Chapter Two
When Damian’s mouth crashed down onto hers the pointless thought that she should push him away and run from the old creaky house flitted through her mind. But his hand was wrapped in her hair and his other hand, fingers worn and calloused from years of hard work, had come up to caress her jaw and his body caged her in against the hall wall. He was so warm, and his kiss felt like home. What could it possibly hurt to let him hold her for a minute? He was still her husband after all.
So instead of running away—which, let’s face it, was her modus operandi—she melted into his long body, feeling the pressure of his erection pressed into her belly through the denim of his jeans. She heard a low groan and quickly realized it came from her. Of course it did, everything Damian did was so controlled, so calculated. She longed to make him lose control like she once had, watch as his rigid demeanor peeled away from him like so much discarded clothing.
Without thought, she yanked his T-shirt from his jeans. She nearly stopped breathing when her hands met with his hard, hot body underneath. She spread her fingers on his concrete back, noting every line and divot, like he was a map. A really sexy, really hard map. He was so much bigger, stronger than he had been before. Damian had always been ripped, but this was ridiculous. She ran her hands around to his front down his chest, finding a light smattering of rough hair under her hands that had grown thicker, and then down to his defined abs.
God, this man’s body. It was so much…more than any other. Not that she had carnal knowledge of any other man or his body. Quite the opposite. She had tried. But despite celebrity news reports to the contrary, including the much-covered “relationship” gone wrong with her criminal of a business manager, no other man could make it past the first grope before she ended it. That and the endless work to succeed had never provided the adequate time or motivation to try for more with anyone.
There was only Damian. There had only ever been him from the time she was a child until their wedding night when he’d kissed her so much differently than he was now. That night when she’d finally shared herself with him, and him with her. So long ago. A beautiful memory erased by so much betrayal, so much pain. And a giant lie.
His hand left her hair and pushed aside part of her dress, exposing her black lace bra and her breast, her traitorous nipple tightening to an almost painful point. While his other hand slid up her body, tracing her curves until he cupped both her breasts. “God, your body. I missed your sweet, tight nipples,” he said, his voice thin like the admission hurt to say. He pinched one bud with his forefinger and thumb, much too hard but not hard enough, sending spikes of desire through her entire body while his other hand made the long trek back down her torso, slowly…achingly.
Finally his hand peeked under the hem of her dress and crept up her thigh. Kendall should probably be embarrassed by the moisture slicking the inside of her legs, especially since this possessed man was not really her husband any longer, was not the man who’d gently taken her virginity as a gift on her wedding night. This man was clearly out to punish her with his lust, make her pay for leaving him. But she refused to feel anything but her own desire. Their love might be no more, but their sexual heat had clearly never burned away.
Widening her legs, she felt two blunt, work-rough fingers stroke the outside of her panties. Again, too much and not quite enough. She leaned in to his hand, needing more, and heard his dark chuckle just before he tugged her thong aside and parted her folds. She felt her pulse beat frantically, battering her ribs, just as he bit down on that place that drove her crazy, that sensitive spot at the base of her neck. She hated him for being the only person in the world to know all her buttons, hated him for so much more.
His calloused fingers breached her body and suddenly there was no air. It had been sucked out of the room, probably out of the damn house, by his heat. His fire must demand all the oxygen within a ten-mile radius in order to burn so fierce. And there was nothing else anywhere that mattered. Just Damian. And his command of her body.
He wrapped his bulging arm around her waist and pushed her up against the wall, forcing her legs around his lean hips with his fingers still inside her body, his thumb circling her clit. In the back of her mind she knew he wasn’t her safe place. Hell, she didn’t believe in such things anymore, but for that moment she wanted to pretend he was. His warm breath caressed her as his fingers pistoned in and out of her and his thumb began to circle the tightened bundle of nerves of her clit.
“Come for me, baby.” His harsh whisper was all it took for her to spiral into the abyss, shattered and ruined, where nothing else existed but him and her and this unquenchable fire they seemed to always create. Kendall finally took in a deep breath, followed by another, until she felt herself slowly float back. Behind her closed eyelids, lights still blazed bright and her pulse was ragged. A harsh, warm breath in her ear snapped her back to where she was. In the only real childhood home she knew. After burying the last member of her family.
“This can’t happen. This didn’t happen.” Her voice, even to her, sounded strained, breathless.
“It just did, sweetheart. Welcome home,” Damian said, bitterness bleeding from his words. “Figure your shit out. I’ll be back for you in two hours.” He pushed off the wall and away from her.
Still gasping for air, she shoved her hand to her hip. “What does that even mean? Back for what?”
He was already halfway out the front door with his hat in his hand when he turned and raked his gaze over her from head to toe.
