Elliott paced back and forth on the Tates’ porch, nodding to no one in particular when he heard a cheer from inside, signaling one of two things. Either a new item had been donated for the auction or one of the offerings had been purchased. After freshening up, Sage had come downstairs twenty minutes ago with her computer and set up camp at the kitchen table—and every Tate relation within a hundred-mile radius had promptly crowded around her to watch the show. Jess had even unearthed a white board from the basement and propped it on the dining room windowsill so they could keep a live running tally. Around the third time the woman had burst into grateful tears, Elliott had made his escape to the porch.
Drifting from the upstairs window, he could hear angst-ridden music and high-pitched teenage girl laughter, signaling Alice was getting on just fine with her new best friend. Belmont had gone off for a walk, appearing anxious over so many people huddled around Sage. Leaving Elliott to wait for Peggy to emerge from the bedroom she’d been assigned. After devising a plan to get the Tates’ local businesses involved in the auction, Peggy had politely excused herself, saying she would return to check the progress soon. Although his intuition told him she would stay in the bedroom as long as possible, hoping to avoid him.
Well, screw that. He didn’t have much time to work with. While he fully understood that patience was required in this situation he’d created, waiting for her to come to him wasn’t going to cut the damn mustard.
Elliott pulled open the screen door and strode past the dining room, no one seeming to notice him heading for the stairs, except for Sage and Kyler’s mother, who sent him a thumbs-up. Ridiculous that he should take heart from the simple gesture, wasn’t it? But hell, he needed every ally he could get. Before he even reached the door to Peggy’s bedroom, his senses picked up on her silent do not enter vibe. It was hanging in the air, clear as crystal.
Hardening his jaw, Elliott pushed past the imaginary barrier and opened the bedroom door. In such an old house, he’d expected the door to creak and signal his entrance, but it didn’t make a sound, giving him valuable seconds of looking at an undisturbed Peggy.
Invisible fingers dug into his stomach at the sight of her. There was no flirtatious set to her mouth, no artful posing of her curves. She was lying on her stomach on the bed, her chin propped on a fist, reading through what looked to be a journal. Her lips moved in time with whatever she was reading, and those fingers tightened their hold on his stomach when he realized he hadn’t been aware of that habit.
“Peggy,” Elliott prompted, regret weighing on his shoulders when she reacted with a gasp, jerking back into a kneeling position. Almost as an afterthought, she reached forward and closed the journal with a decisive snap. “I’m sorry I interrupted you.”
She wouldn’t look at him. “Do you need something?”
He tried and failed not to notice how soft she looked, her shirt rumpled from being lain on, chin red from where she’d rested it on her hand. There was a far-off look in her eyes that was quickly receding—something was…off—and he wanted to grab that ebbing tide and bring it back to shore.
This was it. His chance to be her friend. He felt it way down deep in his bones.
Elliott entered the room and closed the door behind him, despite the tension that crept into the lines of her body. “What were you reading?”
“Oh, that’s…” She scooped back a handful of blond curls away from her face. “That’s my mother’s journal. She left it behind for us.”
He stopped at the foot of the bed, looking between the moleskin journal and Peggy. “Is there something inside it that’s bothering you?”
“No. Why would you say that?” she asked too quickly, before deflating into a cross-legged position. “I don’t know. I haven’t read past the first entry.”
Since coming upstairs, she’d changed into a loose skirt, and it took a major effort on Elliott’s part not to glance down at her exposed thighs, where the material climbed up toward her— “Why not?”
She quirked a brow over the churned asphalt in his voice, but didn’t comment. “Would you want to know the secret thoughts your mother had about you? If you had the option?” Her fingers plucked at the faded yellow bedspread. “Because those thoughts, the way your mother sees you, are always accurate. Whether you like it or not. She knows you better than anyone else.”
