Tempting Faith (Indigo Love Spectrum) (16 page)

Her gentle touch on his arm started his words. “I used to wake up every morning feeling as if I were serving time for a crime I didn’t commit. There were days when…” His words caught in his throat as hot emotion swelled inside him.

“Those days are gone now,” she soothed, gathering him in an embrace meant to show him that she could share the burden of his pain. She did, always had. When she had seen Orrin Brannon slap him outside Red Irv’s because he’d failed to turn over his paycheck fast enough, when he’d sponged up his heavily medicated mother from the curb in front of Buzzy’s Tavern, and when his former classmates came home from college and sat in the diner ordering Alex around as though he were their personal slave, Faith had wanted to scream and shout, to do all the kicking and punching that he couldn’t.

She hadn’t known how to comfort him then. Her little jokes, smartass comments and horrible nicknames for his tormenters seemed to amuse him, but the moment they parted ways, his melancholy returned. She now had other skills at her disposal, and she readily employed them to return him from the place and time he had worked so hard to keep in the past.

She took his hands and brought them closer to her face. Surgery and medication had softened the appearance of the scars she had learned beneath the tall evergreens on Kayford Mountain, but the stories of their origins still weighed on Faith’s heart. She pressed her lips to them, hoping that her kisses would show him that she cherished everything about Alexander Brannon.

He curled his hand over hers, pressing kisses to her loosely folded fingers. Inching backwards, he put some space between them to avoid getting too carried away.

“I’ve got a pinot noir rosé that should match well with dinner,” he said, pulling the bottle from its cubby hole. “It can carry its own against the strong flavor and fat of salmon.” He selected another bottle and dusted the label before displaying if for her. “Or if you’d prefer a white, this sauvignon blanc has notes you’ll find intriguing.”

Respecting his wish to tread on less personal ground, Faith hooked her thumbs through her belt loops and asked, “When did you learn so much about wine?”

“When Olivia Baxter decided that Brent and I needed a bit of refinement,” he grinned. “She put us in dance classes, a cooking class—”

“The ABCDs of the modern renaissance man,” Faith chuckled. “Acting, booze, cooking and dance. You’re fully armed to seduce, on screen and off.”

“That’s the nice thing about acting,” Zander said. With two bottles of wine tucked under one arm, he held the door open for Faith. “I can be anything I want.”

“Or anyone,” Faith muttered as she passed him.

Chapter 8

Faith had accepted Zander’s invitation to go for a hike to work off the salmon, couscous and wine they had gorged on for dinner. The thin trunks of close, young poplars provided excellent handholds for her to pull herself higher and easily keep pace with Zander. Her Keds were ill-suited for the trek, but the trail Zander had chosen was free of fallen branches and large stones and was thickly cushioned with desiccated pine needles. A few steps ahead of her, Zander breathed heavily, his lungs working harder the higher he climbed. When he stopped, Faith drew up beside him, smiling even as she panted for breath.

“Okay,” Zander said. “Turn around.”

Taking her by the shoulders, he gently spun her. What little breath Faith had left caught in her chest at the sight of the San Bernardino mountains with Big Bear Lake at their feet. Serenity washed over Faith, and she relaxed against him.

“This is disgusting,” Faith beamed, taking a deep breath of cool air scented with freshly disturbed earth, pine sap, and damp cedar bark. “It’s so beautiful, but it’s a different kind of beauty from back home.”

Zander shrugged. “Mountains are mountains.”

Faith grunted.

“What?” Zander asked.

She turned her head, catching his gaze. “It’s purely accidental that you bought a house in one of the prettiest mountain ranges in California,” she remarked with a skeptical pinch of her lips.

“Sure. Half the state is mountains. They’re hard to avoid.”

Faith kept further speculations to herself, particularly her suspicion that Zander lived in the mountains because they reminded him of home.

“People back home say if you flattened West Virginia, it would be bigger than Texas,” she told him. “West Virginia is more vertical than horizontal.”

“You’re just a walking Mountain State encyclopedia, aren’t you?”

“I’m just trying to suggest that if you like mountains, West Virginia is the place to be. Fawnskin reminds me a lot of Booger Hollow. It’s just got a sexier name.”

He would have openly balked at her suggestion that he return to West Virginia if her remark hadn’t been accompanied by a smile so lovely that their mountain view dimmed in comparison.

“The only thing I would have ever gone back there for is right here,” he said.

The sun sank further behind the mountains, taking the last of its warmth with it. But Zander’s words, and the finality with which he spoke them, warmed Faith all the way through.

“Why didn’t you?”

Zander hoped it was a trick of the sunset stealing a bit of the light from her dark eyes.

“Why didn’t I what?” He took a few steps away from her and leaned against a mature fir tree.

“Why didn’t you ever come back? For me.”

“Faith,” he groaned, wincing. “I’ve told you already—”

“I know, you hate Booger Hollow, but that’s not good enough.” She went up to him, standing toe to toe. “You didn’t hate
me
.”

