Into His Keeping

An Ellora’s Cave Romantica Publication

www.ellorascave.com

Into His Keeping

ISBN 9781419910579

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Into His Keeping Copyright© 2007 Gail Faulkner

Edited by Mary Moran.

Cover art by Syneca.

Electronic book Publication: April 2007

This book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.

Content Advisory:

                                                  S – ENSUOUS

                                                  E – ROTIC

                                                  X – TREME

Ellora’s Cave Publishing offers three levels of Romantica™ reading entertainment: S (S-ensuous), E (E-rotic), and X (X-treme).

The following material contains graphic sexual content meant for mature readers. This story has been rated E–rotic.

S-
ensuous
love scenes are explicit and leave nothing to the imagination.

E-
rotic
love scenes are explicit, leave nothing to the imagination, and are high in volume per the overall word count. E-rated titles might contain material that some readers find objectionable—in other words, almost anything goes, sexually. E-rated titles are the most graphic titles we carry in terms of both sexual language and descriptiveness in these works of literature.

X-
treme
titles differ from E-rated titles only in plot premise and storyline execution. Stories designated with the letter X tend to contain difficult or controversial subject matter not for the faint of heart.

Into His Keeping

Gail Faulkner

Special Thanks to…

J. and C. Thank you both for the gift of your experience and insights. Your gift of honesty is stunning. To A., whose support and understanding are priceless gifts.

Trademarks Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

BrainSUITE: BrainLAB AG Corporation

Corvette: General Motors Corporation

Dairy Queen: American Dairy Queen Corporation

Dodge: DaimlerChrysler Corporation

Fleet: Blain Pharmaceuticals

Ford: Ford Motor Company

GQ
: Advance Magazine Publishers Inc.

Harvard: President and Fellows of Harvard College Corporation

Hemi: DaimlerChrysler Corporation

Mustang: Ford Motor Company

Navigator: Ford Motor Company

Presbyterian: Presbyterian Medical Services Corporation

Princess Diary 2
: Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Q-tip: CONOPCO, Inc.

Star Wars
: Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd. Corporation

Super Bowl: National Football League Uninc. Association

Superman: DC Comics Warner Communications Inc.

Transformers: Hasbro, Inc.

Chapter One

Holdin pulled his pickup to a stop half a block away from the little white house with friendly green shutters. The diminutive home was bursting with life and he half smiled. That was how it should look. There were bright toddler toys scattered about the yard and a blue bicycle had been dropped in the grass next to the front steps.

In the back, the oppressive blaze of late summer sun was filtered through shade trees. Tall leafy guardians over the fun to be had on short slides and a turtle sandbox. Abruptly two children burst from the back door and added the raucous melody of a family to the scene.

Holdin forced his gaze to linger on the picture the family made. Pain tightened around his soul and he opened himself to it. This had to be over at some point.

Today he was going to lay her to rest. It was the reason he’d come here. The compulsion to look at this house was a bit like visiting her grave. This was the last place he’d seen her. For him, the future as he knew it had ended here. He needed to let it rest here.

He’d only had her for little more than a spring. She appeared in his world in late January, disappearing from it in early July. One golden spring when his life had been complete. In the arrogance of youth, they hadn’t been aware the relationship consuming them was the rarest of gifts. A pure expression of a dominant and his woman. She’d created hungers in him that he’d planned on exploring for a lifetime. His perfect, precious Jill. Freely, she’d given him her soul and the price had only been his life. Then she was gone as abruptly as she’d arrived in his world.

The day after Fourth of July she hadn’t answered her phone. The memory played before his eyes, obscuring the summer afternoon and wrapping his world in winter. He’d become a barren landscape of dead emotions and frozen future. That summer evening had removed the sun from his world and he’d never found a way to get it back.

When he pulled up to this house that evening, he could feel its emptiness even before he stepped out of the old pickup. Walking up the short path was a baffling pain he couldn’t understand. The house was dark when there should have been lights smiling at him through the windows, not shadows that faded to blackness. Some part of him had known her soul was not here anymore. He hadn’t knocked, just kicked the door in. He’d wanted to believe he was panicking because he sensed danger. Not because he sensed nothing at all.

There were bits of her and her father everywhere but empty closets were as final as a suicide with no note explaining why. Eventually he had to accept that they were gone and he didn’t even have the closure of a “goodbye” to hang his grief on. He’d never known silence could be vicious.

