Chapter Thirty-Two. Duncan
He’d been sitting on the porch at the Madigan house in Linden for an hour and a half when Temperance’s little Corolla came down the lane. She parked next to his truck and closed the door quietly, and her shiny shoes made purposeful click-click-click sounds on the concrete path as she approached.
“I tried to call you,” Duncan said.
“My phone is shattered. I went to the cabin. You weren’t there.”
He stood and looped his suit coat over his forearm. “Obviously.”
She stepped past him and unlocked the door. “Are you here for some polite conversation?”
“Is that where you want to start? Or do we need to get the yelling out of the way first?”
Duncan followed her inside. Her boxes were still in the foyer, the same place they’d been earlier in the summer.
She tossed her keys on a marble-topped side table and kicked off her shoes. They clattered into the darkness of the cavernous house.
“You took the money, Duncan.” Her eyes were sharp, glittering like shattered glass.
“Yes. I did. And if you’d have met me at the Boonies that night when I begged you to, you’d have known it. I tried to fix things. You never showed.”
“You shouldn’t have taken it in the first place. We were supposed to be a team. But you fell right in line with what they wanted.”
“Corbin Madigan is a man who expects to be complied with, Temperance.”
“Since when do you care about that?”
“When you were sick, I’d sit in the main lobby at the hospital every day after work, because that was the closest I could get to you. The third or fourth night, your dad glanced at me as he was leaving. The next day, he sat down next to me. ‘You’re the Brady boy,’ he said, like he was accusing me of something, and I just blinked at him like a fucking idiot. Then he looked me right in the eyes and said, ‘She was asking for you,’ and I cracked a little. He told me he wasn’t sure who I was until he saw the look on my face in that moment. He comforted me, Temperance. Patted me on the back. Told me he understood how much I cared. Then he gave me the check to disappear. I spent the next year thinking about how things would have gone if I’d responded differently. If I’d stood up to him then. Who we’d be now. I was trying to protect you.”
“I didn’t want a protector,” she shouted. “I wanted a partner.”
“How was I supposed to take care of you? We were still kids.” His eyebrows were drawn over agonized eyes. “You had a mysterious illness that you were hospitalized for. I was barely out of high school, on my parents’ health insurance, you were facing twelve fucking years of school.” Duncan threw his hands up and let them fall to his sides. “How the hell am I the logical one here?”
“You’re the one who paid for the clinic to use the community room at Linden CC, didn’t you?”
“Why is it so much harder for you to accept things from me than from anyone else?”
“Answer me.”
“Yes.”
Temperance rubbed the center of her forehead. “The fifty-dollar tip at the bakery. The champagne at Rowan and Harry’s wedding—”
Duncan cut her off. “If you reject what I try to give, you imply that I don’t have anything of value to offer you.”
“Damn it, Duncan. I don’t want you to change your life because of me again. Set aside your dreams. You need that money—”
“What did you say to me once about being stripped of agency?” He got loud. He couldn’t help it. “It’s my choice to help you with the clinic. To spend it on people I love. It’s our money, Temperance. The entire reason I kept it was for us.”
“It feels like blood money. Or some fucked-up modern-day dowry.”
“I know. That’s why I paid back what they gave me. Plus inflation, by the way.”
She didn’t laugh, but her features softened. Progress.
“They used that money as a lever to get what they wanted. I did the same thing. The money stopped being theirs as soon as your dad handed me that check.”
“What did you do with it?”
Duncan hesitated. “I invested it.”
“How much is it now?”
“It’s enough.”
“See?” Anger flashed in her eyes. “Damn it, Duncan, I am asking to be brought all the way in on this conversation, and you’re still being oblique with your answers—”
“Right now, it’s about six hundred grand.”
A breath whooshed out of her, and she stepped backward.
“It fluctuates, obviously,” he clarified.
“Jesus. How? How is it that much?”
“Luck? I guess?”
“You could have told me.” When he opened his mouth to reply, she held up her hand and cut him off. “And don’t say you were trying to protect me again. I get to decide when I need to be protected.”
“I was protecting myself. Nobody knew about the money, Temperance. Nobody knew about school. I needed to figure that out for myself first. Dad and Ma just found out three days ago.”
Her shoulders sagged. She shuffled close to him and pressed her forehead against his sternum. They were quiet for a long time.
