Fortune Finds Florist Page 11

  “It’s just that I prefer it,” she improvised quickly, “e-especially when I’m on my way to work and don’t have time to, ah, clean up.”

  He frowned and adjusted his shoulders. “Guess I’ll buy condoms.”

  “I’d appreciate that.” She kissed him quickly. “Later, okay?”

  He shrugged indifferently, but he had the look of a man riding the knife-edge of disappointment. She moved toward the door, knowing she had to get out of there before she gave in, not that she liked refusing him. Maybe she’d pick up a few foil packets herself so this wouldn’t happen again, because she was determined to do whatever it took to keep Sam from backing off.

  That did not include confessing that she hadn’t used the Pill in nearly eight long years.

  Chapter Nine

  Sierra kept her eyes closed as Sam lifted his head, breaking the kiss.

  The girls were downstairs doing homework. Tyree was helping the twins with a picture scroll illustrating Native American traditions. It was a project she’d done herself the year before last. Content to let her handle it, Sierra and Sam had climbed the stairs to the study ostensibly to go over this month’s expenses. They hadn’t wasted much time with that, finding better uses for the desk.

  Sam covered the pulse point at the base of her throat with his hand, then dragged it downward until it cupped her breast. She arched her back, encouraging him to get on with undressing her. He’d already opened her jeans, and now his fingers moved to the placket of her blouse. She squirmed to get away from the corner of the desk blotter jabbing her in the rib and reached for his shirttail.

  He smiled and lifted her hand to his mouth, sucking her finger inside. Her eyes nearly crossed as she felt the pull all the way down to the apex of her thighs. In moments like these, she knew that Sam was her other half, and she couldn’t believe that eventually he wouldn’t know it, too. Meanwhile, he was making her crazy. She reached for him again, but he batted her hand away, chuckling.

  “In a hurry, are we?”

  Capturing both her wrists in one of his, he stretched them over her head, leaning forward as he did so. She caught her breath, lifting her breasts toward his mouth. He licked the path between them revealed by the opening in the front of her shirt, and it was exactly then that the doorknob rattled.

  “Mom?” They both turned their heads at the sound of Tyree’s voice, momentarily frozen. The doorknob rattled again, and they exploded into action, bolting up from the desk, grabbing at buttons and zippers and misplaced desktop accessories. “Mom, can we have sodas, ple-e-e-ase?”

  Sam looked around, as if trying to decide where to place himself. Sierra pushed him toward a chair in front of the desk, one hand smoothing her hair as she lunged for the door. Yanking it open, she tried her best to behave normally.

  “Sodas? Well, let’s see. You’ve already had a soda today. How about milk instead, chocolate milk?”

  Tyree glanced at the twins for approval and received eager nods. Kim stuck her head inside the room and addressed Sam, who sat forward in the chair, watching over his shoulder. “Can we, Sam? Can we have chocolate milk?”

  He cleared his throat. “How’s the project coming?”

  “Good. Tyree showed us how to outline everything in black marker so it’s real neat.”

  “Except the buffalo looks kind of like a lion,” Keli said, wrinkling her nose.

  Sam smiled. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  “How come the door was locked?” Tyree asked abruptly.

  Sierra stifled a gulp and shrugged. “I must’ve done it accidentally.”

  “Oh. So should I use the syrup or that powder stuff?”

  “The powder has vitamins,” Sierra said, glancing at Sam. “Why don’t you use that?”

  “Okay. Thanks, Mom.”

  “Thanks, Sam,” the twins added.

  “No problem. Just be careful not to make a mess.”

  “We will.”

  “And drink quick, we’ll be going in a few minutes.”

  “So soon?” Tyree whined.

  Sam brushed Sierra with a slightly accusing gaze, saying, “Your mom and I are almost finished here. It’s getting late.”

  The twins hurried for the stairs, Tyree following with reluctant acceptance. Sierra closed the door.

  “Do you really have to go so soon?”

  His eyes raked her. “We can’t keep taking chances like this, Sierra.”

