If Wishes Were Horses Read online

  She grinned, and he tried to focus on the sparkle in her eyes versus the gauntness of her cheeks. “You bet. Is Justin still out there?”

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  “I don’t think he’s been further than a hundred feet from you since they brought you here,” Eric said dryly. He grinned at the sudden pink tint of her cheeks. “You let me know if you want a restraining order filed, hear?”

  * * * * *

  It was several more days before Justin chose to expand that distance. Her parentswere due in today, for against his wishes she had not permitted him to call them untilnow, when it was obvious she was going to pull through.

  Justin pulled up a chair beside her. Sarah expected him to take her hand as he had so often, but he didn’t. “I need to say something to you,” he said.

  For the first time in the short time they'd known each other, Justin Herne looked

  unsure of himself.

  “A lot of things happened in those very few moments,” he said at last. “They say the Lord and Lady can instill full enlightenment upon a mind in the space of a breath, but that the human mind is a sieve. I couldn't hold onto all of it, but I did get some of it.

  You're an incredible person, Sarah.”

  He should have reached for her hand then, but he didn't. She wondered why, for he was not acting emotionally distant. Quite the contrary. His eyes were full of need for her.

  “An amazing, intelligent woman with a generous heart. I knew some of that, but on that plane I felt every aspect of who you are, who you've been, who you'll be. I realized how much I’ve taken from you when I should have been asking. You deserved to be courted. I wanted you, instantly and more desperately than I've ever wanted anything,

  except to get my daughter back. So I rolled over you, no different than that incubus,

  overwhelming you.”

  “Justin—”

  He shook his head. “It’s important I tell you this, Sarah. Hear me out. I did lie toyou. Sin of omission is bullshit. The excuse that you wouldn’t believe what I knew, also bullshit. I didn’t tell you because I couldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t talk about it. Or Lorraine.” He rubbed a hand over his face.

  Sarah realized for the first time how exhausted he was. Why hadn’t she noticed how pale he had become these last several weeks, how that gaunt hardness of his face had gotten more pronounced? She reached out, covered his hand, offered him comfortfor a change.

  “Justin, you don’t need to say all this. You need to go home. Rest, eat a decent meal instead of some of this liquefied crap off my tray, and worry about yourself for a littlewhile. You’ve seen me through the worst of it. I’m going to be okay.”

  He turned his hand, tightened his grip on hers until she winced and he let go,easing off immediately. “It was pride, Sarah. He took my choices away. He gave me my

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  angel, but deep underneath all of that, he tricked me, forced my body, and that deeply offended me. Pissed me off. Disturbed the hell out of me. Whatever you want to call it.”

  A woman would have called it rape, a violation. It was even harder for a man to say it, particularly a man like Justin Herne. She had forgiven him for not revealing what had happened, but her forgiveness had come because he had been there in the desperate moments when it counted. Now Sarah let go any lingering distrust, because she truly understood his silence. She had seen his actions in relation to herself, never as a man who had been victimized. Seeing it in that light, his silence made perfect sense. She was hearing truth, at last.

  “If I had told you sooner, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Was there any way to stop him, other than how you did it?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Was there any other way? You couldn’t predict where he would go except that one instance, because you knew his pattern of going to the woman whose form he took.”

  “If I had had time to research—”

  “Then he could have harmed someone else.”

  “Linda—”

  “Would be in this bed instead of me. You think that I would accept that? I wear a

  badge, Justin. It’s my job to protect.”

  “I know. I knew it that night. That’s why…damn it.” He started up out of the chair, walked over to the window and stood there, his shoulders rigid. “I could have told the dispatch rookie that someone was breaking into your home, anything, and the cavalry would have come and scared him away. But I didn’t, because I knew you’d want to get him. Then I felt you die in my arms, and I knew I’d never forgive myself if I lost you.”

  “But you didn’t lose me. You hung onto my soul, Justin, you wouldn’t let it fly away. I am alive because of you. Please come back over here. Please.” Her eyes were wet, and he came. She took his hand as he sat on the edge of her bed, and she held onto it with the same fervency with which he had poured his life into hers that night,

  keeping her breathing. “It’s my job to protect. Just like it is yours.” She laid her free hand over his heart and felt it beat beneath her touch. “You wear your badge here, but I can see it. I would have made the same choice, if it had been me.”

  “I didn’t give you a choice when we met, Sarah. I took advantage of your every weakness to claim you as mine, didn’t give you a chance to think it through. I still want you,” his voice dropped and he flicked a glance at her, filled with that hunger. “But I’m going to step back and give you the time to think it through, time to choose.”

  “What?” Her brow furrowed. “You’re leaving me?”

  “No.” His hand contracted on hers, that brief, hard grip. “I’m not going anywhere, Sarah. You want me as your lover, I’m all yours. You want a friend, you’ve got one. You need me just to be a shopkeeper in your jurisdiction,” a muscle ticked under his eye, “so

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  be it. I took away your rights, Sarah, so I’ve got no claim on you, until you want to make one on me. I want you, I'm here, and I'm not going anywhere, but I'm going to give you the time and space to make up your own mind.”

