but it bears watching. In the meantime, I’ve been looking over the minutes from recent board meetings and I can’t say I’m impressed with the general direction they’ve been going.”
“And naturally, you have a solution.” She couldn’t resist.
“I do.” He picked up his drink and took a slow sip, watching her over the rim of the glass before he spoke again. “But it may not be one that the current board will embrace unless I can force them to yield by outvoting them at the table.”
Comprehension began to glimmer in the back of her mind. “Just how much stock do you own, Dax?”
“Together, the family held fifty-one percent,” he said. “Now that Charles has left his shares to you, I still control twenty-eight percent.”
“So...” She made a show of crossing her legs and settling back in her chair. “Without my votes, you can’t be sure of enough support to control the board.”
Dax’s mouth was a grim line. “No. I can’t.”
She raised one brow in a mocking manner as she made a production out of recrossing her legs the other way. “Ah. How...interesting.”
“‘Interesting’ isn’t quite the word I’d use,” he grated. “God, I could kill you. And I could kill Charles for creating this mess if he weren’t dead already.”
Abruptly, any satisfaction she’d found in the verbal sparring drained away. Sorrow and a profound depression filled her. She’d worked so hard to make a life for herself after Dax had left, and now she felt as if she had moved no farther in time than mere hours from the day he’d gone.
She almost demanded that he take her home then, but she knew it would only give him pleasure to refuse. So when he set his glass on the desk and motioned for her to precede him, she moved ahead of him into the dining room without a protest. There were three places set, and despite her irritation with him, she was touched. She knew Charles and Alma had taken most of their meals in the kitchen with Mrs. Bowley. It was thoughtful of Dax to include her.
As they cleared the doorway, she moved to the far end of the room and through the open French doors. Being so close to him was torture. Half of her wanted to kill him, but the other half ... the other half wished in vain that she could walk into his arms and let him touch her with those long magic fingers that wreaked havoc on her system.
A gentle evening breeze wandered across the pretty stone patio. Beyond a green carpet of lawn, the pool reflected evening’s approach on its smooth face. The sight of that pool brought memories flooding back...more of the uncomplicated happy moments from childhood, anxious yearnings from adolescence as she wished Dax would notice her in her newest bathing suit, and other memories—giddy, heady, heart-pounding recollections that were better left forgotten.
Would this evening ever end? she thought in despair. They hadn’t even eaten yet and already she felt like someone had flayed every inch of her skin with a cat-o’-nine-tails. She turned to move from the view, desperately seeking some innocuous subject that wouldn’t carry any more bits of her past.
Dax was standing directly behind her.
She barreled into him with a muffled exclamation of surprise; his hands gripped her upper arms to steady her. But when she automatically tried to step back, he held her against him. His big body, where hers was pressed into it, was achingly familiar and enticingly strange. Her breasts knew the planes of his torso, his hips found their old familiar pillow just below her navel. She sucked in a breath of dismay and delight, her body arrested in motion, quivering with the wondrous feel of his form against hers again.
This was what they’d had between them. Since the first time he’d taken her into his arms to dance on her seventeenth birthday, they’d had this. She could still remember the look on his face that night, the stunned need that accompanied his body’s unmistakable response. And she could remember the helpless, melting feeling she’d known, along with the heady sense of power she’d felt when his lips had descended on hers right there on the dance floor.
“You’re too young,” he’d growled against her skin. And despite her protests, he’d stayed away, even going to Europe to do his graduate work at a university there. He had never even asked her out until the summer he’d turned twenty-four.
He’d come to her house the day he’d returned from Europe, and they’d dated steadily from that point on. It had been two months before he’d made love to her for the first time. Two long months, when the only thing that had saved her virgin state was Dax’s self-control. She’d had none. And it was a not-quite-pleasant realization to recognize that she still didn’t.
She could have stood there all day. She barely resisted her body’s pleas to rub herself against him in surrender. Dignity had no place here. Elemental recognition flowed between them. Rib of my rib, bone of my bone—she was his missing half, he was the answer to the unfinished equation in her life.
Above her head, Dax muttered something, and she lifted dazed eyes to his. “What?”
“I said, ‘Damn.’” His thumbs lightly rubbed over the soft flesh he had seized to steady her, flesh he had yet to release. His eyes searched hers. “My life would be easier without this.”
When he spoke, her gaze moved to watch the fascinating motions of his lips as he formed his words. She knew, with no explanation, exactly what he meant. “A lot easier.” She sighed. “Of all the men in the world, why are you the only one?”
“Because you were made for me.” His voice was a guttural acknowledgment as his head slowly lowered.
She lifted her face the barest increment, knowing it wasn’t smart, unable to resist.
Their lips met. Shivers of wild excitement connected that point of contact with a dozen others, all descending to the junction where her legs met.
In one instant, she forgot every hurtful lesson she’d learned from this man. Her arms came up to his shoulders as he pulled her against him. One big hand swept across her back and the other splayed wide just above the swell of her buttocks. She sank against him in total surrender, a surrender he recognized and accepted without a word passing between them. He couldn’t get her any closer to him; her fingers speared into his short hair and cradled his scalp as his tongue renewed every intimate motion, explored every silken corner of her mouth.
She was a twig, carried away in the raging winds of a hurricane; a hapless pebble in the path of an avalanche. When he dragged his mouth down her neck, her head dropped back helplessly, though her hands pressed him to her.
“Do you remember our first time?”
The low words were punctuated with kisses that strayed down over her sweater to the tip of her breast. His hand left her back and came around, sliding surely onto the slight mound that already begged for his attention.
She moaned. “Down by the pool.”
A chuckle of breath huffed over her. When he pulled the thin sweater away from her waistband and put his hand beneath it, against her skin, she jumped and moaned. His palm left a trail of heat behind, and as it traveled inexorably upward, she pressed her lips to the black silk of his hair.
“Daddy?”
Dax jerked away from her in one shocking movement, yanking his hands from beneath her clothing and holding her arms in an iron grip. He pivoted,
