Stone Castles (14 page)

She looked at the faces of Trace and Fi, who had remained friends even though she'd left them to live half a world away with only an occasional visit. The friends she was already booked to leave when she was just getting used to being back with them. The friends who had still stayed loyal to her even if they sometimes sympathised with Luke a little too much for her liking – even if she was starting to see she might have been a little heavy-handed with him.

‘I'll do it,' she said. ‘I'll text him and see if it's okay to go out tomorrow.'

And Tracey and Fi both raised their glasses of sparkling water to her and said, ‘Attagirl!'

Luke frowned down at his phone. After the way they'd parted the other day, the last person he'd expected a text from was Pip. Warily he opened it and scanned its contents before texting back.

Sure. Shed's open. I'll get the tarps off. Help yourself.

He wasn't sure whether to be relieved or disappointed that it was about the furniture. He settled on relieved as he turned the header for home after a long day. Because he had no place being disappointed.

Even if her being back was playing all sorts of tricks on his mind. Like the other day, when he'd had her in his arms and his lips had been on hers and he'd almost felt like he was coming home. Which was crazy, because he was already here, and she was the one who didn't belong.

She'd made her home halfway around the globe in the biggest and brightest of cities, and she was already planning on leaving again.

But he had plenty enough to be happy about. This year's harvest for one. The sun hadn't burned too brightly to burn the crops and the rain had held off.

It was a good season. A bumper crop. One more day in the paddocks and another harvest would be in.

‘What do you reckon, mate?' he said, as he looked at the dog curled up on the seat alongside him. ‘What say we celebrate tomorrow night with dinner at the pub? We'll have to sit on the verandah mind, no going inside.'

Turbo pricked up his ears and wagged his tail, looking keen in spite of the onerous conditions.

‘That's what I like about you, fella,' he said with a grin. ‘What you see is what you get. There's not enough of that going around these days.'

But as he jumped down from the header he was still thinking about that kiss with Pip in the shed, and of the warmth and pleasure and the sheer wonder of it.

And, he thought, maybe there's not enough of that going around either.

Chapter Nineteen

T
he shed door rumbled open with a squawk of metal on metal and then there was silence and Pip and the dust motes dancing on the cracks of light.

She stood there on the cusp of entry, armed with a box for anything worth keeping and a bag for rubbish, and a firm resolution, even if her stomach was anything but solid.

Because forget about what she might or might not find, this was Luke's world.

Once upon a time, it could have been hers.

Something twisted inside her like barbed wire pulled tight around her gut, and she gasped at both its suddenness and severity.

It was a bit late to start thinking about what could have been.

Too late for regrets.

She stepped over the threshold and snapped on the lights to banish memories that flitted like shadows in the gloom, but not even the harsh fluoro lighting could banish the what-ifs. They crowded thickly around her mind, jostling for attention as she put her box and bag down next to the bureau.

What if she found something?

What if she didn't?

And what if she'd given Luke the benefit of the doubt all those years ago, instead of taking it all out on him?

Tracey's words from lunch came back to her.

You were hurting. You were looking for answers. Of course you were going to lash out.

Strange to see your actions from another's point of view.

Strange how those words wormed their way into her mind, digging holes in the absolute truths she'd constructed to justify her actions.

She'd spent last night tossing and turning as the worms had set to work, burrowing away at her cleverly constructed justifications until they were riddled with holes and the light and the fresh air had streamed through.

And the walls and her truth had become so fragile, like the lace doilies her gran had crafted on tiny crochet needles before her mind had drifted shut, that she could deny it no longer.

She had never given him a chance.

Tracey was right. Luke had copped it all. Her pain. Her despair. Her anger.

Her rage.

And now?

Now it was too late.

A good man
, Tracey had called him, and Pip looked at the neat pile of folded tarpaulins. He'd said he'd remove them in preparation, which meant that sometime after he'd dropped her back at the farm on Sunday, he'd put them back over to protect them.

A good man indeed.

She'd joked with Tracey and Fi about too much water under the bridge.

But the problem wasn't the water at all.

The problem was the bridge.

But she hadn't just burned her bridges. She'd well and truly blown them into smithereens.

She sighed wistfully. So be it. She couldn't change the past.

Nor did she necessarily want to.

She had a good life back in New York City. A great job. And the chance of a big fat promotion the other side of this weekend.

She wouldn't change her life for quids.

Mind you, if she got the chance, she might tell Luke she was sorry before she left. He deserved that much at least.

And then she thought about the way he'd been there for her in that week before her family's funeral service – how he'd supported her and kept her halfway to upright in a world that had been turned upside down, only to be unceremoniously cut off – and she knew it was going to have to be one hell of an apology.