  Panic, tinged with unreasonable anger, shook her. They had already taken chances, very big chances. Why stop now? But she couldn’t say that to Sam.

  She lifted her chin and said, much more calmly than she felt, “Then we’ll just have to be more careful.” He stared at her for a long while, and she dared not breathe until he nodded curtly and looked away. “I’d better go help the girls,” she murmured, knowing that it was unwise to press him further at that moment.

  She swept from the room, disappointed that they had been interrupted, not that she believed quick sex was going to convince Sam that they belonged together. If that were so, he’d already be convinced. It was the only way she had, though, of maintaining the intimacy, the connection, and she wanted Sam so badly that she was willing to take him any way she could get him, any way at all.

  Sam lightly closed the master bedroom door, Sierra beside him, and headed for the stairs, as eager as an inexperienced boy with his first girl. The condoms were burning a hole in his pocket, and the self-disgust that underlay the lust was not enough to send him home without indulging his body in Sierra’s. It didn’t seem to make any difference how often they “indulged,” and it was often, he just kept coming back for more. Even nearly getting caught by the girls that night in Sierra’s study hadn’t appreciably slowed them down, and still he was so wound up and ready for her that when Sierra caught his arm just as he was about to descend the stairs, he glanced back at her irritably.

  She gave her head a little jerk. “Let’s go to the guest room.”

  “We can’t do that!” he insisted, dropping his voice to a hiss. “We can’t have sex with the girls sleeping just down the landing.”

  “At least the guest room has a lock on the door,” Sierra hissed back at him. “The den doesn’t have a door at all! What if one of the girls gets up and comes downstairs? What then?”

  Sam clapped a hand to the back of his neck. “I should just go home.”

  “Don’t,” she said, pulling at him. “I want to make love with you on a real bed for a change.”

  Sam had to admit that a real bed did sound inviting. That couch downstairs was narrow and confining, and while taking her up against a wall or over a desk was exciting in the extreme, he had the bruises to prove that easier ways definitely existed. He glanced warily at the master bedroom door, behind which all three girls were bedded down for the night, and conceded with a nod.

  Smiling triumphantly, Sierra caught him by the hand and literally danced at the end of his arm until he followed her with growing enthusiasm toward the guest room, ignoring the niggling certainty that he was the one doing the dancing and it was almost always to her tune. No matter how convincingly he told himself that he had the upper hand in this, he very much feared that he did not. Yet when she opened her arms to him, he followed her down onto that bed and didn’t rise again until nearly two hours later.

  As he reached for his jeans, she reached for him, sitting up and pressing herself against his back, arms encircling his neck. She nipped at his shoulder with her perfect little teeth and whispered hopefully into his ear, “Stay with me, Sam. Don’t go home tonight.”

  He wanted to stay. He wanted to make love to her, then sleep with her in his arms, and that more than anything else drove him toward the door. “I can’t do that. I won’t have the girls find me here in the morning.”

  “Would it be so bad, Sam?” she asked softly. “If they knew we were together as a couple?”

  He wanted to shout at her then, wanted to yell that they were not a couple, but he was too honest to say it, just
because it should be so. Instead, he hung his head, warring with the various parts of himself. He felt pulled into pieces at times, wanting different things; the parts that most wanted Sierra usually won, and more and more of him seemed to be falling into that category the longer this went on. That was another reason he had to go.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, pulling on his jeans and trying not to feel guilty at the look of disappointment on her face. He stomped his feet into his boots, grabbed his shirt, kissed her quickly and got out of there, but he wasn’t any happier about it than she was.

  He wasn’t happy about much of anything these days. He wasn’t happy that he couldn’t seem to turn down what she consistently offered or that his work was suffering because of it, and he wasn’t happy that leaving her just got more and more difficult. Yet he just couldn’t convince himself to end it. He felt trapped by the taste of heaven in a hell of his own making, and he didn’t have the slightest idea what he was going to do about it.

