Night Moves: Dream Man/After the Night (21 page)

He knew he shouldn’t do it, even as he reached for her. The last thing he wanted was to follow his father’s example; he still couldn’t think of his father’s leaving without feeling the hurt and anger, the betrayal, as fresh as if it had just happened. He didn’t want to hurt Noelle and Monica, didn’t want to revive that old scandal.

There were a hundred reasons, all of them good, why he shouldn’t want Faith Devlin in his arms, but in that instant none of them mattered a rat’s ass. His hands closed on her waist, and the feel of her, warm and soft, so vibrant that his palms tingled where he touched her, went to his head like a potent wine. He saw her eyes widen, the black pupils expanding until only a thin rim of green remained. Her hands lifted and flattened against his chest, the placement
covering his own nipples, and a shiver of response rippled his skin. Inexorably, his gaze fastened on her mouth, he drew her closer until her slim body rested against him. He felt her legs tangle with his, her firm breasts push against his stomach, saw those soft, full lips part as she drew in a startled breath. Then he lifted her on tiptoe and bent his head, and fed that particular hunger.

Her lips felt like rose petals, too, soft and velvety. He slanted his head and increased the pressure of his mouth, forcing them to open, a flower blooming at his command. Blood thundered through his veins and he pulled her tighter, sliding his arms around her and holding her welded to his body, letting her feel the swollen ridge of his erection against the softness of her belly. He felt her shudder, felt the convulsive movement of her hips, arching into him, and fierce male triumph flooded him. Her arms slid upward over his shoulders, to twine around his neck, and her teeth parted to allow him deeper access. A low growl sounded deep in his throat, and he took it, plundering her mouth with his tongue. Her taste was sweet and hot, flavored with the strong coffee she had drunk with her dessert. Her tongue curled around his in heated welcome, then she sucked daintily, holding him within her mouth.

He drove her backward, forcing her against the locked and boarded door. Dimly he could hear the voices of the people passing on the sidewalk behind them, hear the sullen rumble of thunder, but they meant nothing. She was live fire in his arms, not struggling against his kiss, not just accepting it, but responding wildly to his touch. Her lips trembled and clung and caressed. He wanted more, wanted everything. Deliberately he cupped her buttocks and lifted her, drawing her hips inward so that his erection was nestled in the soft notch of her legs. He rubbed her back and forth against him, groaning aloud at the exquisite pressure.

Rain pattered on the street, signaling the arrival of the storm, and there was a scurry of movement as people darted for cover. A clap of thunder made him lift his head and look around, a little irritated by this intrusion into the sensual haze that clouded his mind.

Whether it was the thunder or his own reaction to it that
broke the spell on Faith, she suddenly stiffened in his arms and began shoving against him. He caught a glimpse of her furious face and quickly set her on her feet, releasing her and stepping back before she began screaming bloody murder.

She wriggled past him, onto the sidewalk, where the rain immediately soaked her, and turned to face him. Her eyes were yellowish with turbulence. “Don’t touch me again,” she said, her voice rough and low. Then she turned and began walking as fast as she could, her head lowered against the rain that swept down the narrow street like a gray curtain. He started after her, intending to drag her to shelter, but forced himself to stop and step back into the doorway. She would fight him like a wildcat if he went after her now. He watched her until she turned the corner two blocks down, and disappeared from sight. She was almost running by then . . . escaping. From him.

For now.

Nine

F
aith was dripping wet and shaking with both cold and reaction when she reached her car. Her hands trembled as she tried to fit the key into the lock, and it took her several tries before she succeeded. Crawling in, she collapsed against the steering wheel, pressing her forehead hard against the cold vinyl.
Idiot!
she thought violently.
Fool!

She had to have been insane to give in to the craving to kiss him. Now he knew; she couldn’t hide it from him any longer. For the sake of a few moments of pleasure, she had let him see her weakness, and now he knew that she wanted him. Humiliation burned in her face, ate like acid at her insides. She knew his nature very well, having firsthand experience of his ruthlessness. He was a predator, and the first hint of weakness would draw him straight in for the kill.

He wouldn’t rest now until he’d had her; the occasional suggestive remark would become full-fledged attempts at seduction, and what had just happened proved that she couldn’t trust her common sense to resist him. Where he was concerned, she didn’t have any common sense. Horror filled her at the thought of being casually used and discarded, as if she were a sexual Kleenex. He thought of her as her mother’s clone, a slut willing to spread her legs for anyone who had the equipment—and from what she’d felt,
he had more than his share—while she ached for him, her childhood infatuation having changed into a very adult yearning. She wanted nothing more than to be loved by him, to be free to open the floodgates on her own dammed-up reservoir of love; he would turn that dream into a bitter nightmare, using her weakness for him as a means to hurt her, reduce her to being, after all, another Devlin whore for a Rouillard to use.

As much as she wanted to stay in Prescott, she would rather leave than live with that humiliation, to see contempt in his eyes when he looked at her, as she had seen it once before. His words echoed in her mind, a refrain that she had heard many times over the years:
You’re trash.
The phrase was branded on her subconscious, surfacing every so often to taunt her.

No. She couldn’t live through that again.

