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Authors: Carolyn McSparren

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BOOK: Fathers and Sons (Harlequin Super Romance)
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“And you thought that because I didn’t say the words I didn’t love you?” He opened his arms. “But I did. I do. I always will.”
She shook her head. “You see. Even now, you can’t quite bring yourself to say the words.” She stared at the fire.
“Kate,” he said. She felt his fingers stroke down her spine, and in spite of herself she shivered under his touch. “Before I met you, I don’t know how many girls I said those words to. I had no idea what love was. To use the words with you I’d used so...effectively...on other women... There has to be something better, something beyond those words to express what I felt for you.”
She wanted to see his eyes. “And Melba? Did you say those words to her?”
“Yes, before I met you, I did.”
She nodded and turned away from him again toward the firelight.
“But after I knew you, Kate, since you taught me what love is all about, I’ve never said those words to any woman.” He touched her shoulder. “Look at me.”
Reluctantly, she acquiesced.
His eyes looked almost black in the reflected light of the fire. “Kate, I love you. I always have and I always will.”
“Even if we never see each other again after this is over?”
“I won’t consider that a possibility.”
“It is, though.”
“Planes fly, cars drive. Georgia’s not that far from Mississippi.”
“China is.”
“I don’t have to go.”
“Sure you do. The most important thing I learned is that we have to have our own dreams. We can’t submerge ourselves in anybody else’s.”
“There are other dreams. This, for instance.”
The fire had begun to die. She shivered.
“You’re cold.”
“A little.”
He stood and reached down a hand. “Then come to bed. I’ll keep you warm.”
She took his hand. Whatever else happened, she would remember this night for the rest of her life. For a small moment in time, she was complete again. Let tomorrow take care of itself.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 
D
AVID WOKE at dawn with his face buried in Kate’s hair, her body snuggled spoon fashion against his.
She still slept so quietly that he ran his fingers lightly over her rib cage to make certain she was still breathing. He blew her hair away from his nose before he could begin to sneeze, and smiled sleepily. The first time they had actually spent a night together—not simply a wild, passionate coupling after which one or the other of them had gone home to a solitary bed—he had woken in a state of terror, fearing that she really was dead in his arms.
That instant of panic had struck him with a sense of bereavement so terrible that he felt his own heart stop, until he felt her respiration under his fingertips. In that instant he’d known that she was central to his existence. He’d never lost that feeling, through all the years when his only contact with her was through newspaper clippings and conversations with her mother.
Why had he never been able to tell her how important she was to his very being in a way that she would understand and accept? Was it, as she said, his simple inability to say “I love you”? If so, he was an idiot. No, it was more than that. She’d held on to the crazy idea that he was somehow extraordinary—some kind of superstar who’d deigned to shower his favors upon her.
Whereas the reality was that she was the extraordinary one. From the beginning he had clung to her like a drowning man. And they had both lived in fear of allowing each one to sense the other’s vulnerability. No marriage could survive with both parties working so frantically to maintain a fantasy.
He had seen the way his mother had turned on his father the moment he showed weakness, as though losing his job were a betrayal of her. He had watched his father endure that punishment day after harrowing day without complaint. He didn’t have his father’s strength of character. He’d rather lie than take a chance that Kate would react the same way his mother had.
He still wasn’t certain he’d been wrong. Kate said he was, of course, that she would have understood and supported him. That was hindsight. When warriors failed in battle, they were sacrificed. He hadn’t had the nerve to offer himself up that way. He could not allow himself failure, and certainly could never allow Kate or anyone else to see that he’d failed.
He still couldn’t. Couldn’t allow Dub or his son to see what a sham his marriage to Melba had been, couldn’t allow anyone to get close to him, clutched his loneliness as though it were the only possession he had left. It had been a stupid way to live.
And even stupider to let his thoughts drift this way now that Kate actually lay in his arms, her naked bottom against his groin, the nape of her neck within an inch of his lips.
When he kissed her she sighed softly, and moved against him. They made gentle love, slow, sensuous, drawing out the pleasure of remembering one another’s bodies again, until finally passion began to assert itself and he entered her. She responded wildly, wrapping her legs around his waist, digging her fingernails into his shoulders and finally crying out and arching her back against him. He sank onto her. She bit his shoulder and said something muffled against his neck.
