Almost To The Altar Read online

  With trembling hands, he unzipped the jacket. Her body was warm and soft, and molded to his hands. He dipped his head so that he could work the buttons of her cotton blouse loose with his tongue.

  Elsa moaned—a sexy, throaty noise that made his groin tighten. When her legs coiled around his, wedging his hardened, aching body against her pelvis, a shudder rippled along his limbs. This time, she seemed unwilling to simply let him make love to her. This time, she participated. And she enslaved him in the process.

  She tugged at the hem of his T-shirt until he reluctantly raised his hands above his head. When she sent it sailing over the side of the car, he nipped her ear. “Cold yet?” she asked him.

  His rumbling chuckle took him by surprise. He should have known that making love with Elsa would be unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He’d never had a partner he laughed with, wanted more. Her tongue found the whorl of his ear, and the laughter was forgotten. When she stabbed into the sensitive hollow with the moist tip, he couldn’t wait any longer to taste her. He pulled open her shirt to bury his face in the hollow of her breasts.

  Elsa squirmed against him. The feeling sent shock waves pulsing from his groin. “Kiss me,” she told him. “There.”

  Wil took one satin-and-lace covered nipple between his lips. She clutched at his head. “Like that.” Her voice was a throaty whisper that drove him wild. He laved at the nipple, suckling hard.

  Her hands skimmed down his back to the waistband of his jeans. Soft fingers slipped beneath sweat-dampened denim to knead his buttocks. With a groan, he tore his mouth from her breast. “You’re killing me.”

  The grin she gave him was wicked. “Really? You’re pleasing me.”

  “God, Aina-”

  Elise gave his nose a quick kiss. “Do it again,” she told him. “Without the bra.”

  His fingers fumbled with the catch of her bra while she ran her hands over his hips, rubbed his thighs, skated over the line of his ribs, then delved deeper. When she pressed one hand against the hard ridge of his jeans, his body bucked in reaction. “You like this, don’t you?” she asked.

  Like he liked breathing. “Yes.” His voice sounded guttural, harsh. Washed in a sea of moonlight, her face was flushed and beautiful.

  “Will you like it if I touch you?” She ran one finger along the line of his zipper. His heart stopped beating. “Inside?”

  At the question, his heart took off again, at a roaring gallop. “Yes,” he told her. “Yes, I’ll like it.”

  She didn’t seem to need any further encouragement. She eased the zipper down in a slowly torturous movement that spiked his temperature up several notches. When his legs shifted to give her better access, he found his feet wedged between the driver’s seat and the car door. “Damn,” he muttered. Each time he tried to free his feet, his aching shaft pressed into the soft warmth of her hand. The sensation was simultaneously heaven and hell.

  “You’re so hot,” she said. “Is it always this hot?”

  “With you it is.”

  “Hmm…” Elsa rubbed her lips across his chest. “I like it.”

  “It likes you, too.”

  She laughed, then pressed a kiss to his neck. Her fingers were running up and down the length of him, massaging him through the thin cotton of his briefs. “Can I touch you inside?” she asked.

  He shivered. “You can do anything you want,” he told her. “I’m yours. All of me.”

  With a sigh of pleasure, she pushed her fingers beneath the flap of his undershorts. All the blood in his body seemed to surge to the place where her hand pressed against him.

  “Aina…” he groaned. He cupped both her breasts in his palms, rubbing the hardened tips with the pads of his thumb. “You’re tearing me apart.”

  “Tell me how it feels,” she said.

  “I’ll show you instead.” With one hand, he found the button of her jeans. Elsa’s fingers tightened on him in a guileless response. He captured her mouth in a possessive kiss while he pulled at her zipper. When he slid his hand down the smooth skin of her belly, threaded it through the fine hairs, then found the moistened folds of her core, she shrieked in his ear.

  “Oh, Wil,” she breathed, clutching at him. “It really does get better.”

  He smiled against the curve of her throat. “Lots bet-!!ter.”

