Karen Templeton - Honky-Tonk Cinderella

Amusement flickered across her face. “A dozen? My, my…you do get around, don’t you?”

“I wasn’t bragging.”

She jerked out of his grasp, blinking rapidly as she looked away. “But you don’t want me, either.”

Again his hand sought out her face, his eyes, hers. “If anything, I’m saying no because I do want you. But you deserve something better. Something real.”

Her expression at once guileless and provocative, she stared at him for several moments, then got up to wring out her sponge. Alek rose, as well, feeling more than a little lost.

After tossing the sponge onto the back of the sink, Luanne braced her hands against it. “Did you not hear a thing I said outside, Alek? I am not looking for permanent. In fact, I don’t want it, not now, and especially not with anyone from around here. But it’s not like I can just…” Color flooded her cheeks. “Shoot, between my background, living out here all by myself and working at Ed’s…well, thank you for your compliment, but to most folks, I’m just plain old trailer trash, the daughter of a wife-beating drunk and a uneducated waitress. So I’ve sort of made it a mission of mine not to live up to their expectations, you know? But Lord Almighty,” she said quietly, “it’s been a long time since anyone’s held me.”

Alek stilled, as an unnamed monster suddenly loomed up out of that void inside him, one he’d desperately tried to stay one step ahead of his entire life. In the distance, thunder rumbled. Luanne looked toward the window. “Another storm’s coming…” The words seemed to catch in her throat; he could see unshed tears pooling at the corners of her eyes. And he wondered just what it had cost that staunch little pride of hers to ask of him what she just had?

And with that thought, he was lost.

“Are you really sure you want your first time to be with a stranger?”

Her gaze whipped to his. “Don’t tease me,” she whispered.

He took a step toward her, close enough to skim a knuckle down her cheek, keeping her gaze hooked in his as the caress continued southward. Her breathing quickened as his fingers danced over her throat, her collarbone, the sweet swell of one breast. “I’m not,” he whispered back, willing the beast back into its hiding place. Willing himself not to look at it.

“Well, then.” Pupils already dilated, her eyes bored into his. “You have shown more concern for my feelings in the past few hours than all the men I have ever known put together. So I’m willing to take a chance that your considerateness and attention to detail extends past the bedroom door.”

On a sigh that was equal parts longing and frustration, he gathered her into his arms, burying his face in her still-damp hair as a thousand thoughts darted this way and that inside his head like a school of fish, pros and cons and maybes and a good many are-you-out-of-your-minds all but pulverizing what little remained of his resolve. He lifted a hand to her face, stroking one finger down her sticky, child-soft cheek, wondering even then if she was a blessing or a curse. Or whether he really cared which.

Rain began thrumming against the trailer’s roof as he lowered his mouth to hers, his conscience all but drowning in a wave of need….

Chase’s yelling something at the pup shook him out of his reverie. And not a moment too soon, Alek decided on a strained sigh, creaking open the door. Luanne turned, her expression unreadable as she watched him walk out onto the back porch. The sun bit into his bare shoulders; his gaze drifted first to his shirt, quivering on a clothesline in the airless breeze, only to dart to Luanne’s swollen middle—a brittle reminder that the child she now carried was Jeff’s, not his. Which alone should have been sufficient to halt the memories.

But like lovemaking carried to the point of no return, images of that one night slipped past the brink of his tenuous control and now pulsated through him—images of soft sighs and uninhibited laughter, of a pair of blue eyes wide with startled delight, of soul-searing cries of fulfillment.

Of the mixture of awe and terror that had ripped through him afterward.

He’d been careful, or so he’d thought. Careful to protect her, both from getting pregnant and from getting hurt. Careful to protect himself from feelings he knew he couldn’t deal with.

Or so he’d thought.

The last thing he’d expected to discover, when he finally got around to putting together his racing team more than a year and a half later, was that Jeff Henderson had married Luanne, that they’d had a baby boy. No, that wasn’t quite true: the last thing he’d expected, even though he knew he was acting like a child who bristles at the sight of another child playing with a rejected gift, was the senseless, pointless jealousy that had pricked and tormented him like a hairshirt. And until today, he hadn’t believed the chafing could possibly get any worse.

Once again, his gaze swept over Luanne’s rounded belly, then up to those eyes teeming with sorrow, confusion, bitterness. And a fathomless weariness that called to something inside him that was nearly atrophied from disuse. Several feet behind her, Chase looked up, noticed Alek. The child chucked the ball as though it harbored some infectious disease, then took off around the side of the house. A second later the television blared on.

Dear God—what now?

Alek came down the steps, crossing the surprisingly large expanse of yard to where Luanne stood, motionless, the sunlight harshly delineating her fragility.

“Can Chase hear us out here?” he asked.

She shook her head, apprehension hovering in her eyes.

“You look ready to drop.”

Her mouth thinned. “I’ll manage.”

“Can you afford to get in some help?”

“I said, I’ll manage.”

They stared each other down for another second or two before Alek said, “If you’d been able to reach me, back then, would you have told me you were pregnant?”

“No.” She snatched the plastic bowl from the wooden picnic table nearby before taking off across the yard, obviously hoping he’d leave things there.

“Why on earth not?”

She halted, facing away, worrying the rim of the bowl with her fingertips for several moments before she finally turned. Her gaze glanced off his bare chest, then back up to his eyes. “For pity’s sake, Alek,” she said on a mirthless laugh, “you tore out of my house after that night like the very demons from hell were on your heels. So why would I have put myself in the position of makin’ you feel obligated to marry me, or take on a responsibility you never wanted to begin with, simply because fate played a nasty trick on us?”

“Aren’t you being just a trifle presumptuous?”

A strand of hair caught in her lashes; she yanked it free. “Practical, is more like it. My father got my mother pregnant when they weren’t but kids themselves. They ‘had’ to get married. Daddy stuck around for a few years, sure, except he was as miserable as an animal caught in a trap and he made good and sure we all knew it. He took it out on Mama, mostly, but I felt his frustration, too, and don’t think I didn’t. And finally he took off, leaving us in a worse state than if we’d had to fend for ourselves from the get-go. Except Mama didn’t have to worry anymore about how to explain the bruises.”

Every muscle in Alek’s face tensed with the effort not to explode. “I might have been a jerk for leaving the way I did, Luanne, but I’ve never hit a woman in my life, I don’t get drunk, and I would have taken responsibility for my child! For God’s sake—you trusted me enough to let me be the first man to make love to you, but you didn’t trust me enough to know I’d never have abandoned you?”