“I don’t think you brought me out in the rain to talk about custard, sunshine,” Drake said as he stuffed his hands into the pocket of his tight denim trousers. It was either that or surrender to the temptation of reaching out to caress one of the silky chestnut curls brushing against a flawlessly ivory cheek. “Get to the point.”
Crossing her arms over her chest, she averted her gaze to a ray of sun that flickered over the hem of her skirt. Where were all the words she had carefully rehearsed as they’d crossed the yard? she wondered. Shaking her head, Hope tried to pull them back to mind, but they were gone. Her mind was frighteningly blank.
Drake’s hand reached from out of nowhere to cup her chin, gently pulling her attention back to him. The caress of his rough fingers was warm against the coolness of her rain-damp skin. His gaze was dark, searching, and totally unnerving.
“I never paid you.” To her embarrassment, she spilled out the first words to enter her mind. The comment brought a spark of emotion to Drake’s eyes. Or was it a trick of the light? She couldn’t tell. Whatever it was, it disappeared too quickly.
“I know that.” His voice rang a pitch lower than normal as his thumb traced the delicate line of her jaw. She shivered, but didn’t pull away from the touch. Drake wondered why.
“No, you don’t understand. I never...never—”
“I know.” Turning his hands, he savored the feel of satiny flesh beneath his palm. She felt good, he thought, as he caught the sweet scent of the lilac petals clinging to her skin. The fragrance, though fleeting, overrode the smell of sawdust, of dirt, of everything. Did she know how much emotion her doe eyes revealed? No, he didn’t think she did. Otherwise, she would have turned away.
Hope swallowed hard. The tip of her tongue darted out to moisten her lips. She tried to focus her attention on forming the words that came awkwardly to her tongue, but it was difficult to think with the feel of his palm searing her cheek.
“You—you know I haven’t paid you,” she conceded, her voice husky with pent-up emotion. Her gaze dropped to the pulse throbbing at the base of the thick cord of his neck. “You don’t know why.”
“Then tell me.”
Hope looked long and hard into that penetrating gaze, then nodded. She dropped to the floor of the shed as though her knees could no longer support her weight. Drake hunkered down beside her. To Hope’s relief, he made no move to touch her. She didn’t think she’d be able to concentrate with that roughened hand caressing away her thoughts.
“I never intended to pay you,” she admitted, finally. The words were torn from somewhere deep in her soul. “I—I really thought I could—?” she sucked in a ragged sigh. “That I could—oh, I don’t know what I thought.”
“You thought you could hire me to fight for your brother and that afterward, with any amount of luck, I’d find myself on the wrong end of a Winchester come dusk on Saturday night.”
She chuckled despite herself. “No, I’ve never had that kind of luck.” She ran her fingers through the sawdust that powdered the dirt. Her expression turned serious. “I should never have promised you something I couldn’t give. My father’s a good man. He brought his kids up better than that. He told me to never make a promise I couldn’t keep, and until now I never have. But Luke’s life was at stake and I had to do something. I couldn’t let him fight Larzdon. He would have been killed. I know it as sure as I’m sitting here—and so do you.”
The urge to touch one of the chestnut waves spilling over her shoulder was too great to resist. Drake reached out and captured one of the curls between his fingers, marveling at its softness and the way it wrapped around his finger. “So you came to me.”
“Damn it, Drake,” her open palm slapped her lap, “you were supposed to take the money. You weren’t supposed to—”
“Take you?”
Sea-green clashed with brown velvet. Hope’s gaze dropped to the lips that were slowly lowering toward her. A heartbeat passed, more than enough time to stop him if she tried. She didn’t try.
This was not at all like the hard, punishing kiss he’d left her with that night in his hotel room. His lips were soft, surprisingly gentle, and when he urged her back, Hope went without complaint. It was enticing, the feel of the hard floor against her back, and the feel of the hard man against her front. Her arms circled his neck.
He drank deeply of the honeyed sweetness being offered. There was no stiffness in the body beneath him, only soft, generous curves begging to be explored. His palm slowly ascended the small taper of her waist, brushed lightly against the outer swell of her breast, then ran a tantalizing path down the sensitive inner column of her arm. He marveled at the way her breath fanned his cheek, igniting a burning fire there that quickly seeped into his blood. A groan escaped his lips as her body curved into his own with bittersweet perfection.
The aroma of fresh sawdust mixed with the tender scent of lilacs. It rekindled the fire that had been burning in Drake since the first minute he’d laid eyes on the chestnut-haired beauty. Her hair spread around them like a pillow of glistening silk, soft and inviting. His lips left hers to trail a path of fiery kisses across her cheek, fluttering over her brow, and finally tasting the salty pool of tears clinging to her eyelids.
Grudgingly, he pulled away, resting his weight on an elbow as he looked down at the delicately carved face, and the stream of tears that moistened her cheeks. Mesmerized, he reached out to capture a tear on the tip of his index finger. It glistened for a second in the shadowy light before he rubbed it into the calloused finger with his thumb.
“I don’t understand,” he said, his voice a harsh whisper against the backdrop of squawking wet hens outside. She was crying now, but she had responded to him, damn it! It wasn’t his imagination, not this time.
“I know,” she sputtered weakly. With a clenched fist, she wiped away her tears. “You can’t understand. You don’t know.”
“Know what?” Drake tried to keep his impatience from creeping into his words, and failed miserably. “I’ll receive pay
ment from you now, or I’ll have the reason why.”
“Damn it, Frazier! You don’t understand anything.”
Taking a deep breath, Drake struggled to restrain his raging emotions. Fear had crept into Hope’s eyes, and it pierced him to the core. “Maybe not. But one thing I know for sure, sunshine. You can’t tease a man with promises, then expect him to turn away.” His fingers trailed a feather-light line over her trembling lower lip. “Life doesn’t work like that. I don’t work like that.”
“I didn’t mean to tease you. I would never do that.”
Her doe eyes pleaded with him to believe her. Instinctively, he did. “But you won’t pay me either. You’re talking in circles, Hope. Either you want me or you don’t.”