  With tender passion, he caressed the place where he’d recently stolen her innocence. The crisp night breeze brushed through his hair, bringing with it the scents and sounds of Half-Acre Field. But nothing compared to the heady scent of their passion, the feel of her desire in his hands, the sound of her sexy moans and throaty demands.

  His thumb found all the places that sent her blood singing and her heart pounding, and while her hands skimmed over his body, pushed at his clothes, rubbed his skin, he deliberately took her to new peaks.

  He knew the instant her body toppled over the edge. One minute, her fingers were plucking at his nipples. The next, she was arching into him, calling his name, with her head back and her eyes closed. He raised his head to watch, enthralled by the sight of his Elsa finding magic in his arms.

  “Wil,” she whispered. Fine tremors still skittered along her flesh. He felt them beneath his fingers. ‘Oh, Wil.”

  “I told you it gets better.”

  “I want to feel you inside of me.” Her hands moved to caress him again, to support the heavy weight of his arousal. “I want to be closer.”

  Wil hesitated. He still had another condom. Protection wasn’t a problem, but he didn’t want her to feel obligated. “We don’t have to, Elsa. I did this for you.”

  Her head moved back and forth in mute denial. “I want to. Please, Wil. I need you.”

  Tenderly he removed the rest of her clothes. His body ached with the need for release. Twice he had to set her hands aside lest he spill himself. “Easy, Aina. I can’t take much more.”

  When she took the condom from him to roll it onto his length, the pain in his groin tightened with razor-sharp in-!!tensity.

  “Now, Wil,” she whispered. “I want you now.”

  His gaze found and held hers in the near darkness of the moonlit night. “Forever, Elsa,” he said.

  She nodded. “Forever.”

  He slipped inside of her, found his release, and lost his soul for eternity.

  Wil dragged his thoughts back from the memory. With an aching sense of loss, he realized that the pain in his body couldn’t compare to the pain in his heart. That night, he’d meant what he said. It was supposed to have been forever.

  But Elise had been right. He’d given her a physical commitment, but he hadn’t been willing to offer her the emo-!!tional commitment to go with it. He’d loved her. He knew he had. But he’d always held a part of himself in reserve. When she needed him most, when she had nowhere else to turn, he’d still refused to give her that piece. She’d said he was afraid. He balked at the idea. What he’d done, he’d done to protect her. If he’d let her get too close to him, she’d have demanded that he give her everything, even the truth about Maks.

  So he’d refused to let her have that final part of his heart. And now, because of it, he’d probably lost her forever.

  At seven o’clock Friday evening, Elise glanced sharply at the door of her apartment. With a sickening sense of dread, she knew exactly who that firm knock belonged to.

  She contemplated ignoring it, but the second knock confirmed her worst suspicions. He wasn’t going away. Padding to the door in her bare feet, she checked the view glass—newly installed, compliments of Nikki. Wil’s stony expression sent a flutter of panic to the soles of her feet. Once again, he’d turned up on her doorstep, uninvited and unwanted. The set of his jaw told her she had as much chance of making him leave as she had of persuading Edgar Collingham to respect his stepmother.

  “Let me in, Elsa,” he said, his voice implacable.

  “Go away.”

  “No. I’m going to stand here all night if I have to.”

  She didn’t doubt th
at for a second. Bracing herself for battle, she pulled open the door. “Thanks so much for calling,” she sarcastically told him. “I’m really glad you bothered to find out if this was a convenient time.”

  “You would have hung up on me if I’d called.”

  “So you just barged into my apartment instead.”

  At her stormy expression, he frowned. “What’s wrong with you tonight?”

  She gaped at him. “What’s wrong?”

  His gaze swept across the living room of her apartment, resting briefly on the stack of paperwork she’d piled on the coffee table, before returning to study her face. “What’s wrong?”

  “What do you mean, what’s wrong? Even you’re not that stupid.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No.”

  When she made no move to let him in, he shouldered his way into the apartment. “Sometimes I wonder,” he said cryptically. He laid a thick computer printout on her couch. “This is the report you wanted.”

  “I suppose I should thank you.”

