Between the Sheets (31 page)

Moonlight slipped through the high windows and they lay in cool light and thick shadow. The entire world reduced to black and white.

He sat back on his knees between her legs and slowly pulled off her running shoes, dropping them on the carpet. Her yoga pants followed, the dark cotton of her underwear. She reached up to pull at his belt, but he stopped her.

“Let me take care of you,” he said.

“I don’t want that.”

“Oh, honey. I think you need it.”

“Don’t,” she snapped. “Don’t tell me what I need.”

She wanted to work out her anger with him. That was all she wanted him for, and funny, the last time they were in this barn he had been totally on board with that. Completely happy being a simple tool to fix her complex desire.

But now it felt off.

Because he wanted more.

Because he wanted to be more than just an angry fuck.

In the truck, after the party, he’d told her that the two of them wanting each other wasn’t something to be scared of. That whatever was happening between them wasn’t a big deal, but then he saw her mother not remember who Shelby was. He saw Shelby broken wide open over the guilt and pain of her mother’s accident and he’d been ruined.

At that moment Ty wanting Shelby had become profoundly a big deal, because he wanted to help her. He wanted more than just this nasty amazing sex in the barn, he wanted more than the freedom of her body. He wanted her to see him as more than a simple tool.

I’m falling in love with her
.

“Are you saying no?” she asked, and he could see her closing up, shutting down, reaching for her things on the floor.

If he let her go he knew it would be over, and he could hardly blame her because he had fucking signed up for this. It wasn’t her fault he wanted more.

But he wanted more right now.

So he could deny her and be pushed back out of her life.

Or he could soak up this anger of hers, pull out the poison, and see what lay underneath.

“Spread your legs,” he said, and she stilled. For a heartbeat no one moved, and then, very slowly she spread her legs, just a little. Just enough that he could see the pink of her. He slipped one finger from the hem of her tee shirt, which had ridden up to her ribs, across the soft, giving flesh of her belly and down, slowly, through the soft curls covering her until he found her warm, damp skin.

She sucked in a quick breath as if she’d been touched by something cold. She wasn’t ready for sex. Not at all. Not her body or her head. She was a mess of mixed signals and crossed wires. Anger and grief made her think she wanted some kind of release, but her body wasn’t agreeing with that.

I will do this for you
, he thought, breathing soft kisses against the skin of her stomach, feeling against his lips the muscles trembling under the skin.
Because that’s what you want and I can’t say no to you. But I won’t do this again
.

He slipped to his knees on the floor beside the couch and put his hands on her hips, lifting her, shifting her until she was positioned just the way he wanted. In front of him, with one leg beside his arm, the other resting over his shoulder.

From the corner of his eye he watched her pull her shirt down over her belly—hiding her body from him, proving that she was so far away from the moment, light-years away from being turned on enough that she didn’t care about whatever imperfections she imagined she had.

You’re beautiful
, he breathed against the inside of her thigh because if he said it aloud she would deny it and pull farther from him.

So he would show her. He would show her everything he felt that she was so scared of.

Roughly, because he knew she liked that, he pulled her down, closer to the edge of the couch, closer to his mouth so that when he exhaled, he could see her curls move. He could see the ripple of goose bumps over the skin of her thigh.

Open-mouthed he kissed each thigh, he licked the muscle and tendon that connected her legs to her body, bit the soft and trembling rise of her belly. He waited until she was panting, until she was lifting her body up to his mouth, giving herself to his care, and finally, with his callused and grease-stained thumbs, he spread her open for his eyes.

He touched her with the tip of his tongue. Just the edge of his flesh against hers, and she sighed as if the relief were amazing. He could taste her and the salty-sweet beginning of her excitement. Slowly, he lapped at her, finding the soft spots, the hidden places, the hard knot of her clitoris. He circled it once, twice, until she jerked against him as if he were touching her with a hot
wire. He eased off, found the beautiful, tender entrance to her body, and paid homage.

