Kiss Me Hello (Sweetest Kisses) (20 page)

“You seem preoccupied, MacKenzie. Is work going OK?”

He was quiet for a moment, maybe deliberating on an answer, or maybe, like Sid, trying to spare a corner of his brain for making conversation, when his entire mind wanted to focus on the pleasure of touching and being touched.

Do
you
know
what
a
distraction
you’ve become for me?
To Sid, Mac’s question had been sweet, made even nicer by the note of genuine bewilderment in his voice when he’d asked it.

“James is getting married,” Mac said.

Ah.
That would preoccupy MacKenzie Knightley. “Do you approve of his choice?”

“I do, and she wants me to stand up with her.” He sounded perplexed now, in a pleased way. “I thought maybe Trent would get tapped, or maybe James has asked Trent, but it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t miss this ceremony for the world.”

“You ever been married, Mac?” Sid didn’t know what prompted her to ask the question. Maybe it was Luis pointing out to her that Mac was well-heeled. Mac was also intelligent, damned good-looking, blessed with a wonderful family, and good with cranky teenagers. Some enterprising female should have snatched him up—assuming he was interested in being snatched.

“I have never been married.”

“Were you ever engaged?” She was wrapped up against his chest, his arms around her, his knees and thighs tucked right along her body. Her question produced a brief, subtle tension.

“Close to engaged. Engaged very briefly once, and turned down another time.”

“Two near misses?”

“Once in undergrad, once after that, both a long time ago.”

She levered up, pushing against his chest to peer at him in the gloom. “You’ve been on the shelf for a long time too, MacKenzie. Is there a story here?”

“Not a very interesting one.”

That meant he didn’t want to be cajoled into further disclosures, but Sid had to ask one more question. “Who broke it off the first time?”

“She did.”

“The woman was a fool. Both of them were hopeless nincompoops. If they didn’t appreciate what a treasure you are, to hell with ’em.” His gleaming teeth told her she’d provoked him into smiling. She cuddled back down against him, willing to leave the subject right there.

“Honestly, MacKenzie, young women are idiots. They don’t know what’s important in this life. Are you going to kiss me, or will I have to flirt you into it?”

“You already have,” Mac said, shifting Sid so she leaned back against one of his knees, all the better to kiss the hell out of her.

He lowered his mouth to hers, his hand cradling Sid’s cheek in the darkness, not so much so he could find her, but so he could enjoy the feel of her lady-soft skin against his palm.

Though a question intruded on the sense of homecoming he felt as their arms went around each other: Was he kissing her to distract her from the miserable topic of his two failed engagements, or was he kissing her for the sheer, sumptuous pleasure of it?

Or was he kissing her because he was helpless not to?

Sidonie Lindstrom wasn’t a shy kisser. She made little sounds in her throat of pleasure, longing, and satisfaction. Her body participated in the kiss; her breasts pressed against him; her hands took a firm grasp of his hair. She moved against him, communicating urgency and desire more clearly than words could have.

And God above, it pleased Mac to be kissed back like that.

Healed a hurt in his soul.

His mind whipped out a memory from the previous winter, the office Christmas party, where as the managing partner, he was the informal master of ceremonies. Trent and Hannah had arrived together, Trent cutting a fine figure in his tux, Hannah looking both demure and sexy in a black silk dress.

Simply by watching Hannah and his brother, Mac had known they’d been intimate. Hannah had had a glow, and Trent’s gaze was both protective and possessive when he’d watched Hannah waltzing with James.

Mac had wanted to be near that glow, wanted it so badly, when the band had started up a slow dance, he’d simply taken Hannah by the wrist and led her onto the floor. Trent hadn’t objected, but he hadn’t taken his eyes off them either.

For a few minutes, Mac had allowed himself the pleasure of holding a woman’s softness and scent close. He’d felt the silky warmth of her hair against his cheek, held the lithesome, graceful heat of her in his arms.

The pleasure hadn’t been the least bit erotic, but a purely human, sensory sweetness. People weren’t meant to live life in complete isolation from one another. Mac’s body knew it; his mind knew it; his heart and soul knew it.

He’d led Hannah back to her chosen mate and smiled cordially while experiencing a new level of despair, and the despair had only worsened in the intervening months. Then he’d found Sidonie Lindstrom literally in his own—albeit former—backyard, waving her broom at two tons of indifferent equines.

Now, Sid was climbing Mac, twisting into him, and kissing him onto his back, pushing bad memories and cold winters far, far away. Mac ended up with Sid straddling him as he lay on his back, the moon rising beautifully over her shoulder.

“Better,” she said, her fingers going to the buttons of his shirt. “We have unfinished business, you and I.”

Unfinished discussions too.

Mac stilled her fingers by enclosing them with his own. “I told you we’d keep our clothes on if you were unwilling to accept certain terms from me.”

