Sheri WhiteFeather – Wrangling The Rich Rancher (страница 7)
“He said that she’s the longest mistress he ever had. That it ended when you were around twelve.” A clandestine affair for over a decade, she thought. Libby couldn’t fathom subjecting herself to something like that. But it wasn’t her place to judge Kirby or Matt’s mother or anyone else.
“She was foolish enough to remain faithful to him, even when she knew that he had other mistresses or girlfriends or whatever. And then there was his wife and other children. The family he was protecting.” Matt’s expression went taut. “In the beginning I didn’t know he was my father. Mom just told me that he was her friend. I was too young to recognize him or know that he was famous.” He roughly added, “I’m not telling you this so you can feel bad for me. I’m telling you because I want you to know the kind of man Kirby really is, to get a better idea of who you’re working for.”
“I know who he is.” She wasn’t going to hold Kirby’s mistakes against him, not when he was trying, with all of his heart, to repair the damage he’d done. “And I know how badly he wants to make amends with you.”
Matt squinted at her. “I started to suspect that he was my dad even before Mom told me that he was. This tall, bearded man in a long black duster, this larger-than-life guy. He never got up before noon, but Mom would still cook him breakfast food, treating the afternoons as if they were mornings. Sometimes he would even sit at the table with his sunglasses on. I’d never seen anyone do that indoors before. I knew he was different from other people. I just didn’t know how different. But either way, he was just too important to my mother, too revered, I figured, for him to be someone other than my father. Once I learned the truth, I accepted it as the status quo.”
“You must have been a highly observant child.”
“Yes, but I was ridiculously impressionable, too. Kirby told me once that I looked like I was part wolf, and I figured my eyes were this color because I was supposed to be nocturnal, the way he was. But I’d get so sleepy when he first arrived at night and I was waiting up to see him. I didn’t understand how I could be part wolf if I couldn’t stay up at night.”
“Your eyes are beautiful.” Mesmerizing, she thought. Hypnotizing. She could stare at them for hours.
He scoffed at her compliment. “They’re weird, and you’re missing my point.”
“No, I’m not.” She understood what he was trying to convey. How lonely Kirby had made him feel. How he needed to be part of the daylight, where fathers took their sons out in public, where there were no secrets, where normalcy existed. “It was wrong, what he did to you. I’m not denying that.” And neither was Kirby. He knew, better than anyone, how terribly he’d hurt Matt.
“I was taught to tell people that my daddy was a cowboy drifter and that my mom never even knew his real name.” A sharp laugh rattled from his throat. “Even now, if someone asks about my father, I still recount that same fake story.”
“Does your mother’s husband know the truth?”
“She couldn’t bear to keep lying to him, so she told him right before they got married. Of course, it’s only been a few months, so they’re still in the honeymoon stages. But he would never betray her trust. Or mine. He stays out of our personal business.”
“What about your ex?” Libby thought about his marriage and how quickly it had ended. “Did you ever tell her?”
“No.”
“Did you ever want to tell her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because being Kirby’s son doesn’t matter to me, and I didn’t want it to matter to her, either. Besides, we had other things to contend with.” He searched Libby’s gaze, as if he were searching for someone’s grave. “Did you know that she was a widow? Like you?”
“It came up in my research.” But Libby hadn’t expected him to make a comparison in such a disturbing way. “According to what I uncovered, her name is Sandra Molloy, and she and her first husband had two kids and owned the dry cleaner’s in town.” It wasn’t much to go on, but it was the only information she had.
“She went by Sandy, and she sold that business when she married me. She cried about her husband nearly every day. Do you still think about your husband?”
“Of course I do.” Libby glanced away, wishing that Matt would stop staring at her. “But I’ve come to terms with my grief.” With the tears and pain, with waking up alone. “I’m not letting it rule my life.”
“Then why can I see him, like a ghost inside you?”
“You don’t even know what he looks like.”
“I didn’t mean it literally.”
