Sugar Daddy(105)

He chuckled and left me amid the rows of auction items. I saw Heidi and Jack examining some items several tables away, until more people entered the room and blocked my view. I studied the tables carefully. I couldn't figure out what in the world Gage would want. A fancy limited-edition European motorcycle...no way was I going to let him risk losing a limb. A Nascar experience in which you got to drive a six-hundred-horsepower stock car on a super speedway. Ditto. Private chartered yacht trips. Jewels with names. A private lunch with a beautiful soap opera actress.. .As if, I thought sardonically.

After a few minutes of dedicated searching, with lively melodic arias in the background. I found something. A high-end massage chair with an intricate control panel promising at least fifteen different kinds of massage. I decided Gage could give it to Churchill for a Christmas present.

Picking up a pen, I began to write Gage's name on the bidding sheet, but the ink wouldn't come out. The pen was a dud. I shook it and tried again with no luck.

"Here," said a man beside me. setting a new pen on the table. He used the flat of his hand to roll it closer. "Try this one."

That hand.

I stared at it dumbly, while the fine hairs on the back of my neck lifted.

A big hand, the nails sun-bleached, the long fingers scattered with tiny star-shaped scars. I knew whose hand it was, I knew it from a place that went deeper than memory. But I couldn't make myself believe it. Not here. Not now.

I looked up into a pair of blue eyes that had haunted me for years. Eyes I would remember to the last day of my life.

"Hardy," I whispered.



CHAPTER 22



I was paralyzed as I tried to take him in, this stranger I had loved so dearly. Hardy Gates had grown into all the promise of his younger years. He was a big, bold-looking man. Those eyes, blue upon blue, and the glossy brown hair, and the beginnings of a smile that sent a ripple of wonder through my soul...All I could do was stare at him, submerged in fearsome pleasure.

Hardy was still as he looked back at me. but I sensed the vibration of hard-running emotion beneath his exterior.

He took my hand gently, as if I were a small child. "Let's find a place to talk."

I clung to him. not caring that Jack might see us leave, not really aware of anything

except the clasp of those callused fingers. Hardy drew me away by the hand, away from the tables, to the waiting darkness of the outside grounds. We skirted the crowd, the noise, the lights, cutting around to the side of the house. It seemed the light tried to follow, stretching

weakening tendrils after us. but we headed into the shadows of an empty portico.

We stopped in the lee of a column as thick as an oak trunk. I was winded and trembling. I don't know who moved first, it seemed we reached for each other at the same time. I was seized full-length against him, mouth to mouth, bruising each other's lips with kisses too hard for pleasure. My heart thundered as if I were dying.

Moments of silent ravaging, and then Hardy tore his mouth away, whispering it was all right, he wasn't going to let go. I began to relax in his arms, feeling the heat of his mouth as he followed the tumble of wetness on my cheeks. He kissed me again, slow and easy, the way he had taught me so long ago, and I felt safe and young and suffused with a desire so straightforward it seemed almost wholesome. His kisses tapped into deep mines of memory, and the years that had separated us fell away as if they were nothing.

After a while Hardy cuddled me in the loose sides of his tux jacket, his chest hard beneath the intricately tucked shirt.

"I had forgotten how this feels." I said in an ache of a whisper.

"I never forgot." Hardy touched the shape of my waist and hips through the folds of the white silk gown. "Liberty. I shouldn't have come to you like this. I told myself to wait." A catch of laughter. "I don't even remember crossing the room. You were always beautiful to me, Liberty.. .but now.. .1 can't even believe you're real."

"How did you get to be here? Did you know you'd see me? Did you—"

"There's too much to tell you." He rested his cheek on my hair. "I thought you might be here, but I wasn't sure...."

He spoke in the voice I had craved for so long, deeper now than in his youth. He was here at the invitation of a friend, he said, also in the oil business. He told me about starting work on the drilling rig—difficult and dangerous—and the contacts he'd made, the opportunities he'd watched for. Eventually he'd quit the rig and started a small company with two other men, one a geologist, the other an engineer, with the goal of finding new pay zones in mature oil fields. At least half the oil and gas in every field in the world was overlooked, Hardy said, and there was a fortune for those willing to go after bypassed pay. They had raised about a million in financing, and on their first try in a spent Texas field, they'd found a new zone worth an estimated two hundred and fifty thousand barrels of recoverable crude.