The Outsider Series

Chapter 21

Chapter Twenty-One

Andy had shed his jacket and tie. There was a misty rain falling, and the daylight was fading from the gray skies as he leaned against his bedroom window. The night was turning colder, and Andy couldn’t fathom how Laura had spent two nights in her car. She still didn’t have a home. Jed and Diana couldn’t let her stay forever. They didn’t have room, and those cabins beside the house still hadn’t been winterized and were only used in the summer months when booked by the summer riders that Jed took out on pack trips.

A soft knock on his door pulled him from his thoughts. “Come in,” he shouted.

He didn’t look to see who was there, but he sensed her, smelled her as she approached.

“You ran out on me.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” Andy lifted a lock of her silky brown hair.

She just stared at him with an innocence he’d never seen before. She gazed at his lips, and Andy touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. She turned her head inward and pressed her lips to his fingers. Andy bent his head, and her mouth opened under the force of his. His tongue moved in, touching hers.

Alexis buried her fingers in his hair, dug her nails into his skull. Andy walked her back to the bed and lowered her. She wrapped her arms around his thickly muscled shoulders and hugged him even closer to her. The slow movements of her hips beneath him urged him on. He reached behind her and slid the zipper down her dress, sliding his hand and pulling the straps down, exposing a barely decent black lace bra. She was stunning as he ran his hand over her generous breasts and then froze, rolling off her to the side and resting his arm across his forehead. He could feel the way she stiffened and could hear her turn away and pull her dress up.

“Alexis, I’m so sorry. Embarrassing you is not what I want to do. But I can’t do this. I can’t be forced to make love to you, to marry you. The woman I marry, I need to love with my whole heart. You deserve better.”

She didn’t look at him but kept her back to him as she slid off the bed in the dim room, reaching for the zipper he’d lowered. “Then why would you pretend? I don’t deserve that.”

Andy sat up on the edge of the bed. “Alexis, this is about a young lady named Laura. She was fired by my mother just before you arrived for accidentally knocking over a Christmas tree. She had a little boy, four years old. She’s twenty, got pregnant at fifteen, and her parents threw her out. She worked to support her kid, put a roof over their head, to feed them, and she was barely getting by when my mother had her escorted off the property without her pitiful pay. She couldn’t pay rent, buy food, and she was thrown out of her home by her predator of a landlord. She was forced to sleep in her car with her son and was begging for a job. She was found by a deputy one night, and he had her child taken away, ripped right from her arms. Can you imagine a woman who loved her child so much she’d do everything to protect him? Then, for me to discover my mother’s hand in keeping a child from his mother in court today…”

Alexis stood with her back to him, her hand on the door handle. Slowly, she turned. Her eyes flashed with anger. “Your mother is keeping a child from his mother?” She took a step away from the door and placed her hands on her shapely, very sexy hips. “Sounds to me like what you need is a wife.”