Free The Second Time by Janet Dailey Page B

spreading them and studying the straight patterns they made. “He needs a father. He needs you.” She looked at him, folding her fingers together in a prayerful attitude that asked for a truce between them.
    His gray eyes glittered in a cold, calculating study of her. “I can’t help wondering why you waited until after Simpson was dead before you suddenly decided that Randy needed a father. It can’t be that you were waiting until he died. The man’s been dead for more than two months.”
    “Do you think I should have flown out here the day after his funeral?” Dawn bristled at his veiled attack. “There was a small matter of putting affairs in order, not to mention the shock of losing someone I had grown to care about.”
    “Of course.” But it was a response that mocked her explanation. Slater wandered idly towardher, that cool, assessing gaze of his continuing to study her. “At first I had the crazy idea that you’d come back for a much more personal reason. I suppose it shows the size of my ego that I thought you were here to see if we couldn’t get back together again. The second time you were going to marry for love—that’s what you told me the morning you left. And I wanted to believe that you still cherished some love for me.” His voice was growing harder and colder.
    How could she tell him that she did when she didn’t know how much of her desire was rooted in nostalgia? Both of them had changed so much. It wasn’t possible to feel the same. But there was unquestionably smoke coming from an old fire and the ashes were still hot.
    “Then I found out about Randy,” he said in a tone that indicated the knowledge had changed his thinking. “So you’re here, claiming he needs a father.” His gaze made a slow sweep of her, taking in every curve of her body. “And there you stand—a sexy, young widow with money to burn and no one to tell her how she should spend it, and with eleven years of having to be a good wife behind her. A half-grown son is bound to be an encumbrance.”
    “That’s not true,” Dawn protested, stung by his implication.
    “Isn’t it?” Slater challenged, stopping in front of her. “You say he needs a father. Are you planning to dump him on me so you can go out and have your fun? It must be difficult to gohusband-hunting with a brat in tow. How much easier it is to pawn him off onto someone else.”
    She was trembling with anger, too incensed to voice any kind of denial to such totally false and denigrating accusations. The recourse left to her was completely instinctive, the impulse to strike the words from his mouth.
    The lightning arc of her hand aimed for his cheek, striking it with all the force she could put behind it. The blow turned his head to the side, the impact stinging the palm of her hand. Her own temper made her indifferent to the retaliating anger that darkened his expression. If anything, she felt satisfaction seeing the white mark on his jaw slowly turning red where she had struck him.
    Dawn had acted with no thought of the consequences, forgetting that violence was invariably answered with violence. She was forcibly reminded of it when her arms were seized and she was yanked roughly against him, his fingers digging into her soft flesh. The murderous light smouldering in his eyes brought a flicker of alarm to her expression.
    The glimpse of it made Slater pause. An expression that was both wry and bitter with regret swept across his features, but his gaze continued to bore into her. The grip of his hands had pulled her onto her toes and arched her body against the length of his. Sensitive nerve endings picked up the sensation of her bare thighs pressed to the cotton texture of his slacks and the solidness ofhis hip bones ground against hers. The peaks of her breasts were flattened to the hard wall of his chest. Dawn was hardly drawing a breath while her heart beat unevenly, not certain what would happen next.
    His mouth thinned into a grim line as he