“I am so tired, Duncan. I just want to be loved for who I am. Not an ideal, not infallible. Not human capital. Just me. Let me mess up and be imperfect. I might have never been the girl you thought you fell in love with when we were teenagers. But I’m damn sure the woman who loves you now.”
Temperance tucked her fingers into the waistband of his trousers and tugged him closer. She raised her head to meet his eyes.
“I want to kiss you,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to look so mad about it,” he whispered back.
He settled his hands on her shoulders. His thumbs fit perfectly into the notches above her collarbones. He glided his hands up the sides of her neck, dipped his fingers into the sweet wisps of hair at her nape. He trailed the tip of his nose featherlight along her temple, then down the upper edge of her cheekbone. With his tongue, he caught the lobe of her ear, and drew it between his teeth. A full-body tremor went through him when she let out a groan of pleasure.
The vessels in his temples throbbed in unison with the ones in his groin.
“Duncan. Just kiss me,” she breathed, angling her mouth toward his.
Finally, finally, he bent toward her. He felt the heat of her breath first, then the slow, sensual brush of her full bottom lip against his. “Open your eyes,” he said against her mouth. “I love to watch what this does to you.”
The moment seemed to hover suspended in time, a raindrop at the tip of a leaf. The staccato of her breath was hot against his lips. “Please,” was all she said. With every frayed thread of self-control he could summon, Duncan closed the distance between their mouths. He dropped fully into the kiss, inhaling a sharp breath through his nose, lifting her against him so hard it drew her up on the tips of her bare toes.
Her wavering moan was aching need and relief, and it echoed all the way to the darkest places inside him. At his waist, she slipped his belt free of its buckle. If not for the soft metallic clank, he wouldn’t have noticed.
He kissed her open-mouthed and open-hearted. Between their bodies, she thumbed open the top button of his pants. The top of his erection breached the band of his underwear, and the whisper-light drag of her thumb across the slick tip was as erotic as if she’d used her tongue.
“No,” Duncan said on an explosive breath. He stepped back.
Eyes glassy, lips swollen, Temperance said, “What?”
He pressed his forehead to hers. “Bed. Clothes off. Afterglow. Morning after. All of it.”
“I don’t need that.”
“Damn it, Temperance.” He huffed a bullish breath through his nose. “I do.”
Duncan toed off his shoes and lifted her into his arms. Her room was in the back corner of the house, behind two curtained French doors. The sheets were rumpled on the big half-poster bed, and an overstuffed white comforter slumped off the bottom edge onto the smooth wood floor. A paperback romance book lay splayed open with pages down in the center of the mattress. He laid her down beside it, slid her bookmark into the pages, and sat it on the bedside table with care.
“Oh my god, that might be the hottest thing I’ve ever seen,” Temperance breathed.
Duncan chuckled.
One by one, he drew silver pins from her hair until the coil slid down under its own weight, then he untwisted the braid. Standing over her at the bedside, he shucked his shirt off while she removed everything but her panties. A tiny triangle of bronze satin with black lace embellishments at the hips.
His mouth flooded like he was a goddamned animal. He swallowed so hard it ached all the way into his chest.
“Your panties will be on my death certificate,” Duncan growled, dropping his pants.
She drew a finger up the center of the fabric. “You recognize these?”
“Yes.” Duncan gestured with a sideways bend of his wrist. “Off.”
“I haven’t gotten to thank you for them yet.”
“Thank me by taking them off. Now.”
She propped up on her elbows and let her legs drop open at the knees. Just barely. “Come take them.”
“No.” He kept his eyes on hers. “I want your full participation in this.”
A lock of her hair slid between her breasts when she dipped her head. “Is this a power struggle?”
“No.” He grabbed her ankles and hauled her to the edge of the bed. “This is a course correction. And it’s long overdue.”
He bent over her body, skimming his teeth along her hip bones, the lower edge of her rib cage. Then he cupped a hand over the satin triangle between her legs. He twisted the slippery material into his fist. The fabric was soaked.
“Duncan.” She arched off the mattress. “Take them off.”
Through the panties, he pinned her clit between the heel of his palm and her pubic bone. She rose off the bed, anchoring herself with two fists in the bedsheets. When he slid his thumb under the elastic of the crotch, her belly began to quake, and she took short, hissing breaths through clenched teeth. Duncan knew her orgasms as well as he knew his own. She’d come in those pretty panties in the next ten seconds if he kept it up.
