Breaking the Rules (15 page)

Seeing her like this, animated and vibrantly enraptured by the mountain air, he couldn’t imagine how he’d ever thought her ordinary-looking. The sun had coaxed warm color into her cheeks and her big brown eyes blazed with vibrant emotion—happiness now, mischief then, a simple flash of hunger, pure and direct. Her cap of hair clung to her well-shaped head and rivulets of water ran over the long pretty neck as if to invite him to taste the path of her throat.

And every time she left the pool for a minute—to dry her face, or get a sip of water from the canteen or rest for a minute in the thick, hot sunshine, he just about came undone.

She didn’t wear tight clothes, so he’d never really seen how voluptuously curved she was. The wet cotton T-shirt and shorts clung to every tiny detail. Full breasts, a slim waist and a beautiful, plump rear end that liked to drive him right around the bend.

Now she swam easily toward the source of the pool, and leaning against a boulder at the other side, Zeke watched her through half-closed eyes. The shirt billowed around her, slipping off her shoulders to show the teeny strap of her bra and her gleaming skin.

The spring bubbled out of a fissure in granite, a little above the pool. Water sprayed over a shelf of rock to form a softly splashing waterfall. Mattie ducked under it, letting the spray tumble over her face.

Zeke’s arousal, pleasantly low-key until that moment, took a sharp turn toward the urgent. Her expression was sybaritic, wholly focused on the pleasure of the moment, and her sexy, sexy mouth was slightly parted, slick with the spray. She braced herself by clinging to the rock behind her, and the position exposed her breasts in full glory—full and white and about to fall out of that ugly little top, which suddenly seemed about a thousand times sexier than any bathing suit he’d ever seen.

She probably had no idea how stretched that fabric had become, how little it covered. Her bra was a thin beige, made of plain cotton lace, with a tiny pink flower at the center. Through the wet fabric he saw the dark tips of her nipples.

Half-drugged with the need he’d denied for days now, he left his place at the opposite side of the pool and drifted toward her silently. When he reached her, she opened her eyes and he saw by her sharp intake of breath that he’d startled her.

Before she could move, he ducked his head under the waterfall and covered that luscious mouth with his own.

A small noise of surprise came from her throat, but she made no move to get away from him. The spill of warm spring water splashed down over their heads, making their lips slick, giving a musky flavor to their tangling tongues. Zeke pulled back infinitesimally to let the water trickle between them, tasting water and Mattie’s mouth all at once. Her mouth opened and they drank together of the mineral-heavy water from deepest earth and traded the taste with each other, openmouthed. He slid his mouth along her jaw, licked her cheek, her ear, her neck—found again her mouth and suckled it the way he’d wanted to since he’d first laid eyes on her. Plump and sweet. He rubbed his tongue on that plumpness, aware of a wildness rising in him—an unbearable, ungovernable hunger that filled his belly and chest and throat.

Driven by that need, he pinned her against the soft earthen wall behind her and trapped her with his arms and legs. He felt the wildness in him with a tiny part of his mind, felt the slight fear in Mattie as he surrounded her with himself. He struggled to pull himself under control, but as if she sensed it, she wrapped her legs around his waist under the water and held him there. Her arms came around his shoulders, and her water-cooled breasts, so thinly covered, pressed into his chest.

Zeke heard his control snap with a cracking sound. Roughly, he dragged her shirt from her shoulders, devouring her mouth, feeling her heat against his aching erection. She gasped slightly and her legs tightened, and now her hands skimmed restlessly over his chest and back, hungry hands, to match her hungry mouth that plucked and bit at his.

Still drugged on wild desire, he struggled with the clasp of her bra, and when it wouldn’t come free, he tore it at the center, where the fabric was thinnest. Mattie cried out, but he captured the sound with his mouth, touching her with a need unlike anything he’d ever felt. Her skin was slick and smooth, her breasts white and full, tipped with cinnamon. He bent his head and tasted her, suckling the tips until he felt her hips moving against him, jarring his passion to a roaring level.

She opened her eyes, wide and brown, filled with a sultriness he must have known could be there. With a strong movement, she put her body against his, locking arms and legs tight around him. She stared at him with a strangely stricken expression, and began to move a little, below, her sweetness against his aching arousal.