She was moaning now, her fingers dancing over his shoulder, up into his hair.

He loved that. Loved her fingers in his hair, and he quickly pulled out the rubber band that kept his hair back, and as if she’d been waiting for that, she pulled it into her fists, yanking at the small hairs, the sharp sensation rocketing along his nerve endings.

Blood flooded his cock.

He laid the flat of his tongue along her clitoris, pressing hard against it, and slipped one finger inside of her. There she was wet. There she was ready. She pushed down against him, using his fingers, his tongue, for her pleasure.

“Tell me you have a condom,” she breathed. And he laughed. After Friday night he’d put one in his wallet, because he wanted to be prepared, because he didn’t want to miss another opportunity to be deep inside of her when she came, shuddering and crying.

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, setting it on her stomach, his mouth still busy between her legs. She found the condom and tore it open with her teeth. Oh God he loved that and he rewarded her with another finger, which sent one of her arms out wide against the leather cushions. A flush climbing up her neck, across her chest.

He replaced his tongue with his thumb, rolling the hard kernel of her clit, and reached for the condom.

“Undo my pants,” he said, and the words weren’t even out of his mouth before she’d lifted herself forward and gone to work on his belt, the buttons of his jeans. Her cool hand slid around the base of his cock and he groaned.

“Hurry,” she said.

He put the condom on with shaking fingers and then
rose up on his knees. He grabbed the back of the couch with one hand and her knee with the other and pressed slowly into her. Inch by hot, wet inch.

“Fuck, Shelby. So—”

“Good.”

He looked down at her, caught the glimmer of her eyes and held them as he slid deep into her, then pulled up her knee and slid even deeper. He felt like he was right under her breastbone. Right next to her heart. And staring into her eyes he knew she felt it, too.

He wanted to believe no one had ever had her like this. Ever.

Because he’d never been had like this. Ever. All the way. And it wasn’t just sex, it was everything. Every single fucking thing about her.

She closed her eyes, breaking the contact.

“Look at me,” he growled.

“Ty—”

He stopped moving. “Look at me.”

Her eyes when they opened were furious. She knew what he was doing and it was cheap, but he didn’t care. He’d use whatever means necessary to make himself important to her. To tie them together even if only for a few minutes.

He cupped her cheek, his fingers pulling at the fine hair at her temple, and the words, the words he knew he shouldn’t say, that were so new he had no business thinking about saying them, rose to his lips, and as if she knew—and hell, if she felt half as connected to him as he did to her, she totally knew—she closed her eyes and turned her head, burying her face against her arm.

“Just … fuck me, Ty,” she breathed.

Right
. Not love. Not even close.

So he did what she asked, because he was such a simple tool, helpless against her complexity.

Chapter 21

Shelby carefully pulled her pants on. She glanced around the shadows for her underwear but couldn’t find it. Tomorrow morning she’d come in and get it before the Saturday classes.

Then she remembered she’d cancelled the classes for the week.

Then the rest of it, like an avalanche, settled back down around her.

She hadn’t slept more than four hours a night all week.

Mom was confused. Angry.

Every candidate she’d interviewed had seemed terrible. And she didn’t know if their righteousness was real or a product of her guilt. The woman today, Melody—she’d seemed okay, but Shelby was beginning to doubt her own judgment. Was she the right woman by merit or because Shelby was at the end of her rope?

She swallowed the small moan in the back of her throat and put her face in her hands.

“Shelby?” Ty asked, from where he sat on the carpet. “What can I do?”

“You just did it.” She tried to make it a joke, but it wasn’t funny.

“Your mom?”

“We’re coping.” That was all she could say, a bland half-truth that didn’t come close to the ugly reality.
We are falling to pieces, more and more every day
.

“Is there … is there anyone else who can help you? Sisters, brother, aunts, uncles?”

“It’s just us. Just Mom and me.”

“A nursing home?”

Her ponytail had come loose, and when she spun her head to look at him, she was glaring at him through long strands of hair. But he got the point and lifted his hands as if she’d pulled a gun on him.

