Harper Allen - Protector With A Past

“What are we going to do about Lizbet?”

She flicked a quick glance over her shoulder at the house. The child was still sleeping, and King had been left on guard in her room in case she awoke. Earlier Cord had told her that he’d informed Sheila’s mother last night that he had her granddaughter, and Betty Wilson, devastated by the news she’d just received, had been all too grateful that the child was with them. Betty had been battling cancer, Julia knew, and even if she hadn’t been stricken with grief she was no longer able to care for her beloved Lizbet.

“I’ve thought about that. Since Dad moved some friends of mine have been living in our old place down the road. Dad said the place held too many memories of Mom for him to want to sell it.” Cord’s voice held affection. “Anyway, Mary and Frank Whitefield will take Lizbet in for as long as we need to keep her out of sight. I don’t want her around while we’re trying to track down her parents’ killer.”

He bent down and pulled a tuft of dried choke grass out of the garden, revealing a pale green spear pushing stubbornly through the dead weeds. “My father planted these for your mother one year,” he said softly, clearing the earth around the shoot.

With a gentle thumb he touched the young plant, and then he straightened up and sighed, still not looking at her directly. “I didn’t like it out in California. It wasn’t home.”

Julia knew what he meant without him spelling it out. He hadn’t just grown up in New York state, he had his roots here, and they went back a lot farther than the Mayflower. Part of him had always seemed inexorably bound to a more elemental way of life, and in the past, coming back to this place where his family had lived for generations had seemed to be a necessary ritual of renewal for him. He would blend in anywhere, she thought, and if he had to he would find a way to survive in a desert. But his soul would always thirst for a sunrise over a still lake, the dark red blur of cardinals against a snowy bough in the dusk, the crumbly feel of lichen on granite underfoot.

“La-La Land too rich for your blood?” she asked negligently, not wanting him to know how closely attuned she still was to his thoughts. “All those California babes—didn’t you have even the slightest urge to kick loose a little and enjoy yourself?”

As soon as the words left her lips she wished she could take them back. Indulging her almost desperate need to know what had happened to him over the last two years—whether he’d met anyone, if he’d fallen in love—was an area that had to be out of bounds if she had any hope of hanging onto her self-control while he was around. She couldn’t let things get personal between them. She was no good at personal anymore.

“It’s none of my business anyway,” she added swiftly, but she was too late. Cord rubbed the dirt from his hand carelessly against the seam of his jeans.

“You’ve got to be crazy,” he said. His tone was conversational and uninflected. “I only ever loved one woman, and that was you. Did you think that would change just because there was a continent between us? Did you really think I wouldn’t be hearing your voice, seeing your face—for God’s sake—smelling the scent of your skin every waking hour that I was away from you?”

He spoke as quietly as he always did and he made no move to touch her. He stood there, solid and big and about as flighty as the damned oak tree arching protectively over the house behind him, and she stared at him, unable to think of a single thing to say in reply.

“I met a man one night in a bar.” His low voice overrode her thoughts. “He said his people could shape shift and that he himself had flown like an eagle across mountain peaks. He’d had too much to drink, and maybe I had, too. But while he was talking I believed him, and all I could think was that I wanted to shape shift, too, to take on the wings of some bird strong enough to fly day and night until I was back with you again. I thought I would land on your window ledge and look into your room and make sure you were sleeping and safe, and then I would rise into the moonlight again and fly away before you awoke.”

One corner of his mouth lifted unexpectedly in a smile. Reaching out, he tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and then let his palm linger gently on the shape of her skull. “Like I said, I was a little drunk. I remember waking up stiff and cold on a hill hours later and feeling sure that I really had become that eagle and had seen you, but I never could make it happen again. So I dreamed about you instead. I had you in my arms every night.”

She didn’t want to hear any more. “I don’t believe in magic, Cord. And if you held anyone in your arms at night, she was a fantasy woman.” Her eyes met his steadily. “Whatever there once was between us is over. I tried to tell you that two years ago. If you won’t accept it I don’t see how we can work together on finding out who killed Paul and Sheila.”

“I could accept it if it was the truth. But you’re lying to me. I still can’t look at you without needing you so bad I’d crawl over ten miles of rough road on my hands and knees to get to you, and whether you admit it or not, you want me, too, Julia.” His fingers slid under her hair to the nape of her neck. “But go ahead and prove me wrong if you think you can. Kiss me.”

Her breath caught in her throat with a noise that sounded more like a startled gasp than the laugh she’d attempted. “Kiss you? What’s that supposed to—”

“Kiss me like it means nothing.” He drew her slightly closer to him, his fingertips warm against the fine bones at the back of her neck.