Elliott thought of his mother. The forced smiles she would send over her shoulder while making dinner, the way she sighed heavily before having to explain things. “That might be true. But don’t you think they’d be just as terrified, knowing how we saw them?” His shrug was jerky. These were unknown depths he was plumbing, but he forced himself to keep going. “Kids are perceptive. I’m only just beginning to realize how much. Your mother—our mothers—would probably think twice about reading a journal we’d written, too.”
Peggy dropped her attention from him to the object in question. “Damn, Elliott. You’re just full of surprises lately, aren’t you?”
He resisted the urge to take that statement and press his advantage, tempting as it was. “What exactly are you afraid of reading?”
“Why don’t you go first?” Her body jolted a little, as if she’d surprised herself by asking. “What would your mother have written about you?”
Yeah. Definitely some unplumbed depths. “Does it make me a bastard that I haven’t thought a lot about it?”
“Think about it now,” she returned softly.
All those times in the past when she’d tried to reach him and he’d distracted her with sex? He had to beat back the ingrained impulse to do the same in that moment. To crush her body down into the pillows and test the mattress springs. She’d been turned on by him enough down in the kitchen that she would have a hard time saying no. Especially if he got rough. That was her weakness, and after their conversation this morning, he knew why. Knew she thought punishment was her due. Which was exactly why he would never use it against her again as long as he lived. That silent vow kept Elliott rooted to his spot at the bed’s end. “I think she would have looked at me and seen a replica of my father. And been disappointed.” It was unexpected, the wind that left his sails after saying those words out loud. “I came to terms with that a long time ago, though. It’s not something I worry about anymore.”
Peggy’s eyes were wide as silver dollars. “Is she still alive?”
“Yes.” He gave in to the need to be a little closer to Peggy, sitting down on the edge of the bed to a chorus of creaks. “We don’t really speak.”
Peggy surged up onto her knees. “Oh, but you have time to change her mind. I wish I had that. I wish I could have shown my mother I was…more.”
“More than what, baby? You’re a goddamn wonder.” He spread his arms wide to encompass the room. “We’re all here right now because you had an idea. I was out on the porch and…”
A short pause. “And what?”
There was only one way to find out if he was capable of speaking his thoughts out loud without sounding like some soppy, wannabe poet, and that was to do it. “I was thinking, this thing you’re doing—this fund-raiser idea you designed at a moment’s notice—it could have a ripple effect across generations for this family.” He held her gaze. “And I wondered if you even realize how incredible and selfless you are, Peggy. You give so much of yourself, without asking for anything in return. I wish I could go back in time and make sure you knew I appreciated having you there. I didn’t even let myself acknowledge it.” The ever-present throbbing in his chest grew more acute. “Hell, I’m part of the reason you don’t acknowledge it yourself.”
“Elliott—”
“I’m willing to stake everything,” he said, pointing down at the journal, “that she saw what I refused to see. Because if she could raise someone as amazing as you, she must have been a wise woman.”
When her lower lip trembled, there was no way to stop himself from reaching out and running his thumb over the curve of her cheek. Her eyes closed and she leaned into his touch, swaying a little on her knees. The air around the bed grew heavy with anticipation, as if the house were waiting to see what would happen next. With a will made of steel, he checked his impulse to initiate any more contact with her. Much as he wanted to drag her across the bed and kiss the living hell out of her, patience needed to be employed.
Peggy turned her face into his palm and Elliott’s muscles tensed. And when she suctioned her puffy lips around his middle finger, his cock hardened, pushing against the zipper of his jeans. “That feels good, baby.”
Her brow wrinkled and she drew away. “This isn’t going to work.”
His heart rammed into his jugular. “I’ll keep apologizing until you change your mind. I’m nowhere near done.”