  He bent, pressed a kiss to her hand, then he brushed his mouth against her cheek, catching the corner of her ready, confused lips.

  “Now, your parents are here. That’s the other thing I came to tell you. I asked them to give me a couple minutes because I knew you’d want to make yourself presentable, but you’re beautiful. You eat, grow strong again.” He stood, looked down at her. “Lilesville needs you, and so do I.”

  * * * * *

  Well, he certainly had a damn fine way of showing it. A week passed, then another. He did not abdicate a single responsibility. He had left her in capable hands, well on the road to recovery. She came home to find he had arranged for someone to mow her yard, prune and weed her previously neglected flower beds, even air out her house that morning before she arrived. The guys at the station had taken her cat, let him live at the station and returned him to her house the day before she was released so he was there to greet her. There were vases of fresh wildflowers in every room, but no note.

  She wasn’t due at work for another couple of weeks and the inactivity only enhanced her frustration. Whether she read a novel, chose something on TV, or lay

  down for one of a multitude of naps, inevitably he was there in her mind.

  Those serious eyes, those arousing hands. His voice. As her strength returned, so did her libido, and she touched herself in the desolate hours of the night and longed for her clever but mechanical fingers to be his. She almost called him a hundred times. When she put down the receiver for time one hundred and one, she figured it out.

  Since Chicago, she’d been afraid to open her heart, give herself to a man. Justin had to force her to consider the possibility again because she’d been as terrified as the victim of a convenience store crime venturing out for a pack of cigarettes again. He’d given her a taste of what was possible.
/>   More pain, certainly. Failure, very possibly. Or, if all the pieces fell in the right place, and they were both willing to devote themselves to making it work, a lifetime commitment. The love she’d been looking for in her first marriage. But if he was going to commit to it, he wanted her to do it too, out in the open. A straight-forward declaration, no hiding behind trumped up slights or imagined betrayals.

  He thought he was so clever, presenting it like some noble sacrifice on his part, looking at her with those heated eyes, mouth curving in that way that made her remember just what those lips could do to her. While she was lying in her sick bed no less, where even imagining sex of such explosive proportions could kill her.

  Well, she wasn’t on her deathbed now, and she missed him, and he’d pissed her off again. He was going to answer for it. She decided to go to Fred’s Pharmacy and get a

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  double chocolate milkshake, complete with mini chocolate peanut butter cups. Then

  she’d call Linda.

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  Chapter 17

  Justin had avoided driving by Sarah’s house as much as possible, but today there was no help for it. Linda and the coven were meeting him at a meadow off of Route 17. They were scoping it out as a perfect area for the first multi-county pagan festival theywere planning to host and wanted his thoughts on it.

  Her car wasn’t there.

  She was putting effort into avoiding him. Not one time in the past several weeks since she had gotten out of the hospital had he seen her, not even at a distance. Fine, then. If she didn’t have the guts to reach out and take love when it was offered to her,he’d just…be miserable, go drag a commitment out of her, force her to accept him as heknew her heart and soul already did.

  No, that’s not the way it worked. If she’d made her choice, so be it. But he would damn well call her or maybe go see her if he didn’t hear from her by the end of theweek, so she would have to tell him to his face. He wouldn’t press her, but he…oh hell, yes he would. He was in aching, screaming misery, his heart and his cock brothers-in-arms, tormenting him for the stupidity of his resolve. Wasn’t all fair in love and war? Who was he to change the rules and give her a choice? He deserved this misery. Fools deserved what they got.

  He checked his map and made the turn off the highway onto the rural route,hugging the edge of the road to get past the sawhorse barrier left by a road crew that Linda had warned him about. He absently noted it was very isolated and lovely, as she had promised. The road was little more than a dirt track after the first mile. He didn’t see a farm or home, which suggested protected wetlands. If they could find a dry clearing for parking, this would be a good place.

  He started at the sound of a siren and glanced up in his mirror.

  “What the —”

  There was a state trooper behind him. Great. The officer must have seen him going around the barrier and was investigating. He pulled over and shifted to get his wallet out of his back pocket.

  “Sir, keep your hands on the wheel.”

  The microphone was startling in the pastoral quiet. He immediately complied, hisbrow furrowed. The command took him by surprise, but he knew better than to argue with a cop before they got acquainted. An image of Sarah cuffed and writhing beneath him flashed through his brain, and he almost groaned at the longing that gripped him in a tight, painful vise.

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  The trooper’s voice was a woman’s, though distorted by the microphone. Shepulled past him, turning the car in front of him at an angle.

  The door opened and her legs came out, clad in the fawn-colored trousers tuckedinto polished black boots. She rose and her back was to him as she adjusted her gun belt and her hat. She bent back in to retrieve something.

