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He got to his feet. Well aware he was risking his balls, he replied, “You know why,” and kissed her again.
Her groan tasted sweet on his tongue. Fingernails trailed from his shoulders all the way down his back, stopping at his ass to dig in and urge him forward. She rose onto her toes and twined a leg around his thigh. “Dammit, Shane, I didn’t ask for any promises—”
“Yes, you did.” Sliding an arm around her waist, he pulled her away from the tree. A pivot, a drop he controlled, and he had her on her back on the blanket. He planted a palm next to her head and braced himself on his arm. He used the other arm to hitch her leg over his shoulder. “You gave one, and you accepted one in this very spot.” Then he dragged the head of his cock through her center. “Does that stir any memories?”
She gasped. Her hands fisted in the blanket, and her spine bowed until her chin pointed to the sky. “That was a lifetime ago.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He did it again, drawing a lazy figure eight this time, hitting her clit solidly and then circling her entrance while she writhed under him. “There’s no statute of limitations on forgiveness.”
Her chest heaved as he increased the pressure and pace of the stroke. Her cheeks flushed. She rocked her hips and let out a tortured moan. He sympathized, because making his case hurt him as much as it hurt her. Sweat stung his eyes. His muscles burned from the strain of holding back. And his cock…his cock pounded like a second heart. But he didn’t let up. “Why did you follow through on the tours, Sinclair?”
“Because…because we had a deal.”
He slowed his stroke and lingered at her threshold, circling, circling. Killing himself. “Try again. I had no way of enforcing the deal, and we both know it. You didn’t have to be there. Not even once, but you were. Every time. Why?”
“Fuck it, Shane, I was curious.”
“Uh-uh. The night at the wedding was more than enough to satisfy any casual curiosity and put to rest any doubt in your mind that something still sparked between us.” Those sparks were a raging fire right now, but he just kept fanning the flames—moving fast as he stroked upward, and slow as he navigated the downward curve. “By the end of the first tour at the high school, you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I wanted you.” He angled up and whipped her clit again. “Why’d you keep coming? Why wade through painful memories to get some truth between us?”
Her head whipped back and forth. “I don’t know…closure.”
If he wasn’t already in such a world of hurt, he would have laughed. Instead he parked the head of his cock right at the tight, wet entrance quivering for a good, hard thrust. He flexed his hips and tested the resistance—and his own sanity. “Does this feel like closure?”
“Oh, God.” Her eyelids fluttered down. Her heel dug into his back. “No.”
“Why are you here with me, right now?” He eased back—had to—before instincts took the decision out of his hands. The retreat earned a sob from Sinclair.
“You know why,” she whispered.
Game over, thank Christ. He reared up, pulling her with him until he had her on her knees straddling his lap, his hands under her ass to keep her from jumping the gun. “Tell me. Say it like you mean it.”
“I—” Slender arms encircled his head, and her breath hitched. “I forgive you.” As soon as the last word passed her lips, he was inside her—home, a voice in his mind insisted—and then thought ceased as pleasure so intense it qualified as pain shot through him. From a universe away, he heard her cry his name and fought his way back to her.
“Thank you,” he murmured and started moving her on him with some attention and skill, because as unforgettable as their first time had been, he’d just as soon not fuck her like an eighteen-year-old amateur. Deliberately setting the rhythm a little slower than she wanted, he lifted her and brought her down hard enough to force a gasp out of her before he took her up again.
He wanted to kiss her, but she clung to him tightly, her chin digging into his skull with every move, and he wanted that, too, so he settled for pressing his face to the side of her throat. He quickened the rhythm. “I know that wasn’t easy for you. I’m going to make you another promise, Sinclair,”
“Don’t—”
Her word dissolved into breathless whimpers that meant only one thing. He picked up the pace. Suddenly, she arched up, her body strung so tight she trembled in his arms…and that was it for him. The ground slid away under his feet. He was falling. Fighting it, but falling. He forced once last burst of obedience from his muscles and thrust, rocking her hard.
Throu
gh a descending fog of oblivion, he managed to say, “I will never let you down again.”
Chapter Fourteen
If walls could talk, Sinclair mused as she pulled up to the curb in front of the Oglethorpe Inn. The last time she’d been here, she’d been resolutely single, attending the Daughters of Magnolia Grove’s annual Christmas Eve dinner with her family, watching Beau and Savannah crack apart when Mrs. Pinkerton had congratulated them on the new baby Beau hadn’t yet known they were expecting. Little oops. Beau hadn’t taken it well, to say the least. He’d let fear left over from a tragedy in his past dictate his reaction.
At the time, she’d been furious on her sister’s behalf, and not especially concerned with the reasons behind his ugly accusations or hasty retreat. She understood fear and distrust better now than she had at Christmas—or at least understood she shouldn’t hurl stones while standing in the middle of her own house of glass. Fear and distrust had been invisible copilots of her life since the summer when letting her heart take the controls had crash-landed her in a truly awful place. She and Beau actually had a lot in common when it came to coping mechanisms.
But people changed. Beau had. Shane definitely had. Maybe she could, too?
She cut the engine and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Maybe she already was changing? Not bravely, or particularly gracefully, she had to admit, but then again, if someone had told her last Christmas that the very near future would find her on her knees under the willow tree where she’d surrendered her virginity, telling Shane Maguire she forgave him, she would have laughed her ass off. A week after putting her feelings for Shane into words—and accepting the words from him—and nothing disastrous had happened. Fate wasn’t using them as chew toys, so far. She’d survived his version of a tour of downtown Magnolia Grove, the highlight of which had involved some very sinful acts in the parking lot behind the Presbyterian Church—yes, they could still do it in a car. He’d survived another Sunday dinner at her parents’ house before catching a red-eye to Los Angeles for a client in need. When she’d walked him out, he’d seemed a little tense and unsettled. Mind already on his work, she’d assumed, and then he’d thanked her for dinner and kissed her senseless, and she’d let it go. It wasn’t until a day later, when she’d driven downtown and passed the inn that she’d realized he was essentially living like a visitor in his own hometown—hotel, suitcase, rental car, laptop. Other than the view out the window, was it really so different than being in Los Angeles, or Virginia, or wherever?
The thought had left a slippery feeling in her stomach. It was. Of course, it was. He had connections to Magnolia Grove. But maybe it wouldn’t hurt to remind him?
When he’d called yesterday to let her know he’d be back in town this afternoon, she’d informed him she’d meet him at his hotel at three p.m. sharp. She was taking charge of their next tour.
