“YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE come here by yourself.”
Despite the softness in Lancaster’s tone, it was so apparent to Sophie he was a man who was used to giving commands and accustomed to being obeyed.
Shouldn’t have sounded like shouldna and it was impossibly sexy.
Lancaster was sitting on the rock ledge beside her, the water lapping at his powerful pectoral muscles and his broad chest. His eyes were closed and his head was tilted back, revealing the strong column of his neck, the jut of his Adam’s apple. Water was dotted like tiny diamonds in the stubble of his whiskers, and in the thickness of his lashes. Sophie watched the raindrops slide down his perfect features and could, unfortunately, picture all too clearly her fingertips following their path.
“You said it would be good for my feet,” she reminded him.
“That’s not the part I’ve a problem with, lass.”
Lass. His voice felt like a touch whispering along the back of her neck.
“I’ve never felt safer in my life than I do here on Havenhurst, Connal. It feels as if this is the land where nothing bad could ever happen.”
She realized, instantly, what a terrible and insensitive thing that was to say. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Bad things happen everywhere. I think you know that.”
“Wh-what do you mean?” she stammered.
“Has something happened to you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You have an exaggerated startle reflex. I’ve noticed it a couple of times. When that guy grabbed you on the way out of the pub the other night, you looked truly frightened. Did your fiancé do something to you?”
Sophie looked at him. His voice was measured, but there was a contained fury in him when he suggested that. He had noticed so much about her. There was also a feeling of being seen in a way she had not experienced before.
“He didn’t hurt me physically, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I guess I’m asking who did.”
She scanned his face, then sighed. He had told her so much about himself. Trusted her with it. Now, she felt as if she could trust him with one of her own secrets.
“When I was a little girl, my mother was attacked,” she said, her voice catching. “My mom was born in Mountain Bend, the most beautiful girl in town. She won beauty contests—”
“Ah, so that’s where you get it.”
The admission that he found her beautiful somehow made this story even easier to tell.
“As silly as that seems now, she still has those banners on her dresser. My dad came to town as a mill manager, a university-educated office guy. As different from the local boys in Mountain Bend as night is to day. She fell hard for him, and left the guy she’d been going steady with cold. She married my dad, who ended up firing the old boyfriend for showing up to work at the mill drunk.
“My dad traveled a lot on mill business. One night, the old beau and some of his pals broke into our house. Well, not broke into exactly, because we never locked the doors before that. I was about six or seven at the time, and remember waking up to the sound of my mom screaming.
“By the time I got to the living room, my uncle Kettle was coming through the front door. We never found out how he knew there was trouble that night but he arrived, just in the nick of time, to save his baby sister.
“It’s funny,” Sophie said softly. “I have not thought of that for the longest time. But you’re right. It’s in me. Some kind of fear that never quite goes away. We never, ever talked about it.”
“Maybe now that you have some of that fear will go away,” he said, his voice unbelievably gentle.
And it felt like it might not because she had talked about it, though. Because she could feel his protection. Maybe, even as she grated against it, that was why she felt as safe as she ever had here on this island.
She had not been surprised to see Lancaster step out of the trees. Had she known he was there, as if, by some sixth sense she knew his proximity to her in the world?
“They’re in bad shape, lass? Your feet?”
She was grateful for the change of subject. “Yes.”
“You shouldn’t have walked from the ceilidh.”
Shouldna.
She sighed. “My life is probably just a long list of shouldnas.” For some reason, she thought of Troy, and she saw her relationship with him in a new light.
I seem to go for a type, she had confessed to Lancaster the first day she had come back here.
Had a largely unacknowledged fear driven her toward a certain type of man? Men like her uncle who had saved her mother that night?
“You have no one to blame but yourself,” he said, unsympathetically, obviously referring to her feet and not her heart. “Stubborn.”
“Ah, something we agree on.”
Wasn’t Connal Lancaster also that type? Not really. Troy had been faintly arrogant in his gym-enhanced strength. Not quite a bully, but always on the lookout for opportunities to prove himself as stronger, faster, more fearless.
Which she, admittedly, had been drawn to.
Connal was different. A quiet strength, an unspoken confidence in his abilities, a man who would lay down his life to protect others.
He cast her a look that erased the jumble of thoughts—particularly about Troy—from her mind. Then he slid off the bench beside her, and stood in front of her.
