Smashwords version Sweet Surrender (13 page)

“What are you looking at?” Viola demanded.

“Aren’t you the lady who owns that bakery porn
shop?” the man asked, openly staring Poppy. He held up the newspaper. “The one
somebody tried to blow up?”

“What did you say?” Poppy leaped up, ran
over, and grabbed the newspaper from his hand.

Apparently, somebody from the Port Rollins
Telegraph had been at the chamber of commerce the meeting the night before,
because there was a picture of Poppy talking to Henry Chenowith, and quotes
from Henry about how the neighborhood had rallied behind the bakery that was
being attacked. And quotes from a spokesperson at the police department. And
her name was in the paper; they’d mistakenly identified her as the owner.

Poppy put the newspaper down and walked away,
all the color draining from her face.

She fished around in her purse until she
found her cell phone.

She knew who’d been trying to reach her all
morning.

# # #

“Poppy, open the door! I know you’re in
there!” Viola shouted

Poppy sat slumped at her desk, her head
buried in her arms.

Fired. Expelled.  Scholarship gone.  Kicked
out of her on-campus apartment, with her belongings already moved into a
storage facility.

Halfway through law school, and her future
had vanished like the early morning mist.  Her job here would end as soon as
Penelope was back on her feet, and then she would be broke and homeless.

The pounding on the office door grew more
insistent. “Poppy! I am not kidding, open the damn door! I have something
really important to tell you!” Viola yelled.

Then the doorknob started rattling as someone
fiddled with the lock, and the door opened, but it was Rafe, not Viola, who
walked in the office and shut the door behind him.

He looked far more cheerful than he should,
considering that Poppy’s life was crashing down around her ears.

“Good afternoon, gorgeous. They caught him!”
He beamed from ear to ear as he delivered the news.

“What?” She straightened up at her desk.
“Seriously? Where, how? Tell me!”

“He was living in abandoned building on 39
^th
street by the docks.  They set up a stakeout and pounced on him when he
returned to the building. They found the place he’d been staying, some more dud
grenades, spraypaint, a flamethrower…”

At Poppy’s look of alarm, he added, “You
really don’t want to know what all he had in there, actually.”

“No, I don’t,” she agreed hastily. “He didn’t
hurt anyone when they arrested him, did they?”

“No, he tried to run, and they tasered him.
From what Officer Renault told me, he was screaming about how his brother would
rain fiery vengeance down from the heavens on us. But he doesn’t have a
brother, so I think we’re safe there.  But this takes the cake – they found the
car that he used to run over your sister.”

“Oh my God. So they can charge him with
attempted murder, and he won’t be getting out any time soon. How did he even
have a car?”

“It was a stolen car, and he’d just left it
parked in front of the warehouse where he was squatting. Apparently he moved it
around the neighborhood regularly so it didn’t get parking tickets, which is
why it wasn’t recovered earlier. There’s damage to the front of the vehicle
where he hit Penelope. And shreds of what are believed to be her sweater. And
strands of her hair. And-”

Poppy shuddered.  “Stop right there. That’s
all the details I need.  But oh, thank God, that is a huge weight off my mind.”
She sighed heavily and leaned back in her chair.

One problem solved.

“I heard that your school found out about you
working at the bakery. So, you’re expelled and fired, Viola said?”

“Oh, so very expelled. They’re a religious
school. I went there because they offered me a full scholarship and a job and
on-campus housing, but as it so happens, they also have a morals clause, so my
job, housing, and scholarship are now gone with the wind.”

“And there’s no hope of appeal?”

Her lips quirked in a rueful grin. “Trust me,
there is no legal grounds for appeal. I would know; I’m almost a lawyer. Well,
I almost was a lawyer.”

“There’s a law school in Port Rollins, you
know, and it’s a state school. It doesn’t have a religious affiliation.” His
caramel gaze met hers and held it. “You could stay here; now there’s nothing
stopping you.  Nothing at all.”

The familiar fear bloomed poisonously inside
her, the self-doubt, the certainty that she would never really be loved. 
Staying here meant opening up her heart, it meant a real relationship with a
man who stirred feelings in her that she’d never even dreamed were possible,
and the possibility of real heartbreak.

Because she cared too much about Rafe. He
could destroy her without even meaning to.

 “But where would I live? What would I do for
work? This job ends in a month and a half. And – no, just no. This isn’t going
to work. Rafe, we can’t go on like this. I need to leave now. I need-“

She tried to rush past him, but he blocked
her way and then turned her body to the wall and pressed himself up against
her, and the solid muscular wall of his body pinned her in place.

“You need me. And I need you.” He leaned down
and brushed his lips against hers.

“You need this,” he murmured into her mouth. 
A wave of warmth washed over her and his mouth pressed against hers and his
tongue forced her lips apart. For a second she struggled and then she
responded,  lips parting to accept his warm, probing tongue.  His tongue swept
through her mouth and he kissed her as if he were drowning and she was his only
oxygen.

The rest of the world vanished and she was
lost in a white hot haze of desire, and she felt his pelvis pressing against
her.

“Now. I want you now. And I won’t let you go,
ever,” Rafe said. “If you went back to Portland I’d come for you.”

He grabbed the elastic waist of her skirt and
pushed it down and it puddled around her ankles.

For a brief moment she stiffened, panicked,
thinking about Viola and the customers outside in the bakery, and the unlocked
office door, and…

And then Rafe slid his fingers inside the leg
of her baby blue lacy boy shorts and caressed the tiny rosebud of her clitoris
with his thumb, and she gasped in pleasure.

