Chapter Six
Damian had been seconds away from choking on all the ridiculous and flowery words that threatened to spill from his mouth so he shut himself up by kissing Kendall. And damn if it didn’t feel like coming home every damn time he touched her, and even more so when he kissed her. The matching glide of their tongues somehow made him less broken, less jagged when she was near.
Which didn’t make any sense since she was the one responsible for the fucked-up mess he’d become. And yet she seemed to be the only thing that assuaged the dank loneliness that plagued him. Despite their painful past, Kendall was everything bright and beautiful in the world. She had been the light that kept his inherent darkness from overpowering him. And when she’d left him she’d taken that light with her.
Growing up, his brother and he had been their own normalcy. And while Duncan had always been more the rebel, getting in trouble constantly, Damian had been the rule follower, but not always with resentment. He’d never wanted to be a lawyer, never wanted anything other than to work the land. When Duncan joined the Army, Damian had been forced to deal with his future on his own. He’d decided even before he’d seen Kendall that day that he was not going away to college. But then she was there and his decision to stay in Blackberry Cove was final. Hell, had it even been a choice once he’d fallen for her? Probably not.
But even the strange sadness that seemed to have attached itself to her since returning to town couldn’t mask the brave jut of her chin or the courage gleaming in her eyes. In a way he hated her for her strength. But he also admired it about her. His woman never gave up.
Correction. This woman was not his woman.
Regardless, the woman writhing in his arms and grinding against the erection straining against his now much tighter jeans was the epitome of courage. She was infuriatingly stubborn, cruel even, for walking away from him, from them. But she had braved her childhood like a warrior and even her current and far more public crisis.
She’d also made him suffer so perhaps he should stop focusing on how amazing, how right, she felt in his arms and start concentrating on making her see just how wrong she was for walking away. But even as he was saying it, his promise of nothing more than this night sounded hollow to him. Once he’d tasted her he wouldn’t be able to not touch her while she was staying here. So at the very least this thing would continue. But beyond that, what did he want? Tomorrow. He would work that out tomorrow.
He dropped his hands and leaned back into the couch. “Take your shirt off,” he demanded quietly. When she narrowed her eyes and scrunched her brows together, he ran his thumb down the center to smooth it. “Take your shirt off, Kendall.”
She hesitated. Maybe because she didn’t recognize this version of him, maybe because he frightened her, maybe because she didn’t want to take this insane chemistry between them any further. Either way, it didn’t matter. She either would or she wouldn’t. But if they were doing this, then they were playing by his rules. Period.
Kendall seemed to understand that because she tugged off her T-shirt and smirked when his eyes locked on to her breasts. “No bra, huh?” He spread his hands over her hips and slowly ran them up her sides, tracing every curve, every rib, stopping with his thumbs a hair’s width below the full roundness of the bottoms of her tits.
On a gasp, she said, “Changed into my pajamas. Would have made a different choice in wardrobe if I’d known.”
His thumbs brushed the undersides of her breasts and his fingers cupped them, squeezing gently before dipping his head down to taste one tight bud then the other. On a shuddering moan, Kendall’s head fell back, her hands flying up to grip his wrists. His answering groan was louder, deeper and full of male pride.
“Finally,” he breathed out against her breast and watched as her nipple hardened and grew tighter. He luxuriated in her perfectly round breast, pinching and nipping and licking until she wriggled on his lap and her hips rubbed her center against his. He continued until she was mindless, a beautiful angel writhing and crying on his lap for release. His original plan had been to take her here on the couch, to stay out of the bedroom, which felt too intimate, too much like what might have been but wasn’t and never would be. But he couldn’t quite remember why he’d made that rule, or why he’d want her anywhere but in his bed.
Standing with her in his arms he walked them to the bedroom and placed her on his bed. Spread out on his bed, her pale hair was breaking free from its tie and partially spread around her head. And the way she looked at him…well, it almost hurt like a kick to his ribs. But he ignored it, ignored everything swirling around in his head because she was perfect. Stunning. And his.
Except they were both still wearing most of their clothes. He rectified that situation, tugging off her sweats and quickly removing his boots, then his shirt and pants, and threw them all somewhere behind him. Pulling the box of condoms he’d bought on impulse the day before when he’d heard Kendall was coming back to town, he thanked the universe for an idea he’d originally scoffed at. And then it was just them. Naked.
