McKettricks of Texas: Tate (20 page)

He did. A big lump rose in his throat. He wanted her physically, but there was so much more to it than that.

“If you’re talking about that fling with Cheryl,” Libby told him, “I forgave you for that a long time ago.”

Tate raised his hand to her cheek, brushed it lightly with the backs of his knuckles. “Maybe you believe that,” he said, “but I’m not sure I do.”

Her eyes widened again, and patches of pale pink pulsed in her cheeks, then faded. “If you could go back in time,” she asked, after several long moments, “what would you change, Tate? Can you even imagine a world without your children in it?”

Tate unhooked Libby’s seat belt, laid his hands on either side of her face so she wouldn’t look away before she heard him out. “No,” he said gruffly, “but if I had the kind of power we’re talking about here,
you and I
would have conceived the twins. They’d be ours, together.”

She turned her head, and her lips moved, light as the flick of a moth’s wings, against his palm.

Fire shot up Tate’s arm, set his heart ablaze, spread to his groin and hit a flash point. He barely contained the groan that rose from somewhere in the very center of his being.

Libby met his gaze again. Held it. “Do you know what would have made it impossible to forgive you, Tate? If you’d denied those little girls, or bought your way out of the situation somehow—a lot of men in your position would have done that—but you took all the fallout. You did right by your children, and I’m pretty sure you
tried
to do right by Cheryl—”

In the back, Hildie whimpered, wanting out.

Tate shut off the engine, but made no move to get out of the truck and lower Hildie to the ground. “What about
you,
Lib?” he asked miserably. “I sure as hell didn’t do right by you, now did I?”

She reached across, touched his arm. “I’m a big girl now,” she said. “I’m over it.”

“Over it enough to trust me?”

She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Until you give me reason not to,” she said.

Hildie began to carry on in earnest.

Tate got out of the truck, opened the back door and two-armed the chubby old dog out of the vehicle and onto the ground.

Libby got out, too, and stood at the edge of the Ruizes’ lawn, looking toward the house. Tate watched as she shook her head in response to some private thought.

“I guess you heard,” he ventured, after a while, “that Isabel decided to take the boys and go live with her sister.” He was distracted, still thinking about how she’d said she’d trust him until he gave her a reason to stop.

Libby Remington was an amazing woman.

Libby turned her head to look at him again, nodded. “She didn’t waste much time getting out of here,” she observed, and there was a deliberately noncommittal note in her voice that diverted some of Tate’s attention from the riot she’d caused in his senses.

He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his jeans and tilted his head to one side. Hildie squatted a few feet away, then came back to stand between him and Libby, tail wagging, tongue lolling, eyes hopeful that a good time would be had by all, dogs included.

“I told Isabel she was welcome to stay here on the Spur for as long as she wanted,” Tate said quietly, “but she decided to leave right away. Nico said she saw Pablo everywhere she looked, and that was too painful.”

Libby considered that, nodded. Hildie went off, found a short, crooked stick in the grass, brought it to Libby, and dropped it at her feet.

With a smile, Libby bent, picked up the stick and tossed it a little way.

Hildie trundled awkwardly after it. Brought it back.

“Why the impromptu dinner invitation, Tate?” Libby asked mildly. “And what’s with all the lumber and shingles and bags of cement?”

Tate bent, picked up Hildie’s stick, and threw it a little farther than Libby had. While the dog searched through the wild grass that grew beyond the edge of the lawn, Tate held out a hand to Libby.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll explain while I show you around.”

Libby hesitated, then took his hand. Hildie had found the stick, clasping it between her teeth, but she seemed to be done playing fetch for the time being.

Tate took care not to crush Libby’s fingers as he led her up the front steps and into the house. The sexual charge that had arced between them on the drive out of town had gone underground, though Tate knew it would reassert itself sooner rather than later.

He watched Libby as she looked around, waited for the dog to waddle in, then quietly shut the door.

Over the few days since Isabel and Pablo’s relatively few possessions had been loaded into a rented truck and hauled away, Tate had removed the old flooring and knocked out several walls. Sheets of drywall waited to be nailed in place once the new framing was in.

