Birthright (20 page)

She scarcely remembered walking down the hall
to the bedroom. She scarcely remembered his sliding the T-shirt he’d lent her over her head, shucking his shorts, easing her down onto his bed and stretching out beside her. It was too narrow for two people, but she didn’t care. She wanted him as close as he could be.

What happened outside wouldn’t happen here. Aaron had been possessed then, desperate to find in her a way to make his pain disappear. Now she sensed no desperation in him, only love.

He lay on his side, his head propped in one hand, the other tracing her body. His fingertips glided over her cheeks, down her nose, along the curve of her lip and lower. When he touched her throat she sighed, and he let his hand linger there to feel the beat of her pulse. When he touched her breasts she moaned. A thick lush pressure gathered in her belly as he circled her flesh, stroked her nipples, teased them into taut points.

She lifted her hand to his chest, mimicking his exploration, drawing delicate lines across his skin with her fingertips. His nipples grew taut, too. His breath caught. When she skimmed down to his abdomen, his muscles flexed and he groaned.

It was sweet, this slow, patient loving. Sweet and frustrating, a clash of delicious sensations. She wanted Aaron to go faster, but she wanted to make every moment last. She wanted him to bring his hand down between her legs, where tension was building, her body straining—but she didn’t want him to stop stroking her skin, toying with her breasts, roaming as high as her shoulder and down again. She wanted everything now—but not yet.

He shifted, sliding lower on the bed so he could kiss her breasts. His tongue was rough, his lips soothing. Her hips lifted as need and pleasure pooled deep inside her.

He moved lower, kissing a path downward, spreading her legs and pressing his mouth to her. She cried out, a keen spasm tearing through her.

She forgot how to breathe. She forgot how to think. She knew only how to feel, how to love the man who could elicit such searing sensations in her. Her body arched against him, but still he kept kissing her, using his tongue and his lips on her, stroking her thighs with his hands until she could do nothing but surrender. As her climax pounded through her, she heard a strange sound, her own choked voice repeating his name over and over, as if it was the only word she knew. Right then, it was. He slid back up her body until his face was even with hers, and the beauty of it, the passion and longing in his eyes, replaced his name as the sum of her knowledge.

He bowed to kiss her, his hands framing her face, his body heavy on hers. She felt him between her thighs, hot and seeking. She groped for him, guided him to her, opened herself to him, welcomed him.

He moved slowly inside her, almost cautiously, as if afraid of hurting her. She clamped her hands to his hips and urged him deeper. She didn’t want his caution now, after what he’d already done. She wanted only him, all of him, as merciless with his body as he’d been with his mouth.

“Please,” she whispered, “don’t hold back.”

He groaned and kissed her again.

She tightened her grip on him, wrapped her legs around him. She hadn’t thought she could feel more than she had just moments ago, but she could. She did. Her soul was no longer alone. It was mating with Aaron’s, merging with it, in a reaction as volatile as nuclear fusion. The explosion roared through her, through him, and in that flash of ecstasy the boundaries between them disappeared. They were one entity, one being, held together by nothing but love.

H
E DIDN’T KNOW
how he was going to get through the day. He and Lily hadn’t slept much. How could they, cramped together in his skinny bed? Every time Lily had moved, every time she’d breathed, he’d felt her against him and gotten hard.

She would tilt her head and her hair would splash against his shoulder. Or her hand would alight on his rib cage. Or she’d roll over and her bottom would curve into him, soft and round and inviting, and every ounce of blood in his body would speed straight to his groin.

He’d tried not to wake her. But hell, it wasn’t
his
fault. Even before her eyes opened, she would rub up against him or drape her arm around him, and then they’d be kissing again, weaving their legs together, finding each other in the dark, in the night. All night long.

Okay. So now it was the morning after, and he was exhausted. That was the least of his concerns.

