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  "Molly." Quiet, sexy, a little rough. "Open up."

  Heart slamming against her ribs, she looked down at her pajamas, thought about her washed-clean face... and realized none of it mattered. Not when she'd just given him the key to her greatest vulnerability.

  She unlocked and opened the door.

  Fox, his arms braced above the doorjamb, his white T-shirt taut against his biceps, said, "I had to steal a boat for you."

  Toes curling in her slippers even as she stood there feeling exposed, raw, she somehow managed to say, "According to a certain celebrity magazine, you're worth a cool kazillion or two--you probably bought the boat."

  "Noah wouldn't be too happy. He's become attached to the thing." A dawning smile, but his eyes were serious. "Let me in."

  Realizing she'd been blocking the doorway, Molly stepped back and Fox came in, pushing the door shut behind him and flicking the deadbolt. The sound was loud in the silence, seemed to signal an intent to stay that had her stomach in knots.

  "You look good enough to eat," Fox murmured, his hands going to her hips.

  She found her own against the firm warmth of his chest.

  Fingers brushing the side of her breast through the soft fabric of her T-shirt, he ran one hand up over the skin bared by the scoop neck to close his fingers around her throat. "I got your message."

  Feeling vulnerable in a way that had nothing to do with the fact he was bigger and stronger, she looked away. "Did you do the search?"

  "I'm sorry, baby." Rubbing his thumb over her jaw, he tugged back her head with the hand not around her throat and bent to take her lips. "Open, Molly." When she obeyed, he kissed her with an unhidden male hunger and a harsh tenderness that stole another piece of her.

  Lost, she rose on tiptoe and linked her hands behind his neck, her taut, aching breasts crushed against his chest. He groaned and squeezed her neck a fraction, just enough to get her notice.

  "Fox?"

  "I want you in my lap." Nipping at her lower lip, the ring rubbing over the kiss-swollen flesh, he drew her not into the bedroom but to the sofa.

  Sprawling there, he crooked a finger. Molly really, really wanted to find that arrogant, but the sight of him aroused and ready for her made her breath catch, her body melt. Kicking off the slippers, she straddled him, and because he was her own personal piece of insanity, leaned in to tug on the ring that had led her into trouble in the first place.

  His lips curved, and the painful happiness inside her grew bigger, threatening to crush her ribs outward.

  "Kiss me, Molly."

  It was one demand he'd never have to make twice. Burying her hands in the thick silk of his hair, she indulged herself in the taste of Fox, having missed him until it hurt.

  Pleasure thick in his veins, Fox ended the kiss on a soft suck of sound and looked into brown eyes that held a pained vulnerability. He felt something tear inside him, the need to take care of her a violent craving. "Come here." Kissing her with all the tenderness he had in him, he brushed his hands up and under her T-shirt to caress the lush cream of her skin.

  Touch by touch, kiss by kiss, he gentled her, seduced her, the raw sexual possessiveness he always felt when it came to Molly tempered by a vicious protectiveness. By the time he pulled off her T-shirt, she was liquid honey around him.

  Easing her down onto the sofa on her back, he bared her lower half then rose to strip, conscious of the way she watched him.

  "You're so beautiful." It was a husky feminine whisper as he came down on top of her.

  Fox drew up her thigh and, pausing only to check she was ready for him, pushed into the welcoming heat of her body. He needed to be inside her, needed to reclaim her. Molly gasped, her neatly cut nails digging into his arms and her thighs wrapping around him.

  God, she felt good, felt like his. Pulling her hands off his arms to place them on either side of her head, he wove his fingers with her own, their eyes locked as he rode her slow and deep; Molly moved with him, sensual and natural and fucking perfect.

  Fox had done plenty of debauched things in the twenty-seven years he'd been on this earth, had treated sex as a bodily need, found pleasure before... but this... "Look at me, baby," he demanded when her lashes fluttered down, her body an erotic song below his own.

  Deep brown eyes met his own. "Fox."

  His name was the last word either one of them spoke as they rocked together to a pleasure that was a passionate kiss that engulfed both their bodies. And through it all, they held the eye contact, their hands clasped.

