He lifted his head and searched her face in the dull evening light. Emma saw the uncertainty there, the brief shadow of vulnerability she found so incredibly endearing. She smiled at him, hoping to put him at ease. “Meeting you was like my own private miracle.” The confession choked her up a bit, and Emma blinked back the sudden sting. “I love you, Dair MacRae.”
Before she could say any more, he groaned and kissed her again, and again. And again. He took his time and Emma gloried in his passion.
Her body tingled while her soul danced. She could imagine doing this for the rest of her life, and the idea filled her with complete and utter joy. Absorbing the mingled sounds of their breathing blended with nature’s harmony, her heart pounded in tandem with Dair’s.
Something about tonight was different. Dair’s kisses were gentle, seeking, almost inspiring. Gentler than he’d ever been, he touched and stroked, caressed and worshipped. Blissful, Emma let her body melt against him as he whispered mindless praise and taunting promises of what was to come.
“You are perfect, you know.” He licked the whorl of her ear as his hands sought her naked breasts.
“You’re the one who’s perfect, MacRae.”
“I’m trying to go slow. Trying to make this good for you.”
“It’s always good.” Emma arched her back as his thumbs brushed across her nipples, slowly. He bent his head and kissed the top swell of her breast, then the side, pointedly ignoring the straining tip. He nibbled and nuzzled, teased and tempted. With the barest of movements, he drove Emma into a frenzy.
“Please,” she whispered.
“Hmm?” He tasted the heavy underside of one breast. “Did you say something, Texas?”
Her breathing quickened, then burst out in a sharp hiss when his lips finally closed over the tight crest.
He kept to his word and continued his loving slowly—much to Emma’s chagrin. He suckled her sweetly, and the absorbing sensation swirled a path to her toes. Heat pooled in her womb, and her legs shifted apart in anticipation.
Sitting back, Dair’s gleaming gaze met hers, and his smile went positively wicked. His eyes admired her nakedness as he fondled the aroused peaks of her breasts.
Her hips jerked. “Oh, please…please!”
“Not yet, my impatient beauty.”
His hands trailed a path down over her belly, seeking her center. Finding what he sought, Dair parted the wet folds with his thumbs and proceeded to drive her insane with erotic demands. His exploring fingers took full liberty, until her body quaked and shivered. Gripping his shoulders for purchase, Emma thought she’d surely die from the pleasure he gave her. When he lightly stroked the aching nub that strained for release, Emma was dying from anticipation. “Dair, I’m almost…”
“Take me, Emma.” His hands cupping her bottom, he positioned her quickly. With a groan, he thrust upward, hard and fast.
Gasping at the intimate contact, Emma exploded, her cries echoing through the evening air as he drove her higher into bliss. Without waiting for her to recover, Dair rocked her forward with an insistent push.
Keeping his thrusts easy and deep, he nudged her back into the sensual waves. Perfection, Emma thought mindlessly. Every tender movement touched her very core. Pleasure blazed from the depths of her body.
Gripping her hips tighter, Dair held her firmly. “Now you’ll come with me, Texas.”
“I can’t. Not again.”
“You will.” He tilted her hips while angling his body to drive even deeper inside her. He probed, stroked and pleasured her…wringing moan after moan from her throat.
Leaning forward, he suckled her breasts again with more urgency, latching on to one nipple until she caught his hair and dragged him upward to meet her kiss. He kissed her then, moving his tongue in and out to match the insistent movements of his body. Instinctively, Emma matched his ardor as she found her own rhythm.
Labored, he coaxed roughly, “Just let yourself go, Emma. Feel me. Feel yourself. Just a little further. Reach for it.”
He could have asked her anything, done anything, said anything, and Emma would have complied. She was clay in his hands, soft and boneless. Dair could shape her within his palms into anything he wanted. She belonged to him. Heart, soul and mind.
Throwing back her head, Emma rode him until she shattered a second time. Her body clenched around his shaft in agonizing contractions until she milked the hot rush from him. With a hoarse shout of completion, Dair followed her over the edge as his pleasure pumped through her.
I
F HE DIED AT THIS VERY
moment, Dair would face his judgment a content and happy man. He kissed Emma deeply, hoping that he could show her that they shared far more than a physical connection. Something he’d never had before, something he’d always wanted but never dared hope would happen. She was right, their love was a miracle. He didn’t deserve it, but he wanted it anyway. Needed it. Needed her. For as long as he had left.
