She had freckles, he realised with a rush of delight. A dozen or more—so faint he could only see them now he was inches away—marching across her nose. He brought his hands up to cup her face and threw himself back into the kiss.
She moaned, and the sound roared into his ears and straight to his groin. He grinned, left his feast of her mouth to explore her throat, felt the thready pulse beneath her skin. He felt like a schoolboy who’d just discovered girls: eager for everything, all at once, before need drove him blind.
But he wasn’t a schoolboy. He was a grown man, who’d made his share of spectacular mistakes, and he knew what that moan meant. Vera was in the grip of the moment like he was himself, and he didn’t want her to have regrets.
Regrets were the devil to live with, and who knew that better than him?
He pressed his forehead to hers while he gathered up the scattered shreds of his control. If he was going to have a relationship with a woman, with Vera, then he was going to damn well do it right.
‘Vera.’
He breathed out the word as softly as he could, and her eyes snapped open.
Need. It was there in her eyes, clear as the mountain creek. But hiding under it, not guarded away like it was every other time she’d looked at him, was hurt. Deep, muddy pools of it.
The loose focus of her gaze grew sharp and he could tell the moment when need was replaced by regret. And pain.
He ran his hands down her arms, back up to her shoulders. ‘You want to tell me what’s made you so sad?’
Bulldozing his way into the problem was one way to broach Vera’s reticence. Who knew? Maybe it would work? He’d caved to temptation after that moment in the surgery, and at Hannah’s insistence, to find out a little more about the woman who he couldn’t shift from his thoughts.
Vera De Rossi,he’d googled.Journalist.
A flurry of articles had come up under the search string, but he’d only read one before his conscience gave him a good kick in the nuts and asked him what in blazes he thought he was doing stalking the backstory of the woman he had the hots for.
He’d stopped reading then, because there wasn’t a Cody alive who didn’t understand that bullshit on the internet didn’t equate to truth. But that one article he’d skim-read had been enough to convince him that Vera was the real deal.
Honest, earnest, driven … and wounded by it.
WHOCARESABOUTTHEELDERLYwas the headline. An opinion piece in some Sunday magazine, pointing out systemic failures in care and the concerns of family members seeking answers to questions.
And maybe she needed to know that he was an ear that was willing to listen.
‘Vera? You want to talk about it? Whateveritis?’
She frowned and shook her head, and a flush of colour surged faintly beneath those freckles.
She cleared her throat. Looked at her watch. Shifted her hips and wriggled away on the rug so she was out of reach. Evasive tactics if ever he’d seen them. She bore an uncanny resemblance to a softhearted pet owner in that moment, trying not to answer a question about how often she fed her furry companion a highly fatty treat.
‘Nothing’s wrong. That …’—she waved a hand in the air, near her mouth, indirectly in the direction of his chest—‘whatever it was, shouldn’t have happened.’
Like hell it shouldn’t have. He took a deep breath in, let it roll out slowly, tamping down the buzz in his head as he exhaled.
‘That “whatever it was” was always going to happen. And it’ll happen again if I have any say in it.’
She was pale now; the colour that the horseride had brought to her face had faded. ‘Yeah.’ Her voice was bitter. ‘Like what you want, or I want, or any of us wants actually matters a damn.’
He frowned. ‘I don’t get it. What do you mean, Vera?’ He got the feeling the topic of this conversation had just leapt about a hundred feet out of his reach. They weren’t talking about him and her and one soul-scorching kiss on a bridle trail anymore. This was about her past, about which he knew exactly zilch.
He eased back a little. If the bulldozer approach wasn’t going to work, maybe patience would. Time, along with the opportunity to get to know each other a little better, because now that he’d seen—felt—her connection with him, he wasn’t stepping away.
He could give her all the time she needed. And what better way to start than here, by the waterhole, under the warm spring sunshine?
‘Okay,’ he said, making his tone as friendly and unloverlike as possible. ‘If kissing’s off the menu for today, what are your thoughts on coffee?’
‘Oh, right.’
He could see the effort it took for her to pack her feelings down into the secret place where she hid them.