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Did she? Trying to control her reasoning, Annie stared silently at Blake. Upon what should she base her decision? The past, which she couldn’t remember at the moment? The future, which was unknown? Reason? A powerful need was running through her body, driving her onward to join with a force she’d existed without for far too long.
Blake drew back, gave her space, breathing room between them—time.
And then, with no articulate thought, no perception of making a decision, she slid her own fingers beneath the waistband of her panties, lifted her hips off the thin mattress and pulled them down, watching Blake’s eyes follow every movement she made.
Loving the reverent, hungry look in his eyes.
“Yours, too,” she whispered, locking her fingers on the elastic around his hips and easing his briefs downward.
He lifted up, but his arms buckled and then he caught himself. Attempted to help her, and got the waistband caught around his knee. Blake had never once shown a moment of awkwardness when they’d done this in the past, just a powerful drive to be one with her.
In his controlled, rather quiet way.
She’d loved that man. Loved everything about him.
She liked this one, too. Maybe even, in some small way, a little bit better. There was something about knowing that she could move him to the extent that he wasn’t quite himself. That their time together mattered.
And then his underwear was on the floor with hers and he was back, sliding himself against her body, the hair on his legs brushing the skin of her thighs, and Annie wanted to laugh with sheer joy. To shout out the rightness of his return.
His fingers explored her feet and her calves, as he lightly massaged his way up her body. She lay there before him, completely comfortable now, secure in the knowledge that all their choices had been made and she was Blake’s. For now. She would give herself up to needs and wants and desires that were far beyond her comprehension, her control. For a few short hours she would leave worries behind and just live.
And when, some time later, one knee found its way between her thighs, and his other leg followed, settling him in the crook of her body; when she opened to him completely, felt him nudging against her, searching, and finally, finally, sliding into her wet readiness, Annie started to cry with the wonder of it all.
After six long years, Blake truly had come home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THERE WERE NO LIGHTS ON at the Wild Card Saloon when Blake pulled into the parking lot at five after seven on Wednesday night. The guys weren’t due until 7:30, but Verne should be there, getting the cards out.
Getting a little drunk.But then, Blake was forty-five minutes early. Time he’d allowed himself in case he’d had a call from Annie. In case she’d wanted to see him. She knew Wednesday nights were poker nights.
Was it only seven days since she’d crashed the party and made her absurd request?
And here he was, one short week later, possibly having fathered a child. Probably having fathered a child with her.
They’d not stopped at one try the night before, but had come together again and again, until Blake had been afraid he could stay awake no longer. And then he’d left, unwilling to risk a possible nightmarish episode.
One of the things he’d learned in his attempts to manage his condition was that any change in his environment or emotional status was likely to elicit an attack.
He made certain he was alone to handle them.
Thirty-five minutes until poker time and there were still no lights on in the saloon. There never were out front—not since Verne had let the place fall into such disrepair that, after only two years of managing it, he’d had to close the business. But there should be a light on in his apartment at the back.
Blake thought about waiting in his car. He didn’t know Verne all that well, as the old man hadn’t been part of the game six years before, when Blake had played with Cole and a few other guys in town. And in the two years he’d been back, Verne had only joined in the game a handful of times. Mostly he just came to collect the few bucks they paid him to let them use his place.
Whiskey money.
Blake didn’t know Jake Chandler, Verne’s nephew and the bar’s true owner, at all, in spite of the fact that the younger man was an original member of the Wild Bunch. A throw-over title from the old days, when Cole and Jake and Brady and Luke had been at River Bluff High School together and had sneaked illegal games of Texas Hold’em in between all the other exploits they’d managed to dream up.
Blake would have liked to have known them back then. Hell, he’d have liked to have been a part of any group of friends. Growing up as he had—on his own much of the time, while his uncle traveled, and then on the road himself, first with his uncle and then in his stead—Blake hadn’t noticed the loneliness. It wasn’t really until his return from Jordan, finding healing in the camaraderie of the old friends who’d accepted him as one of them as soon as Cole had pulled him back in, that he’d begun to realize all he’d missed.
No wonder Annie had struggled so hard to understand him. To believe he cared about her. She’d been seeking an emotional closeness that he hadn’t begun to understand. Even if he had, on some level, recognized it, he’d certainly not have known how to express it.
Funny how having your freedom, your dignity, your very life stolen from you had a way of waking a man up to the deeper things in life. Of opening him up to his own needs. His own weaknesses.
Blake had been stripped of the defenses that had kept him safe, leaving him vulnerable and aware.
And still living alone.
