The Angels' Share (The Bourbon Kings #2) - J. R. Ward Page 0,17

going to recognize, and her husband’s visitation was one of them. And people had been calling the house already, asking about what arrangements were being made. Not that that was about his father, either. Charlemont high society was as competitive as the NFL, and an event like a Bradford’s visiting hours was the Super Bowl.

Everyone wanted a good seat at the fifty-yard line.

It was all just so fake. And though he’d always known that, it hadn’t been until Lizzie had come into his life that he’d cared about the emptiness of it all.

“I’m going to promise you something,” he murmured. “After this is all done … after I’ve fixed all this? Then you and I will leave. Then we get out. But I have to stay to clean up this mess. It’s the only way I’ll ever be free of this family. Righting the wrongs of my father is the only path to earning my freedom—earning your love.”

“You already have that.”

“Come here.”

He reached for her and pulled her into his lap, finding her mouth in the morning light. Getting her naked was the work of a moment, and then she was straddling him and he was yanking his sweatpants down.

“Oh, my Lizzie,” he groaned against her mouth.

Her breasts were full in his palms, and she gasped as he cupped them. She was always a revelation, always new to him … every kiss, each touch like coming home and going to the moon at the same time.

Perfection.

As she lifted up on her knees, he shifted himself into position, and then they were together, her moving on top of him, him holding her close. She took all of him with perfect coordination, and with her eyes closed tightly, as if she didn’t want any distractions from what she was feeling.

He kept his open.

Oh, she was beautiful, the way she arched back, her head falling away, her breasts lifting, the light bathing across her magnificent nakedness and her blond hair.

This he would remember as well, he told himself. This moment on the far side of the fall, the near-drowning, the panic … this wonderful, vital moment with the one he loved, where they were both alive and together and alone, sequestered in a privacy no one else could touch and nobody could take away, he would recall this along with everything else that had happened tonight.

Yes, he thought. He needed to recharge his strength, his hope, and his heart with times and memories like this with his Lizzie.

He had battles to fight, and questions as to whether he was worthy, and worries about what was coming ahead. But she gave him the power to be the warrior he wanted and needed to be.

Forget the money, he thought.

Everything he really had to have in life was right here in his arms.

“I love you,” he gasped. “I love you …”

SEVEN

Edward was surprised when Shelby didn’t jump to her feet and strut off in a huff out the door. After all, good Christian women who were told that their employer wanted to kiss them tended to get rightfully offended. But the longer she stayed where she was, staring up at him with his boot in her hands, the more intimidated he became.

It was not supposed to go like this, he thought to himself. He’d banked on her backing away from him, leaving him alone, forgetting about the damn doctor.

“Sometimes the land must accept the storm,” Shelby whispered.

“What?”

She just shook her head as she moved up his lower body. “It’s not important.”

And she was right. Nothing much was important at all as she was the one who kissed him, her lips soft and shy, as if she knew nothing about seduction.

That was not a problem for him.

Edward took things from there, and he found himself being more careful with her than he had been with a woman in … well, maybe, ever. He kept his hands light as he circled her torso, urging her in between his legs and up against his chest. Underneath her sweatshirt, her body was as hard as his was, but for a different reason. She was tight from all that physical labor, honed from her health and her efforts, from her work with animals that weighed a thousand pounds more than she did and required gallons of feed and wheelbarrows of sawdust and miles of walking from stall to stall, pasture to pasture.

She wasn’t wearing a bra.

He discovered that as he pulled that sweatshirt up and over her head. She wasn’t wearing