“She must have been proud of you when you explained. I mean, you thought you were rescuing a defenseless little girl.”
“My mom isn’t exactly thrilled about rescues that aren’t of the medical sort, so I figured telling her I barged into a stranger’s house and attacked a guy who carries a gun wouldn’t exactly make her visit go any smoother. The consensus of my sisters is that the unfortunate rake incident was the lamest excuse I’ve come up with yet, in a lifetime of lame excuses. Next time I decide to fib so Mom won’t worry about me, I’m supposed to clear my story with them first.”
She looked so abashed that Cash actually smiled. “I could help you out in that department if they aren’t available. You wouldn’t believe the number of excuses I hear in my line of work. I didn’t see the stop sign. I just forgot I had the candy bar in my hand when I walked out of the Quick Stop. We weren’t really having sex in the car. My girlfriend just lost her contact lens and we thought it might have fallen and gotten caught in her clothes.”
Rowena ran her hands over her shirt as if patting herself down for the missing lens. “I’ll keep that one on file just in case. But I think my mother would be relieved to come bail me out of jail for something normal instead of the weird kinds of trouble I get into. Do you go to jail for getting caught parking?”
“Not on my shift. I suppose legally I could take them in for indecent exposure or lewd acts in a public park or disorderly conduct, but I just send them home with a warning. Vinny used to say it wasn’t fair to ruin some high school kid’s night just because we were jealous they were getting lai—well, you get the gist.” God. He must be even more tired than he thought, talking to a pretty, sleep-mussed woman about a subject as dangerous as that one.
“It’s been a long time then? For you?” Rowena asked a trifle shyly.
Cash’s gaze collided with hers. “What?”
“Since you…” She fretted that plump pink lower lip, and Cash tamped down a surge of heat behind the fly of his pants.
“Since I had sex?” He intended to startle her with his blunt answer, then tell her it was none of her business. It wasn’t, after all. And yet, there was something about her straightforward question that tugged at his defenses. She looked so empathetic, her head cocked to one side and her eyes so green and soft and warm that he surprised himself.
“There hasn’t been anyone since Lisa left,” he admitted.
“Oh.”
She didn’t ask for him to elaborate. He had no idea why he did it anyway. “My girls have been hurt enough. Bringing some new woman into their lives just so I can have casual sex hardly seems fair.”
Not to mention that sex had a dangerous way of tearing down walls, leaving a man vulnerable, tempting him to take risks. If he hadn’t understood how costly those risks could be when he was a horny kid just back from Kuwait, he sure as hell understood them now. Every time he saw his daughters’ faces when their mom bothered to call them on the phone.
“Of course—” he saluted her with his coffee “—most days I’m too damned busy to care about sex at all.”
“I never even think about it myself. Well, almost never.” She flushed, dropped her gaze to the floor. She looked so flustered he knew exactly what had flashed into her mind. That hot, heavy moment when they’d stared at each other through the picture window. When he’d been naked and she’d been breathless, and they’d both been excruciatingly aware of possibilities.
Eve stumbling across Adam in the garden the very first time. Not sure what to do, on the brink of unraveling the mysteries together.
She’d stirred feelings in him he hadn’t had since before his stint in Kuwait, when he’d been clean himself, a kid who believed in honor and valor, determined to prove himself in battle. But he wasn’t that kid anymore. He never would be.
And yet, she’d reminded him what it felt like to be a man, not just a father.
She’s your kids’ babysitter, he told himself sternly. You can’t afford to screw that up to get her in bed.
Which would be damned well impossible, considering where his little girls were sleeping at the moment.
That’s what you need to be remembering…how peaceful the girls looked snuggled up to her, their stuffed animals and books scattered around them.
“So, what about you?” he asked.
She’d said she hadn’t been having sex, but for all he knew her boyfriend could live far away, be in the military or a dozen other places that would keep him out of reach.
“Have you got some guy out there who doesn’t mind dog hair on everything he owns?” He hoped so. It would make the next six weeks a whole lot easier if she did.
Regret flickered in her eyes. He almost let her off the hook, but curiosity pushed him. “Come on. I answered your question about my nonexistent sex life. The least you can do is tell me about your boyfriend.”
“He was my fiancé.”
Whoa. “You’re engaged?”
“I was. Past tense. Before I came here.” Distress etched her features.
“Want to talk about it?”
“Oh, yeah. That would be big fun.” She rolled her eyes, and he thought that was the end of it. But after a moment she spoke. “There’s one undeniable truth about me you probably need to know, Cash.”
“What’s that?”
“When I screw up, I screw up big. I’ve known Daniel forever—since we were kids. Our parents were friends. My sisters played with his sisters. When he asked me on a date the folks practically set off fireworks. It was the first thing I’d ever done that made my family that happy.”
“Don’t tell me. He was really a jerk?” Cash wanted him to be a jerk. He wasn’t sure why.