He felt inexplicably shy, gazing at her in the early sunlight that filtered through the bedroom window. People made love at night because it was easier, he realized. It had been easier to expose himself when
he was blanketed in darkness, when what he was showing wasn’t actually visible. Easier to kiss Lily when he wasn’t confronted with the shocking beauty of her face, a face he’d spent his whole damned life dreaming about, a face that shook loose so many conflicting emotions inside him.

Standing in his bedroom doorway after a shower, he observed her relaxing in his bed, smiling sheepishly, her hair tousled and one breast visible above the edge of the sheet he’d spread over her. In the morning light she was no longer just the magnificent woman he’d spent the night with. She was Lily Holden, the young widow. Lily Bennett the popular student. Lily, the woman who’d wrestled more information from Evie Mazerik in one evening than Aaron had gotten out of her in thirty-three years.

She was Lily, a woman people respected and liked simply for who she was. And he was Aaron Mazerik, with all that implied.

“What time is it?” she asked, her voice a sleepy purr.

He rubbed a towel through his wet hair. He’d thrown on a fresh pair of shorts; he wanted to wear the T-shirt he’d lent her last night, but if he did, he’d be distracted by thoughts of her all day. Entering the room, he pulled open a dresser drawer and found a clean shirt, one that didn’t carry her scent. “Time for me to eat breakfast and get to the high school. I have to be there before the kids arrive.”

She stretched and the sheet slid down to her waist. Her beauty rocked him. Her grace, the perfect proportions of her body, the pure femininity of her…
He turned away, aware that if he continued to stare at her he wouldn’t be able to resist her.

“Breakfast,” she murmured, then yawned.

“I’m making eggs. You want some?”

“Mmm. Thanks.”

Even with his back to her he was turned on. Her voice was as sexy as her body. The sleepy thickness of it, the languor in her movements…He swallowed and bolted from the room, wishing he had time for another shower. A cold one.

By the time she joined him in the kitchen, she was wearing her dress and he was under control. He spooned the scrambled eggs onto two plates, stacked the toast on a third plate, poured the coffee. “This is about twice as much as I usually eat,” she told him. “I guess, being an athlete, you need a substantial breakfast.”

Also being a man who’d indulged in sexual acrobatics for half the night after consuming only a light snack for supper. His body craved protein and carbs almost as much as it craved Lily. And sleep. And a chance to figure out what the hell had happened yesterday.

He knew what had happened. He’d told Lily he loved her. He’d spoken from his heart. His brain was having trouble working through it, though.

“I’d like to see you after work,” he said, then forced out the rest. “I don’t think I should.”

Her eyes flashed at him, filled with surprise and bemusement. “Why not?”

It was too late for anything but honesty between them. “I need time to think.”

She eyed him curiously, then scooped a chunk of
egg onto her fork. “You don’t like company when you think?”

At least she hadn’t asked him what he needed to think about. She could probably guess. She seemed able to read him well. “I think better alone,” he told her.

“All right.” Her tentative smile reassured him.

“I’ll spend the evening painting.”

“I’ll call you tonight,” he promised. Hearing her voice while remaining apart from her would be torture, but he could handle a little torture.

“All right.”

“And I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Aaron, it’s all right.” Her smile grew. “You want to think. I’ll stay out of your way.”

He smiled, too. He couldn’t help himself. If she could be so understanding, so sympathetic…she really must love him.

“I love you,” he said, only the second time in his life he’d ever uttered those words. He still wasn’t sure he could live up to the promise in them, the commitment, the terrifying power of them. But he didn’t regret saying them.

He loved Lily. Just one more truth he was going to have to get used to.

“A
ARON
!” W
ALLY
D
RUMMER’S WIFE
beamed at him through the screened back door. She quickly pushed it open and waved him into the kitchen. “What a nice surprise! How are you?”

“I’m fine.” He gazed about the square, sun-filled room, taking in the wall calendar, the refrigerator magnets shaped like little copper-hued pots and pans, and the potatoes and vegetable brush sitting at the edge of the porcelain sink. He looked everywhere to avoid looking at Mary Drummer. “Is your husband around?”

