“You’re as safe with me as you want to be,” Zane promised, leaning down to whisper the words into her ear. She shivered again, and desire rippled hotly down the center of his body.
Felicity groped one hand out to steady herself against the red brick wall of the hardware store. Even to Zane’s open, uncovered eyes, the light in the alleyway was dim and soft, with the walls of two shops sheltering them on both sides. Main Street was only a few paces away, but pedestrians strolled by on the wide, paved sidewalk and never glanced into the alleyway.
He and Felicity were almost impossible to see, Zane realized. Felicity’s breath was coming fast and light, the wings of her shoulder blades fluttering against his chest, and Zane gave in to the irresistible urge to nuzzle at the satin length of her neck.
With a gasp he felt more than heard, Felicity melted into him, sealing their bodies together in a long, languid rush of heat. Zane went taut and hard, heavy with throbbing need. The rest of the world receded, the sounds of foot traffic and cars passing buried under the pounding waves of their combined heartbeats.
Zane’s hands gripped Felicity’s upper arms, the softness of her skin hitting him like a shot of vodka. Her head fell back against his shoulder, her covered eyes turned up to the sky, and the slash of navy silk was midnight lush against the roses and cream of her cheeks. Her lips parted on a breath. Zane’s control broke.
With a low sound that tore from his chest, he spun Felicity in his arms until her back was pressed to the brick wall, and kissed her.
Felicity had never been kissed like this. Even in the Bad Year, the terrible year when she’d briefly lost her head—and almost everything else—in a misguided attempt to experience life, she’d never experienced this.
Hell, she’d had full-on sex that wasn’t as hot, as consuming, as knee-weakening as Zane’s kiss.
Black stars spangled the inside of her covered eyelids, and the lack of visual input made her extra aware of her other senses. The warm clasp of Zane’s big hand where he palmed the back of her head to cushion it against the scratchy brick wall; the rush of blood throbbing in her ears; the slick slide of his velvet tongue mapping out the inside of her sensitive lips; the cinnamon-spiced sweetness of his mouth; the solid, muscular press of his thigh between her legs.
Felicity felt as if she’d been tipped sideways into an alternate reality, where pleasure and desire ruled her body, and her mind was a soft haze in the background. Her mind, which she’d cracked open like a walnut to share the tender pieces of her past with Greta, was happy to take a little break. And somehow, Zane’s forceful, demanding kiss which could have overwhelmed her, instead seemed to fill her with strength. And a few demands of her own.
Clamping her thighs around Zane’s, Felicity spared a brief moment to be sorry she’d worn pants today. Her hungry body wanted no barriers between them. But when Zane shoved in even closer, notching their pelvises together and making sensation explode in Felicity’s core, she realized it was for the best. She might not survive this much pleasure if they were skin to skin.
An image of what Zane Bishop would look like naked flashed across her mind’s eye, startlingly detailed, and Felicity moaned. The harsh noise Zane grated out in response only stoked the fire in her belly. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her fingers in his the softness of his dark brown hair…and a shrill wolf whistle split the air.
Pulling back, Felicity heard laughter drifting from the open window of a passing car.
“Nobody we know. They’re gone already, anyway,” Zane said huskily, but the moment was broken.
Reality pressed down on Felicity’s shoulders, a heavy burden she wasn’t sure she wanted to pick back up. But she didn’t have any choice. She’d sacrificed all her choices in one stunning year of poor decisions and self-indulgence.
She reached for the knot of the blindfold, which suddenly felt silly and pointless instead of sexy and freeing. Zane made an unhappy sound but he didn’t stop her from tugging the silk tie off her head.
Blinking in the light, Felicity forced herself to meet Zane’s clear blue eyes. “Well. I guess we’ve proved the old cliché true. Opposites do attract.”
He eased his body away, obviously reluctant but reading her desire for space in the tightness of her smile. “We’re not all that different, you and me.”
Felicity licked her lips, the lingering trace of his warm spice flavor sending a tingle through her lower body. “Zane. Come off it. We couldn’t be more different if we’d sat down and made a list of ways to be opposite. We don’t agree on anything about the reception, which is supposed to be happening in two weeks, by the way, and meanwhile you and I are still arguing over where it should be held!”