“No. Dan was exactly the opposite. He was a pediatrician at my mom’s hospital. No one but Mom and I knew, but he was helping pay for prescriptions out of pocket for kids whose parents fell between the cracks.”
“That’s too bad.” Cash scrambled to make sense out of what he’d said. “I don’t mean it was bad he was helping with expenses. After Mac’s medical bills—well, all I can say is thank God I had decent insurance. But losing a jerk would have been a lot easier on you than losing a guy who, well, didn’t let anyone fall through the cracks.”
“Isn’t that the truth?” She gave him a wan smile. “Dan was everything my mom ever wanted for me. Brilliant, kind, responsible, well-off. And…” She hesitated. “He loved me.”
Terrific, Cash thought. But he could hear the pain and regret in her voice.
“In fact, I figured they’d ditch me and adopt him when I called the wedding off.”
“You called it off?” Cash asked. She’d dumped Prince Fucking Charming?
“Yep. I called it off and almost got arrested in the process.”
He almost smiled. “What offense was it this time?”
“I’d spent forever addressing invitations. Mom called me every day to see if I’d put them in the mail. You’re supposed to zing the things off six weeks before the date, but my sister Ariel talked me into doing this thing with sealing wax and ribbons and I got too busy to finish…well, never mind. Suffice it to say five weeks before the wedding I couldn’t stand Mom’s ragging anymore. I finished the annoying little suckers and ran them down to the corner mailbox and dumped the envelopes in. I expected this huge sense of relief once it was done. Planned to run straight back home and call Mom, get her off my case, you know? But the instant those envelopes left my hands, I knew…”
She poured her own cup of coffee, looked out at his tree. Cash stood silent, waiting.
“I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.”
Cash could imagine how she felt. He knew what it was like, looking at the person you were supposed to marry and seeing a train wreck. But then in his case nobody—not his family and certainly not Lisa’s—was overjoyed at the match. It would be a whole different ball game if the fiancé you were dumping was Mr. Perfect, a family friend everybody else adored.
“It must have been hard for you,” he said
. “Breaking things off.”
Setting down her cup, she hugged herself, rubbing her upper arms. “It ended up being a whole lot worse than it had to be. I sat by the box two hours until my mailman came. He’d known me for years. I begged him to give the letters back. I mean, my return address was on every one of them and there was that stupid wax seal with our initials woven together. Besides, wedding invitation envelopes are stuffed to the gills with all kinds of crap, so it’s not like you can mistake them for anything else.”
He could see her frustration rise, even now.
“But would the guy hand the invitations over?” she asked in disgust. “No. Neither rain nor sleet nor begging and tears would keep him from his appointed rounds. He said if I didn’t quit following the mail truck he’d call the police!”
Cash could imagine, all too well, Rowena doggedly pursuing the mail carrier.
“Know what made me maddest of all?” she demanded.
“What?”
“He kept those invitations just to spite me. I’m absolutely sure it made his day to stick it to me that way.”
Cash shrugged. “The man had a job to do.”
“No. That wasn’t the reason. You want to know why he wouldn’t give those invitations back? The man hated a dog I was fostering.”
Another out-of-control dog? Maybe Cash could see where the mailman was coming from. “Did your dog bite him?”
“I’d never keep a dog that bit! The mailman was just steamed about that package Lulu chewed up.”
“Your dog stole a piece of mail?”
“He left it on Mrs. Gully’s porch,” she bristled. “It was a windy day and it blew into my yard. The blasted thing was stuffed with oatmeal cookies! It wasn’t Lulu’s fault she ate them. Wouldn’t you?”
Homemade cookies? Cash remembered when one of his marine buddies had gotten a care package from home. They’d all descended on whatever baked goods it held like a horde of Army Ants. Maybe it wasn’t so hard to see how Lulu had been tempted into a life of crime.
But Rowena was still too focused on a past injustice to bother exploring his train of thought. “Too bad I didn’t know what a jerk the mailman was going to be,” she muttered. “I would’ve borrowed a neighbor kid and seen if I could lower him headfirst into the mail slot. He could’ve gotten those invitations back.”
Again Cash felt the urge to smile. “Then you really would have been arrested. Added child endangerment to the federal charge of tampering with the mail.”
“Jail would’ve been a relief under the circumstances. I would rather have been locked up than have to face my mother and his parents and Dan himself. Even after the whole panic attack over the invitations, I still couldn’t call the wedding off. My sisters tried to convince me it was just a case of pre-wedding jitters. My mother said it was only natural. Two weeks before the wedding, I knew for certain they were wrong.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t settle,” Cash surprised himself by reassuring her. He hated the shadow of guilt that still haunted her eyes, and the tinge of self-doubt. “You’ve got a lot to offer a man. You deserve to find love. The kind most people only imagine.”
Rowena gave him a wobbly smile. Her eyes filled with gratitude. “I couldn’t go through with the ceremony,” she said. “It didn’t matter how kind Dan was, or how successful, or that my family worshipped him. You can’t marry someone you don’t love.”
