Impervious to his seething, she turned to her brother and looked at him with contempt. “This is what you’ve been savoring. All the innuendos and smug gibes. References to a nonexistent infatuation with Wes. This is what they’ve been about.”
“I hoped to appeal to your conscience, get you to break it off before it came to this.”
“No you didn’t,” she snapped. “Far from it. You wanted a scene like this because you’re small, and peevish, and cruel, William.”
“Forgive me for pointing out, Marilee, that you’re in no position to call me names.”
“What will you do for entertainment now, I wonder. Not that I care. I’ll be moving away as soon as I can make other arrangements. You can go to the devil.” Then she turned and retreated into the bedroom, gently closing the door behind her.
Wes confronted William. “You knew about this and didn’t tell me?”
“And spoil the surprise?”
Dutch clotheslined Wes across the chest as he lurched toward the man. William was a third Wes’s size. It would be murder. “Leave it for now, Wes.” When Wes backed down, Dutch took a step toward William. “Give me the keys to the snowmobiles.”
“I can’t think of a reason why I should.”
Dutch took a step closer. “How’s this for a reason? If you don’t give me those keys, I’ll unleash Wes to rearrange the bones in your face, and you’ll be slurping your food through a straw for the rest of your cocksucking life.”
William sniffed as though indifferent to the threat, but he reached into his pants pocket and withdrew a heavy key ring, which he’d had in his possession all along.
Dutch snatched it from him. “You coming?” he asked Wes.
Wes didn’t reply but followed Dutch through the house and out the back door.
They didn’t speak again until they were in the Bronco, headed toward the garage. “If word of this gets out, do you know what will happen to Scott’s chances of getting a scholarship? They don’t want college freshmen humping their professors.”
He banged his fist on the dash, several times. Bam, bam, bam. “And that son of a bitch Ritt. I’d like to make gravy of that sniveling little bastard’s bowels. He set us up to find them, didn’t he?”
“He set us up.”
“Why?”
“Payback.”
“For what? What did I ever do to him?”
Dutch frowned across at him.
Wes had the grace to look chagrined.
“He wanted to get back at you for all the slights over the years, real and perceived. I don’t know why he’d want to humiliate Marilee, though.” He thought a moment, then said, “Scott’s just a kid. He’ll take pussy where and when it’s offered, even from a teacher. But Marilee? I’m shocked. Who’d have thought she was capable of this?”
Wes gave a scoffing laugh. “Oh, they’re all capable of it. Didn’t you know? They’re all whores at heart.”
• • •
It was probably one of his many aches that woke him up. That, and being cold now that Lilly had left their nest. Keeping his eyes closed, Tierney burrowed deeper into the covers and let his mind drift. To last night. To Lilly. To that first time, to that sweet, silent, fluid, ebb-and-flow fuck. He couldn’t have wished for it to be more perfect.
They hadn’t spoken a word. They hadn’t had to. Touch became their language, and it was a dialect in which they’d both been fluent. With millennia of instinctual behavior guiding him, he’d claimed ownership of her, made the body he so desired his. And Lilly, in the mystical and knowing way of woman, had allowed him the self-deception that he had been the one to possess her.
After that first time, when he finally had rolled off her onto his side, he carried her with him, so that they were lying face-to-face. He’d wished he could read her mind, wished he knew if he had regained her trust. As he’d stared into her eyes, they appeared trustful. Or maybe the lambency was a remnant of her orgasm.
He’d brushed several strands of hair off her damp cheek. Touched her lower lip with the back of his index finger, run his knuckle along her teeth. “You know I didn’t use anything.”
She nodded.
“You should have made me pull out.”