Choking sobs rocked her, eventually subsiding into sniffs and shudders as the wave finally began to pass. He held her through it all, stroking her hair back from her face. He said nothing, but somehow his silence was so much more soothing than all the pointless platitudes spoken by well-meaning strangers which she remembered from that day. The musty masculine scent filled her nostrils and it didn’t seem to matter anymore that she found it both comforting and arousing.
At last, he cradled her cheeks in callused palms and raised her head to look deeply into her eyes.
“You miss your mom a lot?” he asked as he wiped the last of the tears away with his thumbs.
She huffed out a self-deprecating laugh and tugged her face away, feeling weak, ashamed and hopelessly needy.
What on earth had the crying jag been about? She wasn’t even sure where the tears had come from. And how could she have broken down in front of him? They weren’t exactly friends.
“Hardly,” she said. “I don’t even really remember her. She walked out on me and Megan when I was still a baby.” She sniffed, wishing she had a tissue handy. She probably looked a total mess. She noticed the wet patch on his shirt left by her tea
rs. But then her gaze lifted to the strong column of his throat, and the wisps of dark hair revealed by the open collar of his shirt, and the heat that was never far away sunk back into her sex. She jerked her gaze to his face and managed a wobbly smile, trying not to obsess about how much she still wanted him. They weren’t going to be doing the wild thing again. He’d made that abundantly clear in his note. And, however much her body might disagree, she still had at least some pride.
“Thanks for bringing me here,” she said stiffly, going for polite and distant but getting breathless instead. “I needed to forgive her so I can finally begin to forgive myself for all the dumb stuff I’ve inherited from her.”
Such as my ability to fall in lust with totally inappropriate guys.
His jaw tensed and she felt his withdrawal like a physical blow. She turned and walked swiftly down the path leading out of the cemetery, embarrassed by the revealing comment. Given his adversity to emotional attachments, her crying jag alone had probably been way too much information. But she’d gone less than five paces before strong fingers clamped on her elbow and he dragged her round to face him.
She steeled herself to see contempt—or, worse, pity. But instead, he looked guarded, while the pure blue of his irises glittered with an anger that for some strange reason didn’t seem to be directed at her.
“What dumb stuff did you inherit from your mom?”
* * *
He shouldn’t ask. He shouldn’t want to know. Heck, he shouldn’t even have offered to bring her here. And not just because riding a bike with her wrapped tightly around him had been agonizing.
But he couldn’t seem to hold back the question any more than he’d been able to hold back his knee-jerk reaction to her tears.
Tears didn’t usually impress him and they certainly had never made him want to offer comfort or support before now. But then he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen tears as genuine or heart-wrenching as hers. Despite the initial show of bravado when he’d caught up with her on the road, she’d seemed so forlorn and fragile as soon as she mentioned her mom and her hunt for the grave. And that unwelcome feeling of responsibility had returned, compounded by the guilt from the night before.
Once he’d known she wasn’t running away from him, the relief had been so huge it had been impossible for him to hold onto his temper. And then the exquisite torture of having her breasts flattened against his back and her arms banded around his waist, while the deep throb of the bike’s engine rumbled up through his thighs, had done the rest.
He didn’t know anymore whether it was the ongoing battle to control his lust or the unhappiness in her face which was driving the anger roiling in his gut but it didn’t seem to matter.
With the lightly tanned skin of her cheeks reddened by her tears, she looked more vulnerable—and more determined not to show it—than he had ever seen her. He could feel the punch of her pulse against his thumb and knew he couldn’t let her go until he knew what the heck she was talking about.
“You do know who my mother was?” she asked. “And the way she lived her life?”
Yeah, he knew, because they’d all been treated to a comprehensive assassination of the woman’s character during Lloyd Whittaker’s trial. The papers and bloggers had had a field day at the time with the stories of his ex-wife’s many high-profile affairs which had been documented in salacious detail by the defense. He hadn’t paid much attention because he wasn’t interested in celebrity gossip and he didn’t see what the heck Alexis Whittaker’s checkered sex life had to do with anything, seeing as the woman had been dead for years. He still didn’t, so he shrugged.
“I guess. But I don’t see what that’s got to do with you?”
Hectic color flooded her cheeks but she didn’t relinquish eye contact. “Given the way I threw myself at you five years ago, and lied to you last night to get you to sleep with me, I would say the similarities between me and my mother are pretty obvious.”
She tried to tug her arm free. He held on.
“Are you kidding me?” he said, stunned by the self-loathing in her voice.
“No, I’m not. You of all people should know that I’m just as much of a slut as she was.”
She began to struggle in earnest, so he grabbed her other arm.
“Stop it,” he said.
“Let me go, please.”
“Not until you look at me, Katherine.” He gave her a gentle shake, unsettled by her distress, especially as he now knew he was the cause.