But that would have to wait. Right now she had a job to do. She took a deep breath and rolled up the lid of the writer's bureau as a swarm of butterflies took flight in her stomach.

It was time to get to work.

‘That's it, fella,' said Luke on a long sigh of satisfaction. ‘Another harvest in the can.' And it literally was, the row of augurs spaced out across the paddock behind him all now full to the brim.

Plenty of grain producers worked in teams, using trucks to offload the grain direct from the harvester when it was full before starting the next run. But Luke had grown up with his dad doing it this way and he liked working by himself and not relying on others. Besides, it wasn't as if he was alone. He had Turbo to keep him company, even if his faithful companion spent more time asleep on the seat alongside him than on the job.

With a weary sigh, and a pat on the head for the dog, he turned the machine for home.

Too many hours to count after she'd started, Pip rocked back on her heels, feeling deflated. She'd opened every envelope, read every handwritten letter and note, and flipped through the pages of every book in case anything had been tucked away, and yet found not one clue. Halfway through the bureau she'd tackled the dresser, to give her knees and ankles a break, but it had been a quick job, the cupboards and drawers long ago emptied of their contents.

Not that the box she'd brought for keepsakes was empty. She'd found a few old photographs of Gran and Gramps, one with them standing outside the farmhouse holding her mum as a baby that had brought a sad smile to her face.

And there was the payment book for the treadle sewing machine that she didn't have the heart to consign to rubbish. It had cost twenty pounds back in nineteen twenty-six and her great grandmother – Gran's mum – had paid it off at sixpence a week for years. She hadn't seen any reason to keep the old bankbooks with their meticulous entries of deposits and withdrawals of amounts that seemed ridiculously tiny now, nor the old timetables from when the train still ran through town.

But she'd found a couple of old seventy-eights buried under the piles of old papers, and they had made her smile, Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas', and ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo' by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra.

But nothing that might give her any clue as to her identity.

And although it had been such a long shot, she still felt a pang of disappointment that her search had uncovered nothing.

She picked up the old recordings and looked over at the gramophone. Luke had that collection he used to play sometimes. Maybe he still did.

He might as well have this couple to add to it.

Her ankles protested as she crossed the room, stiff with being bent underneath her for so long, and little wonder. She'd been here for hours. But now she could go back to the farm with her box and her bag for the rubbish and have a long cool glass of wine and finish up the words she was preparing to say at tomorrow's funeral.

The wooden storage box where Luke kept his record collection was still right there, next to the table holding the gramophone. She swung up the heavy hinged lid to add the ones she'd found, only to have the air punched from her lungs.

Chapter Twenty

I
t sat there in pride of place. Right in front. The Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong album she'd found in a second-hand store years ago when she'd been trawling for a gift for Luke's eighteenth birthday. The album that still bore her inscription written in texta on the cover:

To Luke,

Forget the song, you know what excites me.

It's you.

All my love, forever.

Pip xox

Her head spun and she had to remember to breathe.

The first time she had heard ‘The Nearness of You' it had been Sheena Easton singing in the movie
Indecent Proposal
. The video was already years old when she'd watched it with Luke one night out in the shed, and she'd heard that song and it had said everything she felt, everything she wanted to tell him better than she ever could, and that night it had become their song.

She hadn't realised the song was much, much older, until she'd found this album. This was the version she'd fallen in love with.

She couldn't have found a more perfect gift. Luke had loved it, and made love to her with Louis Armstrong's evocative trumpet playing in the background.

She bit her lip and glanced at her watch. Yeah, it was early. She'd have time to play it just once.

What could it hurt?

It took a while to remember how the old gramophone worked, and she had a couple of false starts, but finally the machine was spinning and the record in place and she slowly lowered the heavy needle and heard the scratch of metal on vinyl and then the tinkling piano riff before Ella Fitzgerald's heavenly rich tones sounded out in the big shed. Pip found herself smiling at the lush sound and the memories that went with them, and then Armstrong's trumpet joined in after the first verse like another voice.

How could one song say so much?

And yet this one did. It had been their story.

The story of them.

The story of then.

She closed her eyes and stretched out her arms and let herself drift and sway with the music.

Bloody hell! He pulled the header up short. She was still here.

What the hell was that about? After their run-in on Sunday, he'd expected her to have flashed in and out as quickly as she could. What was she playing at?

Approaching the door to the shed he stopped short, because he heard the music – that music – and it was enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck. But he didn't turn away because he caught sight of her and he couldn't.

She had her back to him and she was moving to the music, her arms outstretched, her body swaying to the beat of Louis Armstrong's gravelly voice and a strumming bass and god, she was gorgeous. Dressed in shorts and a tank top with her hair tied back into a ponytail, she looked like she'd just stepped out of his past, and the way those hips moved . . .

