The Fall of Shane MacKade (The MacKade Brothers 4)

“I feel wonderful. Don’t you want to feel me?”

This time his curse wasn’t quite as good-natured. He hauled her up, and couldn’t avoid the cheerful kisses she plastered over his face and neck.

“Stop it, Rebecca.” His voice cracked with desperation as his body went on red alert. “Behave yourself.”

“Don’t want to. Always behaving. Tired of it. Let me just get this off for you.” With more enthusiasm than finesse, she fumbled at the buttons of his shirt. “I love the way you look in your undershirt, all those muscles. Let me have them.”

Now he was cursing bitterly as he carried her from the room. “You’re going to pay for this. I swear. A hangover’s going to be the least of it.”

She giggled, kicking her legs, letting her hands run through his long, thick hair. She weighed next to nothing, but the muscles in his arms still began to quiver. His knees were going weak.

He nearly yelped when she bit his ear.

“Oh, I love this house. I love you. I love everything. Can we have wine in bed?”

“No, and you’d better—” He made the mistake of looking at her, and her mouth fused to his. Honorable or not, he was human. The heat ran through him, tormenting, tempting. With a long, desperate moan, he teetered on the stairs as he lost himself in those wonderful, willing lips. “Rebecca.” Her name was a plea. “You’re driving me crazy.”

“I’ve always wanted to drive someone crazy. Then I could fix them, ’cause I’m a psychiatrist.” Wiggling against him, she laughed uproariously. Her fingers tugged on the neck of the undershirt she’d uncovered, then snuck beneath, to flesh that was growing damp with sweat. “Kiss me some more, you know, the way you do when I can feel your teeth with my tongue. I just love when you do that.”

“Oh, my God.” As a prayer, it was perfectly sincere. He repeated it over and over again as he carried her to the guest room. It was his intention to dump her on the bed and make as quick and as dignified an exit as his scattered wits and aching loins would allow.

But she pulled, tugged, and had him flopping onto the big soft bed with her. On top of her. “Feels good.” She sighed. Then arched. “Oh, my.”

He moaned, pitifully. What was left of his mind scrambled so that all of the blood drained out of it, and down. He knew his eyes rolled back in his head when she latched those narrow hands on to his butt and squeezed.

“I’m not doing this.” His breath was panting out with the effort to keep himself from ripping off her clothes.

“Are, too. Soon as we get these pants off.”

His hand vised over hers when she reached for the snap of his jeans. He stared at that glowing, cheerfully seductive face and, with a titanic effort, reminded himself there were rules to the game.

“I want you to stop this, right now.” None too gently, he hauled her arms up over her head and pinned them. The only problem with that was that the position pushed his body more firmly to hers. And, damn her, she wouldn’t keep still. “Keep your hands off me, damn it.”

She grinned at him, lazily experimenting with the sensations that worked their way through her alcoholic haze whenever she rocked her hips. “I promise not to hurt you.” A snort of laughter escaped. “You look so fierce. Come on and kiss me.”

“I ought to strangle you.” But he did kiss her, as much from frustration as from need. And the kiss was raw and wild and just a little mean. When he managed to pull himsel

f back, her eyes were heavy and glazed. But those tempting lips curved.

“Mmmore…”

His body ached, his head throbbed. “You’re going to remember when I make love with you, Rebecca,” he said tightly. “You’re going to be stone-cold sober, and you’re going to remember every instant of it. And before I’m finished with you, you’re not going to know your own name.”

“Okay,” she murmured agreeably as her heavy eyes drooped. “Okay.” Then she yawned, hugely, and passed out.

He lay there several minutes, fighting for breath, fighting for strength. He could feel the steady rise and fall of the breasts that were crushed under him, the clean angles of her body, the limp droop of the hands he still held imprisoned.

“You’re not going to hate me in the morning, baby,” he muttered as he levered himself away. “But I might just hate you.”

As an afterthought, he tossed a quilt over her, and left her fully dressed, right down to her shoes, to sleep it off.

He didn’t sleep at all. As he had been all his life, Shane was up before the sun. But this morning he wasn’t whistling. He did no more than glower down the hall toward Rebecca’s room before he trooped downstairs and outside to begin the morning chores.

If the two 4-H students who worked with him on weekday mornings noticed he wasn’t his usual cheerful self, they were wise enough to make no comment. Cows were milked and tended, pigs were fed, eggs were gathered. There were bales of hay to be split and spread.

The dogs danced around, as was their habit, but after a short time it seemed they sensed things were not quite as they should be. So they slunk off to lie low under the back porch.

The sun was up by the time Shane came back into the house to clean up and start his breakfast. Physical labor had helped work off most of his black mood. His sense of the ridiculous was dealing with the rest. Here he was, a grown man, he told himself, with a reputation for charming the ladies. And he was more frustrated than he’d been as a green adolescent taking that first tentative step into female territory.