“Mmm,” she said, some indiscernible judgment underlying the innocuous sound. She held
out the spoon for him to taste. “And then you invite a waitress, who has a gang after
her, on a business trip. Are you sure you’re not the practical Wyatt Austin’s reckless
twin brother? This is anything but neat.”
He opened his mouth to answer but she guided the spoon forward. The delicate cream
sauce hit his tongue, the buttery decadence balanced perfectly with the fresh herbs
she’d added to it. “That’s delicious.”
She sniffed. “Of course it is. Told you I can cook.”
“And no, I’m not my evil twin brother. But being around you does tend to tempt me
away from my best laid plans. I was supposed to take things slow tonight.”
She reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze. “To be honest, I’m kind of glad you
didn’t. I was getting really nervous to come over here tonight. After a week apart,
I thought it might be awkward. Plus, despite what happened at The Ranch, it’s still
hard to wrap my head around all this. It feels a little surreal.”
He curled his fingers around hers, rubbing a thumb over her wrist. “Surreal?”
“A few weeks ago, I was serving you eggs and now I’m—”
“Serving me, period,” he said softly.
Her lashes dipped. “Yes.”
He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed the center of her palm. “It’s just as surreal
for me, love. Maybe best laid plans aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”
He could see her throat work as she swallowed hard. “You ready for dinner?”
“I’m ready for it all.”
ELEVEN
Kelsey finished wiping down the table in the kitchen and
loaded their dishes into the dishwasher while the storm still hammered the house.
Wyatt had told her not to worry about any of the cleanup. He had a housekeeper who
would be there the next day. But she wouldn’t have been able to sleep knowing that
dirty dishes were in the sink. Her sister, Brynn, had ingrained in her that no food
was to ever be left out. They’d waged a constant battle with roaches in the crappy
little rental they’d lived in growing up, and the habit of making sure everything
was spotless had never gone away. In her days of addiction, she’d lost sight of that,
but it’d been the first thing she’d gotten back on track with once she’d sobered up.
Clean house meant clean Kelsey.
She washed and dried her hands, then took a deep breath. Time to get back to Wyatt.
She didn’t know what else he had planned for tonight, but she wasn’t sure she could
survive another round with him. The experience in the shower had flayed her. Her emotions
felt raw and exposed, like shredded power lines writhing and sparking with danger.
She’d managed to keep things relaxed and light during dinner, but beneath her smiles
and jokes, she’d been trying to piece herself back together, slapping duct tape on
broken shit and hoping it held together.
She needed to figure out how to hold on to some shred of control in all of this. Otherwise,
she wouldn’t survive him. She knew how she could be. In the past, she’d fallen too
hard and too fast. And always for the wrong men. Her heart was entirely untrustworthy.
She needed to keep that part of her out of this. Sex she could do. To endure those
three days with Davis, she’d figured out how to shut off her emotions and just exist
as something to be used. She didn’t need to go that far with Wyatt, but if she’d learned
anything over the years, it was how men wouldn’t look too far past that physical stuff.
She could play the vixen, the seductress, and that was enough for a guy. And someone
like Wyatt, a man who treated his interactions with women like neat business arrangements,
would probably be more than happy to keep it at that level, too. She could let the
other stuff stay tucked away out of sight.
She turned off the light in the kitchen. Wyatt had told her he had a few phone calls
to make, but when she walked into the living room, she found him frowning at the flatscreen
TV that was perched above the massive stone fireplace. The weather radar filled the
screen, complete with a lot of green blotches and an ominous swath of red. The television
was on mute, but words ran across the bottom of the screen at a rapid pace.
“Everything okay?” she asked, stopping behind the cream-toned leather couch.
He glanced her way, then back to the screen. “They’ve just issued a tornado warning.
A wall cloud was spotted a few miles west of here. You see that little dot of blue
over there.” He pointed. “That’s the lake not far from here.”
“Well, shit.”
As if on cue, the slow-building whine of the county tornado sirens started up outside—faint
at first and then blaring as the siren rotated in their direction. Kelsey hugged her
elbows, the sound familiar but no less eerie every time. She’d lived in Texas all
her life and had gone through this ritual many a time, but those sirens never failed
to ratchet fear right through her. “Where’s the best closet to hide in?”
Wyatt got to his feet and held out a hand to her. “Come on. I’ve got a better place.”
The rain turned from a pattering to the plink of tiny hail stones against the windows
as Wyatt led her down an interior hallway and past a number of doors. At the final
door on the left, he stopped and turned the knob. “Watch your step. The stairs are
a little narrow.”