  It was the most starkly intimate moment of Fox's life.

  "How was dinner?" Molly asked a long time later, cradled against Fox's chest.

  He'd sat back up after his breathing evened out and taken her with him, her legs on either side of his and her head on his shoulder. It was an unquestionably sexual position with both of them nude, but this felt affectionate... as the sex had felt like so much more. Now, from the way Fox was running his hand slowly over her back, it was clear he was pleasing himself as much as he was pleasing her. That did things to her she didn't want to accept, didn't want to think about.

  "Bullshitted with the guys," he said in answer, the vibration of his voice against her another small but potent intimacy. "Played some music. It was good."

  Molly went to speak, closed her mouth, afraid she'd break this moment. The way Fox had touched her, possessed her; the way he'd held her gaze to the very end; the way he'd so gently kissed her cheeks, her nose, her closed eyelids after the pleasure caught them both in its relentless current; it was more than she'd ever expected. Warm and strong and protective around her, he was everything, everything she'd never dared dream of. Why did he have to be from a world she could never survive?

  Throat thick, she pressed a kiss to his collarbone, staying tucked up against him. "Thank you for stealing Noah's boat." For coming to her.

  "You always let strange men in at night?"

  Molly's lips kicked up at the corners, the terrifying emotion that threatened to rip her apart woven through with a playfulness Fox alone seemed to awaken. "Only rock stars I'm banging."

  His laughter rumbled against her, his growling bite at her throat making her smile deepen. She was so happy. "It's my turn to help close up the library tomorrow," she said, trying not to worry about the inevitable flip side to this painful happiness, "so I have a later start. We can have a nice breakfast." She didn't want him to go, wanted to hold on for every minute, every second that he was hers.

  Fox brushed aside her hair to bare her cheek. "About your father." He stroked his other hand over the bare curve of her hip. "I'm sorry you went through that."

  Molly had been hoping he wouldn't want to discuss the topic, though she'd known the hope was a foolish one. "It happened a long time ago." She'd quietly begun to use her mother's last name at eighteen, instead of her father's, closing the chapter on that part of her history.

  "You turned me down for dinner today because of it. It matters." Wrapping his arms around her until she felt warm and safe and shielded from the cruelty of the world, he said, "You matter."

  Her barriers shattered. "It was all so sordid." Swallowing the jagged rock in her throat, she fisted her hands against his chest and lifted her face to his. "All my life, I grew up with people idolizing my father--youngest politician ever to hold such a critical post, part of the ruling party, landslide victor of a major seat he continuously held through multiple elections, active in charities, smart, handsome, witty."

  Molly, too, had adored him--until she'd grown old enough to see through the illusion and her mother's desperate fantasies, begun to understand that Patrick Buchanan cared only about himself. "Then he was busted with that girl my age, from my own school, in the back seat of his car, and I saw the other side of fame."

  Patrick Buchanan had been charged with statutory rape, though the girl, the child, had insisted it was consensual. "They released him on bail because he was a 'pillar of the community,' but the press hounded him." She'd oft
en wondered if her parents would both still be alive if the judge had made a different decision. "They camped out in front of the house night and day."

  Fox's arms tightened. "Ah, hell, baby."

  "At least he deserved it, but they also hounded my mother. Asking her how she felt. How did they think she felt?" Her voice rose as old anger, old pain, had her thumping her bone-white fists against his chest. "I was in the car one day when a reporter shoved a microphone through the window as we left the drive and asked her if my father made deviant sexual requests in the bedroom." Molly had almost thrown up.

  Fox muttered some brutal words, cradling the side of her face with one big hand, his other arm steel around her.

  "I was protected from any direct questions by the fact I was a minor," she continued, the words shoving to get out after having been suffocated for nine long years, "but everyone at school knew." Name suppression had been pointless when the photos of her father with the girl had been plastered across the Internet, the original images taken by a jealous boy who'd followed his fifteen-year-old girlfriend to the assignation.

