Holly Read online

  One of his thumbs slid inside her, moving in and out in a slow, sensual way. “We lived so far away from other houses that the school bus and the mailman refused to drive to us. We didn’t have TV until I was nine. I spent my days outside, fishing for the family. I was the best fisherman. I—”

  “No more,” Holly said, putting her hand on his cheek. “I don’t want to hear anymore. Let’s just—” She was going to say “enjoy the moment,” but what he was doing made her stop talking—and thinking.

  He had sunk to his knees and buried his face between her legs. She’d given oral sex before but had never received it. At the first touch of his tongue, her eyes widened in astonishment. In the next second, she closed her eyes and opened her legs. If he hadn’t been holding her upright, she would have slid to the floor.

  Just when Holly was sure she could stand no more, Nick lifted her, put her legs about his waist, and set her down on his erect maleness.

  She pulled him to her, digging her nails into his back, pulling him closer and closer, wanting more and more of him. Her legs tightened, her shoulders braced against the shower wall.

  When Holly came, she screamed, and Nick held her to keep her from falling. For minutes, he held her tightly against him, not letting her fall.

  “You okay?” he asked after a while.

  “I thought I was going to die.”

  She could feel him smile against her neck. “First orgasm?” he asked.

  “Of course not!” she said, life returning to her limbs. “I’ve had a million orgasms. One for each of your cousins.”

  She could feel his stomach muscles moving as he chuckled, and Holly was offended. “Look, Trucker Man, just because you grew up sleeping six to a bed doesn’t mean you know all about life and love and sex, while we know nothing.”

  Still smiling, he moved away from her, soaped his hands and began to wash her, but this time it wasn’t sensual, it was “business.” In the same businesslike manner, she soaped her hands and began to wash him.

  “Who is ‘we’?” he asked.

  “I just meant—” Breaking off, she looked up at him. He had the most infuriating smile on his face, a smirk of such superiority that she wanted to wipe it off. “Your betters!” she said. “You know, those of us who give up our lives to keep the world together.”

  “Oh?” he said, turning her around and soaping her back. “I found you in a pit in an old house, naked, cold, and hungry. Were you planning to give up your life for that old house?”

  “Not me,” she said. “I meant people like my father. He—” She paused a moment as he ran his hands over her breasts.

  “He what?” Nick asked huskily.

  She was determined to wipe the smirk off his face. “My father flies all over the world, from one crisis to another. He has no life of his own. The phone never stops ringing. He—”

  “So he sent you away to boarding schools to be raised by strangers,” Nick said.

  “Don’t you dare say anything against my father! He was—is—You know, that’s very distracting.” He was massaging her breasts.

  “My dad played ball with us. My uncle taught me how to ride a motorcycle. We all went to church together every Sunday.” He pulled back from her, his hands on her hips. “Miss Latham, I said your sister was a snob, but so are you.”

  At that, he turned off the water and got out of the shower, leaving Holly sputtering behind him.

  She stepped out, grabbing a towel from beside the door. He was drying himself. “I am not a snob! I get along with everyone. I can talk to people from all walks of life. I can—”

  “You think that all of us out here are hungering for your life? You think that every man who grew up in a house with fewer than four bathrooms is dying to marry some over-educated, lonely, uptight, suppressed girl like you? No, Miss Latham, we are not.”

  He tossed his wet towel onto the countertop and walked, naked, out of the room.

  Blinking, Holly stood there, the towel draped around her, and stared at the doorway. Over-educated? Lonely? Uptight? Suppressed? That’s not how she saw herself.

  Wrapping the towel around her body, she left the room. He was dressed in clean jeans and a shirt, barefoot, and rummaging inside a chest of drawers.

  She tried to regain her dignity, but that wasn’t easy since she was wearing only a towel and her wet hair was clinging to her face. “I think you misunderstand me,” she said to his back. “I don’t think that you—or people who have been raised as you have—are dying to marry people like me, but I do think that…” She couldn’t think how to phrase what she meant to say—if she even knew what she wanted to say, that is.

  He pulled some clothes from a drawer and looked at her. “You think we’re all dying for your money, that we’d do anything on earth to get away from the fear of next month’s electric bill. You think we all dream of getting our hands on some rich girl so we can leave our nasty little working-class lives behind.” He moved toward her until they were nearly nose-to-nose. “I already know enough about your life, Miss Latham, to know I wouldn’t have it on a bet. You know what my family has an abundance of? Love, that’s what. When my sister got married, she didn’t have some designer fly down from New York. My mother made her dress, and there was love in every stitch. Can your fancy designer top that?”

  “No,” Holly said softly. He was right, of course. But she had always been told that people who had less money than her family did were “less fortunate.” She’d heard horror stories from her stepmother about her life with her first husband. He’d been faithless and what money he did earn, he spent on liquor.

  Maybe because of the stories of the people close to her, she’d been unfair, she thought. Maybe…

  “Put those on,” Nick said, thrusting clothes into her arms. “They’re Leon’s, but maybe they’ll fit you.”

  Silently, Holly put the clothes on. They were blue jeans and a worn short-sleeve shirt. She had clean, but damp, underpants, no bra, no socks, no shoes.

  The atmosphere between them had changed. Nick moved to the other side of the garage where she couldn’t see him, but she could feel his anger. Was it all at me? she wondered. Maybe he’d been snubbed before by someone like her. Someone like me, she thought with a grimace.

  She stopped buttoning the shirt and smiled. She’d gone from thinking about “people like him” to “someone like me.”

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked, staring at her. His eyes were dark, his jaw set. With his unshaven whiskers, he looked like a pirate. Not exactly a turnoff.

  “Go?” she said, then, “Oh.” He was taking her back to her parents’ rented house. It was daylight and he was finished with her.

  She rolled up the cuffs of the trousers and padded after him, neither of them saying a word all the way to the car. Then, to Holly’s surprise, at the end of the drive he turned left, not right. He was going toward his side of the lake, not hers.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

  He gave her a look of surprise as he reached to the backseat and handed her her sandals. “To get your boots out of the pit, and I thought that if you wanted to see the old houses around here we might ask the owners’ permission. You don’t have to trespass, do you? It’s not some deep-seated need of yours, is it?”

  Leaning back against the door, she looked at him hard. Had all his anger been an act? “You have a streak of unlikability in you, you know that?”

  “ ‘Unlikability.’ Did you make that word up? You know how it is with us poor, uneducated rednecks. You have to talk slow. Simple words.”

  “Is that so? What was it you said to me that first night? You were trying to get over the ‘injustice of the accusation’? Now, I ask you, is that proper redneck talk?”

  He stopped the car under the tree Holly had parked under last night. “Don’t fall in love with me, Latham,” he said, opening the door and getting out.

  “Fat chance,” she said as she got out, too. “For your information, my heart is already taken.”