Damian had dreamed of Kendall’s body nearly every night for the last four years and now that she was there he wanted to go slow, taste every inch with his tongue and touch all of the places that he knew drove her wild. But the desperation in her eyes matched the feeling thrumming through his body. And he thought he might actually die if he didn’t get inside her soon.
Quickly he rolled on the condom before he placed his hands on her thighs and slowly pushed her legs wider, her body opening to him. He wanted to be in her, needed her body around his, but he also couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a taste of her.
“Damian, please,” she said. “Please…” The plea turned to a keening cry as he put his mouth on her and a bolt of recognition swept through him.
This. Her. It was so much, almost everything. The familiar sweet, tangy taste of her flooded his senses, filled him with something a lot like wholeness. But that was ridiculous. This was sex. Great sex. But just sex.
He dragged his tongue through her folds and felt her body quiver under his hands. When she lifted her hips and ground herself into his face, he bit down on that hard bundle of nerves and watched her face as her body arched off the bed and she fell apart.
Moving up her body, he stroked everywhere until she finally opened her eyes and looked up with the sexiest little half smile he’d ever seen and he knew time was up for both of them.
Hitching one of her legs over his shoulder and pressing the other down to the mattress he entered her in one slick thrust and settled his pelvis against hers. And stopped. To catch his breath, which sounded ragged and loud in the quiet room. To admire the beauty of the woman beneath him. To feel her lush body wrapped around his.
When she reached her hands up and cupped his face ever so gently the fire inside him exploded and every part of his body snapped and sparked until she began to move beneath him. He met her push against his body with a series of lazy thrusts in and out, all the time marveling at how perfectly their bodies matched, how their lovemaking was almost like a dance.
Damian dropped his hands and her legs wrapped around his thighs, gripping hard, clinging to him as he took over and his moves became more frantic, more erratic, deeper, hotter. Kendall’s nails dug into his shoulder, and her whole body arched and she tensed. Then she sobbed his name and that was it. He was gone, dropping his head to her neck and biting down on the tendon there he was caught up in the exquisite torture of her throbbing body pulsing around his.
The realization that he had been lying on Kendall panting for God knows how long hit him. He started to roll off her, and her arms gripped him tighter around his shoulders.
“Stay. Please. Just for a minute.” So he settled back between her thighs and kissed her shoulder and stroked her damp hair.
Eventually he got up to deal with the condom and the rest of newly opened box and tossed them on his side table.
“Optimistic, aren’t you?” Kendall laughed, the gray sheet already covering her perfect body.
“I don’t know—am I?” he asked and flipped her on her front before starting in all over again.
*
Hours later Kendall knew she couldn’t put off the conversation she’d been avoiding for the last four years. Damian was demanding an explanation. More importantly, he deserved one. She was too soft, too raw, to be anything but honest with him at this point. Apparently he’d sexed the truth out of her with his stupid penis. His stupid magic penis.
“Later is now, sweetheart. Time to talk,” Damian prompted.
“It seemed so clear-cut four years ago,” she started. Because it had.
He rolled to his side, facing her, and gently ran his hand over her hip and thigh. “And now?”
She shook her head and her eyes filled with tears. The back of her throat itched. But she had to hold it together because he’d likely view her crying as bullshit crocodile tears.
“You left. I stayed. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. The question is why, Kendall. Why did you leave? And why was it so easy?”
“I didn’t want to.” That old sick thing in her stomach twisted like it did whenever she thought of that day, which was often. “You know it wasn’t easy. You have to know that.”
“Bullshit. Did you even love me at all?”
The sob she’d been pushing down broke free and she sat up, covering her mouth. She was a coward. Too afraid to face him. Too scared of everything. This was so damn hard.
“Lie back down.” Damian pushed on her shoulder, his hand firm, but gentle.
She settled back on the bed but turned her head toward the wall. “I can’t look at your face…”
“Tough shit, sweetheart. You owe me an explanation and I want to see your face when you tell me.” This was the new Damian, the one she didn’t know, the one who didn’t stare at her like the sun set and rose by her command. He set his mouth in a grim line and his eyes were devoid of any affection.
