“Clay told me he’d all but decided to drop the idea of DNA tests, but you urged him to go forward.”
“So?” Dylan stepped out of the car and she followed.
She tilted her head and studied his moonlit face. “I thought you’d be the one to drag your feet.”
With a hand on her arm, he turned her toward the carriage house. “I changed my mind.”
She stopped, unable to continue on as if nothing else had occurred. “What are you going to do about David?”
He tensed but shrugged off her question. “Nothing.”
Cautious relief sluiced through her. “Why not?”
“My father’s been dead a long time.” With his hands in his pockets, he rocked back on his heels. Taut jaw muscles contradicted his casual air.
Elation raised Gracie’s spirits a notch, but this seemed too good to be true. “You aren’t going to tell anyone?”
“Just my sister.” Dylan shook his head sadly, slowly. “What would be the point of telling anyone else? My father will still be dead, and another good man’s life will be ruined.”
“What about your uncle?”
He hesitated again. “I don’t think he’ll say anything.”
Her heart filled with gratitude and admiration and another emotion that slammed into her so hard and so fast it left her breathless. Could this be love? Although she’d resisted the emotion from the beginning—and considered the idea foolish in the extreme even now—she no longer denied the truth to herself. Joyfully, she flung her arms around him. “You’re a good man, too.”
“Do you happen to need a good man?” He folded her into his arms and crushed her against him.
She planted herself against his chest. “Desperately.”
“I want to be good. To you. For you. With you.” His lips trailed across her cheeks, ears, and neck, punctuating each phrase with soft, sweet kisses.
“Let’s be good together.” Her smile twinkled. “Or bad.”
“Not bad. Not tonight,” he said as serious as she’d ever seen him. “Tonight, I want everything between us to be good.” He breathed deeply of her skin, and she felt like he was trying to absorb her into him. “So good. Like you.” He kept his arm around her shoulders. “Although, I wish you had worn the lab coat home. That hot doctor look is a real turn on.”
“I should have known you’d like that. I’ll bring one home tomorrow and give you a good going over.”
After an evening chock-full of worry and stress, she eagerly accepted the forgetfulness he offered. His magic touch spread through her with the slide of his tongue beneath her ear.
Slowly, they made their way up the staircase, through the living room, and into the bedroom. They stripped one another’s clothes, tugging off a sweatshirt here, a T-shirt there, jeans, socks, all the way down to her teeny pink thong. Dylan had gone commando.
With a stroke of his rigid shaft, it jutted boldly into her palm.
Each delicate and brief brush of skin, as well as each lingering contact, sizzled and intensified.
Gracie moaned deep in her throat as she matched his long, sensual, drugging kisses. She couldn’t get enough of him. She wiggled against him, her hands moving over him everywhere, from muscled back to corrugated stomach, along the smooth length of his rock-hard cock.
She savored the hot dizziness that came with his hand’s caress along her ribs, his mouth’s tug on her breast, and his reverent attention to her slickest flesh. Increasing sensations, escalating responses overlapped in an endless stream.
When she positioned the tip of his penis against her, he stopped and held her gaze.
“Go for it,” she whispered, breathless with anticipation. Her heart pounded as he eased the long, hard length into her. She relished each delicious inch.
“Sweet Jesus,” he prayed, his hands cradling her face. “You’re amazing, Gracie.”
With their eyes locked, they began the slow dance to completion. Each stroke took her to a new level, higher, deeper, farther than she’d ever been. She wanted to tell him how she felt, but words eluded her. She hoped he understood from her touch, from her acceptance, from her response.
He reached beneath her and tilted her hips up, increasing the depth of each thrust. Her desire accelerated until she could only gasp out his name. “Dylan, Dylan.”
“Come for me now,” he breathed into her ear.
“Come with me,” she pleaded.
Their bodies tensed and arched as the powerful climax gripped them. She squeezed him within her sheath as he continued, harder, stronger, faster, exploding them into the free-fall of mind-numbing, heart-stopping, life-affirming pleasure.
Drifting back into reality, a sensual lethargy pulled at Gracie’s humming body, but her thoughts ricocheted with unfettered energy. After the fire, they’d had sex. A grand, pounding, no-holds-barred, physical release. In the shower before the festival, they’d had fun with bubbles, playing together, their mating as easy and as uncomplicated as seals.
But this time, this glorious time, they had shared love. Created love. Invented love. A binding, emotional experience that stirred her heart and her senses and floated her deep into mysteriously tempting, terrifyingly uncharted waters.
When morning came, it dragged in about ten pounds of doubts and worries along with a window full of buttery yellow sunbeams.
They’d made love. Gracie conceded the fact, picking up on her earlier thoughts. She had felt it in the depths of her heart and soul. But as she took MacDuff for his morning walk, she admitted that the actual word hadn’t been spoken. Not by him. Not by her.
They lived in completely different worlds, with different rules and expectations. A fish and a bird might fall in love, but they would never live in the same world. How could they share a happily ever after?
If a fairy godmother waved a magic wand to shoehorn Gracie into Dylan’s world of glitz and glamour, she wouldn’t want to make the transformation. Life had to be filled with more important pursuits than frolicking at the latest hotspots and shopping for the hippest designer fashions.
She loved her work. Financial necessities aside, she enjoyed the mental stimulation it demanded, and the emotional gratification it provided.
If Dylan could fit into her world—a niggling voice reminded her how hard he’d worked during the past week to do just that—she couldn’t picture him taking up permanent residence there. He’d done great here in East Langden, but her real life was in Hartford with her practice and the patients that liked her and needed her. She couldn’t see him cooling his heels when she got called away to check on a six-year-old with a tummy ache.
And even though she personally admired the accomplishments Dylan and his sister spearheaded through The Matthew Bradford Foundation, the role was too structured and limiting to grab his interest full-time.
He was good at investing his and other people’s money at his grandfather’s brokerage. But he played at it like a hobby, not a calling or even a job. She suspected he could give it up tomorrow and never miss the work or the income.
Shaking her head at their incompatibility, she returned to the house, stood over the bed and watched him sleep. They probably had only a few days left together. She’d do her best not to get in any deeper, but she wouldn’t let him go until she had no other choice. She shimmied out of her yoga pants and sweatshirt and tossed them aside.
Running a fingertip along his eyebrow, she leaned in to kiss him. He snapped awake then smiled. “Gracie,” he said. Just that. Warming her to her toes with the single word. Her name had never sounded so good.
“Dylan,” she answered, liking the sound of that equally well.
He grabbed hold of her hand and pulled her into his arms. “You know what?” He lifted her chin and kissed her mouth. “We forgot to use protection again.”
“No!” She jerked away, shaking her head. “No.”
“Denial won’t change the facts.”
“Oh, my God.” Her hand pressed against the heart pounding so forcefully she thought it might crack a few ribs. “What was I thinking?”