Libby’s expression was curious and a little pensive when she looked at him. “I still don’t understand,” she said. “All this—?”

Tate put a hand to the small of her back and steered her toward the kitchen. It was the only room in the house he hadn’t torn apart—yet.

“I’m planning on living here, Libby,” he said, and his heart beat a little faster, because her reaction to that news was vitally important to him. “Maybe not for good—but for a while.”

“Why?” she asked reasonably, folding her arms. The last light of day flowed in through the window behind her, and to Tate, she looked almost luminous, like a figure in stained glass.

“I’m not sure I can explain,” he answered, reaching out to flip a switch so the single bulb dangling from the middle of the ceiling illuminated the kitchen. “I want to see what it’s like to live in a regular-size house. Drive to a job every day. Actually work for a living.”

Libby smiled faintly at that. She
did
live in a “regular-size house,” and she certainly made her own way in the world. “I wouldn’t know about commuting,” she quipped, “but working for a living is overrated, in my opinion.”

Tate shoved a hand through his hair, more nervous than he’d expected to be. He’d planned this evening carefully, right down to the steaks marinating in the refrigerator and the coals heating in the portable barbecue grill out back and the good red wine tucked away in one of the cupboards. It had made so much sense during those night hours spent prying up carpeting and stripping walls to the insulation and framework.

Libby came to him, laid her palms to his chest.

The gesture was probably meant to be comforting, but she might as well have hit him with a couple of defibulator paddles, given the effect her touch had on him.

“Tate?”
Libby urged.

He sighed. He’d meant to ask Libby to move in with him, come and live in that modest house by the bend in the creek as soon as the remodeling was done; but now he realized what a half-assed, harebrained idea it was. Libby
wasn’t ready for that kind of constant intimacy, and he wasn’t, either.

The twins barely knew Libby, and of course the reverse was true, as well. He would make any sacrifice for his children, but he couldn’t expect Libby to feel the same way.

“Give me a minute,” he finally said, his voice hoarse, “to pull my foot out of my mouth.”

She moved closer, frowning, then slipped her arms loosely around his waist. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

A reasonable question, Tate thought. “I wish I knew,” he said.

Libby rested her head against his chest for a few moments, as though she were listening to his heartbeat, and the smell of her hair made him feel light-headed—it was as though all the oxygen had suddenly been sucked out of the room.

Finally, she looked up at him, and her eyes were at once tender and curious. “You’re serious about living here, aren’t you?” she asked.

Tate nodded. Maybe she’d hate the idea—that would be a problem for sure. And maybe she wouldn’t give a damn—which would be even worse.

“And for some reason,” Libby went on, “my opinion matters to you.”

“Yes,” he ground out. “For some reason, it does.”

“Why?” Libby seemed completely, honestly puzzled.

“Because—” Again, Tate’s neck burned. “Well, because it
would
matter to some women—they’d think I was crazy, moving out of a place like the ranch house, into this one…”

Libby brought her chin up a notch and set her hands on her hips. “Would it matter to you, if I thought you were crazy?”

“No,” he answered, after some thought. “If you
didn’t
think that, I’d figure you hadn’t been paying much attention.”

She laughed, stood on tiptoe to kiss the cleft in his chin. Then she looked around. “Alone at last,” she said. “Do you want me as much as I want you, Tate?”

“Yeah,” he replied, “and I’ve got the hard-on to prove it.”

“So I’ve noticed,” Libby crooned, grinding into him again. This time, there was no mistaking things—the move was deliberate.

“You might want to watch it,” Tate warned, his hands making their own way to where they wanted to be—cupping Libby’s ass and lifting her closer so he could do a little grinding of his own. “This time, I’m prepared. I have condoms.”

Libby moaned, her eyes half-closed, her head back. A fetching wash of pink played over her cheekbones.

When Libby was fifteen and Tate was seventeen, he’d taken her virginity in the back seat of his dad’s car, and she’d looked just the way she did now—flushed, eager, unafraid.

“I’m prepared, too,” she said, so softly that Tate barely heard her.

