Holly Read online

  Nick lay still, his hands on her hips, lifting her, helping her, until he could stand no more, then he bent his long legs and rolled her onto her back on the seat and thrust hard into her, once, twice, four times, before collapsing on her, sweaty, sated, fulfilled.

  Beneath him, Holly smiled and closed her eyes. She felt wonderful, truly wonderful.

  Chapter Three

  “SO NOW WHAT HAPPENS?” NICK SAID AFTER A FEW moments, and Holly knew what he meant. Did she want him to drop her somewhere? Leave it to other people to watch her all night so she didn’t fall asleep? But he’d said he was going to take care of her. She didn’t answer. Instead, she let her body go limp against the seat, one arm falling toward the floor.

  “Miss Latham?” he asked, moving back from her, trying to see her face in the dark. “Miss Latham?”

  Holly still didn’t answer, just pretended to be asleep.

  Nick sat up. “I wonder how much her father would pay in ransom?” he said softly.

  When Holly’s eyes flew open, he snapped on the flashlight and they smiled at each other.

  “Does this mean you want to go home with me? Have me, the motorcycle man, make sure you don’t sleep?”

  Holly could feel her face turning red. She’d always been pretty enough that she’d never had to go after any male. They pursued her. Any man she’d ever been interested in had done all the chasing.

  She couldn’t see his face, and in spite of what they’d just done, she didn’t know him very well. “I…” she began, then smiled. “The real truth is that I want to see what’s inside your barn.”

  He laughed at that and Holly saw his eyes crinkle. His laugh was deep and rich and made her feel safe.

  “Okay, barn it is,” he said, then opened the car door to get out. When the dome light came on, Holly pulled his shirt over her and watched him. His legs were so long she wondered how he’d been able to climb through the space between the front seats. He turned away from her while he pulled on his trousers so she had a good look at the back of him, at the muscles playing under his skin, tapering down to a lean waist. His rear end was beautiful: hard and firm—and his legs were well-muscled. Did he get them from hauling engines in and out of trucks? she wondered.

  Smiling, still happy she was alive, she didn’t want to think about what she was doing, what she had done. She wasn’t a modern woman when it came to sex. More than one girlfriend had told her that she was a throwback to the Middle Ages. Holly was the kind of girl who didn’t allow a man to kiss her until the third date. Sex was months away. She’d listened to reminiscences of one-night stands, but they weren’t for her.

  She’d never said so, but she thought her attitude came from having “fallen in love”—as she saw it—with Lorrie when she was so young. She’d loved him and there’d been no sex. Maybe she was still searching for that ideal. Maybe, in her mind, sex and love didn’t go together.

  While Nick dressed, she pulled on her panties (she found them under the front seat) and slipped into the front passenger seat. When he got in the car and started the engine, she looked out at the road.

  “I go home tomorrow,” she said softly. “My parents are expecting me.” She didn’t want to elaborate even in her own mind about what she was trying to say. Was she telling him that he was good enough to rescue her, good enough to have sex with, but not good enough to, say, be seen in public with?

  But he seemed to understand completely. “Then we’d better make the most of tonight, hadn’t we?”

  “Yes,” she said, closing her eyes for a moment and thinking she was a fool. She didn’t want to hurt him.

  “Someone waiting for you?” he asked.

  “Yes. Maybe. I think so. I haven’t—” She stopped because he’d pulled the car to the side of the road, turned on the dome light, and looked at her.

  “Look, Miss Latham,” he said and held up his hand to stop her from saying anything. “If it’s all right with you, I’d as soon not be told your first name. If you’re worried that I’m going to fall in love with a society girl like you because of one night spent together, then I’ll pine for you for the rest of my life, think again. I broke up with a woman weeks ago and I’ve been celibate since then. What I need is a lot of sex with no possibility of the words ‘relationship,’ ‘commitment,’ and especially not ‘marriage.’

  “My concern in all this is that if you spend twenty-four hours with me I’ll spoil you forever for your little blue-blood boyfriends who’d rather play tennis than make love.”

  Holly blinked at him for a moment. “You’ll fall in love with me,” she whispered, exaggerating. “All men do.”

  “Twenty-four hours from now I’ll pour you, exhausted, into your bed in your ugly new house and you will be the one who won’t be able to stop thinking of me.”

  “Now why don’t I believe that?” she said, smiling.

  “I accept the challenge,” she said, and held out her hand to shake his.

  Picking up her hand, he turned it over, then looked up at her with blazing hot eyes. The next second, Holly fell onto him, the gear shift hitting her in the hip. His hands were under her shirt, running up her body onto her breasts, caressing, kneading.

  The ringing of her cell phone brought her back to reality. Reluctantly, her heart pounding wildly, she pulled away from him and dug under the seat to find her big handbag and search for the phone. Her stepmother was calling, in tears of worry about her. One glance at Nick and she knew that the voices on the phone were loud enough that he could hear everything.

  Nick started the car again and began driving as Holly talked to both her parents. That her stepmother was so upset was touching and her concern brought tears to Holly’s eyes—and apologies to her lips. Yes, yes, she’d been trespassing yet again. Yes, she’d been snooping through some rotten old house. With a glance at Nick, she told her parents she’d been so absorbed in looking she’d forgotten about the movers.

  Her father, ever the practical man, took the phone and quietly bawled his daughter out. “Yes, sir,” Holly said meekly. “I’m sorry, sir.” When he’d finished, he put Holly’s stepsister, Taylor, on the phone.

  “So what really happened?” Taylor asked.

  As usual, Taylor was too close to whatever secrets Holly tried to keep. “So how are the wedding plans coming?” she asked, trying to distract her stepsister.

  “I’ll tell you everything when you get here. Wait until you see the dress I chose for you to wear. Oh,” Taylor said, “Dad says to tell you that the movers will be there day after tomorrow at eight A.M. He says you’re to be there, and, by the way, he wants to know why the woman at the diner thought you’d run off with some guy on a motorcycle. Did you know that Dad knows the woman’s family?”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it. I guess Dad straightened everything out with the police.”

  “Of course he did. But he was giving you until midnight. If you hadn’t been reached by then he was sending out the posse.”

  Holly glanced at Nick’s profile by the dashboard light. If he hadn’t rescued her, her father would have sent people to find her. She wouldn’t have died in the pit after all.

  When Nick glanced at her and winked, Holly smiled warmly. All in all, she was glad things had worked out the way they did. She turned her attention back to the phone. “I’ll see you in two days. Don’t pick out your dress until I get there.”

  “Pick out my dress? Aren’t you quaint? You think I’m going to some bargain basement and trying them on? Daddy’s flying a designer in from New York.”

  “Okay, so let me see the sketches. I have to go. I have something I must do. ’Bye, Taylor, and love to everyone.”

  Nick had pulled into the driveway in front of a dilapidated old house. “It ain’t much, but it’s home,” he said.

  She was staring at the house in the headlights, as always, trying to date the structure. Early nineteenth century, nothing in the least remarkable about it.

  Nick got out and opened the car door for her. When she