Kendall sighed and turned toward him. He was right, of course, which didn’t make her less annoyed or uncomfortable or afraid. Because what if the truth was as flimsy an excuse as he seemed to believe it was? What then? Had everything she’d done been for nothing? A complete waste of two lives?
She’d avoided this very moment for so long. But he was right. He was always right. Maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe that’s why she thought it was okay to leave without any word other than her stupid note. Regardless, here they were and it was time to come clean.
“I left because I had to,” she said swallowing past her discomfort, past the huge lump of sand in her throat. “I know you’re not going to believe me. And you probably shouldn’t. Never really gave you reason to trust in me. But…”
She glanced down, took another deep breath, and looked back up into his beautiful eyes—those eyes that had once viewed her with love and trust and hope now only stared back blankly.
He didn’t say anything and the look on his face didn’t change. He just waited. Goddamn Damian and his endless patience. He wasn’t going to make this easy for her. But of course why should he? He had no reason to. He had suffered, and as far as he knew he was the only one doing all of the suffering. Damian had no idea about the endless empty ache she felt on waking every day and that grew even worse at night without him in her life.
More than anything, Kendall wanted to reach out and rub her hands over his messy dark hair, drop to her knees and soothe the pain in his heart, and save him from this, from her. But she’d tried that—that’s why she’d run away. To save him, or so she told herself. “Do you remember that day? The day I left?”
A shadow crossed his face and quickly ghosted away before he simply nodded. Of course he did. “You were out in the fields fixing fences. I’d stayed home to can the blackberries and make pies for the town picnic and dance.” In truth, that day was never very far away from her thoughts. But she’d gotten pretty good at pushing down all that raw jangly emotion that had scratched at her for so long. It all boiled up to the top now…and it hurt just like it was yesterday.
“Your dad came by to talk to you, but he ended up having plenty to say to me. Some hard truths that I didn’t really want to hear.” Damian’s eyes never left her face and his expression never changed, but his hands fisted at his sides and his Adam’s apple bobbed as if trying to jump out of his throat, as if he had something to say, but she needed to get the whole story out before she lost her nerve. Or worse, started crying.
“What he said was hard to hear. And it hurt… It hurt a lot. He was right though.” She closed her eyes for a moment remembering that day, remembering the hope she’d felt that this was the day the Sloane family would take her into the fold. That they’d finally see her value, and how much she loved their son, and how she planned to take care of him for the rest of their lives.
“Kendall, I’m not sure there’s anything he could have said that would be so bad you would leave me without telling me.” Damian’s voice was deep and gravelly, clearly filled with emotion that he wasn’t showing but felt. He was right. He was always right.
“He told me that marrying me ruined your life. And when I chuckled and said everyone said that—that you loved me and our love would show everyone how wrong they were—he laughed. He said that you applied for the vet program at Davis and that you had been accepted.”
She watched Damian’s face for a response, waited for him to deny it or even confirm it. Something. She’d never truly known if Mr. Sloane had been lying or if Damian had applied for school without telling her. But she couldn’t read him anymore. Other than lust or anger, the man in her bed was a virtual stranger to her. That thought made her even sadder than anything else. “He backed that up with a lot of stuff about how useless I was, how a wife like me would only hinder your chances of success, how we were only playing house. You know, the usual.”
Damian rolled back on the bed and bent his arm under his head. The sheet shifted, dropping down below his waist, exposing his chiseled chest and abs, sending a flush of unexpected heat through her body at the most inappropriate time possible. Go figure: that was Kendall Kelly right there in a nutshell. Sharing her darkest of dark moments with her soon-to-be ex-husband and ogling the divots and bumps of muscle on his stomach. Again, she wanted to reach out and run her hand through his hair, tangle her fingers in the dusting of hair on his chest, drag her mouth over his tight abdominal muscles. Just to reassure herself that he was actually there with her. She shouldn’t; he wouldn’t want her to, not right then. But she had to. So she did.
At first she just settled her hand on his chest but she couldn’t stop there. She’d always been impulsive, and when it came to him she had absolutely no control. Stroking her hand gently across his chest, she felt the muscles ripple under her hand, but he didn’t pull away. Instead she kissed his hard stomach and sat back again. “I’m not sure your dad’s visit alone could have chased me off. No, scratch that, no one chased me off. I left on my own. I take responsibility for that.”