  "That's when I learned how cruel people can be." The boy who'd originally posted the photos had ended up in serious trouble, too, for distributing sexual images of a minor, but the damage was done. "I didn't defend myself at first--I knew it was that poor girl who continued to stick by my father, saying they were 'in love,' who was the true victim." Instead, Molly had taken blow after blow in penance, her soul bruised black and blue.

  "Then"--she took a shuddering breath and buried her face against his shoulder, the memory vicious--"someone set up a page about me on a website we all used, calling me a slut and a whore and saying I'd probably had something going on with my father." Nauseated, she'd curled over in the computer lab, dry heaving as her classmates stared... or sniggered. "I'd never even been kissed, but boys I didn't know started posting that I'd done sexual things with them, that I was a 'freak.' I knew I had to fight back then or they'd break me."

  "Hey." Fox's hand on the back of her head. "The shitheads don't matter."

  Shaking from the ugliness of the memories, she tried to curl impossibly deeper into him. "It wasn't the bullies who did the real harm, it was the way the people I'd thought were my friends joined in." The exclusive all-girls private school her father had insisted she attend, because that was where the child of a man of his "stature" should go, had turned overnight into a toxic hothouse.

  Furious her tears wouldn't stop falling, she swiped her hands across her cheeks. "Suddenly I wasn't being invited over for sleepovers and birthday parties, and even the people who didn't join in with the bullies looked uncomfortable when I walked by." Charlotte alone had never turned her back, Molly's small, fierce, loyal defender.

  "I heard the other students gossiping about how I groomed my friends for my father, even though I didn't know the girl at the center of it all." The two of them hadn't had a single class together. "Then the media reported children's services had been to the house to see if I needed to be removed, and it was read as confirmation of the rumors. It was ugly."

  "Fuck, baby, you must've been strong as hell to stick it out," Fox said, his voice holding a taut, angry tension. "Most kids would've left school for home study."

  "I did that later, when I was told I was being transferred to a public school." Traumatized from her parents' deaths after a horrific year, she'd had no resources left to deal with a whole new set of bullies. To their credit, children's services hadn't argued with her decision, instead helping her enroll in an accredited correspondence course.

  "But back at the start," she continued through a throat that felt as if it had been shredded by a steel grater, "I was determined to show them all." It was teeth-gritted rage that had driven her. "Now I look back and wonder why it was so important to me when I hated most of my schoolmates by the end of the first week after it began."

  "No, I get it." Fox kissed the side of her face, his embrace a living barrier against the darkness. "Part of the reason I raised so much hell as a teenager was to show my mother I didn't give a shit."

  Chapter 14

  Fox never spoke about his mother beyond the obvious, but when Molly raised her head, wiping the backs of her hands over her eyes to rid herself of the remnants of her tears before touching her fingers to his face, he knew she was about to ask for more. He would answer. After the brutal honesty of what she'd shared, to do anything else was unthinkable.

  "Your mother, you were mad at her because she left you as a baby?" Her own eyes were yet bruised from the ugly memories of her teenage years, but her voice was painfully gentle, as if she was afraid of hurting him.

  Fuck, what the hell was he going to do about this? Because no damn way was he walking away from Molly. "That was the best thing she ever did for me," he said. "My mother was young, couldn't handle a child." He shrugged. "Gramps and Grammy might've been old-fashioned, not overly expressive, but I was safe, healthy, happy."

  One of his earliest memories of his mother was of her telling him to "Behave," because his grandparents had been very good about putting off their retirement plans to look after him. So he'd always known he wasn't a choice his grandparents had made--but that hadn't mattered. Not when they'd never treated him as if he was just a responsibility.

  "My mother used to come by now and then." His muscles tensed, anger a dark burn beneath his skin. "She'd bring me gifts, play a game or two, then be gone." For days afterward, her perfume--floral and rich--would linger in the house. That was how he knew she came to visit other times, too, while he was at school or with friends. He hadn't been jealous about that. "I knew she was my mother," he told Molly, "but to me, she felt more like a distant aunt, so I never felt neglected or treated unfairly. Gramps and Grammy were my parents."