He kissed her violently, wanting to somehow inhale her into himself, unable to stop the fury of his reaction, the trembling rocking hunger for her—so vast and all-encompassing, he couldn’t stand it.

Mattie, flowing all around him, met his savagery. He clasped her hips hard against him, found himself biting her neck, laving her breasts with his tongue. He felt such unblunted, furious desire he thought he might die of it.

Sweet Miss Mary grasped handfuls of his hair to drag his head up to her, so she could kiss him—and she was strong, so much stronger than he’d believed. He kissed her, feeling the slight pain of her grip in his hair, feeling her teeth and his, and the bruising sharp blaze of their desire.

He tasted blood on her lips—and the moment shattered. With a rippling sense of honor, he lifted his head, pushing her away urgently to look at her. That beautiful, plump lower lip was split and beading blood; her neck showed a blazing bruise from his mouth, and another showed on her full white breast.

Shaken, he let her go abruptly and swam for the bank, afraid he would be sick before he could get away.

M
attie paced the small space inside the cabin as another late-afternoon rainstorm rolled in, darkening the sky, shooting dramatic slashes of lightning through the gray. The air was almost oppressively still.

A film clip of the scene at the pool this afternoon played over and over in her mind, not in a smooth, orderly way, but in jerky bits: that blistering wildness that came from Zeke all of a sudden, as if his armor had split and let a new man out, this one not reserved or controlled or in the least bit civilized; the sudden claim of his mouth—she touched the bruised lips gingerly as she remembered; the urgent strength of his body.

Remembering, she felt a rustling over her nerves, an alertness in the faintly overused parts of her body. She had a bruise on her neck from his mouth, scarlet and vivid, and one lower on her breast; she couldn’t look at them without feeling a sharp, deep throb in her belly.

His intensity had frightened her. She had to admit that. His need, breaking free all at once, had seemed more than she could manage—he seemed to need to devour her. His hands had been so rough, his mouth so hungry.

And yet, it had been like everything else with Zeke—vivid, overwhelming Technicolor. He hadn’t hurt her at all, not even when his fierce kiss had split her lip. To her deep embarrassment, she found she’d rather liked it wild and intense like that.

In her pacing, she paused at the window. Zeke had disappeared into the sauna when they came back down the mountain, his silence unbroken all the way back to the cabin.

She had no idea what had made him surface so abruptly, what had made him push her away. With a stunned and plummeting sense of frustration, she’d watched him splashing awkwardly in his haste. Mattie had called after him, to tell him she was all right, but he ignored her, stumbling on water-heavy legs as he made his way toward the trees.

And then she’d realized she was standing waist-deep in the pool, her shirt bunched around her waist. Pierced, she sank under the water hastily and tugged the wet fabric over herself.

Now she paced to the stove and back to the door, peering out to the grayness beyond, watching the lightning come closer and shiver over distant mountains. A flicker of uneasy guilt touched her. Was what they’d done wrong? Was it wrong to feel such powerful desire? Was that what was meant by lust?

Absently, she touched the place on her neck that held the stain of his mouth, thinking of the way it had felt to have his tongue on her skin there. A rippling hunger weakened her knees. Was this lust?

She had no idea.

Was it dangerous? Would he have hurt her?

No. The feeling was very strong. It might have been intense, wild, but he wouldn’t have hurt her. If she had wanted him to stop, it might have taken a minute to penetrate that haze of desire, but she knew without a doubt that he would have listened to her.

Mattie’s eyes were drawn to the picture of the blonde on the wall, the woman who stared with such naked longing at Zeke. He seemed oblivious to the emotion in her eyes, and Mattie felt a stirring of sympathy for the woman.

There were men who couldn’t accept love, and Zeke, with his history, was a likely candidate for that sort of emotional stunting. He’d said as much.

And yet, she thought of his eyes earlier, when the raccoon had been on the back porch. Mattie had touched his scars and seen a boiling in those beautiful eyes. He wanted to be able to reach out, to break free, but he didn’t know how. He couldn’t reach out to her when she was being tender with him, so his emotions had exploded at the swimming hole.

