Forged of Steele Bundle (5 page)

Sienna stared into Dane’s eyes, the heat and passion she saw in them making her shiver. The love she recognized made her heart pound, and the desire she felt for him sent surges and surges of sensations through every part of her body, especially the area between her legs, making her thighs quiver.

“You’re my everything, Sienna,” he whispered as he began easing inside of her. His gaze was locked with hers as his voice came out in a husky tone. “I need you like I need air to breathe, water for thirst and food for nourishment. Oh, baby, my life has been so empty since you’ve been gone. I love and need you.”

His words touched her and when he was embedded inside of her to the hilt, she arched her back, needing and wanting even more of him. She gripped his shoulders with her fingers as liquid fire seemed to flow to all parts of her body.

And at that moment she forgot everything—the beast from the east, their limited supply of food and the fact they were stranded together in a cabin with barely enough heat. The only thing that registered in her mind was that they were together and expressing their love in a way that literally touched her soul.

He continued to stroke her, in and out, and with each powerful thrust into her body she moaned out his name and told him of her love. She was like a bow whose strings were being stretched to the limit each and every time he drove into her, and she met his thrusts with her own eager ones.

And then she felt it, the strength like a volcano erupting as he continued to stroke her to oblivion. Her body splintered into a thousand pieces as an orgasm ripped through her, almost snatching her breath away. And when she felt him buck, tighten his hold on her hips and thrust into her deeper, she knew that same powerful sensation had taken hold of him, as well.

“Sienna!”

He screamed her name and growled a couple of words that were incoherent to her ears. She tightened her arms around his neck, needing to be as close to him as she could get. She knew in her heart at that moment that things were going to be fine. She and Dane had proven that when it came to the power of love, it was never too late.

Sienna awoke the following morning naked, in front of the fireplace and cuddled in her husband’s arms with a blanket covering them. After yawning, she raised her chin and glanced over at him and met his gaze head-on. The intensity in the dark eyes staring back at her shot heat through all parts of her body. She couldn’t help but recall last night and how they had tried making up for all the time they had been apart.

“It’s gone,” Dane said softly, pulling her closer into his arms.

She lifted a brow. “What’s gone?”

“The beast.”

She tilted her head to glance out the window and he was right. Although snow was still falling, it wasn’t the violent blizzard that had been unleashed the day before. It was as if the weather had served the purpose it had come for and had made its exit. She smiled. Evidently, someone up there knew she and Dane’s relationship was meant to be saved and had stepped in to salvage it.

She was about to say something when suddenly there was a loud pounding at the door. She and Dane looked at each other, wondering who would be paying them a visit to the cabin at this hour and in this weather.

Sienna, like Dane, had quickly gotten dressed and was now staring at the four men who were standing in the doorway…those handsome Steele brothers. She smiled, shaking her head. Vanessa had evidently called her cousins to come rescue her, anyway.

“Vanessa called us,” Chance Steele, the oldest of the pack, said in way of explanation. “It just so happened that we were only a couple of miles down the road at our own cabin.” A smile touched his lips. “She was concerned that the two of you were here starving to death and asked us to share some of our rations.”

“Thanks, guys,” Dane said, gladly accepting the box Sebastian Steele was handing him. “Come on in. And although we’ve had plenty of heat to keep us warm, I have to admit our food supply was kind of low.”

As soon as the four entered, all eyes went to Sienna. Although the brothers knew Dane because their families sometimes ran in the same social circles, as well as the fact that Dane and Donovan Steele had graduated from high school the same year, she knew their main concern was for her. She had been their cousin Vanessa’s best friend for years, and as a result they had sort of adopted her as their little cousin, as well.

“You okay?” Morgan Steele asked her, although Sienna knew she had to look fine; probably like a woman who’d been made love to all night, and she wasn’t ashamed of that fact. After all, Dane
was
her husband. But the Steeles knew about her pending divorce, so she decided to end their worries.

She smiled and moved closer to Dane. He automatically wrapped his arms around her shoulders and brought her closer to his side. “Yes, I’m wonderful,” she said, breaking into the subtle tension she felt in the room. “Dane and I have decided we don’t want a divorce and intend to stay together and make our marriage work.”