With heightened awareness, she could feel the coarser texture of the last few grains of soil still remaining on his hand. He was leaving his fingerprints on her, she thought foolishly, and as soon as the ridiculous notion entered her mind it was followed by a rush of desire so raw and unexpected that it felt as if the air around her had turned to warm water, immediately drenching the cotton sweater and the jeans she was wearing and soaking through to her skin. Cord’s mouth was only inches from hers.

“All we’ve got is history, Cord,” she said tightly. “Let’s leave it at that.” Her body was tense against his touch.

He exhaled softly, still holding her gaze. Shifting position slightly so that he was blocking the sun from her eyes, he shook his head and let the ghost of a smile cross his defeated features.

“My God, you’re one mule-headed woman. Why couldn’t you have held on to what we had just as stubbornly?”

He let his hand slide from the back of her neck and shrugged, that ironic smile still lifting one corner of his mouth. A crazy mixture of relief and disappointment swept through her, but she forced herself to concentrate on the former instead of the latter. He started to turn away, and suddenly her limbs felt like lead.

Then he stopped and turned back to face her. His eyes were unreadable.

“Hell, no. Not this time.” With one fluid movement, he bridged the space between them, pulling her to him so swiftly that she had no chance to react. “Good God, I just have to have this,” he muttered, his mouth coming down on hers.

She could taste salt on his top lip and the same sweat slicked her exposed skin where the vee neckline of her sweater dipped as he gathered her to his chest, his arm tightening around her. With his other hand he pushed her hair from her temple, his opened fingers sliding through it until they reached the back of her head, and then spreading wider. Individual sensations fell away, overwhelmed by the shock of sudden mindless need that tore through her.

She’d first kissed him when she’d been seventeen and he’d been twenty-two. Now it was ten years later, and if she’d had to guess a few seconds ago, she would have said that after all the years of intimacy between them there was nothing about Cord Hunter that was unfamiliar to her. She couldn’t have been more wrong, Julia thought incoherently.

Never, not even in the last few months of their relationship when everything had been falling apart, had he ever seemed to forget the physical disparity between them, and his size and strength had always been downplayed when he’d been with her. But this kiss was different from anything she’d experienced with him in the past—harder and hotter, his mouth open against hers with an almost adolescent lack of finesse. Once he’d been able to maintain some semblance of control even at the height of their lovemaking. Now not only had he lost that control, but he seemed to have forgotten any subtlety he’d ever possessed. All that was left was urgency.

He wanted her. He wanted her now, and badly enough that he hadn’t been able to ease into the moment or prolong the waiting. Despite the warning bells that were shrilling frantically in that part of her brain that was still functioning, there was no real choice left to her.

She kissed him back, opening herself fully to him, and he immediately took advantage of her lack of resistance and moved in even closer, his biceps tensing against her breasts. Liquid fire flashed through her. She could taste him, Julia thought disjointedly, and even that was different from the way she remembered it—he tasted ripe and dark, like cherries flamed in brandy, burning their way down her throat and exploding sweetly as they reached the pit of her stomach. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she felt her fingers fumbling at the buttons of his shirt, impatiently opening them. Her hands slid possessively against his skin, and she felt the faint ridge of scar tissue that followed the line of a bottom rib.

Another woman would have to ask him how he’d gotten that, Julia thought fiercely. Another woman could question him for years and still never know Cord the way she did. Once she’d lain in bed beside him, touching every mark on his body with gentle fingers and recalling the circumstances of each while he’d watched her, a faint smile playing on his lips as she went through the litany—falling from the oak tree when he was nine; getting a fishhook in his shoulder when he was teaching a tourist how to cast; being hit by a piece of flying debris when, as a member of the community’s volunteer fire department, he’d arrived at the blaze that had leveled the old box factory in town just as an ancient propane tank had exploded.

She knew him—every inch of him, Julia thought. He was hers and no one else’s, and not having him had been like existing in hell for two years. She arched her body to his and his grip around her tightened convulsively. His mouth moved to the corner of her lips, and she could feel his lashes flicking against the line of her cheekbone.

“Right about now I usually wake up,” he whispered hoarsely, his breath warm on her upper lip. His words were muffled against her skin. “Every time I do it’s like dying. Tell me it was the same for you.”

The scar on his ribs was from a stray round he’d caught the year before they’d separated. He’d been instrumental in tracking down the Donner “family,” a chillingly twisted group of serial killers who in the end had chosen to die in a violent confrontation with the authorities rather than surrender. Her fingertips passed over it gently, like a blind woman touching her own features in a reaffirmation of something she’d always known.

“It was the same for—”

The words died in her throat. Past the scar on his ribs her searching fingers had found another—a raised weal that snaked down from the side of his torso to the top of his hip. It felt ugly. It felt unfamiliar. She had no idea how he’d gotten it or when it had happened. All she knew was that it had to be less than two years old.