If
you
allow
me
the
privileges
of
a
lover, then I will expect that for whatever time I enjoy that status, those privileges are exclusively mine.
He willed her to recall the words, even as desire rose as luminously as that moon.

She climbed off him and sat with her back to him.

“I need to tell you a few things, MacKenzie. Things that will make it brutally clear I’m not—I’m not a player.” She sent him a peevish look over her shoulder. “You’d better not be a player either.”

The sense of her words was reassuring. The tension in her spine and the truculence in her tone was not.

Mac finished unbuttoning his shirt, and for the sake of his comfort, unbuckled his belt as well. He also got up off his back, for the sake of his ability to concentrate, and shifted so his legs were on either side of her.

“Tell me these things, Sidonie.”

“The topic is uncomfortable.”

He went to work unraveling her braid. “Take your time, then. We have all night. Or don’t tell me if you’d rather not.” Except he wanted her confidences. Craved them the way he craved her kisses and the exact, perfect weight of her breasts in his hands.

“I enjoyed an active social life in college.”

Mac waited, his fingers teasing her hair free from its plait.

“I was with some guys.”

When he had her braid undone, he finger-combed her hair from her shoulders to her waist, the contact soothing him even as he hurt for her.

“I was a tramp.”

Mac slipped his arms around Sid’s waist. “You were not a tramp. You probably slept with half as many guys as the guys did women, and you were not a tramp.”

“I was easy, and once you get that reputation, the guys make it easy to be easy, you know?”

Yes, he did know. Knew exactly how tempting it was to believe sexual congress meant something to his partners, to believe
he
meant something to them because they’d shared some fleeting physical encounters.

“We all have regrets, Sid. Maybe you’d do it differently if you had it to do over, but who wouldn’t?”

“Oh, MacKenzie.” She sounded so lost, so utterly without hope. He pulled her back against his chest.

“You were young, Sid. You were coping as best you could, and I’ve been every bit as much at a loss.”

“We pay a price for coping like that.” She rested her cheek against his arm, and Mac felt a world of sorrow in one small female.

“Tell me, Sid. I don’t care who you were with five or ten years ago. I don’t care how many people you were with. I don’t care about your past at all except insofar as it shadows your future and weighs on your heart.”

She turned, so she was again in his embrace, leaning on him. “Have you ever wondered why I’m doing foster care?”

“Because it’s what you’re supposed to do. Some people are supposed to teach therapeutic riding, and some people are supposed to be foster parents. It’s a calling.”

“Bless you, MacKenzie Knightley.” She rested on him more heavily, and again he waited. Whatever troubled her, to her it was real and powerful, and she was about to share it with him. He felt Sid gathering her courage, so he kept his caresses on her back slow and easy, willing her to lean on his emotional strength even as she leaned on him physically.

“I’m a city girl, but growing up, I always knew I’d end up in the country. It’s a better place to raise kids, and if I knew anything about myself, it was that I wanted kids. I used to draw pictures in my imagination of me on a big porch swing with a half-dozen kids around me. We’d read children’s stories, the kind where everything turns out all right in the end.”

The wistfulness of her words lingered in the night air as the moon rose higher and the tree frogs sang their love songs.

“Pity me, MacKenzie. I am that most pathetic of creatures, the foster parent who cannot have her own children.”

Sid’s voice was so quiet, a whisper in the darkness, but Mac heard her. By God, he heard her, and the sense of her words slammed through him like a gale-force wind.

“
Not
pathetic
.” He gathered her up, held her close, his words coming out in a fierce growl. “You are
not
pathetic because of an accident of nature. You are courageous and beautiful, and a goddamned saint to be reaching out to other people’s children when you deserve to have your own. If anybody should be having children, lots and lots of them, it’s you. You mother the hell out of the one cub you’ve got, and for all you know, Luis is just on loan. Jesus,
God
.”

Sid wasn’t saying anything, and this drove Mac crazy.

“Argue with me, Sid. Kiss me, smack me, tell me you understand what I’m saying, don’t just—Sidonie, for God’s sake, please don’t cry.”

“I’m not—it’s not that kind of crying. I’m done with that kind of crying.”

Mac had to bend his head to catch her words. Her hands were fisted in his hair, though, holding him desperately close, and her cheek was damp against his chest.

“It’s some goddamned kind of crying.” He brushed her tears away with his thumbs, his chest aching. He should have seen this, should have seen it in the way she watched Luis, the way the social worker’s stupid games got to her.

“Men don’t get it.” Sid rubbed her cheek on Mac’s chest. He eased back so she was sprawled over him, the better for him to get his hands everywhere they needed to be. Her face, her back, her hair, her arms, her shoulders, her everything.

“What don’t we get?”

“The emptiness, the sorrow, the
ache
. It never goes away, that ache. You have a period every month, just as if your body had the same reproductive ability every other female body does. You have the PMS, the bloating, the cramps, all of the messy, undignified burden, but you never get the reward. You get failure. You get nothing. Then you feel like nothing.”