He backed off.
Her frustrated whimper ended on a feral groan at the back of her throat. Duncan intercepted her hand on its way to finish what he’d started. He surged over her, restraining her arm above her head.
“Take off the fucking panties, Temperance,” he said against her mouth.
The pale blue of her eyes was white hot, and in that moment, Duncan estimated his odds of getting headbutted in the nose were as good as anything else. She slipped her wrist free of his light grip and exploded into motion. He sat back on his heels as she hooked her thumbs in the waistband, nearly kneeing him in the face in her frenzy to get the panties off. She wadded them into a ball and hurled them across the bedroom, chest heaving.
He pushed her back to the mattress with a hand on her sternum. Then he dropped to his knees beside the bed and dragged her to the edge again by her ankles.
“We good?” He ran his hands up the backs of her thighs.
“Yes.” Temperance pressed her hands against her eyes. “Please.”
With one hand shackled around her hip, he lowered his head between her thighs and fed on her like a man starved. Every stroke and tug of his mouth echoed the rhythm she set with her hands in his hair. Like he was her fucking marionette.
Her thighs clenched around his ears and her hips levitated off the bed. Duncan hooked both forearms under her legs and stacked his hands across her waist, locking his fingers together just below her navel. He flattened her against the mattress. “Stay here,” he demanded.
She came like a storm, drenching and loud.
Duncan rose to his feet and thrust into a condom. In one fluid motion, he lifted her back from the edge of the bed and used his knees to spread her legs wide. He lay there for a moment, hip bones cradled by her still-shuddering inner thighs, his erection trapped tight between his pubic bone and hers.
“Wait.” He exhaled hard and buried his face where her earlobe met her jaw, sucking the skin over her jugular with a wide-open mouth. Her pulse beat hard against his tongue. “Just breathe with me for a second.”
“I’m already breathing.” She drew her knees high against his rib cage to tilt the slippery center of her against his excruciating arousal. “I don’t want to slow down.”
The final thread in his frayed self-control shuddered like a pounded piano wire, but it held.
“I plan to take my time.” He bit his teeth together so hard he saw stars. “We seem to be at an impasse.”
“Stop talking.” She pressed her heels into the mattress and canted her hips further upward, urging him to slide inside.
He pressed his hips down hard and rotated against her in a slow, broad circle.
Temperance sank her fingernails into his shoulders and hooked her ankles together at the base of his spine. She made another growly sound of frustration. “Why are you doing this?”
Duncan curled his toes and raised up to press his sweaty forehead to hers. “I hate how fast I blow my fuse with you.”
“It’s fine, we can always—”
“Listen to me, damn it. This isn’t some idiotic toxic masculinity thing.”
Temperance finally went still. Her eyebrows pulled together, and her chest rose and fell fast beneath his. Duncan raised on his elbows to fully take her in. Just once, her chin quivered. He had her attention.
“Every time you’ve come to me over the years—those were the only times I got to be that close to you. To touch you. To even look at you without worrying about whether anyone would notice. It never lasted long enough.”
Tentatively, she cupped her hands around his face. She coasted the pads of her thumbs across his cheekbones. His bottom lip. His chin.
Every nerve in his body felt stripped raw. “I never knew when would be the last time, but I never doubted that someday—it would be.”
On a shaky breath, she softly said, “You are such a pain in my ass, Duncan Brady. Stop talking and kiss me.”
“No. We’re doing this my way tonight.” He wanted her like he wanted to breathe. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Duncan angled his hips back and up. He nudged inside her inch by searing inch, savoring each new depth he reached.
Lashes lowered, Temperance clamped her lips between her teeth and panted hard through her nose.
“Look at me,” he grated out. Duncan withdrew completely, raising high over her. “The only way this is happening is if you watch me.”
Her lashes lifted, and he sank his full weight into her with a solid, rolling thrust. Her burst of breath flared hot across his collarbone. She arched her neck and squeezed her eyes shut.
“The whole time, Temperance.” He was primed to the point of pain, but again, he pulled out. The brief pause was enough to bring him back from the edge. The throaty noise of frustration she made almost sent him right back over it.
He plunged inside her again. “Open.” Another greedy thrust, all the way to the hilt. “Your.” He rocked into her so hard her cheeks trembled. “Eyes.”
