She remained silent for the longest time, and then said awkwardly, ‘A twenty-two-year-old virgin. Funny, huh?’
‘Hilarious,’ he said grimly. He gulped in air, allowing his thought processes time to kick back into gear. He knew then that he couldn’t use Liv to forget any more than she could use him to fulfil some childish fantasy. But as he went to pull away she tightened her hold on him.
‘No!’ she gasped out. ‘Don’t stop…’
Her grip on him was vice-like.
‘Cade, please…’
He sank down to his knees and buried his face between her legs. He would soothe her down another way.
‘No!’ she begged him hoarsely. ‘Not like this…’
He made the mistake of looking up.
‘I know exactly what I’m doing,’ she told him firmly, ‘and I want you, Cade.’
He should pull back to teach her a lesson, and show her how dangerous this was, but they had passed that particular side road some time back and now he wanted it as much as she did. He stood up and tried to reason with her. ‘You have no idea how you’ll feel afterwards.’ Was she even listening? He groaned as she cupped him, and as she started stroking him their positions were reversed, and she was the aggressor. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘Why not?’ she whispered. ‘If you don’t do this, Cade, I’ll have to find someone who will.’
He tensed. Her words had made him angrier than he could have believed. He tried telling himself it was an empty threat, and while he was still battling with this thought she thrust her hips towards him and it was done. Too late to turn back now he sank deep inside her, taking it slow and relishing every delicious moment, until lazily he withdrew.
‘Again.’
He obeyed, voicing his pleasure in a groan as he sank to the hilt and worked his hips against her.
‘Nice, Cade, nice,’ she wailed as he continued to move inside her. She made it easy for him, drawing her knees back and holding herself open for him.
It shouldn’t be like this, not on a kitchen side with the heat building inside both of them until it could only release in searing sensation. She came almost at once, which was to be expected, but it was when she quietened down again that the punishment really began for him. The escape he had both sought and found was short-lived. The freedom, the release from the memories, was already ebbing away. ‘Go take a bath,’ he suggested, murmuring against her hair as he soothed her down by stroking her. ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve freshened up…’
She could hardly compute the information. Cade was pulling away from her as if nothing had happened—as if they’d done nothing. For her it had been a life-changing event. Just as he had warned her it would be…
He turned away from her to do up the zip on his jeans. He washed his hands at the kitchen sink and dried them. He raked his hair. He pulled on his discarded T-shirt, and fastened his belt. ‘Still here?’ he said lightly, as if to make a joke of it.
She didn’t meet his gaze. Throbbing physically, trying to come to terms with the new her, she found the heartache unbearable. She hurried to straighten her clothes, warning her fingers not to fumble. This was not a moment for showing a weak underbelly; this was the time for her to realise she had made a dreadful mistake and to try and find a half-decent way out of it.
Back in the attic room Liv was throwing her few possessions into carrier bags without any of her usual care. She had come to the conclusion that the lesser of two evils was to return home. She could hardly stay at Featherstone as some sort of charity case Cade had sorted out in his spare time; not when she had fallen in love with him and loved him with every atom of her being. Humiliation lay ahead of her at her parents house in Acacia Drive, she was under no misapprehension about that, but nothing could be worse than the pain in her heart.
Catching sight of Cade striding across the yard, she paused by the window. She could understand his eagerness to get away. The atmosphere in the hall had turned so heavy it was like an unwieldy load pressing down on her head. There was a sense that both of them were rushing back to normality with relief. She should be glad he was out of the house; it meant she could leave without fuss. She couldn’t face conversation, least of all apologies, for who would make them? She had viewed the possibility of an affair with Cade through rose-tinted spectacles, when the reality was so much more complicated, because he was so much more complicated than her imagination had allowed. She had considered her own needs without thinking of his and must go now before she exposed how shallow she really was. She must go now before she fell any more deeply in love with him…
He strode to the barn where his Harley was in pieces. Tinkering with the high-powered machine had kept him sane before, but would it help him now? He’d told Liv she would be changed by what had happened between them—he should have remembered to warn himself at the same time. He was just opening the barn door when he heard the kitchen door slam. He didn’t turn around. He glanced at his watch instead to see Liv had ten minutes before the local bus stopped at the end of the drive. She had timed it all to perfection. And it was for the best, he told himself. She would go home now and put things right with her family. They’d take her back, they’d understand; that was what families did.