“You have a basement?” she asked in disbelief. That was about as rare as having a
snow blower in this part of the world.
“Sort of,” he said, leading her down the narrow staircase and shutting the door behind
them. The steps were carpeted and as they went lower, the sounds from above faded,
leaving a thick silence behind.
When they reached the bottom, he turned a knob on a panel of controls on the right
side wall, bringing the dark room into view. Recessed lights slowly came to full strength
from above and illuminated the posh leather couch and chairs in the center of the
room. On the far left, there was a wall of dark wood shelving packed from floor to
ceiling. But what drew her attention was the large screen gracing the main wall. It
was a movie lover’s dream come true. “Wow.”
He let go of her hand, shifting his stance and looking a little uncomfortable all
of a sudden. “We’re below ground level in here. So we should be fine if anything comes
through.”
“This is some personal theater,” she said, crossing the thick red carpet and walking
over to the wall of shelves. Rows and rows of DVDs filled the spaces. More than she’d
ever seen in one place before. She scanned some of the titles, running her finger
along the spines. “Wow. Did you buy out Blockbuster?”
He cleared his throat. “I have a bit of a thing for film.”
She peeked over her shoulder, amused at the faint edge of embarrassment in his tone.
Wyatt Austin could be sheepish about something? Who knew? She’d never seen even a
chink in his collected facade, but she found the little glimpse more than a bit endearing.
“I would say so.”
She went back to scanning. There was obviously some prescribed order to the collection,
but it definitely wasn’t alphabetical. Her finger ran over a group of foreign films,
then what looked to be Academy Award winners, and the last of the row was a group
of eighties teen movies:
Back to the Future
,
The Breakfast Club
,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
,
Dirty Dancing
.
She grabbed the last one and spun around, smiling. “
Dirty Dancing
? Tell the truth. You only have this one to woo women when they come over, right?
No straight man voluntarily owns this movie.”
He rubbed a hand over the back of his head. “For the record, I’ve never taken a date
down here. But truth be told, I got that one for when my sister, Leila, comes over.
It’s her favorite movie.”
She grinned. “She and my sister would probably get along. Brynn used to be obsessed
with this movie when we were growing up. Always the hopeless romantic.”
“And you’re not?” He sat down on the couch, propping an elbow on the back cushion.
Not anymore. Life had beaten that ridiculous notion out of her.
“Hardly.” She turned and slid the movie back in its place. “My favorite movie growing
up was
Terminator
2
.”
“Good choice. Amazing effects. Four Oscars.”
“Plus Sarah Connor was badass. I like movies that make me laugh or scare the crap
out of me. That one did a little of both.” She lifted her head to peek at the row
above her. Documentaries. Horror. Sci-Fi. And enough Hitchcock to require its own
section. “You’ve got so many. Have you actually seen all of these?”
“Every one of them. Many more than once.” He shifted on the couch to fully face her.
“I got kind of obsessed with movies when I was a kid.”
She walked over and sat on the opposite side of the couch, pulling her knees to her
chest. “How come?”
His shrug was near imperceptible. “The whole genius IQ thing has its perks now, but
wasn’t so much fun when I was young. Academic stuff made sense to me, but I was a
disaster on the social front. I couldn’t read other people at all. It was like they
were using a different language—saying one thing but really meaning another. And my
father had no tolerance for that deficit, so he was always pushing me into social
situations.”
She sat her chin on her knees and wrapped her arms around her legs. She’d already
figured Wyatt’s father wasn’t dad of the year based on how he’d disowned Jace. But
the guy sounded like an unsympathetic asshole. “That must’ve been a nightmare.”
“Looking back, I’m glad he didn’t let me get away with hiding from it. This world
isn’t built for introverts. But it felt like sink or swim back then. So, I started
to watch movies and TV shows as a way to study people, to teach myself to read expressions
and subtext and subtle shifts in body language. Actors are more deliberate about it
than everyday people. I had to learn that when someone’s lip curled, they were usually
being sarcastic. Or that laughter didn’t always signal something was funny. Picking
up those cues didn’t come naturally to me.”
“And like everything else, you became the master at it,” she guessed.
“I was determined to. I also became a fount of useless movie trivia.”
“So why don’t you ever bring girls down to your secret movie lair? It’s pretty cozy
down here.” And probably soundproof. For someone who hadn’t practiced BDSM in a long
time, Wyatt had a near perfect setup for a private dungeon. Maybe he wasn’t telling
the whole truth about his supposed hiatus.