She thought about the images of Becker on her phone. The happy, smiling, easygoing father of her child. He was so different from Matt. “You’re just seeing what you want to see.”
“Why would I want to see something like that when I look at you? When I’m this close—” he created a tiny space between his thumb and forefinger “—to giving up the fight and kissing you?”
“Then do it, damn you. Just do it.” She didn’t want to keep fantasizing about being kissed by him. She just wanted to lose herself in the feeling, no matter how wrong it was.
He leaned into her, his gaze challenging hers. Was he baiting her stop him, to push him away?
Libby challenged him right back, staring him down, daring him to go through with it.
Heaven help them.
He kept coming toward her, until his hands were tangled in her hair and his mouth was fused passionately to hers.
Just the way she’d imagined it.
Matt cursed in his mind. He was getting consumed with this woman in ways that were driving him mad.
He undid his seat belt and so did she. The straps were too confining, and they both needed to be free.
With his eyes tightly closed, he deepened the kiss, craving the taste of her. He pushed his tongue into her mouth. She reacted just as uncontrollably, pressing closer to him, her hunger equal to his.
Hellfire, he thought. He was getting hard beneath his jeans. From a kiss. From one soft, slick, wet...
She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he pulled her, like a rag doll, right over the center console and onto his lap.
He envisioned how they must look, parked on the road that overlooked his old place, with her straddling him in the driver’s seat, the steering wheel butting against her back.
Matt felt like a teenager, making out in the middle of the day, his hormones jerking and jumping.
He wound his hands more fully in her hair. He liked how wild and wavy it was. She rocked forward, rubbing him where it hurt, where it felt good, where his zipper made friction with hers.
They kept kissing, mindless and carnal. She mewled, then moaned, hot and sweet, and he suspected that she would make those same fevered sounds if he was deep inside her.
When they came up for air, she asked, “Is the truck still running? Is that the vibration I feel?”
“I think it’s us.” He’d shut the engine off earlier. Hadn’t he? Just to be sure, he double-checked. “It’s not running.”
“It’s not? Are you sure?”
“I’m positive. But we should stop now.”
“You first.”
“You want me to end it?” He didn’t appreciate her leaving it up to him. “You’re the one who’s sitting on my lap.”
“And you’re the one who put me there.”
Touché, he thought. “Yeah, but you can climb off me and get back in your own seat.” His frustration was building, at himself, at her. He wanted to strip her naked, right here, right now.
“I could.” Her eyes were glazed over and her hair was totally mussed, maybe even knotted in spots. Her frustration was mounting, too. “Or you could make me.”
“Screw that.” He kissed her again, harder this time, making good on his threat to bite her.
“Ouch.” She flinched, then kissed him right back.
A heartbeat later, he said, “It was only a nibble.”
“Says you. My lips are going to be swollen.”
“They already are.” And she wore it insanely well. “Now get off me before I do something I’ll regret.”
“You’re already regretting this, and so am I.”
“So go back on your own side of the truck.”
She didn’t budge. She stayed there, desire bristling from her pores. She snared his gaze, her eyelashes long and fluttery. “You owe me a cookie.”
Seriously? She was going to hold him to that? “Fine. As soon as I can take the wheel, we’ll go to the bakery.”
“I want coffee, too.” She crawled over the console and nearly kneed him in the nuts, missing him by mere inches. But she didn’t even notice that she’d almost done it.
Matt snarled to himself. He deserved a swift kick, but the entire situation still made him angry. Everything about it ticked him off. Especially what he couldn’t have—like Libby sprawled out beneath him.
He wanted to take her home and make hot-blooded love to her, to be rough and animalistic, to bite her again a hundred more times.
She settled onto her seat, lowered the visor and gawked at herself in the mirror. “Oh, my goodness. What did you do to my hair? I look like a blowfish.”
Since when did fish have hair? Spiny things coming out of their heads, maybe. “You liked it when I was doing it.”