Damian growled under her hand causing her to stop mindlessly caressing his chest. “Then why, Kendall?” he asked almost pleadingly. The anger was still there, down beneath the betrayal, but mostly he just sounded…sad. “If it wasn’t him then what? Who? You knew I loved you. Why couldn’t you just trust me?”
Tears began to threaten at the backs of her eyes. Dammit, if she started crying she would never be able to finish. He really did deserve to know. He deserved closure. So that he could move on, and she could go do whatever she was going to do.
“Nana came to see me, I swear not two minutes after your dad left. God that woman was mean. It’s almost like she knew I was vulnerable and she had to get there before you came home and reassured me that everything would be all right. She told me she knew why your dad was there and that she had some information that would help me make a good decision about what to do with my life. They were tag team wrestlers and their opponent was me.” That was the part Kendall never really understood. Why had her grandma taken her in, when clearly she wanted nothing to do with her? Nana resented every single thing about Kendall: the way she looked, the way she talked, that she ate her food, and that she required clothes to go to school, that she was her mother’s daughter. Everything.
How many nights had she cried in Damian’s arms, wondering why her grandma couldn’t love her? So many…too many to count. “Nana told me I had ruined your life… Surprise! Which of course she’d said a million times before. But this time she added the truth about my mother.” She had repeated this story to herself for so many years that it had sort of become her little martyr mantra. She’d started to believe her own narrative that leaving Damian was for his own good and that he was better off without her.
But for some reason it sounded different this time. Like saying it aloud changed how she heard it, that it changed her a little. Maybe this really was closure. Maybe he would understand why she left and not hate her anymore for it.
“Nana told me my mom was dead. She’d died on the streets a few years before, out of her mind on drugs. She said she lost it in her early twenties and it was hereditary, and it would likely happen to me because I was just like my mother. She said the only reason she’d brought me in was because the state had given her a few hundred dollars a month to do so and that she wanted you to stay on the farm, but not me.”
“Dammit, Kendall, that’s horrible, but that’s still not enough! You didn’t even talk to me about it.”
“Like you didn’t talk to me about Davis?” The accusation clearly hit home because he had the decency to look embarrassed. He had applied to the university and gotten into their program. And he hadn’t told her. Obviously their bond, the one she’d believed in for so long, wasn’t as strong as she’d thought. Maybe it had never had been.
“That’s different. I didn’t apply. My dad did. All I ever wanted was you. And this farm and our own family.”
“But, don’t you see, that’s exactly what I couldn’t give you. She didn’t want me on this farm. More importantly, though, chances are I’m going to end up just like my mother. And my children, our children, could too!”
Kendall sat up and turned to him, waiting for it to sink in. Her family legacy of illness. The farm. Everything.
“You don’t know that. Hell, you don’t even know if she was telling the truth. Chances are she wasn’t,” he whispered to the ceiling. “You never even gave us a chance.”
The agony in his voice coupled with the bottomless regret she felt tipped her over and the tears began to fall. “I couldn’t do that to you. You deserve to be with someone whole. Someone who could give you healthy babies.”
“So instead you did worse. You left me with nothing.”
“You have the farm. And it’s all yours…or it will be.” Why couldn’t he see what she’d done for him?
“None of it mattered without you. With you gone, I was just going through the motions.”
She felt like he’d taken her heart and ripped it from her chest. “It means everything, Damian. Look what you’ve done. You’re a genius. You turned this dirt patch into a thriving business and community. You make things, amazing things, and you employ people. Don’t you see?” He was a natural, and in a time when farms were dying on the vine, he’d created one singlehandedly that was becoming more and more successful. “And, honestly, I wouldn’t even ask you to share it with me—Lord knows I don’t deserve even a little of it—if I wasn’t so desperate.”
“Bullshit. You deserve this farm far more than I do. It’s your family legacy. It’s all you have of any value from them.”
She shook her head. No. Not true even in the slightest. Why couldn’t she make him see that she left to save him from her? For all she knew, her epic and very public meltdown might be due to her inevitable mental deterioration.
“No, Damian,” she said laying her hand on his check, wanting to get lost forever in the sandpapery rasp of his stubble and the hazelly green of his soulful eyes. “Nothing’s changed. This belongs to you and I don’t.”