But for a few minutes, she had been in heaven. His arms had been around her and she had been free to touch him, to stroke his shoulders, thrust her fingers into the thick, silky tail of hair gathered at the nape of his neck. What would he look like with his hair loose, hanging to his shoulders? Or damp with sweat, and swinging forward as he bent over her, his face tight with passion—

She moaned, aching with a sweet pain that only he could ease. She had never been promiscuous; she had been a virgin when she’d married Kyle, and he was the only man with whom she’d ever made love. Her chastity, however, reflected her horror of being like Renee, with all the ugly association of being the town whore, rather than a lack of interest in the act itself. She loved making love, loved the feel of a man inside her, loved the scents and sounds, the tangled sweatiness. As her grief at Kyle’s death had eased, her hunger for sexual contact had grown, intensified by her own restraint. She simply couldn’t bring herself to have sex purely for the physical release, and after Kyle’s death she hadn’t wanted emotional involvement, either. She had gone four years without being held, without being kissed, until Gray had taken her in his arms and briefly opened the door to paradise.

There was a hot earthiness in him that fanned the banked coals of her own sexual fire. He had been as hard as a rock, and blatant about it. He had wanted her to feel him, had deliberately pulled her into him, lifted her to push the hard ridge of his erection against her mound. They had been on a public street, in daylight, but that hadn’t stopped him. Even though this
was
New Orleans, where such things might not be all that unusual,
she
had never before done anything like that. She had always gone out of her way to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Respectability, responsibility, were too important to her for her to allow herself to be publicly fondled, yet that was exactly what she had done.

When he touched her, she forgot everything else but the hot joy of being in his arms. Despairing, she wondered if she would have stopped him even if he had done more, or if she would have let herself be taken there in the street like the lowest of whores, oblivious to decency, modesty, even legality. Her face burned at the thought of being arrested for public lewdness, or whatever it was called. Acute stupidity would be a better term.

It would never have happened with anyone but Gray. With no one else would she have lost herself so completely.

She sat motionless in the car, watching the rain beat down in sheets beyond the concrete pillars of the public parking garage, and let appalled realization seep into her mind. Perhaps she had always sensed the truth, but pushed it away. She couldn’t hide from the full reach of reality any longer.

She had loved Kyle, enjoyed sleeping with him, but it was as if only half of her had been involved. There had always been this other part of herself that was set aside, and belonged, irrevocably, to Gray. She had cheated Kyle; perhaps he had never known, and granted, their marriage had been in trouble because of his drinking, but still she should never have married him without loving him wholeheartedly. In the back of her mind had always been the thought that she would remarry someday, but now she knew that she couldn’t; she couldn’t cheat another man. There was only one man whom she could love completely, heart and soul and body, nothing held back, and that was Gray
Rouillard. And he was the one man to whom she didn’t dare give herself, because he would destroy her.

•  •  •

When the rain stopped, Gray walked back to his hotel and went up to his suite, where he made one phone call, to Dallas. “Truman, look something up for me. You have a city directory, don’t you? See if there’s a Faith Hardy listed in it.”

He crossed his legs at the ankle, his feet propped on the coffee table, and waited while his friend and business associate thumbed through the massive volume. A moment later the Texas accent twanged in his ear. “I got two Faith Hardys, and about ten other Hardys with the first initial F.”

“Any of them F. D. Hardy?”

“Ah . . . no. There’s an F. C. and an F. G., but not an F. D.”

“Occupations?”

“Let’s see. One’s a schoolteacher, one’s retired . . .” Truman ran down the list of occupations. None fit the meager facts Gray had on Faith. Dallas might not be the right city, after all, but it was more likely that Faith had declined to be listed in the city directory.

“Okay, that’s a dead end, I think. Look up Margot Stanley, M-a-r-g-o-t.”

Truman snorted. “Are you sure it isn’t M-a-r-g-a-u-x? Isn’t that the way the ‘in’ people spell it these days?”

“Look up both spellings.”

There was the sound of more pages being turned, and Truman humming. He paused. “There’s a shit pot full of Stanleys.”

“Any Margots, of either the American or ‘in’ variety?”

“Yeah, here’s an American-variety Margot.”

“Where does she work?”

“Holladay Travel. Spelled with two /’s and an
a.”

“Cross-reference that, and see if it lists the owner.”

More humming. “Bingo,” Truman said. “The owner is F. D. Hardy.”

“Thanks,” Gray said, amused at how easy it had been, after all.

“Any time.”

Gray hung up the phone and considered what he had just discovered. Faith owned a travel agency. Good for her, he thought, inexplicably pleased. On a hunch, he dragged the New Orleans phone directory out of the desk and looked through the yellow pages. There it was, in a discreet, tasteful ad: “Holladay Travel—Put the Holiday Back in Your Vacation, and Leave the Worry to Us.”

So she had at least two offices, and probably more, which explained how she had been able to pay cash for her house. He grinned as he remembered the satisfied little smile on her face when she had thrown his offer to buy the house back in his face. But if she was this prosperous, why did she want to keep it such a secret? Why wasn’t she broadcasting it all over Prescott, to show everyone that a Devlin could crawl out of the trash heap, after all? Why had she so obviously interrupted Margot and kept her from giving out any more information than she had already let slip?

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Faith was afraid he would do something to sabotage her business. Not only did he carry a lot of weight in Louisiana and beyond, but he had just told her that he owned a hotel, in a city that made its living from tourists. It would be easy for him to cause trouble for her agency, and she evidently expected him to do exactly that. Her opinion of him wasn’t very high, he thought wryly.