“What’s done is done,” he uttered in exasperation.

“I thought I was going to die,” she persisted.

“I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you,” he said.

“You’re the reason I thought I’d die!”

“That’s not how I remember it,” he mumbled.

“I don’t mean then.” A tremor crept into her voice. “After. When I believed you were dead. They never found your body, obviously, so I didn’t even have a grave to visit. You just disappeared. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep.”

“Yet you recovered in time to start classes at NYU in the fall,” he said blithely.

Faith pinched him. Hard.

“What the—” Zander protested, grabbing at the aggrieved flesh on his upper arm.

“I had to get away from Booger Hollow! It was the only way I could stop thinking about you all the time! When I came home for Christmas that year, I hurt so much that I—”

A soft, silent raindrop cut her off.

Faith swallowed hard, her ire giving way to a flare of panic.

Zander curved an arm around her shoulders and began guiding her back down the mountain. “We’ll make it back before the storm hits,” he assured her. “This mountain hasn’t been mined to death. The rain doesn’t have the effect here that it does in Booger Hollow.”

Their descent was faster than the climb, but Zander’s timing was off. The wind picked up, bringing heavy, dark clouds that emptied their contents all at once, drenching them by the time they dashed through Zander’s front door. Breathing heavily, Faith slammed the heavy door closed behind them, slumping against it as though the wind and rain were attempting a home invasion.

Whether from fear, cold or a combination of the two, Zander couldn’t tell which rattled drops of rain from the tip of Faith’s nose as she leaned on the door, her forehead pressed to it.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I just…”

“I know.” Zander thought of a hundred ways to comfort her, but a gentle touch to the back of her head was the one he settled on.

The rain had completely restyled her. Rain saturated the fibers of her sweater, weighing it down so that it clung to her breasts and arms while hanging loose at her hips. Before Zander’s eyes, her hair was springing back into the curls he’d so loved when they were teens. The curls that had tickled his chin the last time he’d seen her, the first time he’d kissed her.

“It does that when it gets wet,” Faith said without looking at him, in response to the faint tug at one of her curls.

Zander let it spiral around the tip of his finger. The texture of her hair was the softest substance he’d ever known, something between silk and air. His nostrils flared slightly as he took a long whiff of it, the scent so familiar and welcome that it infused him with the blissful rush of a narcotic.

“I always liked your curls,” he said. “When I saw you at the press conference, I didn’t recognize you right away because your hair was straight. But when I got a good look at your eyes…”

“The eyes always reveal who you are.” She turned to face him, once again composed now that she was safe from the storm. “Who are you?” she asked, intently searching his eyes for the answer. “I know you, but you’re a complete stranger.”

“I’m someone who got caught in an early spring rain and now I’m freezing. I need to change.”

You’ve done enough of that already.
With that disquieting thought, Faith watched him retreat to his bedroom.

* * *

Faith stood at the windowed wall, mesmerized by the artistry of the storm in the growing darkness. Thunder echoed through the mountains, prefacing silver-white flashes of lightning that fractured the heavens, which healed themselves instantly. Peculiar grey-bright light illuminated heavy clouds the same shade of purple-black as a two-day old bruise. Rain angrily spattered the surface of the lake, sizzling on contact.

Two inches of polarized, bulletproof glass separated her from the fury of the storm, but Faith still trembled. She was far from phobic about storms, but they still made her uncomfortable. This one in particular brought back memories she had repressed for a long time. She crossed her arms over her chest, tightly hugging herself.

So focused on the storm, Faith was unaware of Zander’s presence when he came to the studio. Two wine glasses in one hand, a bottle of wine in the other, and a black T-shirt draped over his left shoulder, he stood in the wide doorway, stopped dead in his tracks by her reflection in the glass.

His arms dropped heavily to his sides, the weight of sudden emotion filling his chest. He had changed, selected the T-shirt for Faith and, thinking that it would help warm her up, he’d gotten the wine. His tasks hadn’t taken more than a few minutes, but it was all the time needed, upon seeing her again, to free the feelings he had kept deep within himself since leaving Dorothy.

Love and desire were too feeble to name what he was feeling for Faith as he studied her in the warm golden glow of the muted track lighting.

The lively chestnut, auburn and sienna curls and the delicious brown skin that had drawn him to her in Dorothy continued to do so, only now his longing had grown stronger. Either because of the years they had spent apart or his renewed intimacy with her, his feelings, achingly potent, poisoned his ability to think and behave rationally. He took a few steps into the studio, and he realized that everything he had done in the past ten years hadn’t been for himself, to escape his past or to escape Dorothy.

It had all been for her.

For Faith.

For her approval, her respect. For her love.

“Take off your clothes.”

Faith whirled around with a start. His command, the croak of his voice as he issued it, the intensity in his eyes and the hard set of his jaw left her shivering, and not from the chill of her wet clothing.