“He’s downstairs in the basement, fixing my wall clock. Why don’t you go on down? Wally?” she hollered as she opened the door to the basement.

“Aaron Mazerik is here! Go on down,” she murmured to Aaron. “He’ll be glad of the company.”

Aaron forced himself to give Mary Drummer a quick smile. She was a compact woman, short and beginning to thicken in the middle, her brown curls framing the sort of face a person might expect to see on a box of cake mix. For as long as Aaron had known her, she’d been the consummate homemaker, always holding open the back door to welcome “Wally’s Boys,” organizing bake sales to raise money for the school’s sports programs, sending
homemade snacks on the bus with the basketball team when they had “away” games. When Aaron had first joined the team, he’d hated her. She had been everything a mother should be—stable, predictable, dependable and always armed with a plate of cookies fresh from the oven—and she’d reminded him of what he lacked in his own life.

His mother was prettier. But Mary Drummer was warmer. Would the coach have cheated on her?

Aaron didn’t want to think about it. But he couldn’t stop himself.

All day at the high school he’d been distracted, bombarded by a hail of thoughts that had nothing to do with teaching basketball to ten-year-olds. Not just thoughts of Coach Drummer, but thoughts of Lily, memories of the night he’d spent with her, twinges and twangs so physical it was if he was still in bed with her, feeling her breath on his shoulder, her hair spilling over his skin. At one point he’d been running a drill, jogging pace for pace with Sam Sterling while Jeff shouted guidance to the rest of the kids as they passed balls back and forth…and suddenly he was haunted by the sound Lily made, low and throaty, when she came. And the ball bounced right past him.

Later the kids had been practicing layups, aiming the ball at the X’s he’d marked on one of the backboards with strips of red tape, and he’d been elbowed by a recollection of his morning conversation with Lily, when she’d said she would give him space to think. By the time he’d come back into focus, the kids had rotated through the drill three times.

And, of course, he’d thought about Wally Drummer. He found it hard not to think about his old coach
when he was in the gym, playing ball. But today’s thoughts had centered on the fact that Wally had been a father figure to him.

A father figure.

He’d wanted to go somewhere quiet, somewhere private, to work that one through. But he couldn’t abandon the kids. Teaching them basketball was his job, and more important, it was his passion. He refused to let his mind break loose until the last child had left for the day and Jeff had collected the gear.

Watching the lanky teenager scoop the balls into the mesh bag, Aaron recalled when he used to collect the balls for Drummer. The coach used to assign that task to whoever had arrived late for practice, or hadn’t run hard enough, or had used bad language. Aaron had spent a lot of afternoons collecting balls.

After a while Aaron had learned that no matter how bad his language, Drummer wasn’t going to kick him off the team. If he didn’t run hard enough, Drummer would make him run harder. If he arrived late, Drummer would make him stay late. But he wouldn’t cut Aaron. “I’ve got money riding on you,” the coach used to remind him. Aaron had assumed Drummer had been referring to the bail he’d posted—but maybe he’d been referring to something else. Those envelopes of cash Dr. Bennett used to bring his mother?

He thought about that as he locked the equipment room and his office, as he washed up in the locker room, as he left the building and climbed into his car. He thought about the kind of commitment a coach made to his players, the kind of commitment
a man made to a troubled boy. The kind of commitment a father made to a son.

Aaron had scarcely come to terms with the news that Dr. Bennett wasn’t his father. To replace Bennett with his beloved coach in his imagination…It was too mind-boggling to contemplate.

Whether or not he wanted to contemplate it, the possibility lurked inside him like a seam in a mine, glittering with the promise of ore. He had to dig. Even if the ore turned out to be fool’s gold or worse, something radioactive, he had to excavate it.

He stood at the top of the stairs leading down from Mary Drummer’s kitchen, trying to summon the courage to join her husband in the basement. Mary gave him a gentle nudge. “Go on. You won’t be in his way.”

“Thanks.” He descended the stairs slowly, warily, wishing he knew what awaited him at the bottom.