Connal Lancaster was, without a doubt, the most beautifully made and natural man in the world. His skin was wet from the rain and the springs. Fog and steam swirled around him. Each muscle, each curve, each rib seemed as if it had been carved by a master artist from smooth, pure alabaster. He was Michelangelo’s David. He was Bonnat’s Samson. He was Conca’s Hercules.
No wonder all the girls fawned after him, and dreamed their silly dreams of being the one. Sophie would not—
But then he reached into the water. With a tenderness that both shocked her and slayed her determination to not have any dreams at all about him, he cupped his hand under her calf, lifting her foot up through the steaming pool.
While Sophie was aware of her heart moving into the galloping rhythm of spoons played fast, Lancaster was purely a clinician. He frowned at the damage she had done, set that foot back in the water, and before her heart had any hope of slowing down, he picked up her other foot and inspected it.
He let it slide from his grasp, and she was not sure if she was relieved or let down by this reprieve from his touch. He turned from her, went to the pool’s edge and braced both his arms against it, making the rock-hard edge of his triceps ripple and making her stomach drop dizzyingly, like a rock from a cliff. He lifted himself out of the pool with easy, fluid strength.
Sophie ordered herself to look at anything but him. But it was impossible. He had become everything, and she could not take her eyes off him. He fished through his pants pocket and came out with a small blade. He went to one of the shrubs that grew around the pool and sliced several leaves from it.
He came and lowered himself back into the water. “Sit that way,” he said, motioning to her, “and stretch your legs out in front of you.”
He was a man used to giving commands and being obeyed, and she found any desire she had to defy him had melted at his first touch.
She did as he asked her, and watched as he sliced the top of one of the plump leaves he held. It oozed some thick white liquid into his hand.
“Are you familiar with the aloe vera plant?”
She nodded.
“This plant is a cousin. Our ancient books speak of its healing powers.”
It occurred to her what he intended to do. It occurred to her she should protest, or pull away. It occurred to her she was going to experience powerlessness as she had never quite experienced it before.
But Sophie could not speak as he again raised her left foot out of the water, cupping the heel in his hand. Her foot looked tiny in contrast to the strength and size of his hands. He bent his head over it, inspected it again, touching each of the blisters. His touch was unbelievably tender for such a powerful man. She remembered him holding the baby, Rowan, earlier, all that beautiful strength tempered. It was everything Sophie could do not to reach out and touch the wet, gold-red silk of his hair as he bent over her foot.
He began at her toes. There was a particularly nasty blister between her big toe and the second one, and he caressed the pain away with his touch and the thick ointment. Then he separated each of her toes in turn, and ran his oiled fingers between all of them, even those with no blisters. He worked with exquisite slowness, touching her lightly, as though he were stroking the wings of a butterfly. When he finished between her toes he worked the oil from the plant into each plump pad.
His touch, soft, sensual, exquisitely gentle, was making Sophie feel a tantalizing awareness of herself as a woman, and Lancaster as a man. That awareness screamed along her nerve endings, and was unlike anything she had ever experienced.
Without even glancing up—thank goodness, for what would be revealed in her face right now—he moved on from her toes. His grasp on her heel tightened marginally, and he slid his other hand over the top of her foot, his palm pressing deeply into her water-softened and warmed skin, sliding back, doing it again. And then again. And again. And again. As if there was no such thing as time. There were no blisters there. He knew it, and she knew it.
His touch lit some deep fire in the core of her being, and every stroke stoked it. It was the most exquisite of experiences, part pleasure and part pain. The pain was not physical, but it was like having a hunger that could not be satisfied, an intensifying thirst that could not be quenched.
He switched again, moving from the top of her foot to the bottom of it. The slowness of his movements, as he kneaded deeply into the ball of her foot and the arch, was both exhilarating and excruciating. He moved to her ankle, and then to her calf. There were no blisters on her ankles, or her calves, either, and yet she was helpless to protest. Was he being deliberately so sensual?
Or did he just have a way about him? Being sensual was in every motion he made, every breath he took, every word he spoke. Being sensual was as natural to Lancaster as breathing.
Finally, when Sophie thought she could not take another second of what he was doing without doing something to slake her thirst and hunger for him, he surrendered her foot.
The relief—and the sense of loss—lasted seconds. He picked up her right one. And began the dance of touch all over again.
Sophie had to bite her lip to keep from moaning, and she had to make a conscious effort not to squirm. She closed her eyes and clutched her fists at her sides below the water against the tender torment of his touch.
Closing her eyes increased the intensity of feeling.