“I can’t stay here, Damian,” she said, disappointed at the pleading tone in her voice. “I want to sell this place and I want you to sign the divorce papers.” She didn’t add that it was more need than want that drove her. She needed to pay back the money her business manager had embezzled from her, the advance money the record label was demanding be repaid. Even though what she really wanted was to go back in time. To fix the past. But that wasn’t possible. He still would have chosen Blackberry Cove and she still would have had to leave.
“Need and want are two different things, Kendall. This is your home.”
“No, honey, this is just the place I’m from,” she snapped.
He didn’t rise to the bait. Didn’t fight back or try to soothe her temper like he’d always done. Damian smiled, that enigmatic thing he did curving one side of his mouth that had panties dropping across three counties. “Like I said. Straighten your shit out. I’ll be back after my work is done and then we’re gonna talk.”
The giant cinder block that had been sitting on her chest all day slipped down into her gut. She needed that money and she needed to get out of this town before she lost what little sanity she had left.
“I’ll be gone by then. And I’ll be back with my lawyer.”
He laughed, a deep hollow sound that unfurled something prickly and uncomfortable in her chest and set his black cowboy hat on his head. “No, you won’t,” he said, turning and leaving her standing in the dark entryway.
Silently she slid down the wall, pulled her knees into her chest, and sobbed fat wet tears into her hands.
*
Damian glanced at the antique clock on his mantel again. Time to go hash it out with Kendall. At first, before he’d shoved her against the wall and coaxed an orgasm from her, he’d planned on figuring out how to buy her out and get her back on her merry, backstabbing way. But that was before. Before he’d touched her silky skin again, before he’d seen something float past her ironclad armor that looked a lot like regret, before he’d seen the tears leak from the corners of her eyes as he sent her over the edge.
Before all that.
He’d finished up the farm chores and consulted with his crew on their orders for the following week. Then he’d marched off to his little cabin in the tree grove, back behind the main house, and paced. Still, he had nothing. No idea what his plan was. Because now he wasn’t just angry and bitter—the two emotions that pushed him out of bed every morning before sunrise and kept him working until after dark—now he felt something else. And he couldn’t quite figure out just what the hell it was.
And that made him even angrier. Which, of course, made no more sense than pushing her up against the wall and having his way with her.
Maybe he wanted her to suffer a little, shake her up. She seemed so different from the old Kendall, the girl who displayed every emotion on her face like a neon sign. In the last few years, other than the one time he’d flown to Los Angeles to see her open for a big-name pop star, he’d only seen her in the media or the Internet. At first, she’d been so composed, so obviously trained by some public relations expert to act and talk a certain way. But in the last year she’d begun to publicly unravel. Stress lines around her mouth and eyes began to morph into reckless behavior played out for the world to watch, like a car wreck you couldn’t take your eyes from.
In just a few months, Kendall Kelly the punk rock cowgirl, had gone from celebrated crossover artist to tabloid fodder. And, man, had the press been vicious. How they loved to tear down someone they’d helped build up.
Now she was here, his runaway wife, asking him to buy her out of the farm and sign the divorce papers. He glanced down at his desk, glaring at the folder containing those damned documents. Why hadn’t he signed them yet? He’d wanted to carve her from his mind for so long. But now he had the ability to do that and he couldn’t quite pull the trigger.
Why?
Not because he still loved her, that was for fucking sure. And not because he held out some ridiculously romantic notion that she was still the one when she clearly wasn’t. Moving to the door and grabbing his hat before he moved out onto his deck, he looked out on the watercolor horizon and took a deep breath. The purple- and pink-tinged clouds hung along the mountain backdrop, highlighting the green treetops growing dark with the thinning light.
God, he loved this place. Loved it with all that was left of his shattered heart. Why couldn’t she have been happy here? With him? Maybe he was the problem and not Blackberry Cove?
His eyes dropped to the back porch of the main house across the wide yard from his smaller cottage as the screen door slammed and the silhouette of a woman, an angry woman, barreled toward him.
He wouldn’t have to go to her this time. Taking a moment to admire her deliberate step and the long pink braid flying behind her, he noticed she’d changed from her dress to a pair of old loose jeans and a fitted plaid shirt. For a moment, he was reminded of the day they’d run off and gotten married in Las Vegas. Her eighteenth birthday. They’d been so young and though he was only a few years older, he felt like he’d been waiting forever for her. That day she’d skipped from the main house to his smaller guesthouse and jumped into his arms. She’d kissed the side of his neck and said, “Let’s go get married, cowboy.” And they had been happy for a while. Before she’d ripped out his heart and run off to Los Angeles. Before she’d become a star and then a national laughing stock.
“Damian,” she yelled just before hitting his deck. “I’m ready to talk now.” Her pink cheeks practically vibrated with rage.
Tough. He sat down on his old Adirondack chair and gestured to the swing across from him, the swing they’d had their first kiss on. “Talk then.”
Kendall crossed her legs primly, if a little awkwardly, on the old, unstable swing and smoothed her hands over her hair before clasping them tightly in her lap.
