Rescued in a Wedding Dress (11 page)

Just the shock of the assault? Or because she had seen something in him that she couldn’t handle and that love could not tame, had no hope of healing?

Houston took off his jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders, pulled her close into him, aware of how fragile she was, how very, very feminine, how his breath stirred her hair.

There was that exquisite moment of heightened awareness where it felt as if he was breathing her essence into his lungs.

To savor. To hold inside him forever. Once he said goodbye.

And then, out of nowhere, heaven sent, a cab pulled up and he shoved her in it.

“B-b-but shouldn’t we wait for the police?”

The police?
No, when you grew up in these neighborhoods you never quite got clear of the feeling that the police were not your friends.

Besides, what if some nosy reporter was monitoring the scanner? What a great story that would make. CEO of successful company wins fight with street thug. But just a bit of digging could make the story even more interesting. A nineteen-year-old story of a bank robbery.

Loser, his mother had screamed when there was another lost job, another Friday with no paycheck. The look on her face of such disdain.

And the look on his father’s.

I will win her. I will show her. I will show them all.

Except he hadn’t. His father had been his mother’s hero for all of two hours, already drunk, throwing money around carelessly. The police had arrived and taken him. An innocent bystander shot, but not, thank God, killed, during the bank robbery his father had committed.
Nineteen years of a life spent for an attempt to win what Houston realized, only just now, could not be won.

“No police,” he said firmly. “Give the driver your address.”

It was a mark of just how shaken she was that she didn’t even argue with him, but gave her address and then collapsed against him, her tears warming his skin right though his shirt. His hand found her hair. Was there a moment in the last few days when he had not thought of how her hair felt?

Touching it now felt like a homecoming he could not hold on to. Because in the end, wasn’t love the most out of control thing of all?

And yet he could not deny, as he held her, that that’s what the fierce protectiveness that thrummed through him felt like. As if he would die protecting her if he had to, without hesitation, without fear.

A feeling was coming over him, a surge of endorphins releasing like a drug into his brain and body.

He would have whatever she gave him tonight. He would savor it, store it in a safe place in his heart that he could return to again and again.

Once it was over. And it would be over soon enough. He did not have to rush that moment.

He helped her up the stairs to her apartment. Her hands were shaking so badly he had to take the keys from her.

“Do you have something to drink?” he asked, looking at her pale face.

“Zinfandel,” she said. “Some kind of chicken zinfandel.”

“And I always thought wine was made with grapes.”

He hoped to make her laugh, but somehow his tone didn’t quite make it. Tonight he had gone down there with an expectation of
maybe
there being some kind of chance for them.

For him to build a life different than the one of unabating loneliness he had always known. A life different than what his family had given him.

But that fury resided in him. And he was not sharing that legacy with her. Someday, if he followed that look in her eyes, there would be children, too. They did not deserve the Whitford legacy, either. Innocent. His unborn children were innocent, as once he had been innocent.

The ugly truth now? He had
liked
the feeling of his fist smashing into that man’s face.

He would have liked to just leave, but he could tell she was quickly disintegrating toward shock.

“I think we need something a little stronger than chicken zinfandel,” he suggested.

“I think there might be some brandy above the fridge. Chuck drank…” she giggled “…everything.”

She was staring at him with something hungry in her eyes. She reached out and touched him, her hand sliding along the still coiled muscle of his forearm. There was naked appreciation in her touch.

He recognized in her a kind of survivor euphoria. He felt it sometimes after a sparring match. A release of chemical endorphins, a hit of happiness that opened your senses wide.

Tomorrow she would wake up and think of his hands smashing into that man, and feel the fear and doubt that deserved.

Tonight, she would think he was her hero.

He pulled his arm away from her, poured her a generous shot of brandy, made her drink it, but he refused one for himself.

One loss of control for the night was quite enough.

“Houston.” She took a sip, stared at him, drank him as greedily as the brandy. And he let her. Drank her back, saved her every feature, the wideness of her eyes and the softness of her lips.

“I think you’re bleeding,” she gasped suddenly.

He followed her gaze down. A thin thread of red was appearing above the belly line on his white shirt. So, the knife had not dropped instantly. At some level, had the physical threat triggered his rage?

Excuses.

“You’re hurt,” she said, frightened.

If he was, adrenaline was keeping him from feeling it. “Nah. A little scrape. Nothing. A long way from the heart.”

If his arm was hanging by a thread at the moment he suspected he would do the manly thing and tell her it was nothing.

“Let me see.”

“No, I’m okay.”

But she pointed at a chair, and because he was going to savor every single thing she gave him tonight—he sat there obediently while she retrieved the first aid kit. “Take off your shirt,” she told him.

Who had he been kidding when he’d said his injuries were not close to the heart? It was all about the heart.
The walls he had tried to repair around it were crumbling again, faster than he could build them back up.

Now his heart was going to rule his head. Because he knew better than to take off that shirt for her. He was leaving. Why drag this out?

And he did it anyway, aware he was trying to memorize the kindness of her face, and the softness in her eyes, the hunger in her.

He undid the buttons with unreasonable slowness, dragging out this moment, torturing himself with the fact it would not be him who fed that hunger. He let the shirt fall open. He didn’t need to take it off, but he did, sliding it over his shoulders, holding it loosely in one hand. The tangy scent of his own sweat filled the room, and he watched her nostrils flare, drinking him in.

She knelt in front of him, and her scent, lemony and clean, melted into his. Even though she was trying to be all business, he could see the finely held tension in her as her eyes moved over his naked chest.

It seemed like a long time ago that he had first seen her, known somehow she would change something about him.

Make him long for things he could not have.