“No, it’s—” She tilted her face toward the ceiling. “I accept your apology, okay? I’m not going to hold on to the past anymore. That’s why I came to Cincinnati in the first place. But it’s more than that. Even if I were willing to try…” Whatever she had to say was difficult for her, and having no skin-to-skin contact while she struggled through was torture, but he forced himself to stay put. “Remember what I told you? How I can’t feel…pleasure, unless you’re—”
“Unless I’m making you feel like what we’re doing is wrong. That you’re the wrong one?” He swallowed a handful of nails as the images swam into focus. Words he’d spoken to her in the dark. Harsh words. “I’d die before I treated you that way again.”
“I know.” She lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “I think maybe that’s the problem. I don’t know how to accept anything else from you.”
“Come over here and try me,” he rasped, tensing the air with awareness. Peggy and himself, too. In the space of seconds, they were both panting like they’d sprinted a mile. He’d been resolved not to push, but the situation was painted in a whole new light now, and yeah, that was definitely panic creeping up the back of his neck. She didn’t think they could have healthy sex, and animal hunger heated the blood in his veins with the need to prove her wrong. “Come sit on my lap.”
The tug-of-war inside her was clear. On one side of the rope, the chemical attraction they shared fought for precedence, but there was doubt on the other side, refusing to give in. Her torn expression hid none of it. When she finally began walking across the bed on her knees, Elliott released the breath he’d been holding.
Smooth as smoke. Fluid. That’s how their bodies had always moved together, and now was no exception. She eased her leg over Elliott’s lap and sat, the skirt climbing toward her hips the way his hands itched to do. He took hold of her thighs and drew her closer, slowly, slowly, watching her eyelids flutter when she encountered his erect cock. “It’s never any other way when you’re around,” he murmured against her mouth. “But I’ve got more for you, Peggy. More than sex. More than making you feel like a bad girl.”
Her legs jerked around him and she moaned. “Then why do I like hearing you call me that so much?”
“I don’t know.” He eased his right arm around the small of her back and rocked her on his dick. “Someday maybe I’ll call you that and it’ll be okay, because you’ll know what I really think. That you’re nothing but sweet and right. Every inch of you.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, as if trying to block him out.
Elliott wasn’t having it. He slipped his left hand up and down her thigh, moving a little higher with each stroke. “Did you have to change your panties when you came upstairs, baby?” He tucked his thumb just beneath the material of her underwear, dragging it in an arc, stopping just a few inches from her pussy. “When you put on the new ones, I bet you gave your clit a little rub. Just once around with your middle finger. Maybe twice. But you stopped because you felt bad about fingering yourself in someone else’s house, sun out and everything. Did I get that right?”
“Yes,” she breathed, tilting her head to the side, giving Elliott an opening to scrape his teeth up the side of her neck. “How did you know that?”
“I know, because even though you were damp and horny in someone else’s kitchen, you’re a good girl deep down.” He sensed her withdraw at that, just a touch. But he wasn’t finished. “And I know because when your pussy gets wet, that real, aching, slick type of wet, you want to hold out for my cock. Don’t you?”
Their mouths just sort of found each other at that point. Neither one of them initiated the kiss; it was merely a temptation that refused to be put off any longer. When their lips slid together and opened, tongues flicking against each other in teasing licks, he felt an answering grip in his groin. The kind only Peggy ever made him feel, the kind that would normally have him pinning her to the bed and yanking down the zipper of his jeans.
“This feels like something that can’t be fucking great, no matter how we do it?” He groaned as her warm pussy gave a rough writhe on top of his erection. “It doesn’t matter what I call you or if I spank your ass first. You hearing me, baby? Nothing is going to stop it from feeling like heaven when you open your legs and I slide inside. Right into that tight spot you’re keeping warm just for me.”
He shot forward to consume her mouth with enough ferocity that her head fell back, back until she was bent over his forearm, legs clinging to his hips, body arched. With the temptation of her tits pressing into his chest, Elliott could no more resist releasing her mouth and feasting on her perky nipples than he could stop the world from spinning. His tongue bathed, his teeth nipped, right through the cotton of her shirt, dampening the material.
