Page 99 of Tempting as Sin
“I came back,” she said. Laughing, not crying. Laughing, and putting her two hands onto his face. Pulling his head down for a kiss, then stepping into him, wrapping her arms around his waist, and holding hard. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world. And I didn’t want to be there without you.”
Rafe was holding her so tight. He could feel the joy in her like it was flowing straight into him, or maybe it was the other way around. The black dog sitting on his chest had risen, shaken itself, and moved off to torture somebody else. It had no home here.
He didn’t even lift her off her feet. He just held her. Finally, though, he stepped back and said, “Luggage.” Trying to get a grip. Trying to catch hold of this thing, to know what it meant.
“Leave it,” she said. “Take me inside. I don’t need any baggage. I’m dropping it here, and I’m dropping it now. Please, Rafe. Take me to bed and love me.”
It was going to rain. Her suitcase would get wet. Chuck was butting his head in between them, trying to get into the circle. Rafe didn’t care about any of it. He had his arm around Lily and was taking her inside, hearing Chuck come in behind them. Ignoring the dog, heading straight up the stairs to the loft she’d dreaded, and he could tell she didn’t care about that. She only saw him. She onlyfelthim, the same way he only saw and felt her.
He stepped back, beside the bed, and pulled her red, scoop-necked T-shirt off her the way he’d wanted to do the first day he’d seen it, unhooked her red satin bra with a flick of his fingers, and sent it to join the shirt. She stood on one foot, then the other, with her usual grace and much more than her usual haste, unhooked the ankle straps on her sandals, and kicked them aside. His T-shirt was gone, and so were his shoes and socks, and then he had both hands under the sides of that stretchy skirt and was sliding it down her hips, watching it fall, then sending a tiny red thong after it. She stepped out of them, and she was naked, and he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Like he would die if he didn’t have her.
Like. He. Would. Die.
She was unbuckling his belt, getting him naked, too, as fast as she could. Neither of them talking, and outside, the wind picking up the same way it had done that very first night. Wild, and almost dangerous, the open curtains revealing evergreens swaying like ships in the harbor, the rustle in their branches becoming a roar, the already dim afternoon darkening. Threatening, but only if you were out in it. If you were inside, you were safe.
He took her into the shower. He’d ridden a horse for two hours today, run another two, and chopped wood. He took her into the shower.
A wall of river rock on one side, gray tile on the rest with a dull patina like stone, and three shower heads like bathing under a waterfall. Warm, and wet, and wild. Lily’s arms around his neck, her feet off the floor, her mouth on his. He was kissing her like he meant it, like his tongue belonged in her mouth and all of her belonged to him.
The moment her legs came up to wrap around his waist. His mouth at her neck, her shoulder, his hand on a breast, taking the response she was always so ready to give him, as he backed her up against the wall. And the heart-stopping moment when he slid inside her once again, and she welcomed him home.
Lily said, when her soaked suitcase was in the house, when she was under the covers in Rafe’s bed with his strong arms around her and her head on his chest, “I had a whole speech. I had almost thirty-six hours to plan it. I saw you, and I forgot it. It just went…” She raised a hand and waggled her fingers.“Poof.”
His palm smoothed down her back from shoulder to hip, then up again, soothing as a float in a pool on a hot summer day. “Suppose you tell me now,” he said. “I’d like to hear your speech.”
“It had to do with a sunset,” she said, “and a sunrise, and some space to think, so in that sense—I guess I got what I came for. But the truth is, the bed was just so big, and you weren’t in it. Everything was perfect, except that I didn’t have you. I realized I’d rather be in the dust and the chaos, I’d even rather be facing the photographers, than be so far from you. I had something so wonderful, and I’d left it behind. And I thought—all right, so I was scared to come back in here, to come upstairs. So I had a reason to be scared. So what? I can stay stuck there, or I can move on. I’m supposed to be done with cutting off the things I do because I’m scared, done with saying, ‘No, I’ll just stand on this little tiny patch of ground where I’m safe. I don’t need any more than this. I’m fine.’ I wasn’t fine. That patch of ground was too small. I couldn’t move there. I’m still not fine all the time, maybe, but at least I’m trying. And if I can’t push past those barriers when I have somebody holding me in his arms and telling me he loves me and he’ll walk through them with me, when can I?”