He seemed taller, broader, certainly more imposing as he came toward her, presumably to enforce what had seemed like a practical directive. There was nothing menacing in his demeanor, which encouraged her to dare a step in his direction. And to obey him.

Zander had no delusions that what had initially been a practical concern was now something far different. Her clothes were surely uncomfortable, but once her soggy top was in a heap on the floor, he acknowledged the bare truth: After years of dreaming and wanting, he wouldn’t wait another minute to have her.

Faith unsnapped and unzipped her pants as she moved to the center of the room. Keeping her eyes on Zander’s in his reflection, hips shifting right, left and right again, she peeled off her jeans and stepped out of the pool of white.

Standing against the rear wall, Zander appreciated her dexterity in unhooking her pretty bra. The ivory garment glowed against the darkness of her skin, and Zander momentarily envied the way the damp lace briefly clung to her flesh before she drew it away from her body.

Out of habit, Faith’s hands went to her breasts, lightly massaging them now that they were free of constraint. Zander remained motionless, but he made a sound, something between a grunt and a groan. Her back to him, Faith bent over to slide off her sheer cotton panties.

His hand tightened around the neck of the wine bottle as his gaze moved over her. Individually, her attributes were lovely, but collectively her beauty overwhelmed him. Responding to her touch, his gaze or both, her nipples tightened, the plum-dark buds inviting him to lick his lower lip.

Further down, below her toned stomach and abdomen, he noticed the absence of the strip of floss with which he’d familiarized himself at Venus Adonis; the only curls on view now were the ones on her head.

Zander let the wine bottle thunk to the floor, and Faith’s entire body responded when he came at her. He took her by the waist, roughly tugging her in to kiss her. Faith’s arms went around his neck, her fingers into his hair. Zander’s fingertips dug into the meat of her right thigh as he pulled her even closer, bringing her leg around his hip.

His kisses, as tumultuous and fierce as the storm still raging outside, wandered over her face, laying claim to her eyes, her lips, her chin, her lips, her cheeks and her lips once more before sampling the soft skin of her throat and the hollow of her neck. Following a path delineated by her abdominal muscles, he kissed her wherever his lips happened to land, moving lower until he rested on one knee. Clutching the firm rounds of her backside with both hands, his tongue traced the crease joining her right thigh to her pelvis as he guided her right leg over his shoulder.

His domineering tone and posture gone, he succumbed to his hunger for her. The taste of her sweet sweat met the tip of his tongue as it sought the precious pearl nestled within her bare folds. Faith’s knees weakened, the moist heat of Zander’s mouth and the forceful probing of his tongue sending her to a place of mindless need.

His left hand supported her, clamping her bottom almost painfully while the fingers of his right hand opened her to more fully enjoy the tasty target peeking from its delicate hood. Grasping handfuls of his hair, Faith gasped in time to the intense, minute measured pumps of her hips, which met the actions of his tongue and teeth. Firm yet gentle, insistent yet leisured, Zander generated sensations that both weakened and strengthened her.

Zander’s right knee folded under him when Faith’s legs gave out, and her weight drove her off balance. Curling his arms around her thighs, he sank onto his back, refusing to separate his mouth from her. Faith’s forearms caught the brunt of her weight, sparing her knees painful contact with the hardwood floor.

She wouldn’t have noticed a couple of cracked patellas, not with Zander’s fingertips softly moving through the valley between her buttocks, coaxing her legs wider.

Reaching and pulling, lapping and suckling, Zander kept her prisoner to his greed, even tightening his grip when she tried to straighten her arms in push-up position to give him more breathing room.

An upward stroke of his nose followed by the pinch of his lips trapped her breath in her lungs. Faith’s hands clenched, her limbs stiffened, her backside flexed as her hips rode Zander’s head into the flooring. Her air left her in a loud, gasping cry of relief and pleasure, which climbed even higher when Zander coated two fingers with her liquid silk and added them to the work of his mouth. Slumping helplessly over him, Faith allowed him to roll her onto her back. Unwilling to give her a respite, he moved his fingers precisely, slightly curling them upward while drawing them forward and back an inch at a time.

Faith took her breasts in her hands, her back arching, her knees nearly drawn up to her shoulders. Her incoherent sounds of pleasure eventually formed words, and she begged Zander to join her.

To Faith, there was nothing better than anticipation. Too often, waiting for a thing was more titillating, more exhilarating, than the actual receipt of the thing she wanted.

Not this time. Zander was touching places she never knew she had, taking her to levels of physical delight that she had only fantasized about. When Zander slid along her body to bring his face even with hers, she met him with a smile before cradling his head.

“I want this,” she told him, wrapping her legs around him. “I’ve wanted you for so long.”

His jaw hardened and his eyes searched hers for a moment. The past and the present seemed one as he wrestled with desire and responsibility. There was no tension in her body, at least none born of apprehension. But there was plenty of tension in his. He wanted her in a way he hadn’t dared imagine back in Dorothy.