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“I sweat!” he exclaimed, which made no sense at all. “You said I never sweat.”
What was he talking about? She tried again. “I was alone at the swimming hole when he showed up. I asked him to leave, and he wouldn’t. It got nasty.”
“And the son of a bitch paid for it.” He grabbed her arm. “Two months ago I was getting ready to marry another woman. Why can’t you cut me some slack? Just because you jumped off the deep end doesn’t mean I have to jump right in, too.”
She was used to reading his mind, but not this time. “What exactly do you mean by ‘jump off the deep end’?”
His mouth twisted in scorn. “Fall in love.”
The words were so contemptuously uttered, they should have left blisters on his lips. She pulled away and took a step back. “I’d hardly call falling in love ‘jumping off the deep end.’ ”
“Then exactly what would you call it? I was ready to spend the rest of my life with Lucy. The rest of my life! Why can’t you get that?”
“I get it. I just don’t understand why we’re talking about this now, after what just happened.”
“Of course you don’t.” His face had gone pale. “You don’t understand anything about reasonable behavior. You think you know me so well, but you don’t know anything about me.”
One more woman who thought she understood Ted Beaudine . . .
Before she could get them back on track, he resumed his attack. “You brag about how you’re all emotion. Well, a big frigging round of applause. I’m not like that. I want things to make sense, and if that’s a sin in your eyes, then tough.”
It was as if he’d suddenly started spouting a foreign language. She understood his words, but not the context. Why weren’t they talking about the part she’d played in the disaster with Spence?
He swiped a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. “You say you love me. What does that even mean? I loved Lucy, and look how meaningless that turned out to be.”
“You loved Lucy?” She didn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it.
“Five minutes after I met her, I knew she was the one. She’s smart. She’s easy to be with. She cares about helping people, and she understands what it’s like to live in a fishbowl. My friends loved her. My parents loved her. We wanted the same things out of life. And I’ve never been more wrong about anything.” His voice faltered. “You expect me to forget all that? You expect me to snap my fingers and make all that go away?”
“That’s not fair. You acted as if she didn’t matter. You didn’t seem to care.”
“Of course I cared! Just because I don’t go around broadcasting every emotion doesn’t mean I don’t feel them. You said I broke your heart. Well, she broke mine.”
A pulse ticked in his throat. She felt as if he’d slapped her. How could she not have known this? She’d been convinced he hadn’t loved Lucy, but the opposite was true. “I wish I’d realized,” she heard herself say. “I didn’t understand.”
He made a harsh, dismissive gesture. “And then you came along. With all your mess and all your demands.”
“I never made a single demand!” she exclaimed. “You’re the one who made demands, right from the beginning. Telling me what I could and couldn’t do. Where I could work. Where I could live.”
“Who are you kidding?” he said roughly. “Everything about you is a demand. Those big eyes—blue one minute, green the next. The way you laugh. Your body. Even that dragon tattooed on your butt. You demand everything of me. And then you criticize what you get.”
“I never—”
“The hell you didn’t.” He moved so quickly she thought he was going to hit her. Instead, he jerked her against him and shoved his hands under her short cotton skirt, pushing it to her waist, grabbing her bottom. “You think this isn’t a demand?”
“I—hope so,” she said in a voice so small she barely recognized it.
But he was already dragging her to the side of the gravel lane. He didn’t even allow her the courtesy of the backseat of his car. Instead, he pulled her down into a patch of sandy soil.
With only the blazing sun above them, he tangled his hands in her panties, tossed them away, and splayed her legs on each side of his hips. As he reared back on his heels, the sun fell hot on the vulnerable inner skin of her thighs. He never took his eyes off the moist softness he’d exposed even as his hands went to his zipper. He was out of control, this man of logic and reason. Stripped of his gentleman’s veneer.
The shadow of his body blocked the sun. He opened his jeans. She could have yelled at him to stop—could have pushed him off—could have smacked him in the head and told him to snap out of it. He would have. She knew that. But she didn’t. He’d gone wild, and she wanted to race into the unknown with him.
He reached under her and angled her hips so she had to take all of him. No drawn-out foreplay, no painstaking torment and exquisite teasing. Only his own need.
Something sharp scraped her leg . . . A rock dug into her spine . . . With a dark moan, he drove into her. As his weight pressed her into the ground, he shoved up her top and bared her breasts. His beard scraped her tender skin. An awful tenderness filled her as he used her body. Without courtesy, without restraint or civility. He was a fallen angel, consumed by darkness, and he took no care with her at all.
She shut her eyes against the blinding sun as he pumped inside her. Gradually, the wildness that had claimed him claimed her as well, but it happened too late. With a hoarse cry, he bared his teeth. And then he flooded her.