“Elliott, oh please…please just…” She shot back up into a sitting position, slanting her delicious mouth across his, delivering hot, hurried strokes of her tongue until the need to fuck her mounted, his breaking point approaching faster than a fired bullet. “Just do it. Tell me what I need to hear. Say the prayer.”
Denial and regret delivered a one-two punch right to his skull. “No, baby. We don’t need that.”
“Y-yes.” She took his earlobe between her teeth and tugged, hurtling a bolt of lust straight to his lap. “I do.”
He took her face in his hands and waded through the conflict in her eyes. God, he wanted to take it away from her, ease her load so damn bad. “Peggy—”
“No. Stop telling me I’m good and beautiful. I don’t want that from you.”
“Why?”
“Because then I’ll never let go.” Her mouth snapped shut, but it fell open a moment later, and even though her voice was softer this time, it was still a fastball that shattered his rib cage. “And I need to, Elliott. I can’t get caught up in the fantasy of this, like I’m that twenty-two-year-old girl again. You have football and church and there’s no room for anything else. You’ve said it a million times. We would end up back at the beginning in no time.”
“Look at me. Look at me.” He rubbed his thumbs in circles on her cheeks. “I won’t let that happen.”
She just sat there, suspended in time and animation. Waiting for something more? What else could he…
“Come out with me tonight.”
A single blond eyebrow lifted. “Huh now?”
Jesus. He hadn’t asked a woman out on a date in…had he ever asked a woman out on a date? He’d met his wife at church and the majority of their meetings had taken place within those very walls. The time he’d spent with Peggy had been inside his house, his car, her dorm room. Anywhere they wouldn’t be seen. Dates were not his forte. No time to question himself, though. He was losing Peggy. This was literally his Hail Mary pass to get to the end zone. “We’re here for the night. Let me take you somewhere.”
“Like a date,” she said slowly. “Where?”
“Anywhere I can be with you, Peggy.”
A strange—clearly reluctant—light entered her eyes, but he never heard her response, because the door opened behind them, followed by an “Oh shit,” delivered by none other than Alice.
Everyone moved at once, Peggy diving off his lap, Elliott turning his upper body to face the door, just in time to catch Alice’s stricken expression and her black-clad figure streaking off down the hall. With a sigh, Elliott turned his attention back to Peggy. Her hands were clapped over her mouth, shoulder up somewhere near her eyes. “Oh shit is right,” she said, the words muffled.
Elliott stood. “I’ll go after her.”
Peggy dropped her hands and attempted to smooth her skirt. “Can I? Go after her, I mean.” She seemed to be searching for the right words. “I’ll just assure her that nothing is going to—”
“You will not.” His command came out a little too harshly for either of them, Peggy slapping both hands onto her hips in response. “Or you can say whatever you want and I’ll work even harder to make it a lie.”
A flush woke up on her skin. “You’re working hard enough already.”
“Good of you to notice.” Elliott eliminated the distance in between them, plucked up one of the hands on her hips, and kissed the back, the palm, the fingers. “I want to be alone with you tonight. Just agree to that and I’ll let you go.”
She shifted, her eyes trained on his mouth’s movements. “Oh, you won’t otherwise?”
Elliott brought their joined hands to the small of her back, urging her forward and up against his chest. “No.” He leaned down and licked the seam of her lips, one way, then the other. “I won’t.”
She expelled a shaky breath. “Fine. But no cornfields. There are killer turkeys lurking in them this time of year.”
“Is that so?” They shared a searching smile. “You have a lot to tell me about this trip you’re on, don’t you? I want to hear all of it. I want to know every thought in your head.”
“So you can strategize, Coach?”
“Maybe.” He gave in to the primal need to kiss her until she ran out of air. “But afterward, baby, we’re going to find a place where I can show you how good girls get off better than anyone.” He laid a kiss on each corner of her mouth. “See you tonight.”