With heightened awareness, she could feel the coarser texture of the last few grains of soil still remaining on his hand. He was leaving his fingerprints on her, she thought foolishly, and as soon as the ridiculous notion entered her mind it was followed by a rush of desire so raw and unexpected that it felt as if the air around her had turned to warm water, immediately drenching the cotton sweater and the jeans she was wearing and soaking through to her skin. Cord’s mouth was only inches from hers.
“All we’ve got is history, Cord,” she said tightly. “Let’s leave it at that.” Her body was tense against his touch.
He exhaled softly, still holding her gaze. Shifting position slightly so that he was blocking the sun from her eyes, he shook his head and let the ghost of a smile cross his defeated features.
“My God, you’re one mule-headed woman. Why couldn’t you have held on to what we had just as stubbornly?”
He let his hand slide from the back of her neck and shrugged, that ironic smile still lifting one corner of his mouth. A crazy mixture of relief and disappointment swept through her, but she forced herself to concentrate on the former instead of the latter. He started to turn away, and suddenly her limbs felt like lead.
Then he stopped and turned back to face her. His eyes were unreadable.
“Hell, no. Not this time.” With one fluid movement, he bridged the space between them, pulling her to him so swiftly that she had no chance to react. “Good God, I just have to have this,” he muttered, his mouth coming down on hers.
She could taste salt on his top lip and the same sweat slicked her exposed skin where the vee neckline of her sweater dipped as he gathered her to his chest, his arm tightening around her. With his other hand he pushed her hair from her temple, his opened fingers sliding through it until they reached the back of her head, and then spreading wider. Individual sensations fell away, overwhelmed by the shock of sudden mindless need that tore through her.
She’d first kissed him when she’d been seventeen and he’d been twenty-two. Now it was ten years later, and if she’d had to guess a few seconds ago, she would have said that after all the years of intimacy between them there was nothing about Cord Hunter that was unfamiliar to her. She couldn’t have been more wrong, Julia thought incoherently.
Never, not even in the last few months of their relationship when everything had been falling apart, had he ever seemed to forget the physical disparity between them, and his size and strength had always been downplayed when he’d been with her. But this kiss was different from anything she’d experienced with him in the past—harder and hotter, his mouth open against hers with an almost adolescent lack of finesse. Once he’d been able to maintain some semblance of control even at the height of their lovemaking. Now not only had he lost that control, but he seemed to have forgotten any subtlety he’d ever possessed. All that was left was urgency.
He wanted her. He wanted her now, and badly enough that he hadn’t been able to ease into the moment or prolong the waiting. Despite the warning bells that were shrilling frantically in that part of her brain that was still functioning, there was no real choice left to her.
She kissed him back, opening herself fully to him, and he immediately took advantage of her lack of resistance and moved in even closer, his biceps tensing against her breasts. Liquid fire flashed through her. She could taste him, Julia thought disjointedly, and even that was different from the way she remembered it—he tasted ripe and dark, like cherries flamed in brandy, burning their way down her throat and exploding sweetly as they reached the pit of her stomach. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she felt her fingers fumbling at the buttons of his shirt, impatiently opening them. Her hands slid possessively against his skin, and she felt the faint ridge of scar tissue that followed the line of a bottom rib.
Another woman would have to ask him how he’d gotten that, Julia thought fiercely. Another woman could question him for years and still never know Cord the way she did. Once she’d lain in bed beside him, touching every mark on his body with gentle fingers and recalling the circumstances of each while he’d watched her, a faint smile playing on his lips as she went through the litany—falling from the oak tree when he was nine; getting a fishhook in his shoulder when he was teaching a tourist how to cast; being hit by a piece of flying debris when, as a member of the community’s volunteer fire department, he’d arrived at the blaze that had leveled the old box factory in town just as an ancient propane tank had exploded.
She knew him—every inch of him, Julia thought. He was hers and no one else’s, and not having him had been like existing in hell for two years. She arched her body to his and his grip around her tightened convulsively. His mouth moved to the corner of her lips, and she could feel his lashes flicking against the line of her cheekbone.
“Right about now I usually wake up,” he whispered hoarsely, his breath warm on her upper lip. His words were muffled against her skin. “Every time I do it’s like dying. Tell me it was the same for you.”
The scar on his ribs was from a stray round he’d caught the year before they’d separated. He’d been instrumental in tracking down the Donner “family,” a chillingly twisted group of serial killers who in the end had chosen to die in a violent confrontation with the authorities rather than surrender. Her fingertips passed over it gently, like a blind woman touching her own features in a reaffirmation of something she’d always known.
“It was the same for—”
The words died in her throat. Past the scar on his ribs her searching fingers had found another—a raised weal that snaked down from the side of his torso to the top of his hip. It felt ugly. It felt unfamiliar. She had no idea how he’d gotten it or when it had happened. All she knew was that it had to be less than two years old.
It had to be less than two years old, because two years ago their life together had come to an abrupt end. Two years ago she’d sent him away, knowing that it was the last acceptable option she had.
He still loved her. He still wanted her. But he’d made some kind of a life for himself that didn’t include her—the proof was right here, under her fingertips.
She still loved him. She would never love anyone the way she loved him. And the only thing of value she had left to give him—the last token of love she could place before him—was his freedom.
“I felt the same way, Cord.” She drew slightly away from him, bringing her hand up to his mouth and tracing the line of his bottom lip. His gaze darkened with desire. “We were fabulous in bed together and you were right—there’s no way I could kiss you without feeling anything. But…”
She hesitated, avoiding his eyes and imprinting every minuscule detail of his mouth on her memory. “I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that it wouldn’t be fair for me to let you believe we could rebuild a relationship, based only on a childhood hero worship that I outgrew long ago and the fact that we both like fu—”
“Don’t.” Cord’s hands fell from her to his sides. He took a step back, his eyes narrowed to black slits. “That was never what we did in bed together. We made love.”
He rubbed the side of his jaw wearily, still watching her intently. “Honey, I was the boy from the wrong side of the tracks who taught you how to lie, remember? You got good at it, but not that good. It doesn’t take a detective’s badge to see that your life’s fallen apart just as badly as mine has, and for the same reason. We belong together. And this time I’m not leaving until I find out why that terrifies you so much.”
She only had to hold herself together for another minute or two, Julia told herself shakily. She met his gaze with her own, the sunlight turning the hazel in her eyes to a clear bronze, the rich chestnut glints in her hair contrasting with the lack of color in her face. “I’m not the stubborn one, Cord—you are. I’ll work with you on this case, but that’s all. We’re temporary partners, and nothing more.”
High