tears fall. Then she tried coveting the thought that he might be gone when she left the bathroom, but even for someone who'd managed to avoid the problem of her marriage for eight years, it seemed a pretty lame hope.
So Kitty wasn't surprised to find him propped up against the pillows when she walked back into the bedroom. He was wearing his jeans and nothing else. She pulled her blue chenille lapels of her bathrobe a little closer together. It was too bad she hadn't left an armored robe hanging on the hook in the bathroom.
He'd turned up the light, and as Kitty approached, she couldn't help but notice his solid pec muscles, his rippling abdomen, and that when he crossed his arms, his biceps bulged. The medal he wore around his neck glinted from its place against his dark chest hair. He looked so ... male against the butter-yellow sheets of her bed. Her mouth gone dry, she gestured behind her. "Did you want to ... you're welcome to use the shower."
He shook his head. "No, thanks. I smell you on me and I like it that way." His hand patted the mattress beside him.
Another little tremor shook her body. She moved forward to disguise it, filing away the unexpectedly sweet, arousing idea that he liked her scent on him. "I've been thinking, Dylan..."
He smiled. "And what's been going on in that pretty head of yours is exactly what I've been sticking around to find out."
"Well, first." She took a few more steps toward the bed. "There's no need for us to go into any apologies or recriminations or ... whatever."
His eyebrows came together. "Apologies or recriminations for what, exactly?"
She waved toward the bed. "You know."
"For this?" He inserted two fingers in the fist of his other hand and moved them in a vulgar imitation of lovemaking.
Her lip curled. "That's crude."
Shaking his head, he laughed. "You're a prude, Kitty. But don't worry, honey, I'm not about to apologize for what we did in this bed. I've been doing some thinking too. The undeniable fact is, you turn me on. The way I see it, you're twenty-six years old. You wanted to have sex with me, and boy - howdy, I wanted to have sex with you. It doesn't matter what didn't happen between us before."
Kitty released a pent-up breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. She turned him on. That little nugget she also filed in the back of her mind, ready to savor some other, less crucial time.
"Exactly. It doesn't matter." She reached the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. "Whatever didn't happen in the past..." With a casual gesture of her hand, she waved the whole messy business away.
"So now we just have to discuss what did happen." His dark, implacable gaze pinned her. "In the past."
"What?" Swallowing, she shoved her suddenly trembling hands in the front patch pockets of her robe. "What do you mean?"
"I think it's time you told me exactly why you registered our marriage."
Kitty's heart stopped beating, already preparing for sacrifice. "It was a mistake," she tried anyway. "My one silly mistake."
Dylan didn't blink. "I once got a man to confess where he'd hidden the ransom money a family paid to get their son back," he said softly. Pleasantly. "It was what we needed to convict the man and we couldn't convict without it. It took me twenty-two minutes, Kitty, and I never laid a hand on him."
With that, he reached across the mattress and took a firm hold of hers. "Seven minutes later, just to get away from my company in the interrogation room, he agreed to a prison term of thirty years without the possibility of parole."
Kitty swallowed to wet her dry mouth. "You're trying to intimidate me."
"Yes." He stroked the top of her hand with his thumb. "Is it working?"
She swallowed again, and then the words just tumbled out. "The Wilder women don't wed and they don't run."
He stilled. "The motto in The Burning Rose?"
"The family motto." Kitty looked down at their entwined hands. "From Rose to Clara to Margaret to Rosanna. Then to Samantha, then to me. Those words have been passed on to all of us."
"And no Wilder woman has ever done either. Is that right?"
She nodded, her head still lowered. "I guess you could say that Samantha ran for a time, but she's back."
Dylan was silent for a moment. "So registering that marriage, really wedding someone, was your rebellion?"
Startled, Kitty jerked her head up.