like hard to predict. If things were going badly for him, we all stayed away. He’d take it out on us. But sometimes he’d make a big deal about us. Birthdays, for example. He liked throwing parties. When I turned six he threw this big bash—clowns, balloons, pony rides for the kids, a catered picnic for their parents.”
The faint, wistful tone in his voice tugged at her. She swallowed. “Do you think parties were another way to enhance his own image?”
He shrugged. “They were more about him than me, but I didn’t see that as a kid. He didn’t come to school stuff, either, but back then I thought important people like him were always busy.”
He fell silent. Dixie walked with him, trying not to slide around too much in her slick-soled shoes. Her hair hung in wet rattails down her neck, dripping water beneath the collar of her raincoat. She tugged it to one side.
They reached the little grove of olive trees. It was darker here, but the trees offered some shelter. She stopped. “What about when he left? Kids often blame themselves when their parents break up.”
“I don’t remember blaming myself exactly, but…” He didn’t look at her. “You had it right when you said I hated him. But until he left, I’d tried to be like him.”
“You were a kid. You wanted to please your father, and the only thing that pleases a narcissist is his own reflection.”
“And I made myself into a damn good reflection, didn’t I?”
“No!” She seized his arm, making him turn and look at her. “Where did you get the idea you’re like him?”
“Aside from looking in the mirror, you mean?” Rain ran down the taut lines of his face as if the sky were weeping for him. “Come on, Dixie. You’re not dense. I’ve spent years building Louret up so I could prove to the bastard that we didn’t need him. That I’m better than he is in the one way that means anything to him—making money.”
“You’re ambitious, yes. But you don’t use people. You’d never discard someone the way he has.”
“You left me because I was like him.”
Dixie’s breath caught, hard and painful, in her chest. Was that what he’d thought? All these years had he believed, deep down, that her leaving proved he was like his father?
“Cole.” She reached up with both hands and cupped his hard, wet face between her hands, blinking back tears. “You idiot.”
He searched her face. He couldn’t have seen much in the dimness, but apparently he saw enough. He had no trouble finding her mouth with his.
His kiss was soft and slow and unbearably moving. He drifted his mouth over her cheek. “You’re cold.”
“No kidding.” But it wasn’t cold that made her shiver. It was his fingers playing along her throat.
He wrapped his arms around her and held on tight. “Warmer?” he murmured next to her ear, then kissed it.
She was cold, wet, muddy, and her heart was knocking against the wall of her chest so hard it was a wonder he couldn’t hear it. From fear? Arousal? Sheer exhilaration?
Did it matter? She put her hands on his chest. “Not yet,” she whispered, the words barely audible over the shush-shush of the rain. “Try harder.”
This time his mouth meant business. He kissed, licked and sucked, keeping his arms wrapped tightly around her. Her hands were trapped against his chest. She couldn’t move—could only tip her head back and meet his tongue with hers. His breath was warm. His body was warm and hard, and she ached.
She wiggled her arms loose, needing to feel the planes and angles and muscle of him. Sliding her hands under his jacket, she found dry cloth heated by warm skin. She couldn’t get close enough, touch enough of him.
Cole must have felt the same. He fumbled with the buttons of her coat, making a low sound of frustration when they wouldn’t part fast enough to suit him. Using both hands he ripped it open, popping buttons off into the mud. Then his hands were all over her, too—stomach, waist, breasts.
It was a rough wooing. It made her wild.
He ran his hands up her back, then down to her butt, cupping her and pulling her up against him. But he was too tall. He rubbed against her stomach through their clothes—then, when she went up on tiptoe, rubbed lower.
But not low enough. Not quite.
When he pulled her down, she sank with him to the ground, shielded by trees and rain and the gathering darkness. If the earth below her was cold, the rain had made it giving, and the air was sweet with the scents of sage and rain and wet earth.
He held himself up on his hands, his legs tangled with hers and his pelvis pressing against hers. She moaned, the sound lost in the rush of the rain. He brought his face close to hers—then, instead of kissing her, he rubbed his cheek against hers, a sandpaper tenderness that made her breath hitch.
“Dixie,” he breathed against her cheek. Just that. Just her name. For a moment they lay tight and close in the damp and the darkness, unmoving. Holding on to each other.
But her body’s urgency wouldn’t be denied. Her hips lifted, rolled against him. He responded by raising up to gather the skirt of her dress with one hand, then slid his hand between her legs. She jolted at the first touch.
“Now?” he asked. “Now, Dixie?”
“Yes.” She pushed up with her feet, lifting her hips, and he yanked down her panties and tossed them away. When she reached for the zipper on his slacks, his hand was already there. Together they freed him. Then he was cupping her bottom with his hands and pushing inside.
The heat and length of him were perfect. But it had been a long time for her, long enough for the muscles to be tight, resistant. She moaned with frustration, in no mood for slow and easy, and thrust up hard. And he filled her.
He gasped out something, but the words were lost in the storms, inner and outer. Slowly he withdrew, and just as slowly returned. Her world narrowed to now—to this moment when the ground was soft and chill against her back, and the rain fell in a liquid rush on leaves, on earth and puddles, as Cole slid slowly back inside her.
She gripped his hips and held him there, held him tight against her, wanting to hold on to the moment. To somehow stop time and stay here, like this, with him.
But time and their bodies defeated her. The moment slipped away in a flood of urgency as he began to move—faster, harder, smacking himself into her with thrusts that shoved her into the ground, winding her tighter and tighter until she cried out, her nails digging into arms rigid with tension, her body bucking. She heard him call out as her mind spiraled off into a place where now was white and endless.
Slowly her thoughts reassembled. There was a stone digging into her left buttock. Cole lay on top of her, his chest heaving. He was heavy. Her skirt was up around her waist. She was wet, muddy and cold.
And smiling. A few seconds later, she was giggling.
He groaned and propped himself up on his elbows, frowning down at her. “What?”
In