Leaning one hand on the brick wall beside her head, Zane lowered his head to keep eye contact. They weren’t touching, he wasn’t caging her in with his arms, but she could see the taut muscles of his forearm. And she could feel the supernova heat of his big, hard-sculpted body. “We’re more alike than you think,” he contended.
The intensity in his expression sent a hook into Felicity’s lungs, catching at her breath and forcing her to pay attention. “What do you mean?”
“We both learned our life lessons early and well.” Zane pushed away from the wall, giving her his broad back and shoulders, tensing tight under the weight of whatever he struggled with.
“I don’t…” Felicity shook her head, unable to follow, and Zane whirled to prop his hips against the white clapboard wall of the bakery.
“I heard you,” he said. “All that stuff you told Greta, about your parents. I was outside the door, and I listened in. Because I was curious, and I wanted to know you.”
Anger sizzled briefly in Felicity’s belly, then died out. She tipped her head back against the rough bricks, unwillingly amused. “Lord. You really aren’t used to having to ask for what you want.”
“I’m fine with asking. But it’s usually easier to simply take.” Zane shrugged.
He’d heard everything she’d said about her past…and then he’d brought her outside, blindfolded her, and kissed her. Felicity wouldn’t trade that kiss for any amount of politeness. “I might have told you all of those difficult, private things, if you’d asked. I might not. It would have been nice to have been given the choice…But I can’t say I’m sorry you know.”
The knowledge that he’d peeked into some of her worst memories and still wanted her made Felicity feel closer to him, more intimate even than that scorching kiss. Although…he didn’t know all of it.
“Good,” Zane said, relief bringing the sparkle back to his eyes for an instant before he narrowed them on her face. “So why are you frowning?”
Attempting to clear the thundercloud from over her head, Felicity sighed. “What I told Greta, about my parents and their unbreakable connection—I wish that were the only life lesson I learned, early on. But you don’t know the worst of it.”
“What could be worse than watching your parents deal with an incurable illness?”
Felicity eyed him, a sense of calm enveloping her. She could tell him the whole truth, and maybe it would help him to understand where she was coming from, the way she saw the world—but she wouldn’t do it lightly. “Are you sure you want to know? This goes deeper than squabbling about reception details. Deeper than a kiss, and the attraction between us. This is real life, my life, and I don’t share it with just anyone who happens to pass through it. If I tell you this story, it will mean something to me. Can you handle that?”
***
Zane stared, the serene resolve of her words flowing over him. He wanted to say that of course he could handle it. He wanted to demand how the hell she knew that it was hard for him to dive beneath the surface, that he preferred to live his life in the shallow end of the pool. He wanted to walk away.
But curiosity—the need to know this woman—stopped him.
Swallowing down the lump of emotion until it lodged in his chest like a stone, Zane kept his voice steady and sure. “Tell me.”
She searched his face for a long, suspended moment during which Zane absolutely did not hold his breath. He had no idea what she was looking for, or what she saw in his expression, but eventually she said, “Okay. So you know my mom has MS. And you know my dad was her primary caregiver, from the time I was about eight years old, when she was first diagnosed.”
Zane nodded, every particle of his being focused on the tall, polished beauty in front of him. Even after a kiss hot enough to burn down the world, even in the midst of revealing her darkest personal history, with her honey brown hair mussed and her makeup smudged, she still made everything in his body go tight with yearning.
“He worked so hard, my dad.” Felicity’s voice drifted a bit, her far-off gaze fixed on some memory. “My mom, too, when she could. But there was always more to do around the house. We couldn’t afford help, and my mom’s relatives would visit every now and then to pitch in, but they had their own lives, their own families, their own problems. My mother’s illness was ours. Our family, our problem.”
“Your life,” Zane said, realization sinking in. “Your mother was the one who was sick, but it affected all three of you. You all had to live with it.”
“I’m not complaining—obviously, it was worst for her. Some days, when the symptoms flared up, she’d be achy, unsteady on her feet.” Felicity paused, and moisture welled along the dark line of her bottom lashes. “Sometimes she lost her words. She couldn’t make herself understood, and it was like watching someone trapped in a prison, screaming to get out—but the prison was her own failing body. Her damaged brain, betraying her.”
