And then his weight settled over her, his damp skin fusing to hers. Decimated, she held him close, smoothed his tangled hair, stroked his slick back and tried to catch her breath.
Wow. Her teenage affairs had not prepared her for that.
He pulled away and lay beside her, and a hollow feeling opened in her belly, slowing her racing heart.
She wasn’t just a little in love.
She’d fallen totally and completely for Adam Garrison.
A man who defined temporary relationships.
She hadn’t broken the vow she’d made to save herself for the love of her life. But she’d chosen a man who couldn’t love her back.
“How long?” Adam asked Lauryn.
She paused midtap and twisted on her knees in her corner of the empty closet. “How long what?”
“How long since you’ve had sex?”
Her breath caught and she bit her lip. Pink stained her cheeks. “About two hours.”
He shot her a don’t-mess-with-me look. She’d been experienced, a sorceress at driving him out of his mind with desire. But tight. Almost virginal tight. The contradiction had nagged Adam in the hours since they’d torched the sheets and steamed the shower stall and then made love again on the bedroom floor. The rug burn on his knees stung like a bitch. But it was worth it. He hoped Lauryn felt the same about the abrasions on her butt.
Damned rug. He’d throw it out and get something softer.
“Nine years,” she finally admitted with obvious reluctance.
His mouth dropped open in shock and then he whistled. “No wonder you were convinced you could hold out.” A feeling of smugness swelled his chest and a smile tugged his lips. “But that was before you kissed me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t let your success go to your head.”
“My head’s not what you’re wearing out, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart? He didn’t know where the endearment had come from. He never called women by pet names.
He resumed tapping on floorboards, shifted to the next quadrant and started his systematic search again. Five minutes later a board gave beneath his hand. He rapped again and heard a distinctive hollow sound. He pressed the end of the board and the opposite end popped up. “Bingo.”
“You found it?” Lauryn scrambled over and watched wide-eyed as Adam pried the six-inch-by-two-foot board out of the back corner to reveal the compartment below.
The crazy story was true. He’d only half believed Lauryn when she’d told him.
A dozen leather-bound books the size of paperback novels rested atop a blue lining—a silk scarf, maybe. There were other items in the space. Envelopes, bound together with a yellowed ribbon. A small, carved wooden box and a few trinkets.
He looked at Lauryn. With her hands clasped in front of her chest, she stared at the booty as if hypnotized but made no move to pick up any of the items.
“You okay?”
She blinked. Looked at him. Inhaled raggedly. “I had almost given up on finding them.”
After fruitlessly searching three closets with her today so had he.
“I-I’m a little afraid to read them.”
And then he got it. “You’re worried you might not like what Adrianna has to say.”
“Yes. Does that sound stupid?” Her worried expression snagged something in his chest.
“No. I want to know why my father passed me over, but I’m not sure I would have liked his answer. He wasn’t known for pulling his punches.”
Sympathy softened her eyes.
Adam reached over the compartment and covered Lauryn’s linked hands, sharing a connection he’d never felt with his siblings or any one else. He wasn’t the touchy-feely type, and while he’d rather run from the emotional upheaval he expected would follow their discovery, he suspected she might need his support over the next few hours.
“Want privacy?”
“No!” she answered quickly. Too quickly. And then she shook her head and squared her shoulders. “I’m sorry. That was silly. If you’ll help me carry all this to the bedroom then you can go to work. You could still get there before Estate opens tonight. I’ll be fine. Honest.”
He couldn’t deny the relief surging through him and yet there was also an odd reluctance to leave her. “You bet.”
Using the blue fabric as a catchall, he gathered the corners and then lifted and stood. Lauryn’s gasp stopped him. She reached into the hole and picked up one remaining object. A piece of paper.
She scanned the page. “It’s my birth certificate. My original one.”
The turbulent tangle of emotions in her eyes made him want to do something. He wasn’t sure what. Hold her? Surely not. “Let’s get this to the bedroom.”
He waited while she shakily rose to her feet and then followed her out of the room, down the hall and into their suite where he deposited the stash on the small table set in the bow of the window. He studied her pale face, the birth certificate trembling in her hands and decided to get out before he did something sappy like take her into his arms.
Sex was one thing. Getting emotionally embroiled in her affairs was another. “You’re sure you don’t need me to stay?”
“No. Saturday’s Estate’s busiest night. And I—I should probably do this alone.”
Vulnerable. That’s it. Lauryn looked vulnerable—not an adjective he’d ever attached to her before. She was a lot of things—capable, intelligent, composed, beautiful and sexy as hell—but never vulnerable.
He brushed her cheek with his fingertips. “You have my cell number. Call if you need me.”
Adam walked away.