  He had decided to plant wheat. A farm was a farm, after all, and it just wasn’t possible to put all their arable acreage into flowers, which were labor intensive. The wheat would require little enough from him until harvest, and if he found that he couldn’t manage both crops, he could always plow under the mature plants and increase the nutritional value of the soil. Besides, he’d cut his farming teeth on wheat. He liked the idea of having a standing field, and he’d have it in the ground in plenty of time to start the other planting, which could only come after the last hard freeze, early March in his estimation. Only one thing was for sure about winter in Texas, though—or any season, for that matter—it simply couldn’t be reliably predicted. No more than Sierra Carlton could be.

  Now there was a correlation—Sierra Carlton and Texas. Both could be hotter than a pistol, even in the middle of winter. A fellow just couldn’t say what he’d find in either case when he opened up for business of a morning. They were both beautiful, wild at heart and utterly compelling.

  As if to confirm that thought, something caught Sam’s attention, a flash in the corner of his eye. Turning his head, he found the movement and made out the shape. Bringing the tractor to a halt in the center of the field, he sat there, staring out of the glass-enclosed cab at the luxury sedan laying down a trail of dust that led straight to him. It was Sierra. He touched the mobile phone clipped to his belt. If an emergency had cropped up, she’d have called. That left certain scintillating possibilities. Jeez Louise, what wouldn’t that woman do?

  The answer to that increased the temperature inside the tractor cab to uncomfortable levels. He kept telling himself that he wasn’t going to dance to her tune, but damn if his feet didn’t take off after other parts of his body just as soon as she started piping her siren’s song. He could no longer sell himself the lie that it was just sex, either, because if that was the case, the novelty would surely have worn off by now. One of them would have lost interest. Instead, he practically panted every time she looked his way, and the fact of the matter was, those feelings were getting stronger, not weaker, with time.

  Now here she came in the middle of the day, way out in the back of nowhere, and he couldn’t quell the rising desire. He glanced around. They were as alone as they could get out here, so why not? But, by golly, if he was going to dance to her tune again, he was damned sure going to lead. Shutting off the engine, he starting climbing down out of the cab. By the time he reached the ground and headed for the road, she was standing beside her car with the handle of a picnic hamper clutched in both hands.

  “Lunchtime,” she called cheerily, and so it was, but lunch could wait.

  Shrugging out of his denim jacket, he tossed it over one shoulder. She smiled, looking perfectly edible in flowing, deep olive-green, wide-legged pants and a matching sweater with a wide, ribbed collar that hugged her shoulders, baring their tops. A chill breeze ruffled her long, wild hair, but the sunshine, a little shelter and body heat—lots of body heat—would keep them comfortable. He leaped across the narrow ditch running alongside the dirt road and dropped his jacket on the hood of her car, grabbed the picnic basket from her and snagged her hand without breaking stride. She whipped around in his wake and hurried to keep up.

  “Where are we going?”

  He hauled her around the end of her car. “Not far.”

  Setting the picnic basket in the bed of the dually, he yanked open the back door and picked her up by the waist, depositing her on the edge of the seat.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting comfortable.” He yanked off his cap and sailed it through the door before reaching back over his shoulder, grasping a handful of T-shirt and pulling it up and off. “My back seat’s bigger than yours.” He wadded the shirt into his hands and shot it through the open door like a basketball. She opened her mouth, only to yelp when he reached for her feet. “Don’t need these.” He tossed her shoes over the front seat and lifted his hands to her waist, curling his fingers into the elastic waistband of her pants. “Don’t need these, either.”

  Her hands suddenly clamped down over his. “D-don’t you even want to know why I’m here?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Not particularly,” he admitted, “so long as there’s sex involved.”

  She recoiled as if he’d punched her, and he instantly regretted the hasty words. This situation was as much his doing as hers, after all. The impulse to take out on her his shame at his own willingness to compromise his better judgment was both unfair and dishonorable. She deserved better. That was a whole lot of the problem. He set about repairing the damage.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just that you’re positively addictive. I tell myself I can walk away from this at any time, but the fact is that when you’re within reach, I ache to get my hands on you, and when you’re not, I can’t help wondering when you will be again.”

