Devoured Page 5

  Of course, he’d known that since she’d slipped her mouth around his cock and gazed up at him with eyes that told him how deeply she wanted to give him pleasure. Then there had been the whole watermelon business—which was plain eerie—and the fact that she made the best PB ‘n’ J in the entire universe. Not to mention her kindness, her humor, her easy acceptance of his quirks and her intelligent contributions to their conversation.

  Basically, he had already known she was fabulous, but what he’d seen in the past hour had made him seriously reconsider his doubts about getting mixed up with this “hermit.”

  He wanted to do more than get mixed up with her, he wanted to come home to her, to look at those big blue eyes every day. He wanted to have kids with her, for God’s sake. The urge was foreign, but seeing her with the two Proctor children made him think what a great mother she would be. Any kid would be lucky to have her, and he would count himself the luckiest man in the world to call her his wife.

  Your wife! Are you crazy?

  Was he crazy? It was a question that he’d asked himself before and probably would again. This time, however, he was thinking more clearly than he had in a long time. Bella was something special, what they could have together was something special, and he’d be a fool to let this chance pass him by.

  “Okay, guys, finish up, you need to be home before your dad gets back from work,” Bella said. “The last thing we need is to start this horrible business all over again. We have to be smarter this time if we’re going to win.”

  “We’re so sorry, Annabella,” Gretel said, her blue eyes welling with tears for the fifth time. The kid was a wreck, and from what he’d observed it had very little to do with her being terrified that she was going to be boiled in a vat of peanut brittle.

  It had a lot to do, however, with the father who had left the bruises on her arms.

  “We thought you wouldn’t want to see us. We thought you would hate us,” Hansel said, sounding older than any twelve-year-old should.

  “I don’t hate you, I love you both. You know I do.” Bella hugged Gretel—who looked awfully small for an eight-year-old.

  “Dad made us lie. He said he’d hurt you if we didn’t,” Hansel said, his eyes deepening to a dark, midnight blue that reminded him of Bella’s.

  “I figured as much.” A bright flush of red spread across her cheeks, but this time Heath could tell it had nothing to do with embarrassment.

  She blushed when she was angry or embarrassed. He knew her that well already. Of course, she was easy to get to know, so sweet and open and honest. And tough, she was tough, too.

  “He’s not going to hurt you, is he, Annabella?” Gretel asked, snuggling closer to Bella.

  “Hell no. I’d kill the bastard first.” Heath spoke without thinking, realizing it wasn’t the smartest thing to say the second the words were out of his mouth. But hell, that happened to him all the time. He’d given up on controlling his outbursts a long time ago. It was easier to make apologies or jokes after the fact.

  “Nobody is going to kill anybody,” Bella said, “And don’t curse in front of the kids, please.”

  “You could kill him if you wanted,” Hansel said to Heath, his expression serious.

  “Hansel!” Bella gave him a stern look. “You’re better than that. We’ll find a way to work this out. As soon as the new representative from Kinder Services arrives, we’ll talk to her, and get you in a halfway house where you’ll be safe until I can apply for custody.”

  “You don’t have a Kinder Services office out here?” Heath asked, surprised. Deepweeds was in the middle of nowhere, but the late queen had been an advocate for children, and insisted on Kinder Services offices in every parish.

  “No, we do, but the last rep quit a year ago. After King Frederick took power, we had a hard time finding out when a replacement would arrive.” Bella sighed and began to rub at her eyes, obviously exhausted.

  “No one is ever going to come,” Hansel said, doom in his tone. “They’ve forgotten about us.”

  “That’s not true,” Bella said. “I’m sure the new queen will take care of this.”

  “Forget that. She’s only eighteen,” Heath said. “I think we have to take this into our own hands.”

  “Heath, please,” Bella said. “Let me handle this.”

  “Bella, I hate to say it, but it doesn’t seem like you’ve been doing a good job of handling it. You almost got sent to prison for life and these kids are still living with a creep.”