Against his will, he felt himself harden. He'd always loved the way she danced, like her body was an extension of the music, another instrument adding to its richness.

And that, he realised, was what had been missing on Sunday night. He'd dug the record out after he'd dropped her back at the farm. He'd come out to the shed to put the tarps back over the furniture and it had been too damned quiet in there, especially with the air still scented with her perfume, so he'd thought he might as well put on one of his old records and brighten the place up.

He'd been flipping through and that one had stopped his searching fingers, and they'd lingered, and he'd thought,
it's not about her
. It was just such a classic. And it wouldn't kill him to hear it one more time.

Yet it hadn't moved him then, as it did now. Then, it had left him feeling hollow and empty. Now, he realised what had been missing.

Pip.

He should have left then, before she turned and caught him watching, knowing he was intruding. He would have, except that Turbo, crouching otherwise patiently at his feet, chose that exact moment to bark. So Pip, with her arms still outstretched and a dreamy look in her eyes, did turn then and saw him standing there, her lips half open in surprise.

He was still halfway to making an apology and going. He knew when he wasn't wanted and she'd made it more than clear that she didn't want anything to do with him. He wasn't about to give her the chance to push him away again.

He had one hand raised, ready to wave in acknowledgment and leave her to it, when she angled her head, smiled a soft, sad half smile and whispered the words, ‘Luke. I'm so sorry.'

And even though he knew he should put distance between them, his mouth refused to work and his feet refused to move.

‘So very sorry.'

Her eyes were wide and soft enough to melt into and Louis' trumpet was singing and pleading with him in the background and he knew he should get the hell out of there while the going was good.

She smiled, a smile of apology and regret and she sure didn't look like she wanted to push him away, and he wanted to believe her, wanted to believe those outstretched arms might once again be wrapped around him.

And he knew he was going to regret it. He knew he was headed for disaster. He damned well knew it.

But still there was not a thing he could do to stop himself.

‘Aw hell, Pip,' he groaned, and breached the distance between them in the space of one pounding heartbeat. He swept her into his arms to Ella singing about dreams coming true, and she offered up her mouth and he thought,
Oh yes
.

He'd been a boy before. A boy with broadening shoulders and whiskers on his face and well on the way to manhood, sure, but he'd still been a boy. Whereas the Luke of now was a man.

All man.

He tasted of a long day worked in summer, musky and masculine and spiced with desire, and a man had never tasted better.

His chest was hard, his arms were bunched and corded with muscles and tendons, and his mouth was hot and hard and damn near magnetic, the way it was so impossible to leave it. And when his big hands cupped her behind and pressed her close to his hardness, she nearly came apart right there.

It was madness, she knew it, as his lips moved over hers, their mouths meshed and tongues duelled. A kind of madness and desperation and a sudden aching, pulsing need that refused to be shut down.

There was no shutting this down.

There was only one way to go from here.

Her hands were on his shirt, fumbling with his buttons, needing to feel his skin. He was one step ahead and reefed his shirt open, shrugging it from his shoulders even as his mouth never left hers.

And then it was her turn as he found the hem of her cotton tank and tugged it up and peeled it away. This time they had no choice but to separate, and as he pulled it from her head and arms she looked up at him and saw him gazing down at her breasts, his own chest heaving, his eyes wild. He lifted those eyes and she saw the hesitation and the questions flicker across their surface and said, ‘Don't you dare stop now, Luke Trenorden.'

And he gave a half smile as he let go of the tank top bundled in one hand, and gathered her head between his hands to pull her into his kiss. ‘No ma'am.'

Skin.

While his mouth made magic on hers, her hands drank him in, both remembering and learning anew. He'd filled out in the intervening years, her fingers discovered, filled out with hard, lean muscle, and he groaned as she raked her nails down his back, toned flesh shifting under the skin. His hands trailed to her shoulders and lower, cupping her breasts and it was her turn to mewl. And then the scrap of cotton and lace that was her bra was gone and his hot hands fairly sizzled against her skin.

His hips were narrow and lean, his butt cheeks hard, growing harder when she squeezed, his hips pressing into her.

She liked.

She slid her hand down between his legs while his thumbs worked her nipples into bullets and his mouth trailed hot kisses down her throat, and felt the hard length of him under her hand and squeezed, feeling him buck.

She liked that even more.

But it was nowhere near enough. He was still wearing too many damned clothes. She tugged at his waistband, wanting in, wanting him naked, frustrated when it didn't happen. ‘Nnh,' she growled as she fought with the unfamiliar fastening.

‘Boots,' he said, pushing her hand aside as he kicked them aside and wrenched off socks and unbuttoned his pants and pushed them down.