“I can’t help myself,” he murmured against her lips in a brief moment of weakness mixed with bittersweet realization. “I just can’t help it.”
“What can’t you help, MacRae?” She broke away from his searching mouth and looked up at him, the gray twilight shadowing her expression. Her blue eyes glistened with love and hope against dark lashes, scorching Dair’s soul. Suddenly, it didn’t matter that it was a mistake. He needed to say the words. He needed for her to hear them.
Lost in her eyes, he bared his heart. “I love you, Emma.”
She stilled for a brief and shining moment. Then her slow, perfect smile had him smiling back. “I know.”
“You do?”
“Mmm-hmm.” She laid her head upon his shoulder and sighed with obvious happiness. “I’ve known you loved me for a while, now. You just had to come around to the idea yourself. Took you long enough.”
“How can you know me so well?” he asked, kissing her hair and closing his eyes against the pain welling within them.
“Loving you is the easy part,” she said with a laugh. “Knowing you is quite another story. Sometimes I think you’re hiding a deep, dark secret and the rest of the time I think I know you better than you know yourself. That’s all part of the great mystery of being in love, MacRae. You’ll have to promise to get used to it.”
“I promise that I’ll always love you.” At least that was a vow he could keep. He would love her until his last breath.
Too bad he couldn’t promise her the moon and the stars, promise to cherish, honor and protect her all the days of her life. Too bad they were going to be cheated out of happily ever after. But as Emma nibbled on his earlobe, Dair decided that he’d worry about lost love and broken promises in the morning.
Fighting the despair renting his chest, he rolled her beneath him and wrapped himself in the wonder of Emma. All he wanted was to lose himself further into her safekeeping and ignore the impending demons. They would claim their due in time. Talking could wait until tomorrow. For right now, for tonight, she was his.
And he was hers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
J
UST AFTER DAWN ON THE
morning of her thirtieth birthday, Emma awoke to the sound of a party horn blowing in her ear. Loudly.
“Get up, Miss Emma,” Genny shouted. “It’s your birthday and Annabelle and Johnny have made pancakes for breakfast and we need to eat fast so we can do our chores and you can give us the lessons you promised because Mr. Dair says the party can’t start until all the work is done but Annabelle says we can’t eat breakfast without you because that would be rude. Nana Nellie didn’t like us to be rude.”
Emma grabbed hold of the horn just before the little girl stuck it back in her mouth. “Thank you, Genny. Why don’t you run back downstairs and tell Annabelle I said not to wait on me. I’ll be right down.”
“All right. Hurry, Miss Emma.”
“I will, dear.”
Emma rolled from the bed and stretched her stiff muscles. She’d slept four to the bed last night—herself, two wiggle worms, and a lump of a log that wouldn’t move. Despite the lack of rest that resulted from sleeping with three girls, Emma hadn’t minded. After weeks on the road in all sorts of conveyances, it was nice to sleep in a bed that didn’t move. Also, the children were so thrilled to have her around that they made her feel like a princess. Last night, a princess with three little peas in her bed. An impish smile stretched her lips as she mentally added,
Instead of a prince. Or a prince disguised as an outlaw.
It was a surprisingly pleasant beginning to a day she’d long expected to be anything but, and when she made her way downstairs, she did so with a smile on her face. In the kitchen she found organized chaos that reminded her of home, though on a larger scale. The kitchen boasted two stoves, two iceboxes and two long tables each with chairs for fourteen. Annabelle flipped flapjacks at one stove while at the other, Dair fried bacon in a pair of cast iron skillets. “Think five pounds will be enough?” he asked a redheaded boy around eight years of age.
“Yes, sir.” Then, he grinned. “For me, anyway.”
One of the older girls spied Emma in the doorway and called, “Happy birthday, Miss Emma.”
The greeting led to a whole chorus of good mornings and happy birthdays. Dair glanced over her and winked. That, along with the memory of the previous evening’s lovemaking, brought a flush of warmth to her skin.
Upon finishing her meal, Emma rose to help with the dishes but a pair of bossy ten-year-olds shooed her outside instead. The sun was a bright yellow ball in a clear blue sky. Dew sparkled like diamonds on the grass and roses perfumed the air. Emma drew a deep breath and sighed on a smile. Turning thirty wasn’t so bad after all. Happy, she twirled around and laughed.
