply that the judge had fallen off their radar. He wasn’t off Jenny’s radar. If she’d been free, she would have come. “That’s okay, Jenny. Dad knows you loved him.”
“I surely did, hon. So what can I do for you? Can I send you a dinner over?”
Oh, bless her. “Yes, thank you. Today’s special.” She hesitated. “For two people.”
Jenny didn’t pry. “Two specials, you got it. I’ll send them over around seven, with a nice bottle of wine. All on the house.”
“Thank—” Elle stopped. It was an incredibly generous offer. Dinner would be at least seventy dollars, plus the wine and tips. But . . . that was the beginning of a long slippery slope straight to hell.
So far, Elle had kept up appearances. No one came to the house anymore, so they wouldn’t notice that almost everything that could have been sold was gone. But Jenny knew, or suspected. If Elle started accepting charity now, it would snowball. The wives of former friends of her father would start sending over used clothes—Just wore it a few times, Elle sweetie. You’re welcome to it. Maids would start leaving casseroles on her front doorstep.
It didn’t bear thinking about.
Not to mention the fact that Jenny’s smoker’s voice came over loud and clear, and Nick had undoubtedly heard every word.
She injected confidence in her voice. “That’s kind of you, Jenny, but not necessary. I’ll give the delivery boy my credit card. But thanks for the offer.”
She could barely look away from Nick’s dark eyes. It took her a moment to realize Jenny was taking a long time to answer.
Finally— “Okay, hon. That’s fine, then. But the wine will be on the house.”
Yes. That was acceptable. A gesture of solidarity, not charity. “Thanks, Jenny.”
“I loved that old man,” Jenny replied and Elle nearly burst into tears.
That was what her father had been. The kind of man other people loved because he’d done such good in the world.
“Yeah,” she whispered, forcing the word out, and broke the connection before she broke down.
She raised her eyes to Nick.
“I loved him, too,” he said quietly.
And that broke her. It was like a sharp punch straight to the heart. Reaching past skin and bone in a nearly fatal blow.
&nbs
p; “Then why did you leave us?” she whispered as tears began rolling down her face.
Chapter 2
Oh fuck.
That was the last thing Nick wanted, to make Elle cry. She was sitting across from him, crying her heart out without making a sound and it nearly brought him to his knees.
She nearly brought him to his knees.
She’d been a beautiful little girl when they’d found him that winter night. He’d run away from his fourth foster home. The last one had been the worst of all, run by a true sadist. Everyone in the household walked around with scars and hollow eyes. How the fuck the authorities managed to avoid reading the signs was beyond him. But they did. They kept shipping kids to Carlton Norris, and Old Man Norris just kept taking them in and cashing the checks. His beaten-down wife fed them shit food and did just enough housekeeping to keep cockroaches at bay, then would disappear into her room when the old man got that crafty look in his eyes.
It wasn’t rage, it was addiction. He fed off other people’s pain. He didn’t feed off Nick’s. Nick was five foot ten by the time he was eleven years old and he kept himself strong. No one messed with him. Norris didn’t want to mess with him, anyway. Norris liked the smaller kids.
One night Nick stopped the beating of a small boy, Tim, who had that look about him. The look of someone who wasn’t going to survive much longer. There wasn’t anything Nick could do to help the kid’s long-term survival, but by God he was going to survive this beating. Nick swung at Norris and connected well. He pulled the punch at the last minute so all Norris got was a black eye. It could have been a shattered jaw.
Nick woke to blinding pain. Norris had taken a hammer to his wrist and was shining a blinding light in his eyes. Just past the light Nick saw a gun barrel.
“You run, boy,” Norris growled. “You run as fast as you can because in an hour I’m calling the cops and reporting a dangerous juvenile on the loose. He beat me up, and he beat up a younger boy. And don’t think for one minute that little worm won’t rat on you and say you gave him the scars and bruises.”
No, Nick knew enough of the world to understand that Tim would be too terrified to contradict Norris.
The safety went off the gun. “Run, you fucker.”
He ran.
He ran and ran. He hitched rides, was a stowaway on long-haul trucks, and once hid in the luggage compartment of a Greyhound bus. He didn’t even know where he was going. He survived on stolen food and water bottles from service stations, but in the end his wrist blew up like a balloon and infection set in.
He dropped—in an affluent part of a town—unconscious with, as he was later told, a temperature of 104.
He came to very briefly to see an angel looking at him, so he knew he was dead. She was beautiful, a tiny sprite with light blue eyes, fair hair a halo around her head, screaming, Daddy, Daddy!
That’s nice, he remembered thinking. I died and went to heaven. Fucking A.
Only he hadn’t died and gone to heaven, he’d gone to Lawrence, Kansas. And his life split into two, because he was picked up by the finest man on the face of the earth, Judge Oren Thomason.
He was taken to a hospital where the little blond angel rarely left his side, and when he was better, he was taken home to the kind of home he never even knew existed. Calm and gentleness reigned there, along with love and respect.
The angel turned out to be Elle, a beautiful little girl who became his shadow. Nick had never been loved before, but Elle made up for that. She loved him fiercely. He went home with them—to his own room! With a bed with clean sheets, a closet full of clean new clothes, books, and a laptop on a desk. All his own. He’d gone from the hospital straight into bed, still too weak to stand up for long. Elle ferried in trays full of food she could barely carry and stayed with him until he finished every bite, then read to him, endlessly, from books he’d never heard of but which fascinated him. A wizard called Harry Potter. Lions and witches and wardrobes. A whole world called Middle-earth.