The relieved smiles on the faces of the four men were priceless. “That’s wonderful. We’re happy for you,” Donovan Steele said, grinning.

“We apologize if we interrupted anything, but you know Vanessa,” Chance said, smiling. “She wouldn’t let up. We would have come sooner but the bad weather kept us away.”

“Your timing was perfect,” Dane said, grinning. “We appreciate you even coming out now. I’m sure the roads weren’t their best.”

“No, but my new truck managed just fine,” Sebastian said proudly. “Besides, we’re going fishing later. We would invite you to join us, Dane, but I’m sure you can think of other ways you’d prefer to spend your time.”

Dane smiled as he glanced down and met Sienna’s gaze. “Oh yeah, I can definitely think of a few.”

The power had been restored and a couple of hours later, after eating a hefty breakfast of pancakes, sausage, grits and eggs, and drinking what Dane had to admit was the best coffee he’d had in a long time, Dane and Sienna were wrapped in each other’s arms in the king-size bed. Sensations flowed through her just thinking about how they had ached and hungered for each other, and the fierceness of their lovemaking to fulfill that need and greed.

“Now will you tell me what brought you to the cabin?” Sienna asked, turning in Dane’s arms and meeting his gaze.

“My wedding band.” He then told her why he’d come to the cabin two weeks ago and how he’d left the ring behind. “It was as if without that ring on my finger, my connection to you was gone. I had to have it back so I came here for it.”

Sienna nodded, understanding completely. That was one of the reasons she hadn’t removed hers. Reaching out she cupped his stubble jaw in her hand and then leaned over and kissed him softly. “Together forever, Mr. Bradford.”

Dane smiled. “Yes, Mrs. Bradford, together forever. We’ve proven that when it comes to true love, it’s never too late.”

“M
y mom needs to get a life!”

With a sigh of both anger and frustration, fifteen-year-old Tiffany Hagan dropped down into the chair next to her friend, Marcus Steele.

“I thought you said that the reason you and your mom moved here to Charlotte a few months ago
was
for a better life,” sixteen-year-old Marcus said after taking a huge bite of his hamburger as they sat in the school’s cafeteria.

Tiffany rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s what I thought, but now it seems that her idea of a better life
is making mine miserable. Just because she got pregnant at sixteen doesn’t mean I’d go out and do the same thing. Yeah right! I don’t even have a boyfriend and if she keeps up her guard-dog mentality, I never will. She needs a life that doesn’t revolve around me.”

“Good luck in her getting one,” Marcus said, taking a sip of his soda. “My dad is the same way, maybe even worse. He’s so hell-bent on me making good grades and getting into an Ivy League college that I barely have time to breathe. If it weren’t for my three uncles I probably wouldn’t be playing football. Dad sees any extracurricular activities as a distraction.”

Tiffany shook her head in disgust. “Parents! They’re so controlling. Can’t they see that they’re smothering us?”

“Evidently not.”

“I wish there was some way that I can shift my mom’s attention off of me,” Tiffany said, unwrapping her sandwich. “If only she had another interest, like a boyfriend or something. Then she could get all wrapped up in him and give me some breathing space. I don’t remember her ever dating anyone.”

After taking another bite of his hamburger, Marcus
said, “My dad has dated occasionally since my mom died seven years ago, and although I’m sure some of the women have tried, none of them holds his attention for long.”

Tiffany laughed. “Then he better not ever meet my mom. One look at her and he’ll be a goner for sure. I hate to brag but my mom is hot,” she said proudly.

“Hey, my dad doesn’t look too bad, either.” Marcus grinned. “Maybe we ought to get them together since it seems that neither of them has a life,” he added teasingly.

Tiffany was about to bite into her sandwich when Marcus’ suggestion sank in. A huge smile curved her lips. “Marcus, that’s it!”

He looked at her, baffled. “What’s it?”

“My mom and your dad. Both are single, good-looking and desperately in need of something to occupy their time besides us. Just think of the possibilities.”