“That must have been tough to watch.” Zane took a step toward her, not sure what to say, but damn sure he wanted to put his arms around her and shelter her from the memories that put that terrible, haunted pain in her pretty amber eyes.
But Felicity held up a hand to halt him, and Zane stayed put. There was a brittle courage to her stance that might shatter if he touched her.
“It was hard,” she admitted. “But it was hardest on Mom and Dad. They were at home, dealing with it all the time. I could at least escape to school, but I felt guilty about it. To compensate, I worked hard in all my classes, I took on extra credit projects and joined any club that would have me—because I knew I had to get a scholarship. All our money, whatever my dad could piece together from the jobs he could do at home, it all went into my mother’s care. There was nothing left over for college. And I wanted to go to college, so badly I lived and breathed for that and nothing else.”
Shame stole the color from her cheeks, leaving her pale as salt, her mouth a bitter twist of self-hatred. Zane got it. “College was your ultimate escape. Getting there would mean your life could finally start being about you.”
Surprise flickered through her shadowed eyes. “Yes, exactly. And it was perfect, an escape I didn’t need to feel bad about, because my parents wanted it for me. They were so proud when I got that scholarship, so pleased for me to have that chance. My mom cried. I think it had really weighed on her, that they couldn’t set aside a college fund for me. She had to deal with that guilt, on top of everything else.”
“Guilt is toxic,” Zane said harshly, his own past threatening to rise up and swamp him.
Felicity frowned slightly. “Guilt can be paralyzing, but it can also be a good reminder. It can keep you from repeating bad choices and making the same terrible mistakes over and over.”
Jerking his head out of his own memories, Zane shuddered all over like a dog shaking off water. Focus, he ordered himself. “So you fulfilled your family’s dreams and went to college. Doesn’t sound like a terrible mistake to me.”
Felicity’s shoulders hunched, and she propped herself against the brick wall as if she needed the support. “The mistake wasn’t going to college. It was how I acted once I got to NYU. It was as if all the years I spent studying and working and helping out at home and making dinner every night…it all caught up to me. I didn’t want to work. All I wanted to do was party with these new friends who didn’t know me as the serious, nerdy girl in the Latin club. They thought I was fun.”
A faint, joyless smile tipped up the corner of her mouth as the shock of understanding zipped down Zane’s spine. He had a bad feeling about what was coming next.
As if she could read it in his slack face, Felicity nodded. “Yep. I had so much fun that year, I forgot to go to class. I missed assignment after assignment, meetings with professors and emails from the dean. Almost as if I’d used up every ounce of self-control and responsibility when I was a kid, even once I understood how much trouble I was in, I couldn’t stop partying. I was finally the fun girl, and people liked her so much more than who I used to be. I didn’t want to give that up. But in the end, I didn’t have a choice.”
“You lost the scholarship.”
It wasn’t a guess, but she nodded in confirmation anyway. “Yep. I was too busy having fun to realize I was about to lose everything.”
“What did you do? Did you move back home?”
“I was too ashamed.” Felicity uncurled a bit, as if the lack of judgment in Zane’s tone enabled her to stand a little taller. “My parents would have welcomed me, I know, but they would have been so disappointed. I couldn’t face them. I got a low-paying, entry-level job as a receptionist at an event venue upstate to pay my portion of the rent on the student apartment I shared with three other girls, and I didn’t tell my parents I’d failed out of college for three years. By that time, I had managed to work my way up from receptionist to event coordinator at Cadbury Estate, helping to schedule and plan parties, weddings, business retreats, what have you…”
“And you went from partying to planning other people’s parties,” Zane finished. His mind reeled, trying to take in everything she’d said—and everything she hadn’t. He could easily imagine what her life at home was like, the constant stress and the shouldering of too much responsibility at too young an age. It was no wonder she’d gone wild at the first taste of freedom.
“So you see why I have a hard time letting go and enjoying myself?” Felicity stared at him as if willing him to understand.