And in the meantime, Judge Thomason was working his own wizard’s magic. By the time Nick was on his feet, he was a ward of the judge and enrolled in middle school.
Kindness like a warm, gentle tsunami washed over him, a strong and utterly irresistible tide that carried him forward.
Somehow Nick Ross, mongrel dog, had been folded into this loving family and he simply lapped it up.
Until his body betrayed him. He had just turned eighteen and had a man’s body. One summer evening, Elle came in from the garden. Overnight, it seemed, Elle was turning into a woman. She’d been a beautiful little girl and was turning into a spectacular woman. Right then, on that summer day, with a sundress that outlined her small perfect breasts and tiny waist, shiny pale blond hair rippling down her back, she dazzled Nick. From being Elle his little shadow, she had suddenly morphed overnight into Elle a stunning girl on the verge of womanhood—and his body reacted instantly, instinctively.
He’d been having sex for a couple of years, but none of his bed partners had looked anything like Elle.
Before he could think, before he could shake himself from staring at her, he got a massive hard-on. Right then Elle was the most desirable sex partner any man could ever want and before he could will his dick down, before he could even be ashamed of himself, he caught the judge’s hard gaze. Nick was wearing sweats and the judge could clearly see the effect Elle had on him. A boner big as a house.
And his life split into two once more.
No words were spoken. None were needed.
That afternoon, the judge called Nick into his office. The huge safe was open, empty. A stack of bills in plastic-wrapped bricks sat on the judge’s desk.
The judge was sitting behind his desk, his gaze stern but not enraged. Nick understood completely. The judge had a beautiful and innocent young daughter to protect. Nick would have done the same. Actually, being more hot-blooded, if he had a daughter like Elle to protect, he would have beaten the mongrel to a pulp if he saw the guy get a woodie staring at her.
The judge shoved the bricks of hundred dollar bills across his desk and pointed to an open sports bag on the floor. Inside were some of Nick’s clothes, clean and ironed, but most of the space was for the money. Nick stacked the bills inside, looked at the judge, nodded, and walked out of the study, out of the house, and out of that life.
In the bag, he later counted twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, obviously all the cash the judge had at hand. More than Nick deserved.
He’d headed south, to Fort Bragg.
Why did you leave us? Elle asked. He’d left because he was unworthy to stay in that house one more minute, but Nick didn’t know how to say that.
He also didn’t know how to watch Elle cry. It unmanned him, made his stomach swoop with distress. Worse than that first jump out of a plane.
“Why?” Elle asked again, and reached out for his hand.
There was no resisting her. He wouldn’t have done anything five years ago. She’d been a young girl. His body had betrayed him. Luckily he’d known better than to give his body what it wanted.
But now? She wasn’t a young girl, she was a woman and blindingly beautiful. She was no longer the pretty girl of privilege, she was a beautiful woman who had suffered. Overly thin, unsmiling, stunning.
Absolutely irresistible.
When her small hand closed around his, he felt an electric shock go up his arm and his body betrayed him all over again. A nuclear reaction he was totally unable to control.
He stood up so fast his chair fell over, pulled her into his arms so hard he could feel the breath leaving her body, but it didn’t make any difference because she could breathe through his mouth, through him.
And oh, how she tasted. Like honey. All those years of fucking other women and he hadn’t allowed himself once to wonder how Elle tasted. Not once, not while he was awake. His dreams—ah, that was something else. In his dreams he wondered . . . in his dreams he sometimes felt her presence, but this was nothing like his d
reams; it was a million times better.
She was struggling against him, but he was so blasted with lust it took some time for him to catch on. She was fighting him, trying to get away . . .
Oh God.
It was his worst nightmare, worse than when the judge caught him staring at her and getting an erection. Because then it was just between him and the judge. Now he was getting the message from her, from Elle, and he was a hairsbreadth from coming while being intensely ashamed.
This was Elle.
He lifted his mouth, opened his arms, stepped back, feeling like shit.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” he began when she threw herself back into his arms, mouth awkwardly searching for his.
Oh. He’d been holding her arms down and she wanted to hold on to him.
She’d been standing on tiptoe to kiss him and dropped back down onto her heels. Nick looked down at her, nearly blinded by the fact that she was so beautiful and . . . she was Elle.
Her hair had escaped the French braid and formed a soft pale blond halo around her head, just as it had all those years ago.
She lifted a hand from his shoulder to cup his jaw, then her fingers traced his face. From forehead to cheekbone, down over his jaw and neck. “Nick,” she whispered.
He braced himself for more questions but she didn’t say anything, just lifted herself back up to his mouth. He took the kiss over from there.
She tasted so fucking good. So good he was hard as steel. There was no way Elle could miss it either, plastered up against him, rolling her hips against him—groaning as she felt a woodie so hard it hurt.
Which was crazy, because he’d been getting laid on a regular basis at the training camp in Fort Benning. Everyone told him to get as much tail as humanly possible during training because there were no opportunities on ops, and even if there were, he’d be too strung out and exhausted to take advantage. So he’d been on a tear.
Right now, it felt like he’d never had sex before in his life.
Elle was like a cat in his arms, open to him in every way, rubbing sinuously against him. He put a hand under her ass, lifted her a little and groaned when he felt her heat against his cock. He was holding her so tightly he could feel her mound through the thin layer of her pants and panties. She was a furnace there, emanating heat like a sun. He shifted her a bit and felt the lips of her sex open over him. She swung her hips forward and rode him, driving him crazy. If they hadn’t had clothes on, he’d be inside her.