Marcus began thinking. Moments later, he smiled. “Yeah,” he agreed. “It just might work.”

“It
would
work. Think about it. If we got them together, they would be so into each other that they wouldn’t have time to drive us nuts.”

“Yeah, but how can we get them together without them getting suspicious about anything?” he asked.

Tiffany smiled mischievously. “Oh, I bet I could think of something….”

Less than a week later

K
ylie Hagan regarded with keen interest the handsome specimen of a man dressed in a dark business suit, who had just walked into her florist shop. That was
so
unlike her. She couldn’t recall the last time a member of the male species had grabbed her attention. Denzel Washington didn’t count, since each and every time she saw him on the movie screen it was an automatic drool.

She continued watering her plants, thinking that
the woman he was about to buy flowers for was indeed very lucky. The good news was that he had selected her florist shop—she was the newbie in town, and Kylie needed all the business she could get, since she’d only been open for a couple of months. Business was good but she needed to come up with ways to make it even better.

Her heart jumped nervously when, instead of looking around at her vast selection of green plants and floral arrangements, he headed straight for the counter. Evidently he was a man who knew what he wanted and what he needed to woo his woman.

“May I help you?” she asked, thinking that with a face and physique like his, he probably didn’t need much help at all. He stood tall, six-three at least, with a muscular build, a clean-shaven head, chocolate-brown eyes and skin tone of the richest cocoa, altogether a striking combination. The drool she usually reserved only for Denzel was beginning to make her mouth feel wet. As she continued to look at him, waiting for his response, she suddenly noticed that he wasn’t smiling. In fact, he appeared downright annoyed.

“I’m here to see Kylie Hagan.”

Kylie lifted her eyebrows and the smile on her face began fading at his rough and irritated tone of
voice. What business did this man have with her? All her bills were current, which meant he couldn’t be there to collect anything. And if he was a salesman, with his less than desirable attitude, she wouldn’t be buying what-ever it was he was selling.

“I’m Kylie Hagan.”

Surprise flickered in his drop-dead gorgeous eyes. “You’re Kylie Hagan?”

“That’s right and who are you?”

“Chance Steele.”

The name didn’t ring a bell, but then she had only recently moved to the area. “And what can I do for you, Mr. Steele?”

He stared at her for a moment, and then he said, “The only thing you can do for me, Ms. Hagan, is keep your daughter away from my son.”

Kylie froze. The man’s words were not what she had expected. For a long moment she stared back at him, wondering if she had misunderstood. But all it took was the deep scowl on his face to let her know she had not.

“Keep my daughter away from your son?” she repeated when she finally found her voice.

“Yes. I found this note yesterday that evidently dropped out of Marcus’s backpack. They were planning on cutting school together on Friday,” he
said as he pulled a piece of paper out of the pocket of his jacket.

“What!” Kylie shrieked, grabbing the paper out of his hand.

“You heard me and you can read it for yourself,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

Kylie read, then after the first few lines she wished she hadn’t. Three emotions enveloped her: hurt, betrayal and anger. Tiffany had always promised that if she ever got serious about a boy that she would tell her. Granted, she and Tiffany hadn’t been that close lately, but a promise was a promise.

“Now can you see why I want your daughter kept away from my son?”

Chance Steele’s question sliced through Kylie’s tormented mind and grated on her last nerve, deepening her anger. She came from behind the counter to stand directly in front of him. “Don’t you dare place all the blame on Tiffany, Mr. Steele. If I read this note correctly, she was merely responding to a note your son had sent asking
her
to cut school. The nerve of him doing such a thing!”

“Look, Ms. Hagan, we can stand here all day and we won’t agree who’s to blame. But I think we will agree on the fact that your daughter and my son shouldn’t even be thinking about cutting school. I
have big plans for my son’s future that include him attending college.”

Kylie glared at him. “And you don’t think I have those same plans for my daughter?” she snapped. “Tiffany is a good kid.”

“So is Marcus,” he snapped back.

Kylie breathed in deeply and closed her eyes in a concerted effort to calm down before a blood vessel burst in her head. They weren’t getting anywhere biting each other’s heads off.

