Kane straightened. “Ah, yes, the wedding. I guess I ruined the day for you, and women like weddings so much.” He began to unbutton his shirt.
“Many women have weddings like the one I planned, but few have a day such as this one turned out to be.”
As he pulled his wet shirt out of his pants, he smiled at her. “Your sister did all that at the weddin’, didn’t she? You didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, did you? I realized that after I got all the way up here.”
“No, I didn’t,” she answered. “But Blair didn’t mean any harm. She loves me and she thought I wanted Leander, so she tried to give him to me.” As Kane began to remove his pants, Houston looked back at the fire. This was her wedding night, she thought, and her body warmed considerably.
“Thought?” Kane asked, and when she didn’t answer, he persisted. “You said she thought you wanted Westfield. She doesn’t think so anymore?”
“Not after what I said to her,” Houston murmured, looking into the fire. Behind her, she could hear him rubbing himself with a towel, and she was greatly tempted to look around. Was he really as well built as the strongman she’d hired for The Sisterhood meeting?
With a swift movement, Kane knelt before her.
He was wearing only the towel about his hips, looking for all the world like a Greek god of old. The smooth, big muscles under deeply bronzed skin were indeed better than those of the man she’d hired.
Whatever Kane’d been about to say was forgotten as he looked at her. His breath caught in his throat. “You looked at me like this once before,” he whispered. “That time you hit me with a water pitcher when I touched you. You plannin’ somethin’ like that this time?”
Houston just looked at him and let the blanket slide from her head, then down her neck, off her shoulder to hang just above her breasts. “No,” was all she could think to say.
The heat of the fire was warm on her skin but nothing compared to the feel of Kane’s hand on the side of her face. His fingers tangled themselves in the wet hair that flowed down her back. His thumb ran across her lower lip as he watched her.
“I’ve seen you dressed up a lot, but you’ve never been prettier than you are right now. I’m glad you came up here. A place like this is where people should make love.”
Houston kept her eyes on his as his hand travelled down her neck and onto her shoulder. When he started to move the blanket away from her breasts, she held her breath, and realized that she was praying that she’d please him.
Very gently, as if she were a child, he put one arm around her shoulders and lowered her to the cabin floor. She tensed as she thought, this is it.
Kane parted the blanket so that her nude body was entirely exposed to him.
Houston waited for the verdict.
“Damn,” he said under his breath. “No wonder Westfield made a fool of himself over a body like that. I’ve found that them curvy dresses you ladies wear are usually stuffed with cotton.”
Houston had to laugh. “I please you?”
“Please me?” he said, as he held out his hand. “Just look at that. It’s shakin’ so bad I can’t hold it still.” He put his hand on the soft skin of her stomach. “It
ain’t gonna be easy for me to wait, but any lady’d climb all the way up here to spend the night with me deserves the best—not no quick tumble on the floor. You just sit there and I’ll make us somethin’ to drink. You like peaches? No!” he said as Houston began to pull the blanket about her. “You can just leave that on the floor. You get too cold you can crawl in my lap and I’ll warm you.”
Growing up in Duncan Gates’s house had not given Houston much opportunity to learn to like the taste of liquor. But Kane took a can of peaches, poured out the juice, mashed the peaches to a pulp and mixed it with a generous amount of rum.
He handed her the concoction in the can. “It ain’t a fancy glass, but it works.”
Houston took a sip. She felt quite awkward wearing absolutely nothing while sitting in front of a man. But by the time she’d finished the drink, which didn’t taste at all like the few sips of liquor she’d drunk before, she was feeling as if it were the most normal thing in the world to have no clothes on.
Kane took a seat across from her and watched her. “Better?” he asked as he handed her another drink.
“Much.”
She was only halfway through the second can of drink when Kane took it from her. “I don’t want you drunk, just relaxed.”
He put his arms around her and pulled her close to him. The drink inside Houston made her feel less inhibited than she ever had been in her life. Her arms twined about his neck and she put her lips on his.
“What did you tell your sister about you and Westfield?”
“That Lee might set her body on fire, but he did absolutely nothing for me.”
“Not a good asker?”