But it wasn’t nearly as easy as it should have been.
“You’re still awake,” Adam said.
Startled, Lauryn looked at him and then checked the clock. Six in the morning already. She’d read through the night. Eight hours. She closed the diary she’d been rereading for the third time—the one detailing her mother’s pregnancy and Lauryn’s birth.
“She wanted me.” Her voice sounded hoarse from the emotion dammed in her throat. She swiped at her dry and scratchy cried-out eyes.
Adam approached slowly. “You doubted that?”
“Of course I doubted that. She gave me away and never tried to contact me even though she knew exactly where I was.” And Lauryn had thought so much worse—that she’d been a baby even a mother couldn’t love. “But she kept me for two weeks. She tried to be my mother.”
Lauryn tapped the stack of diaries. “I don’t understand some of the medical terminology in these, but Adrianna had a heart condition. The doctors and her family told her to abort me because it wasn’t safe for her to carry a baby to term. She refused and ran away. No one in Miami knows about me because she never told anyone that she’d had a baby and given it up for adoption. Her family thought she’d gone away to have the abortion.”
Searching her face, Adam knelt beside her putting his face on level with hers. “This is good?”
She sensed his wariness. Did he expect her to fall apart all over him? Admittedly she’d had a few rocky moments as she read the diaries and her father’s letters to Adrianna, but those were private. She wouldn’t inflict that on him.
A smile tickled her lips. “Yes. This is good. I have my answers, the ones I craved, and I have you to thank for that.”
“No thanks necessary.”
She couldn’t help touching him. Cradling his face in her hand, Lauryn dragged her fingertips over the beard stubble shadowing his jaw line. His lips were soft against the pad of her thumb, and despite her roller-coaster night desire tightened her middle.
“Adrianna died at thirty-six. I’m ten years from that age. I needed to know if there were health time bombs in my DNA that my regular physicals hadn’t picked up. But what she had wasn’t hereditary. She contracted an infection in her early teens that weakened her heart muscle. She claims her parents smothered her from then on, never letting her live like a normal woman.
“And then she met my father in Fort Lauderdale while he was on leave. He was the first man who didn’t treat her like she was damaged goods because he didn’t know. She fell in love with the dashing air force pilot that week even though she knew they had no future. Besides the class differences, my father had already been reassigned to California and was leaving within the month.
“When she discovered she was pregnant eight weeks later she saw having me as her one chance to do what normal women do and she decided not to have the abortion. But the pregnancy weakened her heart, and she was afraid she wouldn’t be strong enough to raise a child if she survived the delivery. She contacted my father when she was seven months along.” Lauryn’s throat closed up. Her mother had risked dying to have her.
“I read what he wrote her, Adam. When my father found out about me he proposed, but Adrianna turned him down. There were hints to that in her letters to him when she said she couldn’t do as he asked or that he shouldn’t try to turn a vacation romance into something it was never meant to be. But I didn’t know he’d proposed.
“He wanted me. When Adrianna realized she wasn’t strong enough for shared custody they made the arrangements for the adoption. And my father found the perfect solution in Susan, his best friend’s pregnant widow.
“After turning me over to my father Adrianna moved back here and had very little life outside these walls. It’s kind of sad.” Lauryn’s voice broke the last word into two syllables.
Adam rose, pulling her into his arms and holding her tight.
She rested her head over his heart, taking strength from the strong, steady beat. Being with him like this felt right. It was as if she’d found her past and her future right here in this house with him. She tipped back her head and met his gaze and realized she had more than DNA in common with her birthmother.
Like Adrianna, Lauryn had fallen for a man with whom she had no future, and like her birthmother, Lauryn intended to make the most of her time with him.
And then she’d let him go. Even if it ripped out her heart.
Nine
Lauryn smelled coffee and her lagging energy revived.
She turned in her office chair and spotted her husband with a to-go cup in one hand and a bag bearing the same familiar logo in the other and a mischievous glint in his eyes. That glint did crazy things to her pulse.
She held up a finger and pointed to her telephone headset.
Adam entered her office and hitched his hip on the corner of her desk.
Almost every day since she’d started working at Estate she’d ducked out around three to get coffee from a nearby shop, but today her assistant had discovered a discrepancy in a delivery that she hadn’t been able to unravel. Lauryn had taken over and was still tied to her desk trying to fix it.
“So you’ll deliver the missing items first thing in the morning? We must have them the day after tomorrow for the Thanksgiving Day event.” She waited for confirmation and then finished the call. Removing the headset, she smiled at Adam, who extended the cup.
“Thanks.” She gratefully sipped the chocolate coffee brew. Perfect. Had he known what she always ordered? Or had the barista told him?