“Of course I want you there,” he told me.
“What?”
“Stop looking at my dick and look at my face.”
My gaze met his.
“Not that I don’t like you lookin’ at me like ya are right now, but I would like to make a plan to come see you in Chicago when this op is over. If that would be all right.”
Long distance? Was he kidding?
He came outside and walked over to me, hands on my hips again, sliding up under the hem of the T-shirt to my skin as he crowded me and kissed the side of my neck. “Could I do that? Croy? What do you say?”
I’d slept with hundreds of people in Chicago and could not, at the moment, recall any of their names. I took his mouth and kissed him deeply, wanting him to feel my sincerity before I even said the words.
“Yes,” I husked, my mouth hovering over his, having pulled back to speak. “But you have to do me a favor.”
His eyes lifted from my lips to look me in the eye.
“You have a lot of scars on your body. A man with that many scars has an idea what hard living and a short life expectancy means.”
“No, I––”
“I put a high value on my time.”
“As well you should,” he said, lifting a hand to the side of my neck.
“So if I’m going to commit to flying out here on a regular basis, and to picking you up from the airport when you visit me, you had better make some lifestyle changes so you stick around.”
He nodded quickly and leaned in, kissing me once, then again, and would have done it a third time, but I caught his full bottom lip and bit down gently, holding him there before I took his face in my hands, tilted his head back just a bit, and tasted him again, thoroughly, as my tongue tangled with his.
I swallowed each of his moans, and when he was trembling in my arms, I realized that he was probably freezing to death in nothing but a T-shirt and jeans.
Easing back, I looked my fill of him. “Let’s get you inside before you turn into an ice cube.”
“Is it cold out here?” he asked in confused wonder, pupils blown.
I chuckled and wrapped him in my arms, hugging him tight, the man, for whatever odd reason, bringing out a tenderness and demonstrativeness in me that no one who knew me would have thought me capable of.
I held on, my face buried in his shoulder, and he clutched me back, sighing deeply, leaning on me, content, it seemed, to stand right where he was. When he went to step back, he took hold of my hand and walked me to the sliding glass door and into the house. His mother and sister were done with the dishes, and Dallas led me to the couch and flopped down, pulling on my hand until I took a seat beside him.
“So, Croy,” his mother said as she joined us, bringing me a cup of tea and putting it down on a coaster in front of me. “Where did you grow up?”
“Mom,” Dallas groaned. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“Yes. I have yoga class in an hour, but in the meantime, I want to hear about Croy.”
Cate joined us, taking the overstuffed wingback chair near her mother, the two of them separated by a small table.
“I grew up in Bedford, New York,” I told her. “And I left when I was seventeen.”
Her mouth dropped open.
“And while I appreciate you wanting to get to know me, keep in mind that learning anything about my upbringing will give you no insight into who I am.”
“Why is that?”
“I wasn’t raised by my parents,” I told her. “I was raised by the hyper-efficient people who worked for my parents.”
She nodded, and I saw how tenderly she was looking at me, wiping at her eyes to head off any stray tears. She had a very soft heart, his mother.
“Are you retired?” I asked her.
She cleared her throat, beaming at me. “No, I quit. I got lucky and married rich.”
“Oh God,” Dallas groaned, putting his head down on my shoulder, his hand on my thigh, slipping around to the inside, holding tight.
“Really,” I said, arching an eyebrow. “Do tell.”
The story went that Thaddeus Whitney had lost his wife three years before he pulled up stakes and moved from Boston out to Vegas. He wanted a complete change, and since it was his favorite place—the gambling, the golf, the restaurants and real estate market—he made the move, bringing his two sons, Callum and Lawrence, out with him. It had been exactly what he and his boys needed, and all three had thrived because Thaddeus met Jacqueline Bauer. She and Thaddeus met when they needed a fourth for golf one day, and they had talked for hours, after eighteen holes, in the country club restaurant. He had asked her to dinner right there and then, and it felt, she told me, like she’d never gone home again. She brought a blast of fresh air and sunshine into the lives of all three men.