He lifted an eyebrow. “You don’t believe me?”
She blinked, disconcerted by his spot-on assessment. “What?”
“Doubt just crossed your face,” he said, laying his arm across the back of the couch.
“I assure you, you’re the first woman I’ve brought down here who’s not family. I don’t
make a habit of exposing my geeky pastimes to others.”
She smiled. “It’s not
that
geeky. And I actually had a little bit of weird TV thing myself as a kid. I was obsessed
with all those old shows from the fifties and sixties.
Donna Reed
,
The Patty Duke Show,
Dennis the Menace
. Other kids were into cartoons and I just wanted to watch black-and-white sitcoms
on Nick at Nite and dress like I belonged in
Grease
.”
“Huh,” he said, tilting his head as if intrigued by her revelation. “Why do you think
you were so drawn to that?”
She shrugged. “My childhood wasn’t exactly conventional, so I guess I was fascinated
by these families where dads came home every day and moms cooked casseroles and everybody
seemed so damned happy. Looking back, that’s probably what drew me to cooking in the
first place. A home-cooked meal represented some piece of that fantasy world. So when
my sister started college, I bought this stack of old Betty Crocker cookbooks at a
garage sale and started trying the recipes. Brynn probably never wants to eat anything
made with Cream of Mushroom soup again.”
He smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes; compassion rested there instead. “Why didn’t
you go to culinary school after high school?”
She combed her fingers through her hair, not wanting to have this conversation. “I
wasn’t in a good place back then. Partying and my boyfriend became much bigger priorities
than casseroles.”
“Ah,” he said, those watchful eyes still on her.
“So were you into TV as much as movies?” she asked, desperate to get the topic back
to something safe.
“Not as much, but I can recite entire episodes of
Family Ties
and
The Cosby Show.
Not pretty.”
“I never saw either of those.”
A brief look of horror crossed his face, then he shook his head. “Man, I keep forgetting
how young you are. I think I’m in denial.”
She smirked and stretched her legs out, pressing her feet against his thigh. “I’m
old enough in the ways that count. And truth be told, there are days I feel like I’ve
lived three lifetimes already.”
He slipped a hand around her ankle, rubbing a thumb along the delicate bones as he
watched her. “An old soul.”
A wounded one at least. But she didn’t say that part out loud. They weren’t here to
dig into her ugly, good-girl-gone-bad life. That was off limits. She allowed her other
foot to slide up and over his thigh, her toes tracking closer to his crotch. Maybe
if she could get the focus redirected back to the reason they were here, he’d stop
looking at her like he wanted to scoop all her secrets out of her.
He locked his other hand around the ankle of her roaming foot, his grip firm. “I don’t
remember giving you permission to touch me there, love.”
She wet her lips and lowered her lashes, going into her safe zone—temptress mode.
“Are you complaining? We’ve got nothing better to do while we wait out the storm.”
His gaze narrowed as he held both her ankles and moved them away from his lap. “That’s
not going to work on me, Kelsey.”
She frowned, her spine stiffening. “What are you talking about?”
“I know you’re used to controlling the situation. And not many men could resist that
come-hither look you just threw my way. But you need to know, it’s not a wise tactic
to take with me. Topping from the bottom won’t be acceptable.”
“I wasn’t—”
He let go of her ankles. “Stand up.”
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from talking back again and got to her feet.
He was right. She’d known exactly what she’d been doing. And if the roles had been
reversed and a submissive had tried that with her, she wouldn’t have let it slide
either. But she hadn’t expected Wyatt to take this so seriously. They liked each other,
had good chemistry. Wasn’t having a little sexy fun what this was about?
But clearly she’d underestimated Wyatt in this arena. She’d expected him to throw
some power around in the bedroom, act the part. But as he followed her movements with
a hard gaze and a locked jaw, she realized he wasn’t putting on a show at all. He
may be out of practice, but this was no role. This was who he was—the real man beneath
the urbane surface.
She swallowed hard, honest fear entering the equation for the first time. Wyatt was
expecting her to truly submit. For this to be real. He wanted her surrender. Her palms
went damp.
And so did her panties.
She blinked, surprised at her body’s almost instant response. “I’m sorry, sir.”
He pointed at a spot on the floor. “In front of me. Now.”
She lowered her head and stepped to where he’d indicated, standing between his spread
knees. She couldn’t miss the twitch in his pajama pants, his own arousal stirring.
She had the ridiculous urge to fall to her knees and beg his forgiveness, to take
him in her hand, her mouth, to replace that look of disappointment with one of pleasure.