He raised his head. “What?”
She smiled up at him sleepily. “And good morning to you, too.”
He rolled off, gathered her into his arms and stretched luxuriously. “Better than coffee.”
“Opposite effect.” She snuggled and threw her leg across his body. “I want to go back to sleep.”
“So you’re still an early riser,” he said, his right palm brushing the hair from her forehead.
She giggled. “You were sure up first
this
morning.”
He chortled. “Wicked woman.” He closed his eyes. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
She caught her breath, untangled herself and sat up. “My God, neither can I! Am I crazy?”
He opened his eyes and put his arm around her waist to draw her back down. “If this is insanity, let’s make the most of it.” He kissed her, and she responded warmly.
Then she drew away. “We really cannot spend the whole day in bed, David. There’s work to do.” Her eyes widened. “Oh, Lord, Arnold! He’ll probably send the sheriff out here to make sure I’m all right.” She leaned across him and reached for the telephone on the bedside table. The action brought her naked breast very close to his face, so he raised his head and caught her nipple between his lips. He was rewarded with a gasp, and she dropped the phone.
Five minutes later, the damn thing began to whine. David looked over the edge of the bed to see that the handset had fallen from the cradle. “Damn,” he said.
Kate reached down and replaced it. She kissed him lightly and slid across him, then swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. She picked up the phone and sat it on her naked lap. She dialed the phone, listened for only a moment, then said, “Arnold, it’s me. Calm down. I’m fine.” She listened some more, then glanced down at David. “I spent the night at David’s.”
He saw the flush spread over her breasts and up her face. “That is none of your business.”
David heard the sputter from two feet away.
“It’s okay, Arnold, really it is. Any sign of our masked avenger? No? Good.” She shoved David over with the hand not holding the telephone and curled back against the headboard. David realized that she had shut him out as effectively as though he had left the room. Which seemed the appropriate move. He left her to it, went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, shaved quickly and stepped into a hot shower.
He was standing with closed eyes, letting the water cascade down his face when he heard the shower door open. He felt her slide in behind him and grabbed her hands as they encircled his waist. “You want to smell like sandalwood too?” He slipped the bar of soap into her palm.
“Talk about your dead giveaways.”
“What can I tell you? It’s the only soap I have.”
She giggled. “Oh, well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I’ll scrub your back if you’ll scrub mine.”
 
KATE FINISHED drying her hair, checked her makeup—a fairly slapdash job created from the few items she carried with her in her purse—and opened the bathroom door. The aroma of brewing coffee and some sort of hot bread drifted up the open staircase from the kitchen area. David’s king-size bed, which they had so recently ravaged, had been neatly made up; her clothes had been collected from downstairs and were neatly folded on the foot of the bed with her shoes sitting side by side on the floor beneath it.
She considered that she should have brought fresh underwear in her purse. But that would have been an admission to herself that she expected what had happened last night to happen.
“Can’t have been that easy to find all this stuff,” she whispered. From her recollection they had done some mighty clothes-flinging downstairs last night. “Miracle my bra wasn’t hanging from the chandelier,” she breathed as she shrugged it on and fastened it, then wriggled into her sweater.
As her head surfaced from the neck hole turtle fashion she caught her reflection in the mirror over David’s bureau and walked closer to see whether her night of wild abandon showed in her face.
“Beard burn does a super job of exfoliation,” she told her image. “Wonder if plastic surgeons have considered it?” She ran her hand down her cheek, which still tingled.
“Still talking to yourself in the morning?”
She turned to see David lounging against the bedroom door with a cup of steaming coffee held in front of him like an offering. Her heart turned over. Killer smile. Killer eyes. She’d known the moment she turned to face him in that jailhouse corridor that she was dead and done for all over again.
“Only when I’m truly exasperated with myself,” she said, reaching for the cup. He tried to capture her waist, but she eluded him handily. “No you don’t.”
He sat on the bed. “Second thoughts?” He looked concerned, all right, but remarkably smug as well. She wanted to smack him. Instead, she kissed him.
“I knew what I was doing.” She danced back. “Or I thought I did.”
“So where do we go from here?”
