She moved against him with a small wordless whimper that made
his heart contract. He pulled the pillow beneath his head and lay on his back and wrapped his arms around her as she snuggled close. By the time they were settled her head rested on his chest and her arm was draped across him.
She smelled like his soap again. Not Irish Spring. He’d already had to switch brands once because getting a hard-on every time he took a shower could be inconvenient, to say the least. Now she smelled like his new soap, Zest. He supposed he’d be getting rid of that brand, too.
“Want to tell me about it?” he said into the darkness.
She shuddered.
“Okay,” he said, supremely conscious of the soft warm curves pressed up against him. But this was Carly, and she was hurt and scared and needed him, and no way was he going to even so much as think about sex, not tonight. “We can play twenty questions. Was it one of the old bad dreams, or an all-new one?”
“Eyes,” she said, shuddering again. “I dreamed about his eyes. They were looking at me. And then I dreamed about the Home.”
Matt had no trouble understanding that the eyes she referred to belonged to the bastard who had attacked her. He tightened his hold on her fractionally, a purely reflexive gesture in response to how close he had actually come to losing her, and she snuggled closer still. He always forgot how petite she was, but with her pressed up against him like this her size was pretty hard to miss. Her feet reached about halfway down his calves and her bones felt delicate and there was really no weight to her at all, just a sensation of roundness and heat and lush femininity …
Don’t go there.
“You’ve never told me much about the Home. You weren’t there long, were you? A week? Two?” He asked about the Home because he figured it would be easier for her to think about that than the bastard who had attacked her. Just the thought of Carly being helpless and scared and at the mercy of somebody bigger and stronger than she was made him feel homicidal. If he had anything to say about it, she wasn’t going to go back there again even in her mind.
“Eight days.”
“So what was it about it that gives you nightmares all these years later? Were they bad to you there? Abusive?”
He could feel the negative movement of Carly’s head, the tightening of her fingers on his flesh. Her hand lay up near his shoulder with her arm curved across his chest, but not by the wildest stretch of the imagination could her grip be termed an embrace. It felt more like she was hanging on to him for dear life.
“Curls?” he prompted. He called her that deliberately, hoping the childhood nickname would remind him that this was his friend, his pal, the little girl with the acres of hair who’d followed him around everywhere when they were kids, yakking a blue streak all the while. In the beginning he’d considered her a giant pain in the ass, and even after he’d grown to like the little nuisance and finally regard her almost as another sister he’d never in his wildest dreams thought that one day he’d be lying in bed beside her like this, turned-on to his back teeth.
“They were nice to me,” she said in a shaky little voice, and pressed closer. “But I was scared. I was only eight years old, and I really, really missed my mother, and I didn’t have any idea why they’d taken me away from our neighbor who was supposed to be watching me until my mother came back and dropped me off at what kind of looked like a school. And nobody bothered to explain it. I guess they thought I was too young to understand. But it wasn’t a bad place, it was actually okay, there was enough to eat and we all had our own beds and a locker for our things—not that I had very many things—and we could go outside. There was a big area in back, and a barn, and some animals. They even had a donkey. He was funny, heehawing all the time.”
She paused and took a deep breath.
“Then I got sick and they put me in the infirmary. The nightmares are about when I was in the infirmary.”
She paused again. Matt felt her shiver.
“Hey,” he said, patting the soft bare skin between her shoulder blades comfortingly. At least, he meant it to be comforting. There was no doing anything about the fact that the silkiness beneath his fingers reminded him of other, even silkier parts of her body. “I’m
right here. You’re safe. As safe as you’ve ever been in your life. Tell me about the infirmary.”
She rubbed her cheek against his chest. Matt felt the moist heat of her breath flutter across his nipple and gritted his teeth. Carly needed him right now, and not for sex. She needed somebody she could count on to make her feel safe. That would be him. It struck him that she really had nobody else.
“It was kind of like a dorm room, a little bigger than that but not really big. There were four of us in it. The others were all older than I was and a couple of the girls were really kind of tough and I was afraid of them, a little. They didn’t pay much attention to me, I was too young, but they’d talk to each other and I would lie up in my bunk and listen. Oh, there were bunk beds, white iron bunk beds with metal springs that creaked every time anybody moved. I had one of the top bunks.”