 Hands shaking, she grabbed his jeans and
fumbled frantically at the snap, then the zipper, then yanked his pants down in
one swift movement. His cock jutted upward from a thick thatch of curly brown
hair, pointing straight up at the ceiling, and he pressed it against her golden
curls.

“Tell me you want me too,” Rafe murmured.
“Say it. I want to hear you say it.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she swallowed
hard to clear the lump in her throat. When she spoke her voice was low and
trembling. “You know I want you. I need you. I think about you every minute
that you’re not here, and when you walk into the room, it’s as if the sun broke
through the clouds. I’m falling in love with you.”

“Then why do you keep holding me at arm’s
length?”

“Because…because I just can’t believe that a
man like you would love me back,” she whispered.

“A man like me? Poppy, I’m far from perfect.
And I do love you. And I will spend the rest of my life proving it to you.” The
words were like an earthquake; she felt the world shifting under her feet.

He loved her? Rafe loved her? And he was
saying it out loud?

He pressed against her urgently with the
thick length of his erection, and his thrust was quick and hard,  forcing his
way into her so suddenly that she gasped with shock and pleasure.

“Say you love me too. Say you won’t leave,”
he commanded, grasping her face with his hands and forcing her to look at him.

“I love you too. I won’t leave.” Her words
came out in panting gasps.

He grasped her hips in his hands and began
moving in and out, very slowly, and she whimpered and moved against him.

“No,” he breathed. “I’m going to make you
really want it, like I want you. I ache when I’m not with you, Poppy. I’ve just
met you…”

Thrust…pause…

“And already I can’t sleep without you in my
arms…”

Thrust…pause…

“Please,” she begged, struggling in his grip,
but he pinned her to the wall with his hands on her arms and kept up his slow
maddening pace.

“I want to come…make me come…”she pleaded.

“That’s it, Poppy…I love it when you beg…I
want to know how much you want me…Sweet baby…delicious Poppy…”

He increased the rhythm of his thrusts until
he was pounding into her, and his breathing grew deep and harsh.

She felt the familiar, delicious heat
bunching up inside her very core, deep in her pelvis, gathering tightly until
finally it exploded into an avalanche of lava flowing through her and filling
her with delirious heat and light. She shivered,  low moans of animal pleasure
rolling from her lips.

Rafe moaned aloud. “Oh, God. You’re so tight.
I love how hard you come, I love how hard you squeeze me. Yessss….”his voice
was a hiss of pleasure as his hips bucked and his body shuddered in delight.

“So, tell me, when are you going to relax and
actually let yourself just enjoy life?”

A week had passed since David Barbossa had
been arrested.

Viola, Rafe, Jeffrey and Poppy were sitting
at an outside café table at The Beanbag Coffee shop, and Tomas, the baker, was
watching the store for them.

“I am relaxed. This is me relaxing.” Poppy
frowned at Viola.

Viola looked at her suspiciously. “I will
grant you that I’ve never seen you fully relaxed, but I don’t think this is
what you being relaxed should look like. The psycho has been arrested.  There
haven’t been any more attacks. You don’t have to go back to Portland, so
there’s no reason that you and Rafe can’t go on screwing each other’s brains
out  forever. So what’s the problem?”

“First of all, language! Someday I will
figure out how to make you behave yourself.”

“Doubt that,” Viola grinned insolently and
sucked on a chocolate straw in a very unladylike fashion. Jeffrey smiled and
slid his hand up her inner thigh.

Poppy turned to Rafe in exasperation. “Can’t
you make them behave in public?”

“I’ve got as much influence over my brother
as you have over Viola. Stop trying to avoid Viola’s question. She’s right,
you’re wound tighter than a violin string these days. What’s bothering you?”

Poppy shook her head.  “I honestly don’t know
why I’m so tense right now.  I mean, part of it is that I’m still trying to
figure out what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, where I’m going to
work, if I can afford college…”

“You had a 4.0 average. You can get another
scholarship,” Viola pointed out.

“It’s not just that. I have this weird,
nagging feeling…this sort of dark cloud of worry off in the horizon. I feel
like trouble’s waiting around the corner.”

Viola sighed and set down her coffee. “Maybe
you’re just so used to carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders that
you don’t know what happiness is supposed to feel like.”

“Maybe.” Poppy tried to sound chipper and
happy, but failed. Viola gave her the skeptical eyebrow raise – she could never
fool Viola – and sipped her coffee.

Rafe grabbed her hand, enfolding it in his,
and despite the nagging worry that twisted inside her, she smiled. When Rafe
held her, even when he just held her hand, the world was a warmer, safer place.

“Relax. Really. Everything will be…” his
voice trailed off as his eyes lit on something behind Poppy. She turned around
to see…Penelope. On crutches, with her yuppie boyfriend trailing along behind
her.  Alistair, she recalled Penelope calling him. She wore a floating flowery dress
that hugged her slim figure, with a sandal on one foot and a cast running
halfway up the leg of her other foot, and Alistair was carrying her
flower-printed purse for her.

Apparently Penelope had indeed lied about how
long she’d be laid up in the hospital.

And the gloating smile on her face promised
disaster.

Viola leaped to her feet, fists clenched.
Jeffrey jumped up too, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Down, girl. She’s not
worth it.”

“So, Penelope, you’re looking much less
crippled then I’d like. How about I do something about that?” Viola glowered,
shaking Jeffrey’s hand off her shoulder.

Penelope ignored her, turning to Rafe. “So,
they arrested the guy who was targeting my bakery, and cleared me as a
suspect.  I just got a copy of the final report from the insurance company. And
I was ever so fascinated to see the name of the investigator on the report.
When were you going to tell her?”

Poppy felt a sickening sensation in her
stomach, as if she were in an elevator in free-fall.