“Baby,” he said, his voice quiet, “you make me humble. You make me proud.”
She kissed his chest, then twined her legs around his, because she finally could, and because he was hers. “And something else, too,” she told him. “I don’t have to leave you holding the bag. I thought, afterwards—there that video is, there that story is out there, everywhere, making you look bad, and I’ve never stood up and said I believe you. I needed to be here, because I needed—not even to say that. I needed toshowthat. People will believe what they want to believe, but I can help them believe in you.”
This time, he kissed the top of her head. “I don’t even know what to say,” he said, “So I’ll say—thanks. Why didn’t you tell me, though? I had some bad moments there when I couldn’t reach you. I thought you’d made…” He broke off, then said, “Another decision.”
She pushed herself up to sitting and stared down at him. Silver-blue eyes, somber face. “What?” she asked. “Why? How could you think that? And the reason’s stupid. I forgot my charger, because I packed and left in one big hurry, and then I thought…I can’t even say what I thought. After a while, it was just a slog. Martin’s so good, makes it so easy, and getting back on my own—well, not so much. It was impulsive, and it was really surprisinglyhard. Australia is a long, long,longway from Montana. I figured out what all I did. A shuttle to the Gold Coast Airport. A flight to Sydney. A flight to LA. US Customs, which deserves a chapter of its own. A flight to Seattle. A flight to Kalispell. A taxi. I may not even be the same person anymore, I’ve left so many pieces of myself behind along the way. But still—how could you think I didn’t love you? How could you imagine I’d change my mind? Couldn’t you feel me? Because I swear I could feel you. You were right there in my heart the whole way.”
He raised a hand, let it fall. “Maybe because your life is here, and we both know it. Maybe because being involved with a celebrity has its share of pain, and its share of doubt, too, when heiskissing somebody else, pretending to make love to somebody else for hours on end, tangled up under the sheets with her, touching her body. I knew you’d wonder, in the middle of the night when you couldn’t sleep and I was halfway around the world, if you were the only one waiting.”
“Like you did,” she said, lying down with him again. “I’m sorry, Rafe. I didn’t even think about that. I just wanted to get back to you.”
He held her that much closer, then rolled her over and kissed her, long and sweet, like he could touch her heart. And he could.
“It isn’t perfect,” he said when he was finished. “It’ll never be perfect. I’ll take it anyway. And I’ll take you.”
A week later, at nine o’clock on a warm weekday morning, Lily sat down on the couch and picked up a magazine, then stood up again, set the magazine on the coffee table, and headed through the brand-new door that took her into the back of the house.
Three windows. One on the short wall, overlooking her little orchard, and two with a view up the mountain.
“It might feel like it’s looming over you,” she told Rafe, who’d followed her as far as the doorway and was leaning against the frame, ankles and arms crossed, and watching her. Possibly in bemusement. “If you don’t like mountains.”
“I think Bailey likes mountains,” he said. “I think she likes mountains and animals and gardens. I know she likes you.”
Lily picked up the throw pillow she’d put on the bed on top of an ancient coverlet her grandma had made, the one she’d slept under as a little girl. Nothing fancy, a machine-stitched tied quilt in cheerful, faded blues and yellows and greens, but it was homey, and so was the pillow. It showed a bicycle, outlined in flowered fabric on a background of white, and it was blue and yellow and green, too. Not too girly, but pretty. The butterflies, though…
She’d painted them, then attached them. Larger painted ones at the bottom, on the wall behind the bed’s headboard, then getting smaller as you went, and finally, nearer to the ceiling, three-dimensional ones made of paper and silk, glued to the wall and looking like they’d take off.
Rafe anticipated her. “It’s a perfect room for her. White furniture, pale-blue walls, white trim, blue rug. It’s clean and happy, and it’s Bailey. You know it is, because you know her. It’s not fussy. It’s fun.”
“Your cousin Willow says you’re an empath.” She sat on the bed and gave Chuck, who’d come to stick his head in her lap, some scratches. “I think it’s true.”
