This time he’d gotten the message across in spades. She turned abruptly in the chilly water, cried out in surprise, and went straight down. He caught her before her chin hit the water, but the rest of her was submerged. He heaved and she came out of the creek with a loud sucking sound and a squawk.
“Jaysus,” he fumed at the feeling of a wet, stiff-nippled breast pressing against his bare chest. He marched out of the creek and through the yard with Katie in his arms, his gaze trained on the house, refusing to look at her as she commanded him to put her down.
Blood roared in his ears and pounded into his cock. Why, he had no idea. Katie Hughes wasn’t his type. She wasn’t. Rill preferred quiet, elegant women. He’d had enough of blatant, earthy sexuality from his mother, who had dragged him from one man’s house to another when he was a child, their rent paid by his mother’s spread thighs.
Not that Katie was like his mother. She wasn’t at all. He was just worried he was.
In the distance, he heard shouting in his ear, but he existed in a thick fog of impenetrable lust and fury.
It infuriated him to hold a wet, nearly naked Katie in his arms and consider his mother. He was not like her. He may drown his sorrows in alcohol when the mood struck him, but unlike many of his friends and coworkers, Rill had never been ruled by his prick. My fucking, aching, chubbed-up, traitorous prick, he added to himself furiously.
The cry Katie made when he tossed her onto her bed in the dormer bedroom finally pierced his anger.
She lay on her back, her elbows propping up her upper body. She stared up at him with huge eyes, her breasts and belly heaving in agitation, her legs parted. Wetness gleamed on her smooth skin. He stood over her at the side of the bed, breathing heavily, watching as her gaze lowered over his torso.
He was hard enough to pound nails with his cock, and there was nothing he could do to stop her from seeing it. His boxer briefs clung to him like a second skin. Rill didn’t need to look down at himself to know his erection was about as obvious as a servicing bull’s.
He jerked his gaze off the sight of her tiny, thin, wet shorts clinging to a well-trimmed triangle of pubic hair and outlining succulent-looking sex lips. He should be shot point-blank just for thinking about what he wanted to do to her in that volatile moment.
Her expressive eyes told him that she knew he fought with his baser instincts. The hint of anxiety he saw in irises that were the color of a newly opened, green leaf caused a wave of self-disgust to flood him. When he pointed at her, his hand shook.
“I want you out of this house, Katie.”
He turned and stalked out of the room without another word.
The night passed, and then another day, and still Katie couldn’t get Rill to sit down and speak with her. His withdrawal left her feeling even more anxious than she had been after the creek incident.
And after having sex with him, of course.
On the morning after her arrival, she’d left when Rill disappeared into the woods. She’d driven down to Errol’s house to check on him. Once she’d assured herself that he was properly using the passive motion machine they’d given him at the hospital, which helped to keep his knee joint limber while he began to heal, she headed back to the hill.
Instead of isolating himself in the woods this time, Rill had taken refuge in his bedroom.
She’d spent the better part of the day making the place livable again. The house really was nice once one got rid of a year and a half’s worth of the dust and grime of Rill’s depression. She’d been making the beautiful wood mantel gleam with furniture polish and considering what she could make them for dinner when she heard Rill in the hallway.
“Rill?” But he never answered her call, just headed out of the house. Katie had heard his car start up before she reached the screen door.
Almost two hours later, she waited in the shadows of the wraparound porch sitting on a rusty wrought-iron chair. Darkness had just fallen, slow, silent and all-consuming. The creatures in the trees and fields had ceased their clamorous communications. The dim kitchen light barely penetrated the thick shadow of night.
Had Rill found her presence in the house so disturbing that he’d left town, perhaps? What if her being there had made him more desperate . . . more impulsive, and he’d done something crazy and dangerous?
She stood. She’d promised herself she’d wait until nightfall before she went to try to find Rill. The time had come, but uncertainty stilled her feet. He would only resent her more for seeking him out . . . for treating him like he was a delinquent fifteen-year-old. No matter how much she wanted to, Katie couldn’t make Rill see reason.
She couldn’t force him to snap out of his grief.
Helplessness didn’t sit well in Katie’s belly.
She heard a vehicle’s motor in the distance. Her heart pounded into overdrive when she saw headlights cast on the grove of trees that lined the road.
The car door shutting sounded abnormally loud in the still night. A dog in the far distance must have thought so, too, because it started barking a warning.
She assumed Rill didn’t know she was there as she listened to his heavy footfalls on the steps and front porch. He paused a few feet away from the screen door, though, his head lowered.
“What am I going to have to do to get you to go, Shine?” he asked quietly.
“I’m not going,” she replied softly. Firmly.
He sighed. With a hitch in her chest, Katie realized he had known she was there. Somehow. He hadn’t been talking to himself. When he didn’t respond, Katie took several cautious steps toward him.