“All right,” he murmured. “No nursing homes.”

She couldn’t imagine this house without her mother. Couldn’t imagine being able to breathe in it if she weren’t there.

“Where’s your dad?” he asked.

The silence was so thick and so heavy she could hold it in her hands, watch it drip onto the floor. He’d fucked the anger out of her, but now she was left with nothing. And half the time it was the anger that kept her moving.

And that man, her father, seemed more and more like the poison at the root of her life. Nothing she ever did was untouched by him.

“He died. My first year of college. That’s who she thought you were the other night. When she told you to leave.” He sat on the floor, on the rug in nearly pristine condition rolled up and left on her front porch like a child at an orphanage.

Suddenly, she thought that of all the things that had washed up here on her property, Ty was somehow the most amazing. The most surprising. He came as one thing and had turned into another. Actually, he’d turned into a dozen other kinds of things. He kept multiplying when she wasn’t looking, growing more important. More useful. More endlessly … necessary.

“Was she talking about you?” he asked, quietly. “The girl he didn’t deserve.”

“I’d imagine she was. Though he really didn’t deserve either of us.”

His silence was a very specific question, a very clear demand for more, and she knew in her heart she should stand up and go, put an end to this thing building between them because she would never be able to be what he needed, but … she couldn’t.

Her inner stores of strength and wherewithal had been used up this week and she was beyond empty. But still she tried, because being alone was so much easier than being with someone else. She pulled her legs together as if to stand up, but that was as far as she got.

She opened her mouth to tell him he should go, to tell him actually to leave, but instead she told him everything else. As if the story had just been waiting for a weak moment to get out.

“In college I took this psych class and when we got to the part about narcissism, it was like my head exploded. That was my father. Right there in the textbook. On the page. And not just a little bit. My dad was a narcissist with a god complex. He didn’t see anything that wasn’t a reflection of him. He was a preacher of this bullshit faith he cooked up, opened a church down along the south highway, a tent really. And he got every alcoholic, every addict, every wife-beating husband who wanted to believe he could change, he could be saved, and my father just … he just lied to them. He told them what they wanted to hear and they ate it up. They ate it up until they got drunk again. Or high again. Or beat their wives and kids again and then they’d come back to Dad, hat in hand, tears in their eyes, and beg forgiveness and Dad would give it to them. He’d absolve them of their sins and take their money.”

“How did he and your mom meet?” Ty asked.

“He sought her out. She was older, awkward, I think, around men.” She glanced over at Ty ready to joke “like mother, like daughter,” but Ty was staring at her so earnestly,
soaking up all she had to say, that the joke died on her lips.

That’s right,
she thought,
he doesn’t see me that way
.

The reminder was a painful tender sting.

“But she owned this farmhouse and she had a good job at the factory and was really well-respected in town, and he needed someone who would foot the bill for this church and someone who could make it seem legitimate and someone he could fool into thinking he loved her.”

“You don’t think he loved you?”

“I was seven, standing at the county carnival handing out fliers for one of my dad’s revivals, and I saw all these families … all these happy families. Dads with kids on their shoulders, moms taking pictures, kids puking up cotton candy after a ride, their moms stroking their heads, and I realized Dad was never going to love me like other kids were loved. That he was different and he’d made me different. He’d messed me up in some way and I hated him. So, I dumped all the fliers in the garbage and just wandered the fair all night. Dad found the fliers, and when we got home he—” She hadn’t thought of that night for so long, a horrible bloody thing she’d buried.

Ty made a low sound in his chest as if he could see the memory, the way the belt had smacked between her shoulder blades, over her arms.

“Well … it was bad. But because I hated him so much, he lost all power over me. He could hit me, he could force me to pray all night long, he could haul me up in front of his bullshit congregation and make up lies about my sinner’s heart—but he couldn’t even get close to hurting me. I was so far away, so locked down, he couldn’t even get close.”