The Secret Heir

Maybe his words got through to her that time. Or more likely, he thought with a silent sigh, she was simply too worn out to fight him anymore. Whatever the reason, she closed her eyes and went out again, her body going limp against him.

He, on the other hand, was wide awake now. He lay there for a long time, holding her and wishing the physical closeness they shared now was mo

re than just illusion.

The next time Laurel awoke, it was a more gradual easing into consciousness. She became aware first that she felt more rested than she had in days. Her muscles had unknotted and her head wasn’t aching. And then she realized that she was still cradled in her husband’s arms.

She opened her eyes, blinking away the blurriness of deep sleep. Jackson lay on his back with his eyes closed, his left arm beneath her, his right hand resting on his chest. He had removed his shirt, leaving him clad only in loose jeans for his nap.

She lay very still, watching his tanned chest rise and fall with his even breathing. A light rain fell outside, and the watery light slanting in through the bedroom window cast intriguing shadows over Jackson’s strongly carved features. She couldn’t deny the pleasure she took in watching him sleep. He was such a good-looking man.

She allowed her gaze to drift downward, pausing at the pulsing hollow in his throat, sliding down to the broad, lightly furred expanse between his nipples, traveling even lower to his flat, solid stomach. She spent a moment admiring the way his soft denim jeans hugged his lower half, cradling his unmistakable masculinity and making his legs look a mile long.

When she raised her eyes again, his were open.

“Hey.” His voice was still gravelly, a warm groan that elicited a shiver of response in her.

“Hey.”

He studied her face. “Your eyes are brighter. There’s more color in your cheeks. You must have slept well this time.”

“I did.” She glanced at the bedside clock, realizing that she’d slept solidly for just over two hours. “Surprisingly so.”

“Want to talk about the bad dream you had earlier?”

Embarrassed by the reminder, she shook her head. “I’ve already forgotten most of it.”

She remembered the key points, of course. Tyler’s disconsolate cries. Her own frantic, but futile, efforts to reach him. That haunting voice that questioned Laurel’s competence as a mother, preying on her deepest insecurities.

“You don’t have nightmares very often. At least, not that you’ve mentioned.”

“No. Not since childhood, really.”

“You had a lot of nightmares when you were younger?”

They hadn’t talked much about her childhood—her choice, mostly, since so many of her early memories were unhappy ones. She’d never wanted to compare their upbringings too closely, since Jackson’s had seemed so idyllic in contrast to hers. The one thing she had never wanted from her husband was pity.

But maybe it was time she shared a bit more with him, so he could understand her a bit better. Past time, actually. She deliberately kept her tone light as she answered his question. “I went through a stage of having them almost every night. I guess that’s why I identified so strongly with Tyler when he went through that phase last year, even though I was older when mine started. Fortunately, his didn’t last long.”

“Did your mother sleep close to you when you had nightmares? Did she comfort you the way you did Tyler?”

Here was the tricky part. Still unwilling to draw on his sympathy, she chose her words carefully. “You’ve heard me say enough about her to know better than that. My mother told me that big, strong girls didn’t need anyone to reassure them after a nightmare. Good, smart girls told themselves it was just a bad dream and went back to sleep without disturbing anyone else.”

Watching her face a bit too closely, he grimaced. “You told me you pretty much raised yourself. That your mother was gone a lot.”

“My mother left me home alone by the time I was six years old. I was already making my own meals and doing my own laundry, putting myself in bed and getting myself off to school in the mornings. She was usually too tired from partying the night before to get up that early. My father was in and out of my life until I was ten or eleven, when he took off for the final time.”

She paused, thinking again of Donna’s boast that she had never left her son alone. “Our mothers were very different.”

“Mine might have been a bit too involved in my life at times,” Jackson murmured. If he felt pity at the description of Laurel’s youth, he kept it to himself. Probably because he knew her well enough to know how much she would dislike it.

She had never heard him say anything that close to a criticism of his mother’s child-rearing techniques. There had been times when she’d wondered if he had ever felt smothered by Donna’s somewhat obsessive mothering, but she’d never quite had the courage to ask. It had been such a sensitive topic for them from the beginning.

She liked to think she had split the difference between their mothers—maintaining her own life through her job, yet making sure Tyler had the very best care she could provide during the hours she was separated from him.

“It’s no surprise we turned out so differently,” she murmured. “I wonder why it took us so long to realize that.”

“Maybe because we were too blinded by lust?” he suggested, a hint of teasing in his voice as he moved his hand slowly down her bare arm beneath the short sleeve of her T-shirt.