  Shedding his jacket, he faced her. “No need. You look frazzled.”

  “Gee, thanks.” To her acute irritation, Elise was again struck by how “right” it seemed to have him in her apartment. Parker had always looked strangely out of place amid her eclectic belongings, comfortable furniture and homey atmosphere. In jeans and a denim shirt, Wil could almost be the “do” example in a magazine article about how to appropriately dress for an occasion. He looked perfect. And tempting. Too tempting.

  “Look at you,” he said. “Your hair looks like a chrysanthemum run amok. Your eyes are red. You look like you haven’t had a decent meal in two days.”

  “You really know how to flatter a girl, don’t you?”

  “Just stating the obvious. You going to stand by the door all night, or are you going to come back in?”

  “I was going out,” she lied, more because she needed to stall for time than because she expected him to believe it.

  His gaze traveled over her loose-fitting pajamas. “Just where were you planning to go in your pajamas at seven o’clock at night?” The question was deliberately evoca-!!tive.

  “None of your business.” She was starting to feel ridiculous. Wil knew she was lying, and she felt like a fool for letting him manipulate her.

  He held up his hand. “I’m not trying to pick a fight. I just want to know what’s wrong.”

  “What’s wrong is that you’ve obviously completely disregarded everything I said to you last night.”

  “I haven’t,” he said. “I came here to talk to you.”

  For long seconds, she studied the look in his eyes. Pain, and something else, lurked beneath the surface. Her resolve began to melt, but she wasn’t quite ready to concede. “I’m on my way to the movies,” she said. “If I don’t leave now, I’ll miss the trailers. That’s my favorite part.” Still wary, she waited for his reaction.

  With a slight smile, he touched the collar of her pajamas. “I don’t think so.”

  At the vulnerable look he gave her, Elise knew she was lost. When he pushed her, she found it easy to resist him, but never, not once in her entire life, had she been able to resist that pleading look.

  “Aina,” he whispered, and the word carried with it a world of hurt.

  Much as she wanted to, she couldn’t turn away from him. Unless she missed her guess, she’d wounded, and perhaps even frightened, him yesterday. If he needed solace half as much as she did, she couldn’t make herself refuse him. Because she wasn’t ready to confront him, she deliberately made light of the situation. “I’ll have you know,” she said, trying very hard to concentrate while his finger traced a path along the neckline of her pajama top, “that I used to wear my pajamas to the movies all the time.”

  He seemed to sense the softening of her mood. Some of the tension left him. “Is that a fact?”

  She nodded. “When I was a kid, Pop would take us to the drive-in” for special occasions. Mama would dress us in our pajamas to make it easier if we fell asleep in the movie. Pop would come home and just carry us to bed.” Her voice trailed off on the last word as she immediately recognized her mistake.

  A flash of heat registered in his gaze. She’d come to recognize, that look. It was the same one that had flared in his eyes Wednesday night, just before his parting shot. Slowly his eyes traveled the length of her body. “Elsa,” he said, his voice just above a whisper, “when I carry you to bed, it isn’t going to have anything to do with sleeping.”

  Elise shivered. Wil’s fingers tightened on her elbow. “You look as tight as a rubber band, and I don’t think it has much to do with the fact that you and I have been stringing each other out lately. I know that look. I used to see it in my mirror every morning.”

  What remained of her resolve evaporated at the soft confession. It still disturbed her to think of Wil, a man she’d always imagined as invincible, lying in a hospital bed, fighting for his life. “It’s been a rough week,” she told him. “Nothing I can’t handle. I’m just a little bogged down in details.”

  Not relinquishing his grip on her elbow, he guided her toward the sofa. “And the fact that I’ve been acting like an insufferable bastard hasn’t helped.”

  “That, too,” she admitted.

  With a firm hand on her shoulder, he settled her on the couch. “Talk.”

  Elise hesitated. They’d rarely discussed anything about her work beyond Wil’s involvement with the auction. Somehow, she wasn’t prepared to tell him the more intimate details of her frustrations with her job. From the be-!!ginning, she’d sensed what she believed was his disapproval of her career and her dedication to it. Whether deliberately or not, she’d avoided the subject rather than face his scrutiny. Yet yesterday she’d accused him of being afraid of commitment, of intimacy.