“You’re not nothing to Luis.”
Or
to
me.

“He won’t let me adopt him, Mac, and I tell myself that’s fine. He shouldn’t have to un-choose his mom to choose me. I can love him anyway.”

“Have you ever asked him what his reservations are?”

“He’s a teenaged boy. He probably doesn’t know what his reservations are, and couldn’t put them into words even if he did. It comes down to him not wanting to be legally mine, and if I love him, I have to accept that. The legalities aren’t what matter anyway.”

The lawyer part of Mac’s brain wasn’t so sure, but family law wasn’t his area. The situation was worth discussing with Trent though. Some other time. Some other time, when Sidonie Lindstrom had told him the full extent of her sorrow.

“Why can’t you have kids, Sidonie?”

“Indirectly, it’s my own damned fault.”

“No, it is not.” Mac was utterly certain of that.

“I was the hookup queen of my class, Mac, before hooking up was as popular as it is now. I was stupid and I took risks and my body put an end to it. You know what endometriosis is?”

“I do.”

“Well, I didn’t. I generally comported myself like a shameless hussy on a perpetual spring break, until I was with a guy in the fall of my sophomore year, and for the first time ever, it hurt. Not a big, dramatic pain, just a twinge. When it happened again, I went in to get checked out, and the doc listed endometriosis along with a lot of other it-could-bes. I didn’t think anything of it, because the sex wasn’t important.”

More sorrow, because sex
should
be important. Mac’s belief in that regard probably qualified him as a caveman.

“You’re important, Sid.”

She kissed his heart. “I’m honest enough to admit my sleeping around was one long, protracted mistake. I settled down, applied myself academically, and found—wonder of wonders—a lot more than I liked sleeping around, I liked learning things, liked excelling in my studies.”

“Of course you would. You’re smart as a whip.” Sid went silent, and Mac mentally kicked himself, because all those good grades hadn’t left her
feeling
smart as a whip. “Something happened, didn’t it?”

He kissed her temple, hoping to reassure her back into speaking.

“In grad school, I met a guy. We hit it off. We got engaged.” She took a deep breath, her chest expanding against Mac’s. “We got married because we wanted to have kids.”

Mac knew, knew as if he’d written the script himself, what came next.

“We got divorced a couple years later because I couldn’t have kids.” Her voice caught. “I can’t have kids.”

“Breathe, Sid. Don’t fight it.”

She let out her breath on a gusty, miserable sigh. “My husband was a decent guy, and I think if it had just been my infertility, he would have coped. But I couldn’t cope. I felt guilty and ashamed and angry, and pushed him away, and clung, and pushed him away. I don’t blame him for giving up. He remarried. They’re happy.”

While Sid was broke, heart-broke, grieving on top of grieving, and pretending nothing was wrong.

“If you tell me they have two adorable kids, which your charming ex has the temerity to send you a picture of with his damned Christmas card, I will know where to dump your first load of top-quality horseshit.”

She lifted her head, the tracks of her tears glimmering by the light of the low-hanging moon. “They’re all over his social networking pages too. The cutest damned little rug rats you ever did see.”

“Two loads, then. One on each of their birthdays.”

Sid folded down against him, and if she hadn’t been sprawled over him, Mac would have hunted down the sorry bastard and wrapped his nuts around his neck.

“So that was it? He dumped you, and you and your faulty plumbing started doing foster care?”

“You make it sound like I’m a utility sink, but my uterus is fine. My fallopian tubes seem to be the problem, though I still have all my equipment, and my yearly checkups suggest I’ve dodged the bullet for now.”

Mac shifted, because Sid’s weight was pressing on parts of his body that had no sense of timing, no respect for a woman’s distress. Those parts of him only knew Sid was warm and soft and female, and under other circumstances, probably willing.

“You let yourself have any rebound relationships?”

“Yes, MacKenzie. I got back on the horse, but it wasn’t much of a ride. Then Tony was diagnosed, or let me know he was diagnosed, and that was that.”

That was a tragedy wrapped in a misery tied up with a sorrow. Mac could feel the gears whizzing in Sid’s female brain, maybe thinking up questions he wasn’t ready to answer.

“Are you scared to have sex with me, MacKenzie?”

Or questions from so far out in left field, Mac didn’t even have sense enough to see them coming.

“Why would I be scared?”

“You should be. I’ve been a mess most of my adult life.”

“Phi Beta Kappa?” Mac asked.

“Well, yeah.”

“Mensa?”

“I qualified. I didn’t join.”

“Dean’s list?”

“I missed out freshman year by a whisker.”

“And you ran your brother’s production company, managed his hospice care, kept an eye on Luis, pulled up stakes and moved out here when that was best for the kid. You’re a rolling wreck, all right.”