The Men of Medicine Ridge - Diana Palmer [24]
Chapter 5
Mack saw the glitter of tears in her eyes and he grimaced. “I’m sorry,” he said tersely. “I should never have told you.”
She pushed back a wisp of hair and dug in her purse for a tissue so she could wipe her eyes. “You should have told me years ago,” she corrected. “What an idiot I was!”
“You were naïve,” he said gently. “You saw what you wanted to see.”
His face was grim, and she realized belatedly that he was angry. She wondered what else Carl had said to his brother, but she was leery of asking.
He glanced at her and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “You were seventeen and bent on putting him on a pedestal for life. It would have been a waste.”
That note in his voice was almost defensive. She turned in the seat and looked at him openly. She was seeing things she didn’t want to see. “What you did…that night,” she faltered. “It was deliberate.”
“It was,” he confessed quietly. “I wanted to give you something to think about, at least something to compare with what you’d already experienced.” His jaw tensed. “I didn’t realize how innocent you were until it was too late.”
“Too late?”
He slowed for a turn and he looked so formidable that she didn’t say another word. A tense silence lay between them for several long seconds.
“Maybe it really was like imprinting,” he said heavily. “I should never have touched you. You were far too young for what happened.”
She felt her face coloring. The hungry passion they’d shared today and the night at his house was almost as explosive as what they’d shared all those years ago. Even in memory, her body burned as she relived her first experience of Mack.
“Do you think I blame you?” she asked finally, but she didn’t look at him.
“I blame myself. You’ve lived like a recluse ever since.”
She leaned her face against the glass of the window and smiled. “You were a pretty hard act to follow,” she said huskily.
His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “So were you.” He sounded as if the words were dragged out of him, and she turned her head to encounter a stare that stopped her heart.
It was as if she could see right into his mind, and she ached at the images that flashed at her, memories they shared.
“I didn’t really expect that you’d be inexperienced just because I warned your boyfriend off,” he added after a minute. “I got the shock of my life when I realized that you’d never experienced even the mildest form of intimacy.”
“Men always say they know, but how do they?” she asked irritably.
He forced his gaze to the road. “Because of the way you reacted,” he said tersely. “A sophisticated woman gives as much as she gets, Nat,” he told her bluntly. “You were wide-eyed and fascinated by everything I did, and I got in over my head long before I expected to. I dreamed about that night for years.”
“If we’re making confessions, so did I,” she admitted without looking at him.
He grimaced. “I should have gone home before I gave in to temptation.”
Her pale eyes touched his face like loving hands. She’d never known anyone like him. She didn’t think there was anyone else like him. He’d colored her dreams, become her world, in the years since that one incredible night.
She didn’t answer him. He glanced at her and laughed hollowly. “Which doesn’t change the past or bring us any closer to a solution,” he mused. “You’re not liberated, and I’m a confirmed bachelor.”
She toyed with her seat belt. “Are you really? I used to think that your father made you wary of marriage. He and your mother were totally unsuited, from what everybody says.”
“Everybody being my sister, Vivian,” he guessed. “She doesn’t remember our mother.”
“Neither do you, really, do you?” she wondered aloud.
“She died and left him with four kids,” he told her. “He wasn’t up to raising even one. I’ve always thought that the pressure of it started him drinking, and then he couldn