A Touch of Persuasion. Janice Maynard
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for disappointment.”
“Is that so? From what I could tell, what just happened was a two-way street.”
“It’s late,” she said abruptly. “I have to go.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned a hip against the back of the sofa, his eyes narrowed. From the look of him, no one would guess that sixty seconds ago he’d been kissing her senseless. “You can’t run from me, Olivia. Closing your eyes and thinking about Kansas is a child’s game. I want some answers.”
Her phone chimed to signal a text, and she pulled it from her pocket, glancing at it automatically. Her mother’s words chilled her blood.
Kieran touched her shoulder as she sank to a seat. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“The flight was delayed. My mother has a stalker fan, and he showed up at the airport.”
He squatted beside her, his mere presence lending comfort. “What happened?”
“When he tried to burst through a checkpoint, calling her name, TSA arrested him.”
He frowned. “I don’t like the thought of Cammie being exposed to something like that.”
“First of all, my parents take security very seriously, and second of all, this is none of your business. I’m her mother. It’s up to me to keep her safe.”
From his vantage point crouched at her side, their gazes collided. “You don’t have to do this alone anymore,” he said quietly, the words like a vow. “Any child with my blood running in her veins has the protection of the entire Wolff clan at her back.”
She swallowed hard, near tears, missing her daughter and feeling out of her depth. “A child is not a belonging. She’s her own person. Even if she is only five.”
“You think I don’t know that? I was a year younger than she is now when my mother was killed.” He sprang to his feet, pacing once more. “My brother Gareth was the only one of us really old enough to understand and remember the details, but I lived it, and those terrible days are buried somewhere in my psyche… the confusion, the loneliness, the knowledge that my world was never going to be the same. No child should lose a parent, Olivia, even if she thinks she has only one.”
Guilt reached inside her chest and squeezed hard. Kieran Wolff had hurt her badly. Did she have the right to make her daughter vulnerable to his undeniable charm? Conversely, was she wrong to deny her child a father, even an absentee one? The same questions had haunted her for half a decade.
Her head ached. “We’ll visit for a long weekend,” she said, her voice tight. “As soon as Cammie gets back from Europe. But that’s all it will be. All it will ever be. And if you break your word to me, I’ll take her away and never speak to you again.”
His lips quirked in a half smile. “Mama Bear protecting her cub. I like seeing you in this maternal role, Olivia. It suits you.”
She gathered her purse and the light sweater she’d brought with her. “No one and nothing in this world means more to me than Cammie. And you’d do well to remember that. Good night, Kieran. Pleasant dreams.”
He followed her to the door, having the temerity to press another hard kiss to her lips before allowing her to leave. “I’ll dream,” he said, brushing her cheek with the back of a hand. “But I have a feeling that pleasant won’t be the right word for it.”
Four
Kieran had never liked waiting. The ten days that elapsed between his confrontation with Olivia and her arrival at Wolff Mountain were interminable. Every moment of every day he imagined a dozen excuses she could make to keep from showing up.
As an adolescent he’d imagined the walls of the monstrous house closing in on him, as if he were trapped in a castle dungeon. Even now, his homecoming was tainted with confusion. Mostly he felt the agitation of being stuck in one place. He liked the freedom of the open road.
But if he were honest with himself, he had to admit that Wolff Mountain drew him home time and again despite his conflicted feelings about its past… his past.
Having his brothers close went a long way toward passing the time. They shared meals at the “big house,” and Kieran was introduced to Gracie, Gareth’s new wife. Kieran’s older brother was happier than Kieran had seen him in years, and it was clear that he adored his bride.
In the mornings, Kieran hiked the mountain trails with Gareth, and after lunch every day, he helped Jacob add on a new room to the doc’s already state-of-the-art clinic. Kieran welcomed the physical exertion. Only by pushing himself to the point of exhaustion was he able to sleep at night. And even then he dreamed… God, he dreamed.
Olivia… in his bed, beneath him, her fabulous mane of hair spread across the pillows like a river of molten chocolate shot with gold. Her honey smooth skin bare-ass naked, waiting for him to touch every inch of it with his lips, his tongue, his ragged breath… He’d dreamed of her before… At least in the beginning. When he first lost her. But the pain of doing so had ultimately led him to pretend she didn’t exist. It was the only way he had survived.
But now, knowing that he and Olivia would soon be sharing a roof, the chains he’d used to bind up his memories shattered. He’d taken more cold showers in the past week than he had as a hormone-driven teen. And in the darkest hours of the night, he wondered with no small amount of guilt if he was using his own daughter as leverage to spend more time with the woman he’d never been able to forget.
Olivia wasn’t coming here to be his lover. She’d made that crystal clear. Her single concession was to allow Cammie a visit. And that was only because Kieran threatened court proceedings.
He still felt bad about that, but Olivia’s stubbornness infuriated him. Why couldn’t she just admit that in the short time they were together, they created a life? He knew the truth in his gut, but he needed Olivia to be honest… to tell him face-to-face. Until he heard her say the words out loud, he wouldn’t be satisfied.
With Cammie as his child, everything changed. It meant that when he was laboring in some godforsaken corner of the world, he could dream about returning home to someone who was his, a child who would love him and hug his neck.
Kieran’s family loved him, but coming home to Wolff Mountain was painful. So painful, in fact, that he made it back to the States only a couple of times a year. No matter how hard he tried, the memories of his mother, though vague and indistinct, permeated the air here. And those same memories reminded him of how helpless he had felt when she died.
Seeing his father and uncle and brothers and cousins crying had left an indelible mark on an impressionable four-year-old. Until then, he’d believed that men never cried, especially not his big, gruff daddy. Kieran had been confused, and fearful, and so desperate to make everything better.
The day of the funeral he pretended to take a nap while the adults were gone. While the nanny was on the phone with her boyfriend, Kieran slipped into his mother’s bedroom and ransacked the large walk-in closet that housed her clothes. He tugged at the hems of blouses and dresses and evening gowns, ripping them from the hangers and piling them up haphazardly until he had a small mountain.
The fabrics smelled like her. With tears streaming down his face, he climbed atop his makeshift bed, curled into a ball of misery and fell asleep, his thumb tucked in his mouth.
Kieran inhaled sharply, realizing that he had allowed himself the bittersweet, two-edged sword of memory. That’s why he came home so seldom. In another hemisphere he could pretend that his life was normal. That it had always been normal.
Returning to Wolff Mountain always pulled the Band-Aid off a wound that had never healed cleanly. He remembered being discovered on that terrible funeral day and escorted out of his parents’ bedroom. No one chastised him. No one took him to task for what he had done. But three days later when he worked up the courage to once again sneak into his mother’s closet, every trace of her was gone… as