Cait London - Blaylock's Bride

She shifted beneath him and Roman felt the deep shudder, searching her pale face, despite her furious expression. “I won’t hurt you. Why are you afraid of me?”

“Get off me,” she repeated unevenly and licked her lips, fascinating Roman.

Her lips were full and soft and silky moist—another shudder ran through her as their eyes locked in the shadows. Taking care not to frighten her, Roman eased slowly away from her, locking his hands behind his head. He didn’t shield his arousal and Kallista’s eyes swept down his body, widening at the obvious thrust against his jeans.

He met her darkening gaze evenly and eased a sweep of silky hair back from her hot cheek. “Blushing, Kallista? I’d think you’d be long past that.”

“Neanderthal. Leave it to you to lower the terms of this war.”

“Equal terms, lady. You push. I push back. You’d better get out of my bed now.” Roman fought the need to brush his lips across hers and knew it wouldn’t stop there.

She shook her head and a strand of hair slid onto his chest. Roman slowly looked down at the ebony stripe, sleek against his tanned skin with its light coating of crisp hair. For a moment, he went dizzy, the image of Kallista’s hair webbing across his body, enveloping him in her scents, her flushed face soft after lovemaking...

She glared at him. “I’ll flatten you. You have no idea what you have just started.”

“Don’t I?” Roman couldn’t resist running his fingertip across her hot cheek once more. He hadn’t flirted since his early twenties, before his marriage, when the Blaylock sons were prowling the country, stirring up females. Lying beneath him now, Kallista had stirred him on a more urgent, fiery, elemental level that hadn’t been scraped in his experimental years.

Kallista dashed his hand away, rolled to her feet, grabbed the picture and the file and stormed out of the house. She closed the front door gently, mindful of Boone’s treasured stained-glass window. Her car revved in the ranch yard and Roman stood to watch her through the darkened window.

“Damn.” Instead of driving back to Jasmine, Kallista’s headlights soared in the opposite direction. She left the main highway to drive toward his deserted house.

If only she didn’t remember his hard mouth on hers, that long-ago kiss as if he’d give his soul to her—wrapped in her unsteady emotions, Kallista had wanted to devour Roman. His body over hers had sent her senses leaping.

Fine. Roman Blaylock’s rugged face and build, his soulful dark eyes, would make any woman take a second look. His skin had a tanned healthy and weathered sheen that made a woman want to stroke those hard cheeks, that unrelenting jaw, and soften that grim mouth with her own—Then there was that arrogance that just made her want to take him down and make him pay. But the nice packaging wasn’t the man, and Debbie had clearly been frightened of her husband.

Kallista picked the door lock and stepped into the shadows of Roman’s deserted, dark house. A modern ranch home, built of rock and logs and surrounded by pines, the house settled into the slope of the Rocky Mountains as if it had always been there. After testing the dead light switch, Kallista panned her flashlight across the living room’s rough timber paneling, noting the lighter squares where once pictures had hung. The house was cold, shadowy and empty. The huge rock fireplace spanned one side of the room and a rumpled sleeping bag lay in front of it. An antique walnut church pew stood in the center of the living room, like a huge dark monument, marking the absence of a woman’s touch. Three of the bedrooms were empty; a fourth, a small one, was decorated in frills and flowers with Alice in Wonderland figures hanging from the ceiling. The tiny room was packed with antique furniture, piled haphazardly. A box of framed pictures sat on a tiny tea table, and a collection of arrowheads, Native American beads and hunting knives were stuffed into another box. Only the child and the man were noted in this room; Debbie had not taken remembrances of either with her into her new marriage.

Debbie. Petite, blond, blue-eyed—a dreamer, an intellectual and an innocent. Debbie would always need protection, unable to fight her own battles. Four years ago, pitted against Roman’s dark predator intensity, Debbie had paled.

Kallista had a lifetime of fighting to survive behind her; no one had protected her—except Boone. She ran her hand over a large scarred rocking chair, and cobwebs clung to her hands like shredded memories. She shut the door, remembering the daughter that Roman had lost; from Hannah, Kallista knew that he grieved—or did he? Was his grief a call for sympathy so as to shield his takeover of The Llewlyn?

She entered a large office, lined with filled bookshelves, and could sense Roman’s dark presence. Layered with dust, the rifle case was empty, the modern desk aclutter. The pantry was empty, the laundry room stripped. The kitchen was bare except for a half-full bottle of whiskey, a scattered array of photographs, some of them rumpled as though crushed in a furious fist. Kallista smoothed a photograph of Roman holding a baby in his arms, a tender smile on his tanned, rugged face. The other pictures were portraits of Roman as a loving father and Debbie the “little woman,” standing on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. A clutter of unopened mail lay on a card table. The house had been stripped, the windows without drapes. Kallista shivered; the house was a cold tomb.

She stooped to collect a crumpled ball of paper, smoothing it open on the counter and scanning it with her flashlight. Debbie’s faded big loopy writing spread across the page.

“I’m marrying Thomas and taking everything. We’ll need the start. I paid for it by living with you for thirteen years and by putting up with the Blaylock family. Though I appreciated you marrying me when I was pregnant with John’s baby, I want a man I can share my dreams with and my mind, and my bed. With Thomas, I won’t want separate bedrooms.”

Kallista remembered how four years ago, in the dreadful scene at the shop, Debbie had called out Thomas’s name. Later, she’d introduced him as a “friend” and a professor of literature, though their gazes had shared emotions more than “friendly.” Frowning, Kallista read on.

“He would have never come after me like you did at the Bisque Café. He lets me make my own choices and I like taking care of him. I am expecting his child. I won’t be back. Do not fight the divorce, or I’ll tell your family that the marriage was all a sham. That you married me to protect me from gossip and that I couldn’t bear to have you touch me all these years. Debbie.”

In contrast to the shattering note, but in keeping with her light-brain personality, Debbie had drawn a smiley face. She also dotted her name’s i with a circle. The P.S. was hurriedly scrawled, an afterthought.

“Thank you for being a good father to John’s daughter. Michaela’s birth hurt too much for me to really love her. I took the mortgage payment.”

From Hannah, Kallista had learned that Roman’s three-year-old daughter had drowned in a shallow plastic swimming pool, a freak accident. Roman had been in the fields, working on the tractor, and had returned to find his daughter drowned. Debbie had said she’d just run into the house for a moment to answer the telephone. He’d been griefstricken for years, and Debbie, a fragile woman, had proclaimed to everyone that she was a good mother. Soon after the child’s death, Debbie had set about making a new life to please herself.

Kallista folded the note and let it flutter into a trash basket. A fat envelope caught her attention, and she scooped it from the trash. Four years ago, the day that Roman had swept angrily into the shop, the checking and savings accounts in the name of Roman and Debbie Blaylock had been emptied. Debbie’s handwriting was on both withdrawals, which left a balance of ten dollars. When pieced together, a torn overdue payment on Roman Blaylock’s mortgage revealed the bank’s foreclosure notice.