Cash winced at the conviction in her voice. “You can if they’re pregnant.” The words slipped out before he could stop them. But what the hell? They were telling their deep dark secrets this morning. Might as well get that one out in the open, as well.
“Lisa was…pregnant?”
Cash took a deep drink of his coffee, welcoming the burn in his throat. “The fact that Charlie was on the way was not good news,” he said. “Especially to Lisa’s family.”
“But surely once she was born—Charlie is so precious. They must’ve seen that.”
“What they saw was that I’d ruined Lisa’s life. They had some guy from the yacht club picked out for her. Barry something-or-other. An up-and-coming executive in her daddy’s company.”
He felt it again, the sweat on his palms as he faced Lisa’s father, the man’s sneer, his sarcasm, the way he’d tried to make Cash feel small. Now Cash wondered how he’d behave himself if it was his little girl some smart-ass kid knocked up. He’d probably break the guy’s jaw.
“I don’t blame him now, for being angry. I was fresh out of the marines. A construction worker’s kid. No education. No job. No money. A real catch. Your parents would have been thrilled if you’d backed out of a wedding to me.”
“How did you feel about the baby?”
“The baby? I was scared shitless. I remember going to tell my mom. The look on her face when I admitted what I’d done. I told her I wasn’t ready…I couldn’t be a father. She sat there, quiet for a long time, listening to me. Then she looked me straight in the eye and said I was going to be a father, whether I was ready or not. The only thing left for me to decide was—what kind of a man I wanted to be.”
Suddenly he felt warmth, Rowena’s hand on his forearm. “She’d be so proud if she could see you now.”
“I had five brothers—you know, this house full of boys. Every time we left the house for a date she’d catch us at the door and say ‘keep your pants zipped.’ Didn’t matter who else was in the house—somebody else’s girlfriend, Mrs. Crosly from across the street, even the parish priest. Used to embarrass us to death.” He covered Rowena’s hand with his own. “Too bad I didn’t listen.”
She pulled her hand free then cupped his cheek, her palm soft against the stubble of his beard. He felt her touch down to his soul. “But then there wouldn’t be a Charlie or Mac,” she said, her face mirroring his pain, his regret, offering comfort and wisdom that surprised him. “I barely know your girls, but already I can’t imagine a world without them.” Her thumb skimmed his cheekbone, feather light. “They’re beautiful, Cash.”
Cash’s voice roughened with love, awe and a faint trace of fear that he’d fail them. “They are beautiful, aren’t they?”
She smiled, an angel’s smile. His gaze held hers, an eternity spinning out between them, mouths mere inches apart. He could feel her breath, sense her heartbeat, see so deep into her eyes that he was drowning in them.
“Beautiful…” he echoed the word, but this time it was Rowena he was seeing, the fresh cream of her face, the pink on her cheeks, her lips parted just a little. Her tongue swept out to moisten them. Cash’s own mouth went dry.
“Listen, Rowena,” he began. “I want…” Want to thank you for taking care of my kids. Want to tell you how good it was to know you didn’t leave them alone, Charlie with her guilt, Mac with her dreams of dancing. It should have been easy to finish the sentence, but only two words kept echoing in his mind.
I want…I want…I want…
“Me, too.” Such a small voice. Such a brave confession. She peered up at him with eyes wide and green and far more innocent than he deserved.
Don’t do it…
He tried to warn himself. But he wanted too badly, needed too deeply, for just this one moment, not to feel alone.
Sunshine. Light. Hope.
Rowena was everything missing from his life. This one moment all he could ever have.
How could he resist stealing just one taste? Cash threaded his hands back through her tousled golden hair, tipped her face up and lowered his mouth to hers.
She gasped. In surprise? In pleasure? He was too lost in sensation to know for sure. He was sinking fast, diving deep. His pulse raced as he explored her mouth tentatively, trying to gauge her reaction. He skimmed his tongue over her lips, teasing them, learning their shape, their texture. He groped for sanity, but she melted against him, running her hands over his shoulders, along his throat, then back to cup his nape. He trailed kisses down to the hollow at the edge of her jaw, where he’d felt her pulse leap when he’d touched her before.
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Still warm, her throat smelled of clean cotton sheets and faint traces of yesterday morning’s perfume and he sucked there just a heartbeat before he kissed his way back to her mouth and slipped his tongue inside.
She tasted like summer as her curves fitted against him, her small breasts against his chest, her hips and thighs against his. He hardened where he pressed against her, his pulse racing at sweetness beyond anything he’d ever known.
He felt her hesitate, her fingers stealing up to his face in shy exploration that nearly undid him.
And he wanted to find the edge of her top and pull it over her head, strip off every stitch of clothing between them and take her to bed.
Bed. Where his children were sleeping. Bed. Where he’d promised himself he’d sleep alone. He went still, reluctant to surrender her mouth. Knowing once he did, he’d never taste it again.