Half the basement had been finished into a windowless den, with inexpensive paneling on the walls, rugged carpet on the floor, bluish fluorescent light fixtures in the false ceiling, and chunky, indestructible furniture arranged haphazardly about the room. Drummer used to invite the team over for pizza whenever they had a big win. They’d be shepherded down the stairs, feeling a bit claustrophobic beneath the low ceiling tiles. Aaron used to sit by himself on the ugly plaid armchair in the corner, munching on a slice of pizza and observing the camaraderie of his teammates. They hadn’t ostracized him, but they hadn’t exactly included him, either. Everyone had seemed aware that he wasn’t really one of them.

A door stood open into the unfinished half of the basement. “I’m in here,” Drummer shouted.

He found the coach seated on a stool in front of a well-lit workbench that stood against one of the cement walls. A peg-board lined the cement above the bench, with tools neatly arranged on it.

“Hey, Aaron!” Drummer glanced over his shoulder and grinned a greeting. “How are you?”

“Okay.” Aaron leaned against the wall, far enough to be out of the coach’s way but close enough to study him. Gray eyes, he thought. Wally Drummer had gray eyes. His own eyes were flecked with gray.

But other than that, was there any resemblance? Certainly no more than between Aaron and Julian Bennett. Wally was tall, like Aaron, but huskier in build. His hair was straight, like Aaron’s, but Bennett’s hair was straight, too. The coach had a sharp chin, but…Damn. Aaron bet half the men in Riverbend old enough to be his father had sharp chins.

Drummer had always been kind to Aaron’s mother—but kindness wasn’t passion. Aaron had always assumed the coach had treated Evie nicely for no other reason than that he’d invested time, effort and a whole lot more in her son.

That investment was the reason Aaron was in Drummer’s basement right now, weighing the odds that the coach’s genes had shaped him. He willed his heart not to thump too loudly. He willed his stomach not to twist into yoga-like contortions. He willed himself to smile as the coach set down his screwdriver and lifted the back panel off the clock. “I’ve
got to tell you, Aaron, this is the ugliest clock in the world. Look at it!”

He held it up for Aaron to view. It was shaped like a daisy, the main part of the face yellow, with twelve white petals circling the face, each imprinted with a number. The hands of the clock resembled green stems; the hour hand had a tiny leaf budding off it.

“It’s ugly,” Aaron agreed.

“When it stopped working, I thought my prayers had been answered,” Drummer said, setting the clock back down and examining the plug and wire extending from the motor. “Finally, I thought, we can get rid of this monstrosity and buy a new one. But Mary won’t hear of it. We got this clock as a wedding present from her aunt. Thirty-two years it’s been running. Mary says if I can’t fix it, our marriage is over.” He laughed.

Aaron managed a chuckle as his mind ran through the calculations. If the Drummers had been married thirty-two years, the coach would have been with Aaron’s mother
before
he married Mary. But would he have married Mary, knowing another woman had brought his son into the world?

No. Not Wally Drummer. He would have made an honest woman out of Evie. Aaron was sure of it.

Of course, he’d been sure Julian Bennett had been his father, too. The fact was, Aaron wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

“I think the problem is a loose connection,” Drummer continued, tugging on the cord. “If that’s all it is, sorry to say, I can fix it, and then there’ll be no escape from the daisy clock. What do you think?”

Aaron leaned toward the bench, wondering if Drummer was going to ask him to help. “I don’t know much about electronics,” he admitted. It occurred to him that repairing broken clocks was the sort of thing boys learned how to do by watching their fathers. Basic electronics, basic plumbing, basic carpentry—little boys were supposed to hang out with their dads at the tool bench in the basement, learning the skills necessary to keep a house and its contents in working order. Aaron had missed out on that. “Your daughter would probably be a better help to you when it comes to fixing things,” he added.

“Megan is good at this stuff,” Drummer confirmed. “She never took much to cooking, but she loved learning how things go together and how they come apart.” He stripped back the insulation from the cord, then loosened the screws that connected it to the motor. “Nowadays, of course, all the girls take shop and the boys take home-ec. If I recall, they don’t call it home-ec anymore.”