But he could have never foreseen how this moment of her caring for him would undo him. Her tenderness toward him created an ache, a powerful yearning that no man, not even a warrior, could fight.

Not forever.

And he had been fighting since his hand had first tangled in her hair, had found the zipper on her wedding dress.

“Oooh,” she said, inspecting the damage, a tiny thin line that ran vertically from just below his breastbone to his belly button. “That’s nasty.”

He glanced down. To him it looked like a kitten scratch.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t call the police?” she said. “You’ve been stabbed.”

“No police.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“You wouldn’t understand it,” he said harshly. “All it would take would be for one snoopy reporter to be monitoring the police channel, and it could be front page news. What a nice human interest story. Especially if anyone did any digging. The son of an armed robber foils an armed robbery.”

“Your father’s shame isn’t yours.”

“Yes, it is,” he said wearily. “You know after my dad was arrested, and my mom left, I got a second chance. A great foster home. For the first time in my life I had food and clothes and security.

“Then in high school there was a dance. I danced with a cheerleader. Cutest girl in the school. And some guy—maybe her boyfriend, or just a hopeful, I don’t remember—came and asked her what she was doing dancing with a thug.

“And I nearly killed him. Just the way I nearly killed that man tonight. And I liked the way it felt. Just the way my dad must have liked the way it felt when he was hitting people, which was often.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said uncertainly. “That you liked it. You just did what you had to do. He was huge. Any kind of holding back might have turned the tide in his favor.”

He laughed, aware of the harsh edge to it. “That was the first two punches. He was already done when he hit the ground.”

“Houston, you did an honorable thing tonight. Why are you trying to change it into something else?”

“No,” he said softly. “Why are you?”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. Because you always want to believe the best about everybody even if it’s not true.”

“How come you haven’t spent your life beating people up if you like it so darn much?”

“I learned to channel my aggression. Boxing.”

“There you go.”

“Not because I wanted to,” he said, “but because I didn’t like the way people looked at me after that had happened.”

“You want to be a bad guy, Houston. But you’re just not.”

He got up even though she wasn’t finished. He could not allow her to convince him. He knew what he was. He knew what he had felt when he hit that man. Satisfaction. Pure primal satisfaction. He tugged his shirt on. “I have to go.”

“Please don’t.”

That man could see through her veneers as ruthlessly as he had disposed of his own. That man saw everything that she wanted to hide.

Her need was naked in her eyes, in the shallowness of her breath, in the delicate color that blossomed in her cheeks, in the nervous hand that tried to tame a piece of that wild hair.

Her gaze locked on to his own, her green eyes magnificent with wonder and hunger and invitation.

He was aware of reaching deep inside himself to tame the part of him that just wanted to have her, own her, possess her, the two sides of his soul doing battle over her.

He took a step toward the door. She stepped in front of him. Took his shoulders, stood on her tiptoes.

Her lips grazed his lips. He had waited for this moment since he had tasted her the first time. He felt the astonishing delicacy of her kiss, and the instant taming of that thing in him that was fierce.

Not all the strength of his warrior heart could make him back away. He had promised himself he would take whatever she offered tonight, so he would have something to savor in the world he was going back to.

So he took her lips with astounding gentleness and a brand-new part of him, a part he had no idea existed, came forward. It met her tenderness with his own. Exploring what she offered to him with reverence, recognition of the sacredness of the ritual he had just entered into.

This was the dance of all time. It was an ancient call that guaranteed the future. It was a place where ruthless need and tender discovery met, melded and became something brand-new.

His possession of her deepened. With a groan, he allowed his hands to tangle in her hair, to draw her in nearer to him. He dropped his head from the warm rhapsody of her mouth, and trailed kisses down the slender column of her throat, to the hollow at the base of it.

With his lips, he could feel her life beating beneath that tender skin.

“Please,” she whispered, her hands in his hair, on his neck.

Please what?
Stop, or go forward?

His lips released her neck, and when that contact stopped, it was as if the enchantment broke. Some rational part of him—the analytical part that had been
his presenting characteristic, his greatest strength, his key to his every success—studied her.

The half-closed eyes, the puffiness of the lips, the pulse beating crazily in her throat.

Storing it.

But an unwelcome truth penetrated what he was feeling. He could not take what she had to offer, for just one night. You didn’t just kiss a woman like her and walk away from it unscathed, as if it was nothing, meant nothing, changed nothing.

She would be damaged by such a cavalier
taking
of her gifts.

Besides, she was not fully aware of what she was offering. The brandy on top of the shock had made her vulnerable, incapable of making a rational decision. If there was ever a time the rational part of him needed to step up to the plate it was now.

He was not the hero she wanted to see.

“I’m going,” he said.

“Please don’t,” she said. “I’m scared. I know it’s silly, but I feel scared. I don’t want to be alone.”

Perhaps he could be a hero for just a little while longer, though it would take all that was left of his strength.

It was so hard to press her head into his chest, let his hands wander that magnificent hair. It was hard to move to the couch, to allow her to relax into him, to feel her shallow breathing become deep and steady, to let her feel safe.

He had another fault then, as well as fury that years had not tamed. He was no hero, but a thief, because he was going to steal this moment from her.

Steal it to hold in his heart forever.

After a long time, her grip relaxed on his hand, her
lips opened and little puffed sighs escaped. She had gone to sleep on him. He slipped out from underneath her sweet weight, laid her on the couch, looked for something to cover her with.

He tucked a knitted afghan around her, looked at her face, touched her hair one more time.

He glanced around her apartment, noticed the poster on the wall, and was mesmerized by it for a moment. He took a deep breath and moved away from all it represented.