“Well, now. Isn’t that a right fine sight on a summer morning.”
Emma turned to see a stranger—actually three strangers—approach the house from the direction of the barn. She took an instinctive step back. They were big men, each of them standing well over six feet. They wore broad-brimmed, high-crowned straw hats, bandanas around their necks and gun belts around their hips. They all wore their trousers tucked into knee-high boots.
“I say ‘right fine’ doesn’t do her justice. She’s a real beauty, Lucky.” The man in the center whipped his hat off his head. “Mornin’, ma’am.”
The man on the left stepped in front of the man in the center. “Beauty isn’t good enough. She’s a goddess. Howdy, miss.” He tipped his hat and winked.
The man on the right—who by elimination must be Lucky—shook his head sadly. “Boys, y’all are pitiful. The lady is not only pretty as a field of bluebonnets, she’s also too smart to fall for such blatant flirtation. Don’t waste your time on them, honey. These windbellies blow harder than a middlin’ hurricane.” He thumbed his hat back on his head and folded his arms across a broad chest. “I’m the man here with the follow-through.”
“You’ll be following-through all the way to Hades.” The screen door banged shut behind Dair. “Johnny, you better get me a gun. Looks like we have varmints in the peanut patch.”
In that moment, Emma lost the men’s attention. She might have felt slighted had she not paid attention to the four pairs of eyes. In the three strangers, she saw identical emotion—joy. In Dair’s eyes the emotion she saw was more difficult to pinpoint. Joy, yes, but she saw more than that. It was the same kind of look Kat sometimes got when she looked at Mari’s children. Sadness, almost grief. But it was gone in an instant, replaced by a gleam of pleasure and the twitch of a grin on his lips.
The one called Lucky said, “Sonofabitch, MacRae. I didn’t think we’d ever see you again.”
Then he was striding toward Dair, his friends right on his heels. Dair took three steps forward, then the four men met with handshakes and back slaps and punches to the shoulders. Cade Hollister, Logan Grey and Holt Driscoll, of course. And Alasdair MacRae.
They were, Emma thought, breathtaking examples of the male of the species. And she was staring. Unabashedly appreciative. Why, she was acting just like her grandmother Monique. Is that what happens when one gets old? You lose your sense of shame?
Recalling her interlude with Dair yesterday, she grinned. Yep. Not an ounce of shame. Too bad it took her until thirty to be shameless.
Children hung out windows upstairs and down, gathered in doorways and eased out onto the porch, watching the quartet with wide eyes. Emma could only imagine how they felt, going so long without an adult presence at the home now overflowing with grown-ups. And not just any grown-ups, but the first four, the legends of the Piney Woods Children’s Home.
“So what’s the emergency?” one of the newcomers asked. “Not that I wasn’t happy to make the trip, but your telegram sounded serious.”
Dair nodded, then cut his gaze toward Emma. “We do have business, but it can wait until after the party. Today is the lady’s birthday, and y’all arrived just in time to help us kick off the festivities. Now, find your manners, boys, and I’ll introduce you. Maybe a miracle will happen and you can fix her first impression of you so that you don’t seem so stupid.”
He paused, appeared to draw a bracing breath, then smiled at her. “Emma Tate, I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Holt Driscoll.”
The man who’d called her a beauty stepped forward. Like the other two, he was tall and muscular, his features chiseled, his grin ready. His eyes were a deep sapphire blue that reminded Emma of Luke Garrett’s. He reminded her of Luke in a lot of ways which probably wasn’t all that surprising since Dair had said Holt Driscoll was a Texas Ranger, too.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am. I hope my comments didn’t offend you. It’s just that you made such a pretty picture and I had to speak from my heart.” His eyes gleamed and he offered up a boyish grin as he added, “Happy birthday, ma’am.”
Oh, my. He certainly is a charmer. “Emma. Please call me Emma. All of you.”
Dair’s eyes certainly didn’t twinkle as he gestured toward the man who’d called her a goddess. “Cade Hollister.”
Mr. Hollister was probably the most classically handsome of the three with dark hair, brown eyes and shoulders almost as broad as Dair’s. She could picture him as an investigator. Dair had said he hunted missing children and she wondered how being raised in an orphanage might have affected his choice of profession.