  Bella was obviously in over her head—much too gentle a person to deal with the monster that called himself the father of these two kids. But Heath wasn’t gentle and had experience dealing with evil sons of bitches.

  “Listen,” Heath continued gently. “I know you did the best that you could. I’m just saying you guys need some help. I’ll get my people on this and we should have Hansel and Gretel out of that house by the beginning of next week.”

  “Really?” Gretel looked up at him like he was her new hero.

  “Heath, don’t make promises that you can’t keep,” Bella said, though she too was looking optimistic. “They’ve been through enough.”

  “I’m going to take care of it,” Heath assured all three of them with a big smile, already thinking of the perfect people to send to Mr. Procter for a visit he would never forget.

  “Legally, with no one getting hurt. Even their father,” Bella said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Heath waved away her concern. Legal-schmegal. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

  He knew as well as anyone that the law wasn’t made for kids. It was made for assholes who liked to hurt kids and get away with it because they happened to biologically be their parents. But it took more to be a parent than the donation of an egg or some sperm, and sometimes it took more than what the law allowed to find justice.

  “Well then, we’ll keep our fingers crossed, won’t we?” Bella asked the kids, her words met with a huge grin from Gretel. Heath even thought he saw the ghost of hope in Hansel’s eyes.

  If Heath hadn’t been set on helping them before, that hint of hope would have done it. Hansel wasn’t beyond saving. He could still have a shot at being a normal kid if they got him away from the man who had already stolen most of his childhood.

  By the time Hansel and Gretel had been bundled into their coats and sent on their way home, it was nearly midnight and Bella was looking even more exhausted. Little wonder, really. She had been home less than a month, her company was in the crapper, her good name was ruined, and two kids she obviously loved were in a horrible situation and she felt powerless to help them.

  Heath smiled as she closed the door behind Hansel and Gretel’s retreating forms, thinking how happy he was going to be to help all of her troubles fade away. Pretty soon she would be back in the money and the entire world would know the truth—that she was innocent and still the queen of candy that the entire Kingdom had loved for years.

  “And then you won’t want to work with me anymore,” Heath said out loud, his smile slipping before he put it firmly back in place.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Heath

  “What?” Bella turned to him, running a hand through her long black hair, which looked even more delicious a little tangled.

  “Nothing. Just thinking out loud,” he said with a smile.

  What kind of asshole was he to even think about his own selfish crap? There was no way he wanted to profit off of Bella’s misfortune, especially since it would be so easy for him to help her get back everything she’d lost.

  “You do that a lot?” She walked toward him with a gleam in her eyes that he liked a lot. “Talk to yourself?”

  “All the time.” He smiled.

  She laughed softly before the grin faded into a serious, heartfelt expression. “Thank you, Heath. You don’t know how much this means to me.” She reached out, pressing his hand in a gesture that was surprisingly—and wonderfully— intimate.

  “Somebody should have
helped you out a long time ago. I’m just doing what any decent person would do. What your lawyer should have done a year ago, if you want my opinion.” He wrapped his arms around her waist, fighting the urge to fondle her unbelievably luscious ass.

  “I fired my lawyer. She didn’t know Carl or what he was capable of. I thought it would be better to go through Kinder Services, but even that would have been a risk.” She sighed as she dropped her head to his chest, where his heart was doing funny things again.

  “Kinder Services won’t be able to protect them, and they probably won’t care what the kids want when you apply for custody, either. And I can’t really help you with that. They’ll place them with the next of kin and getting custody will be a long, hard battle. I’m not meaning to be a downer or anything, but that’s—”

  “I don’t think that will be a problem. They only have two living relatives as far as I know, a distant cousin and an older half sister.” She lifted her face to his and gave him a hard look, as if she were searching for the answer to an unasked question.

  “How much older, because if she’s not of legal age—”

  “I’ll be thirty-one next month,” Bella said, smiling at him in that way that made him feel like he was going to lose his balance and never recover.

