Marie Ferrarella - The Coltons - Nick, Clay & Jericho

Balancing his weight across his hands as if he were coming down from a powerful push-up, Nick plunged into her. A moment later, he was employing a rhythm that was older than time, and as new as the next second.

At the end, she would have cried out if his mouth hadn’t covered hers. She arched up as far as she could, trying to absorb every last fragment of sensation and hug it to her breast.

Then she realized that he had stopped moving.

When he rolled off her the next moment, she expected Nick to get up. To act as if all of this was no big deal. The way Jason had. Jason was her only frame of reference, the only other man she had slept with.

That Nick didn’t automatically get up surprised her. That he slipped his arm around her and drew her closer to him surprised her even more.

Almost as much as it surprised him.

He wanted to hang on to the sensation, to the exquisite moment, knowing that once it faded, there would be anger.

His own directed at himself.

Because he had slipped off the path he’d laid out for himself—slipped off big time. But just for a moment longer, he wanted to pretend that there were no consequences, that he had done nothing wrong. He’d simply enjoyed another human being.

He felt her turning her head toward him. Felt her studying him for a long, silent moment. And then she asked, “Did I just compromise you, or did you just compromise me?”

The question took him aback. So much so that he raised himself up on his elbow in order to look at down her. “What?”

Georgie blew out a long breath. “What just happened here?”

He grinned. The temptation to say that they’d just stood in the path of a twister was hard to resist. Instead, he teased her. “You are Emmie’s biological mother, right?”

Georgie frowned as she shook her head. “I’m not talking about the process. I know what happened here, but,” she looked up at him. “What happened here?”

She couldn’t word it any better than that. Because something had happened here. Something unsettling and overwhelming.

Nick shrugged, trying his best to regain ground, to appear nonchalant. But underneath, he was wondering the same thing. He did his best to define it. “I think we just had a moment.”

She glanced at her wristwatch. “It was a hell of a lot longer than just a moment. More like an hour,” she corrected.

He laughed then. And laughing beside her felt almost as good as making love with her.

It had been a long time since he’d laughed. Longer than the last time he’d allowed himself to make love to a woman.

His laugh was deep and rich, making her feel inherently good. Inherently happy.

“That’s a nice sound,” she told him, unconsciously curling her body into his. “You should laugh more often.”

He thought of the life he had been leading. There was satisfaction, but no humor. “Not much to laugh at in my line of work,” he responded.

“Your line of work,” she echoed thoughtfully. And then she smiled to herself at the irony. “You mean catching bad guys like me?”

He looked at her for a long moment. Again, his instincts told him she was innocent. But there was the evidence to consider. Her IP address and her computer were involved in this. Logically, that would mean that she was too. And she had hidden her last name from him. Because she was accustomed to using her stage name, or because it made her look guilty?

“Tell me about your father,” he finally said.

He felt her stiffen slightly against him, and then he saw her force herself to relax. “Is this how you conduct your second wave of interrogation? Naked?”

Nick shifted, pulling her toward him. His hand gently rested on the swell of her hip. He felt himself being aroused again. Something else out of the ordinary, he thought. Usually, when he got to this part, he’d be sated and that would be that.

Not this time.

“It does have its advantages.” Maybe it was the moment, or the aftermath of lovemaking, but he leveled with her. “My gut tells me you’re innocent—”

She didn’t bother suppressing the smile that rose to her lips. “Your ‘gut,’ or something else?”

“My gut,” he assured her. “But I need to be convinced a little more.” A wary expression came into her eyes. He could guess at what she was thinking. That he was coaxing her to make love with him again. “No, not like that. Answer my question. Tell me about your father.”

“Nothing to tell.” Rather than look at him, Georgie stared off into space, doing her best to divorce herself from her words. She’d convinced herself that it didn’t matter, that the years when she’d wanted her father were in her past. She’d gotten over that. But a part of her still hurt, still smarted from being abandoned along with her brothers and mother. And she would never forgive him for turning his back on her mother.

“He came into my mother’s life, turned her whole world upside down, gave her three babies and then left. He went back to his rich wife. I never knew him when I was growing up, although Clay said he came around for a little while.” She set her jaw hard as she continued. “Now he’s back, trying to make amends. Probably because his own kids can’t stand him from what I hear.” She told him with no little feeling, “I’ve got no use for him.”

This didn’t sound like the Joe Colton he knew. Joe Colton was an honorable man. He would have never had an affair, especially not one that extended over several years’ time. But to be thorough, he had to ask. “What’s your father’s first name?”

“Graham.” She knew where he was going with this. “Don’t worry, Secret Service Agent Sheffield, it’s not your precious Senator. Just somebody with the same last name.”

He watched her face. Unless she was one hell of an accomplished actress, he thought, she was telling the truth. “But you’re all related.”

“Maybe. But I don’t care,” she added truthfully. “I care about my immediate family. My daughter and my brothers.” Ryder might have taken a few wrong turns that had landed him in prison, but he was still her brother and she loved him. There were ties that went beyond logic. “I care about the men I ride the rodeo circuit with,” she told him. “And that’s it. Oh, and I care about who’s been impersonating me.” She could see that the addition surprised him. And then she said with feeling, “Because I’m going to strangle her.”

He laughed softly at first, then realized that there was no humor in her eyes. “You sound as if you mean that.”

“Of course I mean it.” As she spoke, her indignation at what the other woman had done grew like a flash fire. “She stole something precious from me.”

Her life savings. He could understand her anger. “The money—”

But Georgie waved her hand at that. The money represented security and was exceedingly important, but something was more important to her. “That’s secondary. She stole my good name. I don’t know about where you come from, Sheffield, but around here, your good name, your word, means something.”

A woman of integrity, he thought, nodding. But then he supposed he could expect nothing less of her, just from what he’d learned in the last twenty-four hours.

Georgie cleared her throat, feeling somewhat awkward. She was still naked, still lying beside a naked man and without her passion, which was spent, or her anger, which was slowly settling down, she felt uncomfortably vulnerable even though she couldn’t exactly explain why.

“Um, don’t you think you should get up and go to your bed in the guest room?”

“Right. Sure.” And then, giving in to impulse, Nick lightly brushed his lips against her bare shoulder. Something began to stir within him again. “In a minute—or so.”