“Consumer studies,” Aaron supplied.

“That’s right. Consumer studies. Boys wouldn’t be willing to take it if it was still called home economics. Consumer studies and…what’s shop called?”

“Technology education.”

“That’s right. It’s a good idea, I think, everyone studying everything. Boys have to know how to cook and girls have to know how to fix broken clocks. Even if they’re ugly.” He pulled a new cord out of its packaging and separated the wires. “So what’s on your mind, Aaron?”

Aaron scrutinized Drummer’s hands as they ma
nipulated the tools and probed the clock’s inner workings. His hands were large, like Aaron’s. A basketball player needed large hands. “Nothing,” he lied, shoving his own hands into the pockets of his shorts so he wouldn’t compare them with Drummer’s.

“You came over here for nothing?”

“Maybe I came so I could learn electronics from you.” Like a son from a father, he thought, then slammed that notion out of his brain with a silent curse.

Drummer glanced at him, smiling wryly. “I may be older, but I’m not that much slower. Now try telling me the truth.”

The truth? Aaron wasn’t sure Drummer was ready for that. He wasn’t sure
he
was ready. But he owed Drummer some sort of explanation. “I guess you could say I’m trying to find myself.”

Drummer looked at him again, this time a long, leisurely perusal. “Aren’t you a little old for that?”

“When I was the right age for finding myself, all I wanted to do was lose myself,” he reminded Drummer.

“Mm.” The coach focused back on the clock.

“Do you think you can find yourself in my basement?”

Maybe,
Aaron thought, the possibility fisting around his soul and squeezing painfully. “I’m thirty-three years old, Coach, and I’m still not sure who I am.”

“I know who you are,” Drummer said. “You’re a smart man, a good man. A responsible man. A man
I’d trust with my life. What more do you need to know?”

Aaron sighed. “I’ve just…been going over old times in my mind,” he said carefully, his voice steady even as his heart pumped like a jackhammer inside his rib cage. “I’m trying to figure out why my life went the way it did.” He drew in a deep breath, then pushed out the words. “Why did you save me, Coach? Why me?”

“
Save
you?” Drummer gave him yet another probing look, then shook his head. “I paid your bail. I didn’t save you.”

“The charges against me were ultimately dropped because of you.”

“Not because of me. Because of you. Because you kept your nose clean and didn’t get into any more trouble, and the judge decided to close that book.”

“My nose stayed clean because of you, Coach. You fed me that morning, and then you made me join the team…”

“I was desperate for a forward, one who could run fast. I’d seen you run. I thought the team would benefit from having you.”

“And I’d benefit from having the team.”

“That, too.”

“You could have chosen some other kid. Lots of kids ran fast.”

“But you had a fire in your eyes,” Drummer said, laying down his screwdriver and turning to meet Aaron’s gaze. “I didn’t want to see that fire burn out, Aaron. I believed in you. Rightly, it turned out. You were a boy who needed only one thing—someone to believe in you.”

“I needed a hell of a lot more than that, Coach,” Aaron argued with a laugh.

“Well, you got some of it from me and the rest came on its own. You grew up. You learned self-discipline. It took you a while to get the hang of schoolwork, but you managed to earn yourself a master’s degree, so I reckon you figured that out, too. What else did you need?”

Someone to teach him how to fix things. Someone to teach him about love, the kind of love that would drive a man to repair a tacky clock just to make his wife happy. The kind of love that didn’t scare a man half to death.

“You need a woman in your life,” Drummer guessed, answering his own question.

“I think I’ve got one.”

“Really?” Drummer broke into a smile. A paternal smile? Aaron wondered. “Who is she?”

“Lily Holden.”

“Julian Bennett’s daughter?” Drummer digested this, then gave a noncommittal nod. “I heard she was still recovering from her husband’s death.”

“She’s pretty much recovered,” Aaron said.

“I also heard she inherited a small fortune from her husband.”