  “You’re kidding me.” But it made sense. It was the eyes; all three had the same deep blue eyes.

  “My mom had me when she was only fifteen. Carl was sixteen.”

  “So they didn’t live happily ever after.”

  “Hardly. I don’t think they even saw each other more than once or twice. My mom didn’t really go into detail,” Bella said with a sigh. “All I know is that he married his wife almost twenty years later and they had Hansel and Gretel. I didn’t even know about it until my mom died two years ago. She left me a journal. I guess she felt I deserved to know the truth. I’d always asked who my father was, but she wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Some people don’t deserve to have kids. I’d say she made the right decision,” Heath said, tempted to share his own personal history, something he’d never done outside of his therapist’s office.

  “I understand why she didn’t want to tell me, but I wish I’d known earlier, for Hansel and Gretel’s sake.” Bella pulled away from him and started cleaning up the dishes from the kids’ snack. “I wish I could have done something for them sooner, could have really helped them.”

  “You are helping them. You can’t worry about what could have happened, only what’s happening now. Otherwise you’ll make yourself crazy.” Heath screwed the lids back on the peanut butter and jelly. Peach jelly. He’d never heard of it before. Damned good stuff. Looked homemade too.

  Just another reason he wanted to keep Bella around.

  “Actually you’re helping them now,” Bella said with a smile.

  “I’ll be on it first thing tomorrow. Unless you have a phone I can use,” Heath said, enjoying the feeling of closeness generated by cleaning up together.

  What was it called? Domesticity? Yeah, that was it. Never thought he’d be into getting domesticated, but if Bella was part of the package, then he was ready to enlist.

  “No, we still don’t have phone service past the train station,” Bella said. “It was another thing that was on the royal to-do list that seems to have gotten lost in the transition between monarchs.”

  “Stupid monarchs.”

  “Amen.”

  “Are you religious?” Heath asked, amazed at how little he knew about the woman he was falling in love with.

  “Not particularly.”

  “So I guess you wouldn’t particularly care if I slept in your bed tonight? I mean, seeing as I’m trapped in Deepweeds until the train comes tomorrow morning.”

  He turned her around, trapping her between his body and the kitchen counter. He’d had a hard-on for Bella from the second he saw her. He couldn’t wait to get closer, deeper, to pin her against anything that would stand still and show her how crazy she made him.

  “You want to sleep in my bed?” Her breathing grew faster as her breasts came into contact with his chest and her mouth tilted up toward his.

  “More than I want to breathe. In fact, I’ll hold my breath until you say yes.”

  “Very mature.” She laughed. “I want to say yes, but I can’t. At least not right now.”

  “What if I keep holding my breath, will that change your mind?” he teased, still holding his breath.

  What had he expected? He’d already had more good fortune than one man could expect in a day. He shouldn’t push his luck, but by God, his cock throbbed just thinking about pushing inside her, watching her eyes change color as he rode her until she came hard around him.

  “No. Now stop.” She laughed again and gave him the lightest punch in the belly.

  “Okay.” Heath let the air rush out of his lungs and tried to smile. He knew she was tired and that things were moving fast between them, but he couldn’t figure out what he had done to make her change her mind.

  “Don’t give up,” she whispered, standing on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Just try again in a month or so.”

  “A month or so?” Heath asked. “This isn’t one of the ‘Real Life Rules to Catch a King’ is it? I hate that show and I’m not a king and reality television is stupid. You don’t even have phone service, so how in the hell would you be able to watch TV?”

  “Well, they did have TV in the dungeon, but it’s not anything like that. It’s a…personal issue. But I do want to be with you, if you can wait.” She shot him a look that was horny and vulnerable and amused all at the same time.

  He loved that look. He wanted to see that look every day from here on in. “I can wait. I can’t wait two months if you want. I could probably even wait a year if I had to.”

  “Let’s not go overboard, a month should be fine,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll go make up the trundle bed.”