“I need you to buy me out. And I need you to sign the papers.” She took a deep breath and then with a look reminiscent of the old Kendall she added, “Please, Damian.”
“As much as I’d like you to be gone, I can’t buy you out. Not yet anyway.”
“Why not yet?”
“Have you bothered to look around? Kelly Family Farms is a working farm…a profitable working farm. We have a healthy CSA business going, as well as goat milk products…a whole bath and body line we sell locally and online. This isn’t the same dirt patch you ran away from, Kendall.”
Awareness lit her face as she looked around. It was getting too dark to see much, and most of the crew had already left. They’d been on short staff and even shorter hours due to the memorial, but she could see well enough that the landscape of the farm had changed. Transformed. She would see the condition of his cottage had altered drastically since she’d left, that it was nearly twice as big and a dozen times nicer.
“I didn’t know,” she answered quietly as she ran her foot over the stained wood of the deck. “The cottage…”
“We got a loan. Made some investments in equipment, built a new barn, bought some goats, hired staff.”
When he mentioned the goats she tried to hide her smile by ducking her head, but he saw it nonetheless. For a moment, it softened his jagged edges, made him not hate her. So much. Took him back to the afternoon they’d sat on this very porch and made plans for the farm. Kendall had strummed her guitar while they talked about their future, their plan for the farm once her grandmother gave them a stake in it. Kendall had wanted goats even back then and he’d laughed, teasing her that she’d be a big country music star one day. She denied it, and made him promise that one day they’d have a whole bunch of them. “Goats,” she said quietly.
“Yeah.”
They sat quietly for several minutes while she looked over his shoulder as the sun made its dramatic exit and the sky began to fill with stars. He never tired of how bright the stars were out here in the country.
“If you got a loan then why can’t you buy me out? You don’t want me here, Damian. I know you don’t. And I don’t belong here.”
He sighed, probably a little more dramatically than he’d meant to. “That’s not it. I just made a bulk loan payment and until some of our receivables come due and we sell off some of our inventory I won’t be in a position to buy you out.”
“How long?”
“What’s the hurry, Kendall?” he asked, taunting her.
“You’ve seen the news?” He nodded, and she looked into her lap at her hands twisted tightly together. What he wouldn’t do to erase the tension she held like a trophy. Having her trembling in his arms earlier that day had released him from his own angst and the memories of love lost for just a little while.
“It’s worse than that.” She looked up into his eyes. The light had come on over his door, bathing the porch in a soft glow. Without the makeup she’d had on earlier, he could suddenly see the dark circles under her eyes. And more…more sadness than he’d seen etched on her beautiful face ever. Why was his default to comfort her even after she was solely responsible for his misery the last four years?
“How?”
“I owe my label because I pulled out of my last recording project. But I don’t have the money. My business manager took it…mismanaged everything. Contractually I’m responsible though. I have to pay it back.”
Jumping up from his chair, a wave of irrational rage broke over him. That was the last jackass she’d been with. At least, that’s what the tabloids had reported. In less than two strides he reached her. He wanted to put his hands on her shoulders, shake her, get the asshole’s name and beat him to a pulp. Instead he fisted his hands at his sides. “Well, make your jerkoff of a business manager pay it back.”
“I can’t. No one can find him. I wasn’t the only one he screwed. Figuratively, of course.”
Of course. Well, no, not of course. She had had well-publicized liaisons with actors and other musicians since she’d been gone even though she’d technically been married to him. How the hell could he know what was real and what wasn’t? So over the years he’d just tortured himself and assumed they were all true.
Pacing back across the porch, he wondered how smart it was to have her around the farm now. His Helen of Troy. But what could it hurt for her to stick around for a while? Punish her for her betrayal? She could do some real work for once and, at the same time, hide from the press until the drama of her implosion became just another story.
“Why don’t you just make the record?”
Kendall lifted her shoulder. “My last one didn’t sell that well, to be honest. And…my heart’s just not in it anymore.”
Damian didn’t know what to do with her admission. Did that mean she’d left him, their marriage, for a career that she’d lost interest in? Or did it mean something else altogether?
“Stay. For a few weeks. Get away from the tabloids. You can help me work the farm, get your grandmother’s house purged and updated, and then I’ll buy you out. You can move on to where ever it is you’re going next.” For reasons he wasn’t ready to define, Damian found himself hoping she’d say yes. Hoping she’d stay and maybe they could find some kind of peace between them before she moved on again. And this time it would be over for good and he could take his life back.
She stared out at the horizon as the last hue of pink disappeared into the darkness behind the hills. The entire time she tapped her bracelet. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Or, in Kendall’s case, probably overthinking. Because that was her way. She always used to say that he was her quiet place, that he helped slow the chaos in her head. But that had been a long time ago. The job was no longer his.
“Okay.” But she didn’t smile when she looked up at him, though she somberly nodded before walking back toward the main house.