When he reached the top, he couldn’t speak. Maddie stood in the sunlight holding an ivory gown against her, her eyes closed and tears rolling down her cheeks.
With careful steps, Boone crossed to her. “Maddie?” he spoke softly.
Her eyes opened, showing him a world of such pain and confusion that he reached for her without considering anything but that she needed to be held.
Maddie was always so relentlessly cheerful that he’d come to think nothing could bring her low. To see that he was so very wrong struck him in a way that scattered his resolutions. Maddie needed someone. Right now, it would have to be him.
She nestled into him and sobbed softly. Boone thought at that instant that he would slay dragons to bring back Maddie’s smile.
“Why couldn’t I know her, Boone? Why did I miss so much?”
He had no answers, no way to change the past. So he just held her while she cried.
After a moment, her face turned up to his. In her eyes he saw such need for comfort, such loneliness and despair, that he did something he knew he would regret.
He kissed her.
He only meant it to comfort, to ease her pain, to let her know she wasn’t alone. But one touch was all it took. One brush of lips and he was lost.
Maddie slid one arm out from between them and gripped his shirt in one fist, lifting herself to her tiptoes, bringing back the hunger that never really left him.
Boone forgot about good intentions, forgot about being the wrong man. Forcing himself to go slowly, he licked softly at her full lower lip and heard her intake of breath. A quick prickling heat flashed through him, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. For one instant, an instinct as old as man warned him away, reminded him of danger.
Then Maddie parted her lips and her tongue stroked him back, her fingers pressing into his side, her breasts soft against his chest.
He had to get closer. With one hand he gripped the back of her head, sliding his fingers into the thick fall of dark hair and turning her into his kiss. His tongue slid into the sweetness of Maddie’s mouth and he wanted to stay there forever, to drink of her kind heart, her cheerful soul, to soothe her despair and her sorrow.
Maddie knew only that Boone was here sharing his strength when she couldn’t find her own, that he warmed the cold corners of her anguish and made her feel, for the first time in years, that she wasn’t alone.
His kiss was a balm and a solace, but it was so much more. In his kiss, Maddie found a dark, edgy promise of excitement, of bliss beyond the power of words. Maddie felt the ragged border of Boone’s own anguish and she poured herself into soothing him, forgetting her own pain as she touched the raw edges of Boone’s grief.
He was so strong that he hid his pain too well, but for a moment Maddie thought she knew his heart’s need. She lifted herself higher, sliding her fingers into his hair, murmuring soothing comfort mingled with sharp spikes of need.
Through Boone shot the same fierce need to possess her that had driven him the night of the dance. He dropped his hands lower and gripped her hips. Pulling her hard against him, he wanted to tear off her clothes and his own, to salve this endless ache that was so much more than physical.
Maddie thrilled to his touch, to the power of the wanting she felt from him. As his hand slid upward and cupped her breast, she arched against him, pressing into his fingers.
When they tightened, Maddie bucked against him. Her grandmother’s dress slipped from nerveless fingers, and she realized how close she’d danced to the edge of a terrifying precipice.
It was one second of sanity in a world gone mad with longing.
One second of hesitation, facing the point of no return.
Could she do this to him? To herself? For a moment, Maddie flirted with the idea of staying, of yielding to the ever-increasing sense of connection to this place, to the past—
To this man.
The second’s pause was fatal to something too new, too fragile. It gave Boone time to feel her doubts. To remember.
He couldn’t let himself need Maddie. He couldn’t let her in this close. She spoke to him on a level deeper than anyone in his life had ever gone.
Shaken to his boots, he realized that Maddie could break him, when nothing else in his life ever had.
She felt him leave her, felt him pull away just the tiniest bit. It might as well have been the Grand Canyon.
She dangled over the precipice, naked and needy. Alone again for one eternal moment when she thought she’d found home.
Why hadn’t she learned from the past? Robert had brought her low, but he had been nothing like Boone, had not wielded a fraction of Boone’s power to hurt her. Boone was a thousand times more dangerous to everything she’d been trying to recover.
Boone wanted her, yes. She even thought he needed her.