Everything she’d always known she’d find with Ry.
Make love to me.
She’d barely thought the words and then she’d heard herself saying them out loud.
And then she’d felt him pull away.
And now…now he was glaring at her…like some brooding grizzly. Like someone who didn’t even like her, let alone want her.
The passion she’d felt in his kiss had shifted to anger. And she didn’t understand.
“Ry?”
“So…do you understand now what happens when you don’t behave yourself?”
She blinked, chilled to the bone suddenly, where only moments ago she’d felt nothing but heat. She clutched her arms around herself, his anger slicing through the last of her longing and heightening her feeling of vulnerability. “Behave myself?”
He gave her a stern stare and bent to snag his hat from the floor. “You just got a lesson, little girl…I hope you learned it well.”
“A lesson?” She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand any of this. “What…what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about what happens when a woman teases a man beyond reason.”
He brushed some imaginary dust from the brim of his hat, then settled it jerkily on his head. “I saw the way you let Beldon kiss you in the park. I saw the way you let him put his hands all over you.”
For what felt like an eternity, all she could do was stare. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Then finally found her voice. “What does Nathan have to do with what just happened between us?”
He shook his head, then smiled…the picture of tolerant benevolence. “Sweetie…that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nothing happened between us but a little adult-education class.”
She felt as if she’d just walked into a theater in the middle of a movie—a horror movie or a foreign movie—French with German subtitles. “Adult education?”
“Exactly. Honey, I just taught you that if that had been Beldon instead of me—someone who cares about you—you’d be flat on your back and compromised by now.”
Time stopped while her mind wrestled with his reaction and his words until finally she pulled it all together.
He hadn’t kissed her because he wanted her. He’d kissed her because he thought she needed protection from herself when it came to the opposite sex and he needed to show her the error of her ways. He’d kissed her because he thought she hadn’t behaved appropriately with Nathan and if he hadn’t intervened, she might have ended up, God forbid, compromised.
An incredulous laugh pushed out from somewhere in the vicinity of her horribly bruised pride. “Compromised? Was that really the word you used?”
She laughed again, covered her face with her hands, then on a deep breath let them drop. She glared at him. “What Victorian tome did you pull that out of?”
He actually flinched and turned a shade of red she’d never seen on him before. To cover his discomfort, he shook his finger at her. “Beldon wouldn’t have stopped like I did.”
“So…let me get this in perspective. You kissed me and backed me up against the wall to scare me straight, is that it?”
“Damn right I did. And I hope it worked. If you have an ounce of sense in you, you’ll think twice before you—”
“Before I what?” She cut him off, her anger firing with a vengeance. “Before I go out and throw myself at another man’s feet and beg him to deflower me? Now, there’s a word for you. You can probably find it right next to compromise.”
She sucked in a ragged breath. Dragged her hands through her hair. How pathetic was she? How pathetic was she to actually have thought he had kissed her because he’d wanted her? Because he’d been as excited and aroused and as in love with her as she was with him?
Well. He was right about one thing. She’d definitely learned a lesson: Trust her intellect not her heart. Her head had known weeks ago that she had to give up on him. It was her heart that hadn’t been on board with the plan.
Well, it was on board now…bruised and bleeding, but on board. And one shot at this kind of humiliation was all he was going to get at her.
“Get. Out,” she ordered, walked to the door on shaky legs and opened it wide.
“Oh, now, bear,” he began in that condescending, cajoling voice that made her want to grind her teeth…preferably into some very tender part of his body that created immeasurable pain. “Don’t get all huffy. You know this was for your own good.”
“I do know,” she said with all the sweetness of vinegar and the sincerity of Jerry Springer, as he stepped out the doorway and onto her front stoop, “and I thank you so very much for presuming to know what’s best for me.”
She watched his face as tolerance transitioned to suspicion. “That was um…sarcasm, right?”
“So you do have some functioning brain cells,” she ground out through a nasty smile, then whipped the door shut in his face.
Ry heard her throw the dead bolt. Heard her snarl of rage. Heard her give in to the tears.
He hung his head, closed his eyes, laid his closed fist against the door…and almost begged her to let him back in.
He wanted to hold her…to tell her the truth. That he was stupid crazy about her. That he hadn’t meant to hurt her…that he actually had damn few functioning brain cells left when it came to her or he never would have kissed her in the first place then bumbled out that lamebrain, dull-witted excuse to cover up his mistake.
“Hell, Shamu could have come up with a better story to make sure she didn’t read the truth in that kiss. No offense, buddy,” he told the dog, who gave him a soulful look when he climbed behind the wheel.
And what was the truth in that kiss? The honest truth, he asked himself grimly.
He slumped back in the driver’s seat. The truth was that the moment he’d touched his lips to hers he’d stopped thinking of her as little Carrie-bear. She’d become a woman in his arms. A woman whose response had sizzled with instant arousal…and fueled his libido to flash point.
Hell. He was still aroused…his damn hands were shaking.
He wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel to steady them, then stared through the windshield at…nothing.
And came up with nothing.
There was no good answer to the what-ifs that, despite the futility of the situation, had been rattling around in his head since he’d kissed her. Yet they were still forming. What if he had made love to her? What if she wasn’t Trav’s sister? What if she wasn’t off-limits because of it…because of a hundred other reasons that didn’t add up to what she needed him to be?
He felt as low as the cracked asphalt beneath the wheels of his four-by-four as he turned the key, shifted into Drive and pulled slowly away from her house. Damn Trav for putting him in this position. Damn Beldon for putting the moves on her. And damn the sleepless nights he’d spent agonizing about the possibility of another man making love to her for the first time. And all the times after that.
A fist curled in his gut at the thought. He knew he couldn’t be that man. He’d known it for years. Carrie had always had a crush on him. For her sake he’d always done his darnedest to discourage