After a short stretch of silence, she said, “Ledge? When you needed help tonight, you called Don, not your uncle. Why?” She must have felt him tense, because her fingers became still and she raised her head to look at him. “I know he reared you, but you don’t talk much about him.”

He leaned his head back against the slats of the chair and began to rock slowly. “My dad was Henry’s brother, older by barely a year. My dad was in the navy, stationed in San Diego. He was about to be deployed to a ship that patrolled the Persian Gulf.

“I wasn’t even two years old, so I don’t remember any of this, but I’m told that he and my mom went out with a group of friends for one final fling before the men shipped out. They rode home with a guy who shouldn’t have been driving. He plowed them into a bridge abutment. Killed everyone in the car.”

She returned her head to his chest. “Unlike you, I at least have vivid memories of my mother. Although I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.”

“I can’t say. My uncle Henry and aunt Brenda came out there to get me and brought me back to Penton, where they were trying to make a go of the bar. Life with them was the first one I remember. They treated me like their own. Maybe because they never had a kid.

“When I was six or seven, thereabouts, Aunt Brenda got really sick, really fast, and died of stomach cancer three months after her diagnosis. So then, my uncle Henry was stuck with me to raise by himself. But if he resented it, he never once, not ever, showed it.

“When I got my discharge from the army and came back, he was his same jolly self. Everybody’s friend. But I noticed that he would be in the middle of one of his bad jokes and forget the punch line, and usually it was a joke he’d told a hundred times.”

“Oh, no,” Arden murmured. Again she lifted her head and looked into his face. “Alzheimer’s?”

“I finally had to put him in a place in Marshall. For his own safety. It’s a nice facility. He’s well looked after. The staff—”

She leaned up and stopped his lips with hers. “You don’t have to justify doing what is best for him and for you.”

“You sound like George.”

“Who’s that?”

He told her. “He keeps an eye on Uncle Henry for me.”

She returned her head to his chest, and they continued to rock for a time before she said, “It’s because of him that you’ve stayed here in Penton, isn’t it? Rather than pursue your ambitions.”

“He’s the main reason. When I was helpless, he didn’t cut and run. I won’t cut and run on him.”

“That’s very self-sacrificing. What one would expect of a hero.”

“I’m no hero, Arden. Listen. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.” He tilted her head up to look at him. “Last night when you got mad at me for ending what we’d started on the stairs, you thought it was because of Crystal. Now you know better.”

“You stopped because of Jacob.”

He was so focused on what he was going to tell her and how he was going to phrase it that the name didn’t immediately click. “What?”

“Because of my pregnancy, you assumed there was, or recently had been, a man in my life.”

He shook his head. “No. Believe me, a phantom ex wouldn’t have stopped me.”

“Then why did you? Does it involve Rusty Dyle, Foster, my dad, all that?”

He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yes. It’s about all that.”

“Then can you please put it on hold?”

“No.”

“Just until morning.”

“We need to talk—”

“All right. But not tonight. Please? It happened twenty years ago, Ledge. A few more hours aren’t going to matter. This chair is already crowded with the two of us. I don’t want anyone else to join us.”

She opened the coverlet, placed her leg over his, and straddled his lap. Sitting on his thighs, she undid the bottom button of his fly, reached in, and began to stroke him.

“God above, Arden.”

He should stop her but knew he wouldn’t. He wasn’t going to ruin this. To stop now would be as unfair to her as it would be to him. That was a bullshit rationalization, and he damn well knew it, but…

He shut off his mind and just rode the waves of pleasure. Her small hand squeezed him, pumped him, mastered him. When she milked from him droplets of semen, his surrender was complete. And so was his damnation.

He lifted her onto him. She lowered herself with agonizing slowness until he was completely sheathed by her snug heat. He kissed her mouth with unforgiving and, as yet, unfulfilled hunger, then released it to rain kisses on her brow, her closed eyelids, her cheekbones.

When she tilted her head back and exposed her throat, he kissed his way down it and across her breasts, before eventually making his way back up. He placed his parted lips against hers, their breaths soughing in unison.

“I’ve lied to you, Arden. So many times. Continually.”

“You’re forgiven,” she sighed, as he began rocking the chair.

He kept the pace languid, but with each gliding arc, he pushed in a little higher, reaching her where he hadn’t before, and when she said his name on a near sob, he gathered her against him until there was no space between them. Nothing existed except her body and his, his hard and insistent, hers soft and inviting, his inside hers, a perfect coupling.

The chair rocked slowly; they spun out of control.

“But tonight I told you the biggest lie of all,” he murmured against her lips.

As she began to come, she gasped, “Confess.”

“This fantasy did involve fucking.”

After a lengthy shower, where hands and mouths were never idle, they returned to the bed and spooned. He put his arm across her and drew her close.

Rubbing his face in her hair, he said, “When I called you Baby, over and over, I know better. That was my cock talking.” He raised his hand to her lips and pressed them open with his thumb. “Who could think straight with you doing that?”

“Did you call me Baby?” She caught the pad of his tongue between her teeth and stroked it with her tongue.

“You don’t remember?”

“I was preoccupied.”

“Then I apologized for nothing?”

“No,” she said, her shoulders shaking with silent laughter. She clasped his hand and tucked it with hers between her breasts. “I appreciate your chivalry. You are a hero.”

His euphoria evaporated. Despair replaced it, pressing in on him from all sides. Against the back of her neck, he whispered fervently, “I’m no hero, Arden.” But she hadn’t heard him. Her breathing had become even and peaceful, her body soft and settled against his.

Over her shoulder he stared through the darkness at the two full glasses silhouetted against the rain-streaked window.

Chapter 35

Arden woke up alone.

She and Ledge had turned to each other once more during the night for a brief but hotly passionate bout; during it, they hadn’t exchanged a single word. Language would have been redundant.

Feeling a bit let down because she had wanted to wake up beside him, she got up, showered in the master bathroom, which, in accordance with the man who used it, was large in scale. The materials were natural, masculine, and appealing.

After dressing, she followed the aroma of coffee into the kitchen, where Ledge was seated at the table, steaming mug at hand, the pages of the investigation reports spread out in front of him. His head was down, fingers pushed up into his hair, his forehead resting in his palm.

“What are you studying so intently?”

He raised his head and looked at her. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes drew her toward him. When she was still steps away, he reached for her, pulled her between his legs, wrapped his arms around her, and pressed his face into her middle just below her breasts. Her fingers replaced his in the thick tangle of his hair. She bent her head over his. For a time they just held each other.

When he released her from the hug, he tipped his head back to look into her face. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“How was your night?”

She shrugged, faked a yawned. “It was okay, I guess.”

He smiled, but there was a restraint in his demeanor that she’d sensed the moment she’d entered the room.

“Coffee’s still fresh,” he said.

“I believe I’ll have some. You want more?”

“More of you, yes.”

Her tummy levitated like an untethered balloon.

But his sexy, gravelly tone, his suggestive squint, were short-lived. The reserve, which she couldn’t account for, reappeared. “I don’t know how you take your coffee,” he said. “I’ve got real sugar and milk.”

“That will do.”

“Want breakfast?”

“Not just yet.”

She went over to the counter and filled the coffee mug he had set out for her, then carried it to the fridge and poured a dollop of milk straight from the carton.

As she turned around, she saw through the wide window a car pulling in behind Ledge’s pickup. Instantly she recognized the whir of the motor. She set her full mug of coffee on the counter. “Ledge?”

“Hmm?”

“Rusty’s here.”

He raised his head from the material he’d gone back to reading. “What?”