He felt both touched and frustrated and transfixed, all at the same time, as she finished with the phrase, “Remember, fighters make survivors. May God bless you all!”
She descended the podium steps, and the incoming nearness of her scent in the air made his nostrils twitch. No matter how hard he tried to ignore it, it seemed like the place had come alive by her simple presence, people rising and heading toward her to say hello. His cock stirred, and it made his lips curl in disdain at himself. In loathing.
His fucking dick hadn’t worked when it should have. When his wife had lain in the hospital, dying, begging him to make love to her. And Cade had kissed her and caressed her—but no. He hadn’t been able to make love to her. Not once.
She’d been too weak, pale and yellow, bald and frail, and he’d been hurting too much to feel anything but pain.
For years, he’d shut himself off. Convinced he just didn’t want sex like the rest of humanity. It had taken years for him to begin responding to his dreams, dreams about faceless women doing shit with him. But it had never been like this. He had never felt this need. And never with a woman he’d just met. He’d always known he would never love again, and felt it was wrong to want somebody when he hadn’t been able to want Laura like this. But JesusLordChrist, he wanted Ivy. What she stirred inside him felt so raw and so violent, so fucking dangerous, all he knew was that he would take her until she begged him to stop.
Heart pounding as she neared, he watched her wind around the tables hugging people and his eyebrows pulled low. He didn’t like the way the men looked at Ivy. The way they hugged her, like they wanted to feel her chest against theirs. He fisted his hands so hard, his knuckles jutted out. Visions of violence teased his mind, until he saw her come closer still, toward him, and his pulse quieted.
Finally she was near enough for him to hear people wish her luck, like she was this white knight of theirs, “fighting” to get donations. Cade wanted to be the black knight who took their white knight away from them and took her somewhere where cancer did not exist, and was not a word she ever spoke again.
“Hi,” she said, reaching him, her cheeks flushed a pretty pink. Her scent did a number on his senses, and he got more protective, tenser in his stance. Ivy didn’t belong here.
She. Did not. Belong here.
He set his forehead against hers and pulled her closer to him, his voice gruffer than he’d intended. “Let me take you home.”
She drew back and gave him a startled look that clearly told him she suspected he was crazy, which was actually spot-on. “What? Cade, I can’t leave now.” Her expression softened all of a sudden, and so did her voice as she touched his arm lightly. “I understand if you want to leave, though. I’ll catch up with you. I promise I’ll stop by when I’m done.”
He hesitated, but shook his head and remained, almost fevered in his skin by that mere light, fleeting touch of her fingers.
He wanted her hands under his shirt, all over his torso. He wanted her writhing again. Moaning his name.
Throat tight with desire, he watched as she once again turned to greet some other attendants, and he edged back to give her space, tapping his thigh as he waited, hoping these people didn’t make Ivy cry. He could see her eyes were red-rimmed.
He clenched his teeth. Fucking shit, why did she expose herself to this pain? Again and again? For new people? People she didn’t know, wouldn’t even have to know were dying?
He tore his mind away from the black cloud of his thoughts and focused just on Ivy. On what he wanted to do to her. On how they would both shatter to a thousand pieces when they got to his home or her home. It didn’t matter. He was so anxious to feel her he’d do her in a bathroom.
A text popped into his screen.
You coming to poker? We’re sitting here waiting like idiots.
You’re always an idiot.
U coming or not?
He wasn’t about to tell his friends where he was, especially Luke Preston, the loud-mouthed son of a bitch who was up on everyone’s cases, all the damn time. Good thing Luke was a little tamed now that he had a new woman, a real sexpot who seemed to know just what to do with Luke Preston, but Cade still snorted at the thought that it would even last. Nothing good ever did.
He and Ivy were …
Shit, they were probably not going to last more than a week.
He felt like he’d just swallowed a bowling ball, and he scowled once more at the waiting message. No, he was not telling Preston or anyone he was at a cancer dinner. They wouldn’t believe him. Hell, they almost pitied him, and always danced around the subject of Laura. Nobody dared speak her name around him. They tried to pretend she’d never existed, which was something that irked him, for it prevented him from ever really … venting at all.
Busy.
He shut his phone off after texting that brief word, and waited for a half hour more, thinking of all the things he ached to do to this woman. He waited. Keenly aware that for once in his life, anger didn’t dominate his every thought. For once in his life, he actually gave a shit about something.
Even it was only burying himself inside of Ivy.
* * *
Ivy kept stealing glances at Cade across the room, and her heart flipped and vaulted in her chest every time she spotted him. In a black suit, and already without the tie he’d worn this morning, he scowled as he gazed around the busy room and hung back from the crowd.
Her heart grew wings for him. Because he looked so good—even if he appeared like he sorely needed something to drink. The rigid line of his jaw hinted at a frustrating day at work, and the scowl deepening the crease on his forehead said he’d rather be anywhere instead of here. But a hunk was always a hunk. And Cade defined the word, scowl or no scowl. Not in a clean, boy-next-door way, oh no. More in a dangerous, raw, and real way that was proving unbearably attractive to her.
Because she was over the fairy tales. She liked the truth, straight up and out front, and that was what you got with Cade West.
His virile face, with every one of its perfect features, was what Ivy had seen today in her mind’s eye when she woke, brushed her teeth, had breakfast, lunch, dinner, even when she spoke to all those people. But seeing those thick-lashed gray eyes in person and that dominant nose and that sensual mouth had her rapidly approaching the point where she would tackle him down on the marble floor and take him right there in the lobby. In front of everybody.