She knew, with a sudden primal knowing, that there was going to be only one way to satiate her hunger. She had to have his lips. She had to taste him. She had to run her hands through the wet silk of his hair and over the hard plains of his body. She had to know every line of him. She had to celebrate his being a man.
She had to make him feel what he was making her feel.
And yet, a moment of sanity pierced the desire-driven thoughts.
It was just more of the same. Her history with Lancaster on endless repeat. Her wanting. Him resisting.
She was just like all those other girls who threw themselves at him, who wanted to penetrate his great mystery, who believed that the intensity of his masculine mystique could resolve some burning need in themselves.
How was she any different from any of them? Maybe she was worse, spending her life looking for someone to make her feel safe.
She yanked her foot out of his hand, and opened her eyes. He did not look the least surprised, as if he, too, had felt something dangerous building, had wondered if she would put an end to it.
He was looking at her, something veiled in his eyes. Her move. Why had he done this to her, given her history with him? Did some part of him enjoy her weakness?
But it was going to be a different move this time. She scrambled from the pool, before she gave in to the temptation. She was aware of his eyes on her, but when she glanced back, his gaze was hooded. Did he not feel any of the red-hot desire that was threatening to burn her up?
“I’m overheated,” she said. And how. She glanced down at herself. The delicate underwear had become transparent. For a moment, she just wanted to hide herself, but then she wanted something else more.
To make him feel the helpless sense of desire he had just made her feel. To make him suffer as she was suffering. She stood there, letting the water slide down her body, unflinching from his gaze.
But if he was in any way tormented, it did not show. Instead, he broke the eye contact between them, lifted himself from the pool, turned his broad back to her, and began to pull his clothes over his wet body.
She could offer to share her towel. No, she could not! She toweled off quickly, threw her raincoat on, jammed her feet back in her sneakers and headed for the pathway.
How could she make him see she was not the same as every other woman in his world? And how could she ever know if her attraction to him was just rooted in a long-ago incident, never truly resolved?
It came to her suddenly.
There was a secret about her Lancaster did not know. They had common ground. Something that they shared.
She noticed the rain had stopped, and the stars were beginning to shine through the trees, through the wisps of clouds. The world had a scent to it that was incredible, but, of course, all her senses were heightened right now.
“Better?” he asked.
Her feet! He was talking about her feet.
“Much better.” She had never felt better and she had never felt worse. “Thank you. That was a lovely thing to do.”
To torment a poor girl who has the hots for you.
But wasn’t it time, really, to see if there was anything beyond that? If they had any common ground beyond the chemistry he made her—and a million others—feel? Wasn’t it time to see if she had grown beyond that childish need for protection?
“I’d like to go fishing with you,” Sophie said. The path had narrowed and he followed behind her. She glanced back at him.
“What?” He laughed. “Females don’t fish.”
Doona.
Sophie had to remind herself not to react with aggravation. Havenhurst was not America. People here played more traditional roles, and did not seem any the less happy for it.
“That’s what you and Edward said about diving to Maddie,” she reminded him. “And look at her now.” Of course, Sophie already knew how to fish. Her quiet, bookish father had been the most devoted and skilled fly fisherman in Mountain Bend. And she had been tagging along with him since she was barely able to walk.
But she’d surprise Connal with that.
Or maybe not. Because from the look on his face, he was going to refuse her this. Fishing was, from what Calum had said, Connal’s private sanctuary, the place that had saved him when he had refused all other comforts.
He would not want to invite someone into this most personal of his spaces. He would not want to invite her into his world.
She could tell already that he might have regretted joining her in the hot spring, that in his mind, some professional line had been crossed.
“Don’t worry if you don’t want to,” Sophie said lightly. “I’ll ask someone else.”
She glanced back again. Bull’s-eye! He hated that.
“You want to try it that badly?” he asked skeptically.
“I do.”
Oh! If there were words one should ever avoid completely around a man who could turn you into a quivering bowl of jelly with just his touch, it was those ones.
I do.
Time, she told herself firmly, to find out if there was anything else here beside the leap of her heart and the sizzle of her blood anytime that he was near her. Time to find out if there was anything beyond the crazy fantasy that seemed to endure, despite her life experiences, despite her maturity, despite her admonishing herself not to invest any more time or energy in this vision.
And the vision was of her walking down an aisle, in a flowing white gown.
Toward him.
It was time to find out if there was any substance to this wisp of a dream that would not seem to let go of her no matter how hard she tried to break from its grasp.