The loss destroyed him and then it rebuilt him into a modern-day hero as he would never have imagined being.

So this was the day he had to give up Jill for good. Today was the first day of training camp and he wasn’t there. He’d thought he’d given up football the day he’d announced his retirement after last season. It hadn’t been that day. Today was the day he gave it up. Not being in training camp was the final step. He really was out of the public eye.

No more flickering hope that she would call, find him, show up at a game. No more thrusting himself in front of the cameras because he needed to be visible to as many people as possible so Jill would know where he was. His entire adult life had been a quest to make it easy for her to come back to him.

He’d shaped himself into the king of the gladiators as ruthlessly as any man who’d walked the blood-soaked dirt in the original Coliseum. Holdin had poured out his soul on a thousand fields of honor and still she’d not come back.

He couldn’t convince himself that she was dead. Her spirit still walked this earth or he’d have felt her leave. Their connection was that strong. But it was time she was dead
to
him. He had to find the strength to let her go. For fifteen years he had battled this moment. Now that it was here, the pain filled him with a darkness he couldn’t fight his way past.

Watching the children play, Holdin’s big body shuddered as he let soul-wrenching sorrow wash through him. What would their children have looked like? He turned away from the thought as it sliced a new piece of his soul off into the abyss. His future was not her future. It never had been.

Damn you
,
Jill
!

An aging Ford Taurus drove slowly past him and down the street. The rumble of the motor reminded him of the bull the vehicle had been named after. He watched it because he couldn’t look at that house anymore. Time to go. He had one more stop to make in town. One more place to gouge out of his heart so he could finally get on with the rest of his life.

* * * * *

Jill slid into the old soda fountain booth, gazing around in amazement. It was exactly the same. The shine had faded but chrome and linoleum still seemed to coat every surface from the bight red booths to the black-and-white-checkered floor. Nothing had changed.

Closing her eyes, a little over fifteen years fell away and she was eighteen again. Every cell in her body was in a frenzy of hormonal euphoria as
he
slid in the booth beside her. Tall, terminally cute,
he
was Holdin Powell. His long arm folded around her shoulder, a large hand pulling her body into his hard, muscled side and his head dipped down to whisper in her ear, “Hey, sexy,” as he bent to drag his tongue up her neck to her earlobe.

The move was a public display as several other guys slid into the booth across from them. He owned her and he’d been making sure every other male knew it since the moment they’d met. His open possessiveness never failed to turn her on. She tried to disguise it but didn’t do it very well. She knew he knew. And he liked it, liked how she glowed for him.

She responded with a wild blush as her neck arched to accommodate him. “Behave, Holdin,” Jill gasped as her body clenched. There was no controlling him or her. Heat sizzled deep in her womb like a low-burning fire that never quite went out. She smoldered and all he had to do was look at her for the embers to flash into full blaze.

His lips still nibbling on her neck, the arm around her shoulders bent so his hand glided possessively into the loose, modest neckline of her top. Long hard fingers grazed her collarbone and came to rest just brushing the top of her breast. Not actually groping her but making it clear he had a right if he wanted to. This possessive touch thrilled her. It always did. It was such an erotic expression of their relationship and his wanting her. Sexy and adult, he made her special in ways she hadn’t known it was possible to be. Other guys looked at her and she saw it in their eyes. They wanted what Holdin had.

He saw it too. She knew he loved that in his casual, cool way. He showed her off as his woman. He was proud of her. Holdin acting as if she were the most beautiful woman on earth made it so. He was the fantasy, the embodiment of everything she’d ever dreamed of and he couldn’t keep his hands off her. Life was perfect. Absolutely perfect.

“I can’t behave, woman,” he growled into her neck. “You drive me nuts.”

Jill shuddered under the onslaught of sexual heat he always drove her to. He was the type of good-looking that wet girl’s panties at twenty paces. He didn’t walk. He prowled with all the controlled power of a lion who owned his world. He possessed the body of a young Greek god and the cool attitude of an alpha male who is master of his domain. Holdin was “it” in every possible way.

Before Holdin, she’d thought her slightly plump body was fat. Her full breasts had developed early, as had her hips. She was rounded with womanly curves that she’d despised until Holdin looked at her. His look had been heavy-lidded sensuality from the first, and he’d truly been there from the first moment she stepped into The Connersville Major Department Store.