“Ms. Hagan, are you all right?”

She slowly opened her eyes to focus on the man looming over her. Concern was evident in his gaze. “Yes, I’m fine.”

“Look, I’m sorry I came barging in here like this,” he said, the tone of his voice calmer, apologetic. “But after reading that note I got upset.”

She nodded. “I can understand why. I’m pretty upset myself.”

“Did you know our kids were hung up on each other?” he asked. She could tell that he was trying to maintain a composed demeanor.

“Mr. Steele, until you walked into my shop and dropped your son’s name, I had no idea he even existed. Tiffany and I moved here a few months ago from New York State, right before the start of the
new school year. I knew she had made some new friends but she’s never mentioned anyone’s name in particular.”

“Okay, so as parents, what do you think we should do?” he asked.

His voice was drenched in wariness and Kylie could tell he was deeply bothered by all of this, but then he wasn’t the only one. “The one thing we shouldn’t do is demand that they not see each other. Telling them to stay away from each other will only make them want to see each other more. Teenagers will always deliberately do the opposite of what their parents want them to do. And once they start rebelling, it will be almost impossible to do anything.”

She didn’t have to tell him that she knew firsthand how that worked. Her parents had tried to keep her and Sam apart, which only made her want him more. The more she and Sam had sneaked around, the more risks they had taken until she had eventually gotten pregnant at sixteen…the same age Tiffany would be in about ten months.

“We have to do something. In confronting Marcus about that letter, I’ve thrown a monkey wrench into their plans for Friday. But how can we be sure this won’t happen again?”

At the sound of Chance’s voice, Kylie dragged
her thoughts back to the present. “I’ll talk to Tiffany and, like I said, she’s a good kid.”

“Yes, but it appears that my son and your daughter are at the age where overactive hormones cancel out good sense. We need to do what we can to make sure those hormones stay under control.”

“I fully agree.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. “This is how to reach me if you need me to do anything further on my end. I talked to Marcus but things didn’t go well. I did the one thing you indicated I should not have done, which was demand that he stay away from Tiffany. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him that angry or rebellious.”

Kylie nodded as she took the card from him. She didn’t want to think about her upcoming talk with Tiffany. “I appreciate you dropping by and bringing this to my attention.”

“Like I said earlier, I apologize that my approach wasn’t more subtle. But Marcus’s last words to me this morning were that nobody would stop him from seeing Tiffany. I was furious and still riled up when I decided to come over here.”

He sighed deeply and then added, “It’s not easy raising a teenager these days.”

“Don’t I know it,” Kylie said softly, feeling
terribly drained but knowing she would need all her strength when she confronted Tiffany after school.

“Well, I’d better be going.”

“Again, thanks for coming by and letting me know what’s going on.”

He nodded. “There was no way I could
not
let you know, considering what they’d planned to do. Have a good day, Ms. Hagan.”

As Kylie watched him walk out of her shop, she knew that as much as she wished it to be so, there was no way that this would be a good day.

The moment Chance got into his truck and closed the door, he leaned back against the seat and released a long sigh. If the daughter looked anything like the mother, he was in deep trouble. No wonder his usually smart son had begun acting downright stupid.

Kylie Hagan was definitely a beauty. He had noticed that fact the moment he had walked into the flower shop and headed straight toward the counter. When she had come from behind that same counter and he’d seen that she was wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, he’d thought the outfit fit just right on her curvy, petite body and showed off her shapely legs too perfectly. Braided dark brown hair had been styl
ishly cut to accent her face. Her creamy chocolate skin complemented a pair of beautiful brown eyes, a perky nose and an incredibly feminine pair of lips.

How in the world could she be the mother of a fifteen-year-old when she looked barely older than twenty herself? She looked more like Tiffany’s sister than her mother. Perhaps Tiffany had been adopted. There were a lot of questions circulating around in his mind, but the foremost was what the two of them could do about their kids who seemed hell-bent on starting a relationship that neither was ready for.