  While his thoughts and heart were firmly locked on Sarah, Justin Herne was a very sexual man, and one who noticed women. This female trooper was wearing the tightest pair of trooper jodhpurs he’d ever seen, stretched so taut over her skin it clearly definedthe crack of that terrific ass, and the fact there was no way she was wearing underwear.

  “What kind of officer—” and then she turned.

  He blinked. She wore the short-sleeved thin summer weight uniform shirt that

  went with the pale breeches, and she was all but spilling out of it. Her breasts were pushed together and displayed up high in a black lace shelf bra. He knew this, because the top two buttons of the undersized shirt were open so he could see the quivering top of her breasts, barely tucked into the cups. As she headed toward him, the effect was enhanced by the sway of her hips, exacerbated by the weight of the gun on her hip. Her hand rested lightly on it. It had taken him a full thirty seconds to reach her face. Moist pink lips and fiery blue eyes, her pale white-gold hair pulled up under the hat.

  “Holy Mother—”

  She stopped at the lowered window of the convertible BMW. “I think I told you to keep your hands on the wheel, Mr. Herne,” she purred, bending over, her hand braced on the door. In that posture, with her hand still on her belt, he was staring into two perfectly displayed breasts within licking distance, if he had any saliva to use. Stupidly, he obeyed, returning his hands to the wheel. “Sarah, what—”

  In a quick move he would have seen coming if his mind hadn’t been so boggled with lust and shock, she pulled the handcuffs from the back of her belt and locked his right wrist to the base of the steering wheel.

  However, the position required her to lean further over him. He recovered his wits enough to grab her neck with his free hand, knocking her hat off so her blonde ponytail spilled over her shoulder. He caught her mouth with his and plundered, not caring that she might be arresting him, just needing desperately to drink from that mouth he hadn’t had in weeks and needed right now. Even if he died in the next moment, which was possible, since she was armed.

  He wanted to fill his hands with those ripe breasts as well but was afraid to let go, afraid she’d pull back and he’d be forced to rip his steering wheel out of its column toget her.

  She pulled back gasping, her lips swollen. She ducked out from under his hand andstepped back from the car. Justin shoved open the door and lunged after her. The cuffbrought him up short, making him stand in the open doorway as she stayed a maddening foot out of reach.

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  She was getting her breath back, though he wished she wouldn’t, for her erraticbreathing did wonderful things with that shirt. He could tell for certain now she wasn’twearing underwear, for the trousers cut into her pussy, defining the labia for his gaze. Silently he begged to see that area darken with moisture, proving his effect on her.

  Good Lord, Herne, get a grip. You’re acting like a randy teenager.

  “In this situation,” she said, somehow managing to come across officious and stern, even with a hitch in her voice, “an officer typically tells you your rights. I’m going to tell you what rights you don’t have anymore.”

  So here it was. An elaborate way to dump him and cruel, but he knew he had it coming. He wished she’d just take out the gun and shoot him, because that would be less painful.

  “You see these?” She lifted her left hand, showing him a set of glossy nails, filed to smooth curves and painted a delicate pink that looked so attractive on her he wanted to suck each fingertip. “This is one of the many things I have done during my recuperation. A weekly manicure. One of the countless, inane, trivial things you do to keep yourself from going completely insane when you’re out of death’s door, but not quite up to your daily job. But I discovered something nice about these nails, Justin. Well-manicured nails feel very stimulating when you caress yourself.”

  Her fingers slid into the open collar of the shirt and stroked over the top of one rounded curve. He swallowed, but she wasn’t done. Her fingertip straightened, slid down the deep cleft between them, then down over her stomach to the top of her thigh, so close to
that well outlined pubic area he wished he had the magic to will her to touch herself.

  “I did a lot of that, Justin. I’d lie there in my bed, alone, and I’d caress myself. I imagined my fingers were your tongue, your lips, the slide of your cock in my cunt. I’d be wet just thinking about it, even before I ran these glossy nails over my clit, gave it a light bite with them, the way I’d imagine your teeth would do it.”

  “I can do it now, if you’ll just come here,” he said impatiently.

  “You left me there,” she said, slicing through his words. “Left me with nurses and doctors, and my own thoughts.”

  “I thought you—”

  “No.” She held up that hand. “Number one. You don’t have the right to speak until I’m through, so shut up, or I swear, I’ll pistol whip your testicles.”

  He winced. “Jesus, Sarah.”

  “Number two.” Her fingers closed into a ball with two digits lifted. “You don’t ever

  have the right to pull a stunt like you did in the hospital.” Her eyes met his, and what he saw there stilled him, the deep flame of volcanic lava, simmering just on the edge of eruption. “Do you know that after I was shot, I was in the hospital about the same amount of time?”

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  Herne shook his head, because she raised a brow expectantly for an answer. “No, I

  didn’t know that.”

  “Of course you didn’t. It was pretty much like it was this time. You wander in this

  nebulous state of life and death, not sure which way you should go. It’s clear which is