That’s the question she’d been dreading. She leaned her bottom against the dresser and sipped her coffee while his eyes scalded her soul and heated her body. She kept her voice light. “We don’t go anywhere. Not together.”
He came off the bed and had her upper arms in his hands before she could take a breath. “Listen, wench, if you think for one moment I’m going to let you walk out of my life again, you can just forget it.”
“Down. Sit. I mean it.”
He grumbled, but he went back to the bed.
“More than twenty years ago I walked into that theater, saw you sitting there and fell off a cliff. Took me most of that twenty to put the pieces back into some semblance of order. I’m older and, I hope and pray, at least a little smarter. I sure break easier. This time I’m going to find a nice. gentle pathway and take it one step at a time. And if you try to throw me over the edge, I swear I’ll have you arrested for stalking.”
“That’s fair.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her. “As long as I can shove a little in the flat places.”
“Is that what you call last night? Shoving a little?” He laughed, sat back and folded his arms behind his head. “No, that was actual Kate-tossing. Did it work?”
“What do you think? It worked to the point where I am ravenous. Do I smell food?”
His eyes widened and he sprang up. “Oh, Lord, I forgot the cinnamon rolls.”
A moment later she heard him clatter down the steps two at a time.
 
DAVID HAD PROGRESSED from tumbling off his own cliff to figuring out the logistics of a life with Kate. As he took the cinnamon rolls—thirty seconds away from being overdone—from the oven and set them on a rack, he realized he hadn’t come up with any workable plan. Of course, Kate would be around until she got Jason off—he’d begun to think she would actually get the boy off—then she would go back to Atlanta.
What the hell. Any time was better than the last twenty years of no time at all.
Going to China was out. No way would he go halfway around the world and leave her, and no way would he drag her with him. She had a job to do, a job she did very well for people who needed her. Besides, she loved it.
What on earth could he. do to make a living in Atlanta? As he set plates out on the counter for the rolls, the doorbell rang. He’d been so deep in thought he had not heard a vehicle arriving. “Arnold,” he said. “The man must be part German shepherd.”
He wiped his hands on the dish towel stuck in the waistband of his jeans as he went to the door and opened it.
“Dad? We’ve got to see you.”
He barely managed to get out of the way of his son who was closely followed by Coral Anne Talley. She looked as though she’d been crying, and she clung to Jason’s hand.
Five steps inside the door Jason stopped. “What’s that smell? Man, am I hungry!” He started toward the counter, and David saw his eyes widen at the two plates and two glasses of orange juice as Kate started down the stairs.
She saw Jason and Coral Anne and stopped two steps from the top. David heard her “uh-oh” when Jason’s eyes swung her way.
“I spent the night here,” she said before Jason had a chance to open his mouth any wider than it already was. “David insisted I not stay at the motel after my encounter in the parking lot with Mr.—”
Coral Anne began to wail. “With my Dad. Are you gonna arrest him?”
“Of course not,” Kate said, came the rest of the way downstairs and walked over to the mantelpiece. “He was drunk as a skunk. Does he know you’re here?”
The girl shook her head. “I snuck out and drove to Long Pond to speak to Jason. He said we needed to come see Mr. Canfield to find out what to do.”
“The first thing to do is have some breakfast,” David said. “There’s plenty. Jason, pour some more orange juice. Have you taken up coffee drinking at school?”
Jason shook his head. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Kate. “Coral Anne, go wait in the car,” he said.
She stared from him to Kate for a moment, made an “oh” sound with her lips and bolted.
The moment the front door closed behind her, he turned to his father. “Man, you really did it. I cannot believe this!”
“Now, wait a minute, son.”
“You gonna try to tell me you two didn’t get it on last night?”
“Watch your mouth.”
“Or you’ll what? Have me up on contempt charges?”
“I’ll wait upstairs,” Kate said, and started for the stairs.
“Shoot, I don’t know why.” Jason’s voice had begun to take on an edge of hysteria. “You’ve stuck your damn nose in everywhere else you weren’t wanted.”
“Stop it,” David said.
“Oh, right. You’re gonna tell me she spent the night in the guest room.”
“Where Kate spent the night is none of your concern.”
BOOK: Fathers and Sons (Harlequin Super Romance)
13.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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