She’d passed the required tests for running a register and was the newly hired early morning cashier. They’d been happy to get a girl who didn’t have children to put on a school bus or other complications. The store was probably one of the last of its kind but still going strong. It included a grocery department, full home supplies, furniture, office supplies, clothing and a jewelry counter along with a soda fountain.

Shy and nervous, she’d picked up her timecard and work schedule from the personnel manager. Steeling herself with a deep breath to face walking into the staff room, Jill turned away from the manager’s desk to see the unbelievably cute guy leaning against the door she needed to exit through.

“That’s all right, Mr. Blain,” he’d said casually. “I’ll show her where to go.” The busy manager nodded in relief and went back to the stack of papers on his desk, abandoning Jill.

As the door closed behind them, he’d grinned down at her from his studly height. “Hi, I’m Holdin. You’re Jill, right?”

All Jill could do was nod as his hand landed gently on the small of her back. He didn’t exactly have his arm around her, but almost. Suddenly Jill couldn’t breathe as she glanced shyly up at him. He didn’t seem to notice. Fighting back the embarrassing blush rushing up her neck, Jill managed to get out the doorway and partway down the hall without stumbling.

“Your first day is tomorrow?”

“Yes, I guess they needed an opener pretty bad.”

They walked through the busy store to the back. “Lockers are in here.” He took her into a relatively small room with a door leading out to the back parking lot. “This one is almost empty. You can share it with me.” He offered as he stopped at a locker midway down the line and opened it to show her how the old latch worked. The lockers were the old-fashioned full-length ones. Big enough for a person to step in, Jill thought as she watched him.

“Um. Okay” was the only thing she could manage to say while she stared dumbly as his large hands. Giving herself a stern mental shake, Jill dredged up reason with great determination. “Are you sure? I mean…” But then he grinned at her and her thought processes snapped off again. He was just too beautiful to speak to.

His grin was intimate. “I’m sure.” He abruptly stopped and a very concerned look crossed his perfect face. “You don’t mind, do you? Sharing with me, I mean.”

Jill knew her body was consenting like crazy and he probably recognized it. She shook her head and bit her lip. His intense gaze made her warm in places she was uncomfortably aware of.

His eyes remained on her face as his fingers came up to graze her flushed cheek. “Good.”

Passing out would be just too embarrassing. Her eyelids fluttered down as she tried to breathe through the heat his touch ignited.

“Come on,” he said softly, his big hand at her back again. He turned her and they moved to the time clock beside the door. He showed her how to line up her card on the old time clock and where to put it in the slots on the wall.

“I’ll be here at six when you get in. I work the early shift too. If you have any problems, just ask me. It’s a good place to work, but you have to be careful of some of the guys.” His deep voice was sincere and Jill nodded. She couldn’t think of a thing to say. What was she going to do? Argue that she didn’t have to avoid the unknown “guys”?

The next day at her lunch break, he was in the crowded locker room talking with a group of men. Being the youngest of the group didn’t seem to make him the “boy” in it. As soon as Jill came through the door, he excused himself and was at her side.

“Hey, how’d it go?” He took her uniform smock as she slipped out of it as if he’d been doing it forever and hung it up in the locker.

“Great” was all she could manage while what seemed like the entire staff population acknowledged Holdin and watched them as he deftly took charge of her. His touch had clamped a lock on her vocal cords and sent butterflies flitting around her lower belly in mind-boggling abandon.

He was very well liked, it seemed. The men clapped him on the back or called friendly, though slightly rough comments. Several of the women slid assessing glances at Jill and tried to joke suggestively with Holdin. He was polite but his attention always turned back to Jill. His complete command of both her schedule and her needs was baffling.

Jill glanced around nervously. She knew the signs. He was popular, obviously sought after by the entire female half of the staff regardless of the woman’s age. She was a new girl and not skinny. Nothing about his attention made sense except the worst possible outcome for her.

As he was about to shut the locker with her bag lunch in his hand along with his, Jill frowned up at him before he could touch her again. “Why are you doing this?” she whispered urgently.

“What?” Holdin asked seriously and subtly moved so her back was to the locker, the tall open door concealed her on one side and his big body shielded her from anyone else’s view. He’d managed to put the two of them in an intimate space, blocking out the chaos of the group going to lunch around them. Everyone who started at six had lunch now. Later shifts would have it after this crew got back on the floor or stockrooms.