She stopped talking. Matt gave her a minute, then said, “Okay, you’re in the top bunk. Then what?”
Carly took a deep breath. “I don’t really know. I just remember lying up there in the dark and hearing the beds creak. That’s what the dream is, you know, the one about the Home. Just me lying there in the dark with my eyes open, and I hear a bed creak.” She shivered. “I don’t know why that scares me so. Maybe because that was about the time I started getting really afraid that my mother wasn’t ever coming back. When you’re eight years old, that’s the scariest thing in the world.”
Her mother hadn’t come back, Matt reflected grimly. As far as Matt knew, Carly had never seen her again. She’d died out in California when Carly was a teenager. Matt remembered Carly and her grandmother flying out for the funeral, and Carly coming back and being really quiet and withdrawn for a couple of weeks. It had been summer, and he had been so bothered by little Mighty Mouth’s unnatural silence that he’d started climbing up to her room in the middle of the night and coaxing her out on midnight adventures to cheer her up. If her grandmother had ever found out, she would have skinned Carly alive. But by the time school started again, Carly had been back to her old self.
“Hey,” he said, to get her in a happier frame of mind. “Remember when you fell out of that big tree down by the creek and broke your wrist?”
“Because you told me there was a snake in it and if I didn’t get down really fast it was going to slither up my shirt because snakes are attracted to heat? Yeah, I remember.” Her voice held both humor and reproach.
“I was thirteen,” he protested. “I had a fort in that tree, and you were a pesky little girl. Thirteen-year-old boys do not want pesky little girls near their forts.”
“You also walked me home and told my grandmother I broke my wrist by tripping over a root in the backyard.”
Matt smiled faintly. “She didn’t think much of you being in the woods with me, did she? And she didn’t like you climbing trees. I thought the least I could do, after I made you fall out of that tree, was keep you from getting in trouble for being in it in the first place, if I could.”
She was smiling. Matt could feel the movement of her facial muscles against his chest. She felt relaxed now, all pliant and yielding, radiating heat. He was all too aware that he was next door to naked and she wasn’t much more fully dressed and she was a woman and…
She yawned. “I feel so incredibly sleepy.”
So much for the effect he was having on her. “So go to sleep.”
“Matt.” She stirred against him, her hand sliding down over his chest to rest just above his waist, trailing pure fire as it went.
“Hmm?”
“Thank you.”
“For?”
“For saving for my life last night. And for this. For being here. I don’t feel scared with you here, and I’m so tired of feeling scared.”
“Not a problem.” Although, actually, it kind of was. Because he wanted to do her, so much that he kept having to picture little-girl Carly to keep from rolling over with her and—
“You’re not going to go away, are you? Can you just sleep here for the rest of the night?” She was sounding really drowsy now.
“Yeah, I can sleep here for the rest of the night.” If his voice was a shade dry as well as being gruff, well, he couldn’t help it. Sleeping wasn’t really exactly what he had in mind, but for her…“Just think of me as your own personal teddy bear.”
He felt her smile again.
“I like that.” Then she gave another mighty yawn. “ ’Night, Matt.”
“ ’Night.”
Seconds later he heard the softest of snores and realized that she had fallen asleep. He grimaced ruefully up at the ceiling. This was kind of like taking a little kid into a candy store and then telling him he couldn’t buy any. Downright cruel. But at least his bed was roomier than the couch. Even with Carly draped across him and the mother of all hard-ons he was more comfortable than he had been all night. He was just about to drift off himself when the damned cat jumped up on the bed and curled up near his head. He pushed it off. It came back. He pushed it off again. It came back. This went on until he gave up and the cat won. When he finally fell asleep, it was to the tune of Carly’s gentle snores tickling one ear and the cat’s rumbling purrs torturing the other.
His last waking thought was,
Welcome to domesticity.
Then he realized that someone way up there in the cosmos must be having a whole truckload of fun at his expense.