  “Sam,” she said, sliding her hands into his hair, “I feel the same way about you. I think about you all the time.”

  He closed his eyes. “I wish you didn’t. If just one of us could put a stop to this, we’d both be better off.”

  “That’s not so!” she said in a rush. “Don’t you understand yet that I lo—”

  He shook her, shook that word right out of her mouth before she could say it. This was his greatest fear. The forever kind of love that Sierra deserved just wasn’t in the cards for the two of them. “Sierra, why can’t you see that we’re headed for a fall, and a big one at that?”

  “No! It doesn’t have to be that way. We’re so good together, Sam.”

  “We are so headed for trouble,” he countered. “Listen, I know what I’m talking about. My folks started out just like this, Sierra. You wouldn’t have known it to look at my mom after a few years with Jonah, but she was from a wealthy family in Denver, and my father, well, he just wasn’t in the same class. Okay? She thought they could make it. She chose him, and after they wrote her off and he realized he could never give her a life anywhere close to what she was used to, it—it just set up the whole cycle of abuse that finally destroyed them both.”

  “You’re not like Jonah,” she insisted sternly.

  “No, no, I’m not, and I don’t want to be, but I know me, Sierra. I saw the festering resentment in my parents’ marriage, and I’m not willing to set myself up for that by sacrificing my pride, especially since pride’s about all I’ve got.”

  “But why does it have to be that way, just because I unexpectedly inherited some money?”

  “No, not just because of that. Don’t you think I know who your father is? He’s some big shot new-car dealer with businesses all over Fort Worth.”

  “And he practically cut me off when I married Dennis.”

  “Your marriage to Dennis is a case in point, Sierra. From what you say, money destroyed it.”

  She put her hands to her head. “The lack of money. But that can’t happen again. I’m the one with the money now, and nobody can take it away from me.”

  �
��And nobody should,” Sam said. “That’s the point, Sierra. Letting you invest your money in me and taking it as my own are two different things.”

  “But you wouldn’t be!”

  “Which only means that we’d remain unequal, and I’m telling you flatly that I can’t live with that.”

  She stared at him; he held her gaze, letting her gauge the honesty in his eyes. “If the money’s the problem, then I’ll tie it up in trust for Tyree.”

  “And give up that big house of yours?” he asked doubtfully. “Because you know you can’t afford to keep it without the income that money provides.”

  “I’ll find a way. I—I could take in boarders to help with the expense, just until the farm starts to pay off.” He lifted an eyebrow to let her know what he thought of that, but she wouldn’t let go of the notion. “You and the girls could move in! Think how great that would be.”

  He shook his head, trying hard not to scoff. “Sierra, I can’t afford to pay you rent, especially when the girls and I are living rent-free where we are. And who else do you think you’re going to get to move all the way out here? I can’t think of anyone who would even consider it. Except your ex-husband,” he added derisively.

  “Like I’d let him anywhere near my place with a suitcase,” she muttered, crestfallen. “Dennis is a no-good, fortune-hunting con man.”

  “Which is exactly what people would be saying about me if we hooked up,” Sam pointed out.

  “We already are hooked up.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What I know is that until Edwin Searle took it into his head to write me into his will, Tyree and I weren’t so different from you. We were a lot worse off, in fact. We’d been living hand-to-mouth for a long time.”

  “And you should never have to do that again,” he told her. “Believe me when I say that I’m glad you won’t.”

  “But if the money’s that big of a problem for you, Sam,” she said earnestly, “I don’t mind giving it up.” He started shaking his head, truly alarmed, but she pressed on. “It wouldn’t be for long. You’re going to make it big, Sam. I know you are. We are. Together. That’s what I came to tell you. We’ve got an offer, a big one. A wholesaler in Dallas has offered us a contract.”