  If she refused him now, she realized, she’d be just as guilty as he. Whatever was between them, no matter how forbidden it seemed to her, they’d started down this road together. She owed it to him to see it through—even, she thought with a sinking sense of dread, if it destroyed her.

  Reluctantly she picked up the four-inch file on Alex Devonshire’s merger with SYNTEC. “The closer we get to the auction, the more Roger drives me crazy. Edgar is watching every penny we spend preparing the items. Proliss wants detailed reports on all the collections, the ar-!!rangements for sale, the invited buyers, everything. Collingham Industries is one of our firm’s largest clients, and Roger knows there’s a lot riding on this. We don’t want to alienate Edgar, but our first obligation is to carry out Chester’s will. He wanted Brandy taken care of, and that’s what we aim to do.”

  “I thought he dumped the auction on you because, he expected it to be some relatively mundane event.”

  “He did, but—typical Roger—he didn’t bother to think it through to its logical conclusion. Chester Collingham was a major client until his death. We were on retainer for both him and his firm. When he died, he left his estate to his wife and five children, including his controlling interest in Collingham Industries. As in most major estate cases, the heirs are all jockeying to see who comes out in the strongest po-!!sition.”

  “Vultures, aren’t they?”

  “Unfortunately, that’s fairly normal.” She dropped back against the couch with a sigh of resignation. “It doesn’t. help any that the IRS is going to get almost thirty-seven percent of Chester’s estate, despite everything I did to protect his children from the inheritance tax.” With a sigh, she wiped a hand through her tangled hair. “Isn’t that the most obscene thing you’ve ever heard? Fortunately, Brandy doesn’t have to pay taxes on her share. Spouses are ex-!!empt.”

  “How generous.”

  Elise snorted. “But everybody else gets hit with this enormous estate tax for everything over the six-hundred-thousand-dollar limit. If you ask me, that’s criminal. I mean, why should a guy like Chester work hard all his life, then have to fork over a huge chunk of his money to the government just because he die
s? Do you know, if I hadn’t shuffled some things around into tax shelters, Edgar’s tax burden would be over fifty percent? Fifty percent! So after I spent all that time trying to protect his money, he’s still determined to make my life hell.” She knew she was rambling, but the mundane conversation seemed to calm her nerves.

  Wil gave her an amused look. “Sounds sticky.”

  “Like glue.”

  “So now that Roger Philpott has finally figured this out,” Wil said, “he’s driving you crazy with the details of the auction. Am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s that?” he asked, pointing to the thick file in her hand.

  She rolled her eyes. “Alex Devonshire picked this week to launch a major merger with SYNTEC. If the deal doesn’t go through by Wednesday, it probably won’t go through at all.”

  Wil let out a low whistle. Because of his days at the Merc, Elise knew he understood the complications the merger presented, and why it had thrown her schedule into chaos. “And on top of that, I’ve been running you through the emotional wringer for the last two weeks.”

  “Something like that.”

  Wiping a hand over his face, he pulled in a ragged breath. “I think we should make a deal here.”

  “Another one?”

  At her quip, he offered her a brief smile. “I think we both need a break from the pressure we’re putting on ourselves. You need to get some work done, and I don’t need to be standing in your way. I sure as hell don’t need to be ’making your life miserable.”

  Wary, she studied his expression. “Are you sure you’re not just avoiding the conversation?”

  “I wouldn’t go to the bank on it. I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that I’d rather not get into all that with you right now, but the way I see it, you’ve got other things to worry about for the moment.”

  “So what’s this deal you had in mind?”

  “Kind of like Cinderella.”

  Dubious, she narrowed her gaze. “Cinderella?”

  “Yeah. We’ll work until midnight, then we’ll talk.”

  “I don’t know, Wil—”

  With a sweep of his hand, he indicated the stack of files. “It doesn’t make you less of a person to ask for help, you know?”