  “I get to stay here?” Heath asked as she wiggled under his arm and fetched sheets from one of the cupboards.

  “Of course. I said you couldn’t sleep in my bed, not that you couldn’t sleep over. There aren’t any hotels in Deepweeds. I wouldn’t want you to sleep on a bench at the station.”

  “You trust me not to wake you in the night and ravish you?” He forced away the image of Bella in the moonlight, asleep until he pulled the covers away from her body and started trailing kisses up one delectable thigh.

  Thoughts like that weren’t going to help him get a handle on the raging hard-on already visible through his khaki pants. He should have worn jeans, stiffer fabric to hide his stiffy.

  Of course, he hadn’t been anticipating problems of this sort when he’d dressed to make a businesslike first impression.

  “I trust you.” Her look grew serious as she paused in pulling a trundle bed out from underneath her own comfy mattress. “Maybe more than I should?”

  “No way,” Heath said, just as serious. “You can trust me, Bella. I’d never do anything you didn’t want me to do, in bed or out of it. If you say wait, we wait.”

  Her shoulders relaxed. “Thanks. I believe you. Is that weird? Since we’ve known each other less than twenty-four hours?”

  Heath crossed the room and took her face in his hands.

  “No, but it’s probably weird that I think I’m falling in love with you.” His heart and his cock both tightened as she gazed up at him with a mixture of shock and…excitement.

  He stood corrected, that was the look he wanted to see for the rest of his life.

  “That’s the third time you’ve said that.” Her lips parted, begging him to taste them one last time before they went to their separate beds.

  “You’re right. How much thinking do I really have to do?” He pulled her closer and slid his arms down to cradle her ass in his hands, urging her closer to him, giving her a physical reminder of how much he craved her beautiful body.

  Her eyes closed as her hips tilted forward. He almost lost it then, knowing that her clit was rubbing up a
gainst his cock and that he was only a few lousy pieces of clothing away from contact with what was swiftly becoming his favorite thing in the world.

  “I love you,” he whispered, knowing even as his heart skipped a beat and his mouth dried up that he was telling the God’s honest truth.

  “You really are crazy.” She looped her arms around his neck.

  “Do I still get a good night kiss?”

  “Heck yes.” She pulled him down to her mouth, giving him another taste of her heat, her passion. The sense of urgency, of hunger he felt simmering in Bella was the most powerful he’d ever known, so powerful it might have scared a lesser man.

  But he had never considered himself “lesser” and her need made him hotter than any woman ever had. Especially when she did that little thing with her tongue that she was doing right now.

  “Are you sure this is good night?” he asked, unable to resist slipping a hand up to tease at her nipple through her sweater. She was a breast girl; he’d known it from the start. His hands, his tongue, his teeth on her nipples drove her crazy, maybe crazy enough to reconsider making him wait a month to ease his growing hunger.

  “You’re a bad man.” She smiled against his mouth, then surprised him by biting his lower lip.

  “In a good way?” He managed to get the words out, despite the fact that her teeth still claimed his lip and his cock was starting to throb.

  God, did she know what she did to him?

  “In a very good way.” She pulled away, letting out a sigh before she slipped from his grip and threw a lavender-scented pillow in the center of his chest.

  “Good night, Mr. Miller,” she teased before she blew him a kiss and slipped into the bathroom.

  “Good night, Ms. Quinn,” he mumbled, smiling like the idiot he was, despite the killer case of blue balls he was going to be nursing for the remainder of the night.

  He was in love.

  He’d always suspected it would hit him hard and fast if it ever chose to hit.

  Now, he could only bide his time, do everything in his power to make Bella the happiest camper in the Deepweeds, and hope that pretty soon she’d feel the same. If that meant keeping his cock in his pants, then so be it. He’d concentrate on other ways to show her how much pleasure he could bring her. Visions of his favorite purple vibrator teasing along her clit were dancing through his head as he pushed his trundle to the corner and slipped off his khakis and button-down.