His knees weak, Tate dropped into one of the four folding chairs he’d bought to go with the card table, his temporary dining suite. Standing Libby between his knees, he unsnapped her jeans, undid the zipper, pulled them down, waited for her to protest.

She didn’t.

In fact, she kicked off her shoes and shed her jeans, right there in the kitchen. She was wearing ice-blue panties, trimmed in lace.

He nipped at her through the moist crotch, and she groaned, entwining her fingers in his hair.

“What do you mean, you’re prepared?” he murmured, hooking his thumbs under the elastic waistband.

“I’m—I’m on the p-pill—” she gasped.

Had the table been sturdier, Tate would have laid Libby down on it and eaten her thoroughly, but he knew the thing wouldn’t support even her slight weight. So he lowered her panties and plied her with gentle motions of his fingers until she was good and wet. Then he opened his jeans and eased her down slowly, onto his shaft, giving her a little at a time.

She wanted to ride him, and hard—that was evident in the way she moved, or tried to move.

Tate grasped her hips and stopped her. “Easy,” he murmured. “Slow and easy, Lib.”

She made a strangled sound, her eyes sultry, but she let him set the pace. Let him strip off her lightweight T-shirt and open her bra, so her perfect breasts were there for the taking.

Tate enjoyed them at his leisure until Libby made another sound—this one exasperated—and drew him into a kiss so hot that he nearly lost control and came right then and there.

“Do it,” she gasped, when the kiss finally ended, “damn you, Tate McKettrick,
do it!
”

He chuckled, a raspy sound, and took her in earnest then, raising and lowering her, fast and then faster, deep and then deeper.

The release was cataclysmic, blinding Tate, rending a long, hoarse shout from him, like that of a dying man. Through it, he heard Libby, calling his name over and over again.

And then they were both still.

Slowly, the world reassembled itself around them.

“
Damn,
woman,” Tate growled. “That was good.”

Libby giggled. “Yeah,” she said, moving to disengage herself. “Is there a working shower in this place?”

Tate stopped her from rising off him by tightening his grasp on her hips. He was getting hard again, and she was in for another ride.

“No,” he said, raising her and then lowering her again, until she’d taken all of him, until she gasped. “No shower.”

“Tate—”

He bent his head, tongued her right nipple until she groaned and arched her back, offering him full access. “Ummm?” he asked, his mouth full of her then.

“I—oh, God—I’m already coming—I—”

Tate slid his hands up, supporting her with his palms so she could lean back, give herself up to the orgasm.

He watched, fighting his own release, as Libby arched away from him, golden-fleshed, nipples hard and moist from his mouth, her hair falling free, her beautiful body buckling and seizing with pleasure.

When she cried out his name, and a long, sweet shudder of full surrender went through her, Tate couldn’t hold back anymore. He let himself go, with a raspy shout, and she rocked on him until he’d given her everything he had to give.

“I’m not sure I can survive a whole lot of that,” she admitted, a long time later, when they’d helped each other, bumbling and fumbling, back into at least some of their clothes.

“We need to spend more time together,” Tate said. “Get in some practice.”

Libby sighed contentedly. “And we’d—
practice
a lot?”

Tate grinned. “Maybe not on the kitchen floor, though. I was sort of planning on buying a bed, but, yeah, there would be a lot of rowdy sex.”

Libby made a comical move that might have meant her underpants were wedged in where they shouldn’t be. “I like rowdy sex,” she said.

He laughed. Padded over to the fridge for the steaks. “So I’ve noticed,” he responded.

Suddenly, she looked sad, and some of the glow was
gone. “What if sex is all we have together, Tate? All we’ve
ever
really had.”

Tate, halfway to the back door with the package of steaks in one hand by then, turned to look at her. “Then I’d say we were pretty damn lucky,” he responded. “But there’s more, and you know it.”

“Not that I’m angling to get married,” she blurted out. Then she blushed miserably and groaned. “But nobody said anything about marriage, did they?”

“You’re not ready for that,” Tate told her, setting the meat on the counter and going back to stand facing her, “and neither am I. I’ve got things to prove to you, Libby.”

She blinked. “Like what?”