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She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he pulled her, like a rag doll, right over the center console and onto his lap.
He envisioned how they must look, parked on the road that overlooked his old place, with her straddling him in the driver’s seat, the steering wheel butting against her back.
Matt felt like a teenager, making out in the middle of the day, his hormones jerking and jumping.
He wound his hands more fully in her hair. He liked how wild and wavy it was. She rocked forward, rubbing him where it hurt, where it felt good, where his zipper made friction with hers.
They kept kissing, mindless and carnal. She mewled, then moaned, hot and sweet, and he suspected that she would make those same fevered sounds if he was deep inside her.
When they came up for air, she asked, “Is the truck still running? Is that the vibration I feel?”
“I think it’s us.” He’d shut the engine off earlier. Hadn’t he? Just to be sure, he double-checked. “It’s not running.”
“It’s not? Are you sure?”
“I’m positive. But we should stop now.”
“You first.”
“You want me to end it?” He didn’t appreciate her leaving it up to him. “You’re the one who’s sitting on my lap.”
“And you’re the one who put me there.”
Touché, he thought. “Yeah, but you can climb off me and get back in your own seat.” His frustration was building, at himself, at her. He wanted to strip her naked, right here, right now.
“I could.” Her eyes were glazed over and her hair was totally mussed, maybe even knotted in spots. Her frustration was mounting, too. “Or you could make me.”
“Screw that.” He kissed her again, harder this time, making good on his threat to bite her.
“Ouch.” She flinched, then kissed him right back.
A heartbeat later, he said, “It was only a nibble.”
“Says you. My lips are going to be swollen.”
“They already are.” And she wore it insanely well. “Now get off me before I do something I’ll regret.”
“You’re already regretting this, and so am I.”
“So go back on your own side of the truck.”
She didn’t budge. She stayed there, desire bristling from her pores. She snared his gaze, her eyelashes long and fluttery. “You owe me a cookie.”
Seriously? She was going to hold him to that? “Fine. As soon as I can take the wheel, we’ll go to the bakery.”
“I want coffee, too.” She crawled over the console and nearly kneed him in the nuts, missing him by mere inches. But she didn’t even notice that she’d almost done it.
Matt snarled to himself. He deserved a swift kick, but the entire situation still made him angry. Everything about it ticked him off. Especially what he couldn’t have—like Libby sprawled out beneath him.
He wanted to take her home and make hot-blooded love to her, to be rough and animalistic, to bite her again a hundred more times.
She settled onto her seat, lowered the visor and gawked at herself in the mirror. “Oh, my goodness. What did you do to my hair? I look like a blowfish.”
Since when did fish have hair? Spiny things coming out of their heads, maybe. “You liked it when I was doing it.”
She finger-combed her way through the mess. “We’re never kissing again. Not ever.”
“I know.” He tugged at his jeans, trying to make his bulge less noticeable. “It was awful of us.” Awfully hot, awfully barbaric, awfully amazing. He could think of a hundred mixed-up ways to describe what they’d done.
She kept fussing with her hair, struggling to tame it.
“You’re making it worse,” he said.
“What?” she asked. “Your hard-on or my hair?”
“Your hair, smarty.”
She glanced at his lap. “Not from where I’m sitting.”
“Don’t start.” But it was too late. They both burst into a quick, crazy laugh. The situation was too disturbing to keep it bottled up.
She raised the visor, giving up on her hair. He gave up on adjusting his jeans, too. Then he went serious and asked, “Are you going to tell Kirby that we kissed?”
“I would never do that. This was a private moment between you and me. It’s no one else’s business.”
“So what happens between you and me is private, but the rest of my life isn’t?”
“Your relationship with Kirby is the only part of your life that I’ll be writing about.” She glanced down at the canyon house. “Yours and your mother’s. And that’s why it’s so important for me to get your input, and hers, too. I have lots of interview questions, for both of you.”
“No doubt you do. But I’m not signing a release or answering them. If I tell you anything, it’s going to be the way we’ve been doing it, off the record.” He followed her line of sight to the house. He remembered his mom crying on the night Kirby had ended their affair. How she’d sat outside and bawled in the moonlight. Matt had been old enough then to understand what was going on. He’d sensed it was over for him, too, that his dad’s sporadic visits would become even less frequent. He’d even worried that Kirby would eventually stop coming around at all. And he’d been right on both counts. So painfully right.
“Please, just think about it,” Libby implored him.
He blew out a breath. “I can’t willingly be part of your book.” He didn’t want to bleed all over the pages of his old man’s self-serving biography. “I just can’t do it.”
“If you were involved in the book, I would get to know you, better than I am now.”
He laughed, as foolishly as before. “You’re getting to know me just fine.”
“That’s not funny.” She rolled her big blue eyes, frowned, smiled, shook her messy-haired head. “Well, maybe it is.”
He noticed that her lips were still sexily swollen. “Buckle up.” He reached over and pulled the strap across her body, doing it for her. “I’ve got to back out of here.”
And try to forget that he’d ever kissed her.
* * *
Libby couldn’t believe that she’d taunted Matt to kiss her. That she wouldn’t get off his lap. That she let it go that far.
She needed to be flogged, tortured for her idiotic behavior. What part of professionalism had escaped her? She’d been acting up since the moment she’d met him, being so coy and cute, pushing her attraction to him in directions it wasn’t supposed to go.
When they arrived at the bakery, he parked directly in front of the small, pastel-colored building. The town itself was quaint, with its Main Street simplicity and homespun vibe.
“Maybe I should order a tart,” she said.
“Those fruit-filled things?”