His erection sprang free, long and proud and right this minute, the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. She'd forgotten how big he was. Forgotten, or maybe she'd just buried the memory? Either way, it was a happy awakening. The perfect boy had become the perfect man. Broad shoulders, lean hips, his chest covered in a smattering of dark blond hair that whorled in circles before arrowing down to the dark nest and that jutting erection below.

Even under the unforgiving fluoro lights, the man was flawless.

She reefed out the tie holding her ponytail and let her hair sweep down over her shoulders and then her hands went to the button on her shorts. His eyes followed the movement. He stood there immobile as she popped the button. He swallowed and she saw his throat kick as she peeled the zipper down.

His blue eyes grew dark and heavy with longing as she put her fingers on her hips and wiggled her shorts and lace thong down, flicking them away with one foot until she stood naked before him.

She wasn't nervous about how she looked or worried what he'd think. This was no time for false modesty. She was in the best shape she'd ever been in her life and she knew it. All those spin and pump classes had to have some kind of pay-off.

His eyes were the pay-off.

That hard cock was the pay-off.

The look in his eyes and that hard shaft told her that all those classes, all those planks, all those spins of the pedals had been worth every drop of sweat and every last cent.

‘My god,' he said, those hot, hungry eyes devouring every inch of her, leaving scorching trails in their wake that flared along secret lines and pooled into a burning lake deep in her belly. He reached out a hand, cupped her chin in his big hand and growled, low in his throat, like he was claiming her, and it was simultaneously the sweetest and sexiest sound she'd ever heard.

She reached for him but he took her hand instead, and led her to the couch that had borne witness to so many of their encounters before. He pulled a coverlet out of a chest nearby and threw it over the leather sofa.

‘What do you want?' he asked, his voice gravelly tight.

‘I want you. Inside me.'

His cock bucked. His lips twitched. ‘That's the right answer.'

‘And you know how I want you,' she said, predicting his next question with a shove to his chest that sent him sprawling backwards onto the sofa, his cock standing tall and oh, so inviting. If she weren't so desperate to get him inside her, there were other ways she knew to satisfy a man who looked so supremely pleasurable. But right now, her own pleasure was paramount.

She kneeled astride him, his swaying erection between them, a glistening bead of moisture at its head. She gently smoothed it over the surface with her thumb, wondering at the combination of textures, satin over steel, while she rubbed its hard length against her mound.

Oh my god, how the hell had she ever walked away from this?

Luke put his hands to her breasts and dipped his head, capturing a bud between his lips, a nipple between his teeth, and she arched her back as his tongue circled and flicked and sent spears of sensation to that aching place between her thighs.

Sensation built on sensation and she twisted her shoulders, her other breast demanding equal time, and he complied, giving it the attention it craved while she bowed her head over his and kissed him and breathed in the smell of his scalp and his hair and remembered, the familiar made new. Another gift from the past. Only this gift she could bottle up in a memory and take home to open and wrap around herself on the cold New York nights still to come.

He pulled her head down and kissed her so deeply she could have drowned from the sheer pleasure of it. She was burning up with need, the fever building, even before he ran a hand down the curve of her side and around her thigh and parted her, his thumb finding her clit and making lazy circles, and suddenly she could wait no longer.

She lifted herself higher and took him in her hand and shifted him there – right there where he pressed against her aching flesh – already anticipating the rush of feeling him inside her.

But then his hands stilled her hips above him and he looked into her eyes, panicked. ‘Wait –'

She wavered a moment – he was right, damn him, of course, he was right. But she'd had her three monthly contraceptive shot and she'd never had sex with anyone without a condom – not since Luke. She put a finger to his lips. Because this was him and she didn't want anything between them now. ‘I'm protected, and I've never had sex with anyone without a condom. Anyone but you, that is. But it's your choice.'

And eyes that had looked uncertain turned dark and sure as he gave a low growl and pulled her down the length of him.

Sparks went off behind her eyes as she sank down and he filled her and flesh embraced flesh.

Oh yes.

Oh god, yes!

And when he was buried to the hilt, his rock hard flesh deep inside her, she put her hands to his jaw and locked dazed eyes with dazed eyes, and kissed his mouth, both of them stunned by the intensity of the connection.

He lifted her hips and she gasped at the feel of him moving inside her, her muscles holding him tight as he reached the brink, only to draw her down again, harder this time, and then again so she was full of him, his motion setting up that delicious friction that only came with the slide of flesh against flesh.

And all the while the fever built and her world shook and she held on tight to his shoulders and clung on for dear life. His fingers tugged at her nipples and sensations connected and sparked and ignited and she came apart around him in all the colours of the rainbow, showered with all the stars in the Milky Way.