He understood Marcus’s interest in girls—after all he was a Steele—and Chance could distinctly remem-ber when he was younger. He had fallen in love with Cyndi when he’d been just a few years older than Marcus, and had married her before his nineteenth birthday after she had gotten pregnant.

Pregnant.

He would never forget that day when Cyndi had come to him, a mere week before he was to leave for Yale University, to let him know she was having his baby. He had loved her so much he decided not to accept a full college scholarship and leave her alone. Instead, he had married her, gone to work at his father’s manufacturing company and attended college at night. It hadn’t been easy and it had taken
him almost six years to get a degree, but he and Cyndi had made the best of it and he could look back and honestly say that although there were hard years, they had been happy ones.

And then the unthinkable happened. Cyndi had noticed changes in a mole on the side of her neck, a mole that was later determined to be cancerous. Even after surgery and chemo treatments, four years later, on the day Marcus should have been celebrating his ninth birthday, they were in the cemetery putting to rest the one woman who had meant the world to Chance.

He straightened and started up his truck. Although he would never think of marrying Cyndi as a mistake, he couldn’t help but remember her plans of attending college; plans that had gotten thrown by the wayside with her pregnancy. If he had it all to do over, he would have been more responsible that night when they had gotten carried away by the moment.

And then on top of everything else, he couldn’t forget the promise he had made to Cyndi on her deathbed; a promise that he would make sure that their son got to do everything they hadn’t done, and take advantage of every opportunity offered to him, which included one day attending a university that would give him the best education.

That was the reason he was driven to make sure Marcus did well in school. Of course it was Chance’s hope for him to one day join the family business, the Steele Corporation, but if Marcus wanted to do something else after finishing college, then he could do so with Chance’s blessings.

As he began backing out of the parking lot, he contemplated the emergence of Tiffany Hagan in Marcus’s life. He didn’t think his son’s interest in the girl was going to fade away anytime soon, regardless of what kind of talk Kylie Hagan had with her daughter. That meant Chance needed to have a “Plan B” ready. Under no circumstances would he let Marcus succumb to teen lust and ruin the life he and Cyndi always wanted for him.

His thoughts shifted to Tiffany’s mother again, and he felt lust invading his own body. The difference was he was a man and he could handle it.

At least he hoped he could.

After reading the note, Helena Spears glanced up at the woman who’d been her best friend since high school. “Are you sure Tiffy wrote this, Kylie?”

The two of them had met for lunch and were sitting at a table in the back of the restaurant. Kylie shook her head. Leave it to Lena to try to wiggle her
goddaughter out of any kind of trouble. “Of course I’m sure. I can recognize Tiffany’s handwriting when I see it and so can you. Those curls at the end of certain letters give her away and you know it.”

Lena shrugged as she handed the note back to Kylie. “Well, the only thing I have to say in defense of my godchild is that if Marcus looks anything like his daddy, then I can see why Tiffy fell for him.”

Kylie didn’t want to admit that she’d thought the same thing. “You know Chance Steele?”

“Oh, yeah. There are few people living in Charlotte who don’t know the Steele brothers. They own a huge manufacturing company, the Steele Corporation. There are four of them who were born and raised here. They’re not transplants like rest of us, and they are very successful, as well as handsome. Chance is the CEO and his brothers have key positions in the corporation. There are also three female cousins, one of which works in the PR Department. The other two chose careers outside of the company, but all three are members of the board of direc-tors.”

Lena took a sip of her drink before continuing. “Chance is the oldest and the one I see most often with my charity work. He’s a big supporter of the American Cancer Society. His wife died of cancer around seven years ago.”

Kylie, who had been putting the note back in her purse, suddenly lifted her head. “He’s a widower?”

“Yes, and from what I understand, he’s doing a good job raising his son.”

Kylie frowned. “Not if his son is enticing girls to cut school with him.”

Lena laughed. “Oh, come on, Kylie. You were young once.”

“I remember. And that’s what I’m afraid of,” she said, meeting Lena’s gaze with a concerned expression. “You recall how I was all into Sam. I thought I was madly in love. It was like my day wasn’t complete until I saw his face. I was obsessed.”