“Yes, but that was a joke.” She pointed to herself. “A tart, get it?”
He didn’t laugh. “Don’t call yourself names, Libby. I’m just as responsible as you are. We’re just lucky that we stopped when we did.”
“It wasn’t luck. It was restraint.”
“You know what I mean.”
She most certainly did. She’d never kissed anyone that ferociously before, not even Becker.
They got out of the truck, and she glanced at the bakery window. A big, frothy, three-tiered wedding cake was showcased. The bride and groom on top looked a bit like her and Matt. It was their coloring, the bride being blonde and the groom having black hair. She doubted that Matt noticed the cake, let alone the topper. He headed straight for the front door.
“Let’s go get those cookies,” he said.
She nodded, and they went inside. A middle-aged woman in blue jeans and a crisp white apron greeted them. She smiled and acknowledged Matt by name. The bakery lady knew him? This piqued Libby’s curiosity.
But soon she discovered that he’d gone to high school with the woman’s son. In a town this size, Libby shouldn’t have been surprised. Most of the locals probably knew each other. It did make her wonder about Matt’s experiences in high school and if he was as much a loner then as he seemed to be now.
He chose the cookies randomly, four dozen of them, in every shape, size and color they had.
“What are we supposed to do with all of those?” Libby asked as they left the bakery and set out on foot, heading for the little coffee joint across the street.
“You can take them back to your cabin later.”
“Chance would love them if he were here.”
He stopped midstride. “Chance?”
“Chance Mitchell Penn. My son.” She watched the troubled emotion that crossed Matt’s face. She hadn’t meant to blurt out Chance’s name, but at least she’d gone ahead and said it.
“You named him after Kirby’s song?”
“Initially, it was Becker’s idea. But I thought it was a brilliant choice.” She was going to stand by her child’s name, no matter how uncomfortable it made Matt. “If we had a girl, we were going to call her Lilly Fay, after the saloon girl in the song. The one Chance Mitchell loves and leaves.”
“I don’t like any of Kirby’s songs, least of all that one. It came out when...”
“When what?” she asked. They stood on the sidewalk, with Matt clutching the pink bakery box.
“When I fell off the roof of our house and broke my arm. It was just after my ninth birthday, and I was pretending to be Chance Mitchell. I was crawling around up there with a toy gun, a six-shooter, strapped to my hip. I was hiding from the law.”
Libby reached up and skimmed his jaw. She knew she shouldn’t be touching him, but she wanted to comfort him somehow. “You must have liked the song then, or else why would you be pretending to be Chance?”
He took a step back, forcing her to lower her hand. “Sure. I liked his music when I was a kid. But it started to grate on me later.”
She tried to draw more of the story out of him. “Did they put your broken arm in a cast?”
He nodded. “Kirby never saw it, though. He was on his Outlaw at Large tour, promoting the Chance Mitchell album, and my arm healed before he stopped back to see us.”
“I’m sorry he didn’t make more time for you then.”
“I don’t care anymore.”
That was a lie, she thought. He cared far too much. “Kirby told me that he was impressed with your junior rodeo accomplishments. That you were just a little tyke, riding and roping like the devil was inside you.”
“What does he know about it? He never attended any of my events. All he saw were the videos Mom showed him.”
“He remembers those videos. He thinks about them when he’s feeling guilty and blue. He wrote a song about you, too, but he hasn’t recorded it yet.”
“Holy crap.” Matt tightened his grip on the box. “That’s all I need, to be immortalized in one of his frigging songs.”
“He’s not going to record it until the two of you become father and son.”
“Then he’s never going to put it out there.” Matt approached the crosswalk and stepped off the curb.
She followed him. “The song is called ‘The Boy I Left Behind.’ He played it for me. It’s beautiful, raw and touching.”
“That’s a low blow.”
“What is? Me telling you how good it is?”
“No. Him playing it for you. He’s using you, Libby. He’s pushing you around like a pawn.”
“He’s sharing his life with me. That’s my role in all of this, to document his life, to write about his feelings.” After they made it to the other side of the street, she said, “I know you don’t believe that he ever loved you, but in his own tortured way, he did. You were the part of himself that he couldn’t control. He promised his wife that he would never father a child from any of his affairs, and then you came along. The baby that wasn’t supposed to exist. His secret. A sweet little boy who needed more than his daddy knew how to give.”
“I’m well aware of what he promised his wife. It’s the reason I had to stay in the shadows, the excuse that was drilled into my head. My famous father had another family, and it would hurt them if they knew about me. But his wife found out and divorced him, anyway.”
“She’s over it now. She and Kirby are friends again. I haven’t met her yet, but I’ll be interviewing her for the book.” Her name was Melinda, and she was a former fashion model who used her celebrity to create a cosmetics and skin care line. Her face, her brand, were featured in TV infomercials. “She agrees with Kirby that everything should be out in the open now.”
“Of course she does. He always gets women to forgive him. And can we please talk about something else? I’m sick of my dad.”
“Okay. We’ll work on other topics.” She sent him her best smile, even if he was still scowling, much too fiercely, at her.
* * *
Matt and Libby sat outside at a café table. He drank his coffee black. She put sugar and an artificial sweetener in hers, along with cream and milk. He’d never seen anyone mix so much stuff together in one cup.
She opened the cookies. “Look how cute they are.” She lifted a smiley face from the bunch. “This one looks like me.”
He took it from her and held it upside down. “And now it looks like me.”
Her eyes twinkled. “At least you have a sense of humor about that disposition of yours.” She removed a flower-shaped cookie from the box and nibbled on it, leaving the happy face for him.