When he went downstairs the next morning the fun just kept on coming. All three of his sisters were seated around the table in the kitchen, where he’d instinctively headed, drawn both by habit and the alluring smell of fresh coffee. He’d showered, shaved, and put on his uniform without disturbing either Carly or the cat, which still slumbered by his pillow. The dog, though, came down with him. Grunting a good morning while the girls broke off their chatter to look at him in such a way that he knew just exactly what they’d been talking about, he crossed the kitchen to let Annie out into the backyard. Then, resigned, he turned around to face the battery of mascaraed eyes.
Erin started. “Did you have a good sleep?” she asked brightly.
“Okay,” he said, shooting a quelling glance at the three of them as
he crossed to the counter where the coffeemaker hummed away. “Carly had a nightmare. She was scared. I stayed with her. End of story.”
Yeah, right. Not if he knew these three.
“What does that do to your ‘no sex under my roof’ rule?” That was Lissa, grinning at him.
“We did not have—wait a minute, I’m not about to discuss my sex life with my sisters.” Matt cast Lissa a grim look and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Anyway, the rule stands.”
“She’s cute, Matt,” Dani said. “Actually, you two are cute together.”
“Give me a break,” Matt said, revolted. “She’s a friend.”
“Face facts, big bro: You’re in love.” Now Erin was grinning at him too. At the thought, Matt felt his blood run cold. No way. No how. Not happening.
“About time, too,” Dani said.
“You want to drop the subject?” If he sounded a little testy, it was because they were, as usual, making a whole lot of something out of nothing. What did they know about him and love? Nothing. They were girls: they saw love in every kiss. With that comforting reflection, Matt took a gulp of coffee and almost choked because it had something totally disgusting like vanilla in it. “Jesus, who made this?”
“I did,” Erin said. “It’s a specialty blend. Collin likes gourmet coffees.”
All three of her siblings rolled their eyes simultaneously.
“Hey, Matt, you look really hot in your skivvies,” Lissa said, and snickered. The other two nodded and grinned.
“Okay,” Matt said, putting down his cup and fixing his tormentors with a level look. “Give it a rest.”
“Just so you know,” Dani was trying to look grave while her eyes sparkled wickedly at him. “Girls really go for boxers more.”
“Don’t you three have somewhere you need to be?” Matt emptied the contents of his cup down the sink.
“It’s Sunday. Church.”
“Oh, yeah.” Now that Matt thought about it, he saw that they
were wearing dresses and heels, which for them either meant a hot Saturday night or a sober Sunday morning. No, given the demureness of the dresses, it was definitely Sunday morning. He glanced at Erin. “So where’s loverboy?”
“If you mean Collin, he’ll be here shortly,” Erin said with dignity.
“What about Thing One and Thing Two?”
“He’s talking about Andy and Craig,” Dani informed Lissa. She did not, Matt noticed, sound particularly insulted. Probably because the descriptions were apt. If pushed, he could have come up with an even more flattering one for loverboy.
“He’s just trying to change the subject. But it’s not working,” Lissa replied, then focused on Matt again. “We want to talk about you and Carly.”
“Not your business.” Matt dumped the entire contents of the coffeepot down the sink.
“Hey, that was for Collin,” Erin protested. “He’ll be here in a minute.”
“He can thank me later.”
“We took a vote,” Dani said. “You and Carly: we approve.”
“Well, now I can die happy,” Matt said, and turned on the faucet to rinse out the pot and, not incidentally, drown out the chorus.
“You do realize you have just a teensy little problem,” Erin said when he turned the water off. “Shelby’s going to be here any minute. She’s going to church with us.”
“Shit,” Matt said, setting down the pot as he had a lively vision of Carly coming down just in time to join this sure-to-be-happy gathering. “Can’t you find somebody besides Shelby’s brother to marry?”
“I could,” Erin said as Matt crossed to the door and opened it, whistling for Annie. To his relief, the dog came bounding in. “But why?”
“Because Collin’s pretty much a prick?” Dani suggested sweetly.
“He is not!” Erin was hot.
“Yeah,” Lissa concurred with a grimace. “He is.”
“Matt …” Erin looked at him appealingly.
“I’m outta this, ladies. As long as I don’t have to wear a pink bow tie to the ceremony, Erin can marry Collin if she wants to.” He spotted
Mike Toler, who’d drawn the morning’s Carly watch, and waved him in. “Even if he is a prick.”