  Molly pressed a gentle kiss to his cheek, her hands stroking his nape--as if she knew what was coming was going to be bad.

  Holding her close, he opened the doorway to the echoes of a lost little boy's grief. "When I was seven, my grandmother died, and my grandfather followed three weeks later." It had destroyed his world.

  Molly hugged him tight, her tears quiet. Burying his face against her neck, he breathed in the warm, sweet scent of her and told her the rest. "I went to live with my mother and her family."

  Molly sucked in a breath.

  "Yeah," he said with a twist of his lips, "she'd pulled herself together a couple of years after she had me, married into money and had another child, a girl three years younger than me." He clenched his hand against Molly's spine. "Turned out she'd never told her Ivy League husband about me, and the prick refused to bring up 'some piece of trash' she'd had off a stranger in a club."

  "Prick is too nice a word." Molly pulled back to look him in the eye, her expression livid in a way he'd never seen, not even when they'd fought. "Who says that in front of a grieving child? He deserves to be horsewhipped, the useless waste of space."

  Fox found himself grinning, the last thing he'd ever have expected. "Trust me, I've had a few fantasies along those lines--before I realized the limp-dicked fucker wasn't worth it."

  Kissing him in that way she had of doing, one that always made his grin deepen, Molly said, "I'm sorry you had to live with such ugliness," and brushed her fingers through his hair.

  Fox's smile faded. "I didn't--to cut a long story short, the prick told my mother it was either him or me, and she chose him. I was placed in a boarding school in another state and left there to rot." No way to dress it up and he'd stopped trying to convince himself otherwise a hell of a long time ago. "It was an expensive place, a sop to her conscience I guess. As she led me inside, she said, 'I love you, Zachary,' and it was the first time in my life anyone had ever spoken those words to me."

  Hearing the way he bit off the declaration, Molly knew the damage done that day had been brutal. Fox likely never again wanted to hear those words, wouldn't trust them if he did.

  "I was never invited back to their house," he continued in the same harsh tone,
"spent my vacations at the school and, later, at Noah's house. My mother visited about twice a year, when I suppose she could sneak around the prick--or when she could be bothered." He leaned back against the sofa, his fingers digging into her hips as his grip tightened. "When I was ten, I told her I didn't want to see her again."

  Molly's chest throbbed with an ache that made her eyes hot, but she didn't allow her sadness for the boy he'd been to show. Fox, she knew instinctively, was too proud to accept that. Instead, she ran her hand down to tug at one of his, twining their fingers together when he allowed her to take it. Neither did she ask him if his mother had listened to what had been a desperate cry for love disguised as anger--his face told her the truth.

  "Thank you for trusting me." Grazing the rigid line of his jaw with her fingertips, she rubbed her nose gently against his. "I know that can't have been easy."

  "It's not exactly a secret." He thrust his free hand through his hair. "The tabloids and gossip sites dug up every dirty detail of my life as soon as Schoolboy Choir hit the big time."

  "Mine wasn't secret either," she pointed out. "It still hurts to talk about it."

  His brow darkened. "I'm a man. I don't have feelings."

  "Ha-ha." A deep tenderness in her veins that she knew was going to get her into bad, bad trouble, the kind of trouble that could permanently scar, she kissed him on a wave of heartbreaking emotion. The contact helped heal the torn-up places inside her, at least a little.

  She hoped it did the same for him.

  His hands warm on her lower back, he pressed his forehead against hers afterward, their breath mingling. "I have a plan for Sydney."

  Molly stifled her immediate negative reaction, unable to back away after the emotional honesty of the past few minutes. Fox, she thought, wouldn't be so tender with her, only to disregard her deepest fear. "Tell me."

  "You're going to be a roadie."

  Blinking, she stared at him. "I am?"

  "Yep. Stick a Schoolboy Choir crew cap on your head, give you a pair of big, black-framed glasses and a clipboard, and you'll become invisible to the media." A coaxing kind of a kiss, his hand cupping her nape. "Say yes, Molly." Wickedness in the smoky green.