When she finally looked at him again, her pupils were blown so wide her eyes looked black in the low light.
“You aren’t playing fair,” she rasped.
“I’m not playing at all.” The bed slammed into the wall so hard the lamp flickered.
Her body flexed and bowed in counterpoint to his. “Please, please don’t stop—”
“No more talking.” He cut her off with a forceful churn of his hips. Again, and again. “Say my name or say stop. No other sound. No other words. Do you understand?”
Temperance clamped her teeth tight to her bottom lip, draining it of color. She nodded.
“Say it,” he demanded.
“Duncan.”It was a plea, a curse. A prayer.
“Half my life, I’ve been trying to be okay without you.” His lungs hitched on the words. “I don’t want to be okay without you.”
Temperance shoved her fingers into his hair. Her gaze locked to his.
“You were not just a phase.” He hooked one hand behind her knee and gripped the headboard with the other. The sweat of their bellies was hot and slick between them.
“I am not better off without you.” His voice broke.
Temperance was moaning now, fragmented little sounds of desperation. Her thighs began to slip and shudder around his hips. She was the sun and he was a wingless Icarus, barreling recklessly into her heat. He released her leg and the headboard, holding her fast to his chest. He doubled down on his rhythm, pulse thundering in his neck and roaring in his ears.
“I will never”—he gulped air like a drowning man—“be over you.”
She locked ankles behind his waist, opening more fully to his accelerated thrusts. “Duncan.”
“You are not optional.” Each word was punctuated by a labored breath. “You are necessary.”
Temperance fisted her hand in the front of his hair. Her mouth fell open in a silent scream. A pink flush painted skin stippled with goosebumps. She jerked beneath him when she began to come, and every pulse of her molten heat stripped seconds away from his stamina.
Duncan’s nervous system rocketed toward full overload. Again and again, she chanted his name, and a desperate refrain echoed in his mind with each of his powerful strokes. I love you, I love you, I love you.
“You’re mine, Temperance. But it’s not about possession.” He was gasping now, struggling to speak. “It’s about belonging.”
Every fuse blew.
It felt tidal. Soaking and unrelenting and inevitable. Tears burned in his eyes and his vision blurred at the edges. He set his teeth against her shoulder, gently bearing down against the curve of bone beneath. Pleasure arced like electrical currents down his thighs, into his spine, his belly. His bloodstream. Everything inside him loosened. A frantic unraveling into the body of the woman beneath him.
DUNCANrolled sideways onto his back. He brought her with him, and she curled against his side. For a while, they dozed in candlelight.
“No chance your parents are going to show up here, right?”
“God, no. I’m sure they’re back in their swanky hotel room, complaining about the linens and enumerating the myriad ways I’ve disappointed them.”
Duncan grunted, and Temperance laughed.
“Wait, would you want them to?” She propped herself up on his chest with her chin on her fist.
“I mean—it certainly would drive home a point if they walked in on us naked.”
Again, they laughed.
He twisted a lock of her hair around his finger. “Why didn’t you ever want me to talk when we had sex?”
“It’s petty.”
“Tell me.”
Temperance ran her fingernails gently down the center of his chest, then back up again. “Do you remember the first time we were together after we broke up?”
“I told you I still loved you.”
“And you cried.”
“I did.”
“Then I cried,” she said.
Duncan pressed his mouth and nose to her hair and breathed in, long and slow. “You did.”
“Then the next time we were together, you said—”
“Ah, fucking hell.” He put a hand over his eyes and groaned. “I said, ‘At least neither of us cried this time.’”
Temperance sat up abruptly, looking down at his face. “I know the humor, the jokes—they’re a defense mechanism. I just didn’t—couldn’t—”
“I should never have cheapened it like that.” He rolled over to face her fully. “I’m sorry.”
She cupped her hand around his cheek and leaned in to press a long, tender kiss to his mouth.
“Also,” he murmured against her lips, “from now on, I need you to understand that I’ll never shut up when we’re naked together.”
Temperance rolled her eyes and groaned. It escalated to a fizzy giggle when he rose over her and gently pushed her back to the mattress. She squirmed and nipped him on the shoulder, delving her fingers into his hair.
“Sexual filibustering.” He pressed his mouth behind her ear.
They were both laughing when they began again.