She only had herself to blame, Liv reasoned on the bus home, and she couldn’t say she hadn’t been warned; Cade had warned her. She could only put her actions down to a madness sweeping over her; a madness called lust. And now she was willing the bus to move as fast as it could towards safe suburbia as she had once willed it to race away from Acacia Drive. She could see everything that had happened since she’d bolted from the church like a street map laid out in her head—including the dead end leading to the blank wall called Cade Grant. It was arrogant of her to have imagined that she’d found her soul mate. She had fantasised about sex with a local hero, without considering the consequences, or whom she was dealing with. She had seen no further than the fact that Cade was gorgeous, and the job as his housekeeper was her ticket to escape from home. But Cade was more damaged by war than she had realised, and she lacked the experience to deal with that damage. Bestowing her virginity on him like some precious gift seemed such a shallow child’s game to her now. What Cade needed was a mature and thoughtful woman at his side, and so she would swallow her pride and return home to make a better plan. She would search for nursing posts, surf the internet, find courses that appealed to her, anything rather than remain flaccidly waiting for life to deal her a better hand. She would make her own luck by working harder and thinking clearly. She would change her life, but not like this.
As the bus stopped at the junction Liv turned to take a last look at the grand old house, which was just waiting to be brought back to life. Cade would achieve that and more with his plan to turn Featherstone into a rehabilitation centre…
She settled back in her seat with a sad smile as she accepted that she would never be part of it.
CHAPTER NINE
THE phone rang while Cade was pacing out the site where he intended to build a specialised exercise facility for the rehabilitation centre. He fished it out of his pocket impatiently, resenting the intrusion, and when he saw who was ringing he grimaced.
Pressing the phone to his ear, he stared up at the boiling pewter clouds, trying to blank out thoughts of a girl who was soft and lovely, warm and honey coloured, and way too innocent and unspoiled to be a part of his complicated life.
This time he succeeded. He was still a commissioned officer, and his commander-in-chief, the duke, needed him. He listened to the clipped voice of the older man asking him to host the regimental ball that weekend in the duke’s absence. As well as the rank he held this man was both his mentor and friend. The duke made it clear that the top brass would be there, and if Cade wanted to fulfil his dream of transforming his Featherstone Hall into an approved site for recovering soldiers, he should be there too…meeting the right people; making the right impression…
Both men knew what that meant without goi
ng into sentimental detail. Normality was the key. Cade must convince everyone he was ‘over’ his experiences in the battle zone.
‘Desk jockeys have no idea what you and I have been through,’ the duke told him unemotionally. ‘You must show them your soft, caring side.’
Cade almost laughed out loud. They both knew he had no soft side. There were no finer feelings left in him. All the tenderness he might once have possessed had been stamped out of him in the sand box, or in the mud, and with the cries of those he hadn’t been able to save ringing in his ears. He would never allow himself to feel again. How could he when he had failed to save his brother?
As he swiped a hand across his eyes Liv’s face full of compassion sprang into his mind. She was an argument that refused to be silenced. He missed her. He could count the time she had been away in hours, minutes, seconds, rather than days; even a week without her was a week too many. Was it possible she’d only been gone a week? He missed her challenges, he missed her smile; he missed her sweet, fresh, innocent loveliness…He thumbed his jaw as he thought it through. Who better to woo the pen-pushers than Liv Tate? Who better with her soft voice and gentle ways, not to mention her nurses’ training, and steely determination?
Pastoral care was an essential part of any rehabilitation centre, the duke was reminding him. ‘You have thought about that side of things, haven’t you, Cade? I realise you’ve budgeted for trained nurses, but, frankly, a facility like the one you want to open must have a heart…’
And that was one characteristic he most definitely lacked. He’d wondered this past week if he still had a heartbeat. But could Liv cope with people who had lost so much—their pride, their job, their mobility; people who had suffered the most horrific experiences? Would she leave her soft, cosseted home life for him if he asked her to?
Or was Liv’s home life somewhat different from the way she made it seem?
Where that thought came from he had no idea. He hoped for Liv’s sake it was way off beam. He’d been unfeeling letting her go, and the thought that he might have abandoned her to a worse fate was too much to bear; the thought tormented him. It would continue to torment him until he found out the truth and so he had to go see what was happening. This was as much about Liv now as the future of his rehabilitation centre. He had to know she was all right.
‘There’s no doubt that a woman by your side would be a distinct advantage, Cade,’ the duke was saying. ‘It would make the top brass see you in a different, caring light.’