The question was, then, had the blond woman in the picture seen what Mattie had seen? Had she tried to breach his walls, and failed? Did Mattie have anything she could give Zeke Shephard that a dozen other women didn’t have?

Did she dare reach out?

As if her turmoil drew him, he emerged from the mysterious little building, the interior of which she had yet to see. His hair was still damp, curling on his shoulders, and he’d changed into his usual uniform—the jeans and white shirt—except his feet were bare. The sight of those high, bare arches sent a bright pulsing hunger through her. She crossed her arms over herself in warning. A little chagrined, she also found herself covering the mark of his mouth on her neck with a carefully draped hand, and wished for her hair to draw around herself.

So it wouldn’t seem as if she’d been waiting for him, Mattie hurried over to the bed and flung herself down on the pillows, picking up a book she’d attempted to read earlier. Then she wondered if the bed was too suggestive and sat up, intending to race over to the couch, but he walked in.

Before, when he’d gone to the sauna, he’d returned in much better spirits, but there was no such lightening on his face now. He brought with him such a dark presence, it was almost frightening. He stared at her for a moment, and Mattie saw his gaze touch her mouth, the mark on her neck, saw the bleakness in his eyes. He seemed to hover at the door, staring at her, for an endless time. “We need to talk about some things, Mattie.” His voice was heavy.

She nodded, waiting.

From his pocket, he took one of his rare cigarettes and lit it restlessly, blowing smoke toward the open door. A breeze snatched the smoke outside with a jerk. He lowered his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice almost a growl in the depths of his throat. The sound, Mattie thought, of a dangerously wounded animal.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” she said. Softly.

It seemed hard for him to meet her eyes, but he did it, finally. Mattie flinched inwardly at the blaze in his eyes. So haunted. “Right,” he said.

She thought of the way he’d gentled under her hand earlier and stood up, intending to go sit beside him. “Zeke.”

“Don’t touch me, Mattie.” The husky strain in his voice froze her.

She sank down on the bed.

“I’m gonna tell you a story,” he said. “About the meanest son of a bitch that ever lived on this planet.” He licked his lips, drew on the cigarette, stood up to put his back to her. “He wasn’t but sixteen when he knocked up a local girl and had to marry her because that’s how things were done then. He probably hated her before the baby was ever born, but her father promised he’d kill him if he disgraced her, so he stayed.”

A small mournful cry sounded in Mattie’s heart and she clenched her fists. She thought of her foster brother Jamie, and pressed her lips together.

The tone of Zeke’s voice flattened, but the Mississippi drawl thickened as he spoke, and she knew how he’d spoken as a child. The words came slowly, one agonized sentence at a time. “By day, the man was a carpenter, so he was strong. By night, he was a drunk and practiced being strong with everybody around him—the woman that he hated, and raped so often she got a dull look in her eyes and couldn’t hear anything around her, the dog.” The voice lost all emotion. “But he really liked to beat up his kids. They didn’t hit him back. Not at first.”

He took a long draw on the cigarette and Mattie saw the trembling in his hands. His back was so rigid, she thought he might break. “The man had a son first, the rest were girls. Six of ’em. The boy didn’t have too much trouble at first, not till the old man started on those girls.”

Mattie closed her eyes and dug her fingernails into her palm to force herself to stay where she was.

“I think the first time I fought him, I was six or seven. He used to hit my mom a lot, and I was afraid of him, but he didn’t pay me much attention. Liked to brag about me because I was big, strong—you know.” He moved his mouth, as if he tasted something bitter. “He went after my sister that night and I just couldn’t stand it.”

Unconsciously, Mattie was sure, he touched the hollowed scar on his eye. Or maybe not unconsciously. Maybe he still remembered it. “You can guess who won.”

For the first time since he’d started talking, he met her eyes. She nodded.

He shifted, stood up and went to the door to throw away the butt of his cigarette in an old coffee can he kept there. “It was pretty much war from that day forward. Sometimes he’d get to them when I was gone, and he had a lot of tricks to outsmart me and punish me—” His voice roughened so much, she had to lean forward to hear. “But I got him back sometimes, too. And most of my sisters made it out okay.”