Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

another hot rumor about a black pearl whose orient was all of God’s rainbows wrapped together.
    God’s or the devil’s. She still wasn’t sure which. She no longer even cared. She had learned not to care. Just as she had learned not to risk any more unborn children to the whims of their careless father. She would never forgive herself for that. No punishment could be too great for such misjudgment, even the hell of living with Len McGarry.
    In the instant before Hannah stepped back, Archer felt the change in her—resistance where there had been fluid ease, restraint where there had been hunger, distance where there had been heat. He let her slip between his hands like fire, because like fire, he couldn’t hold on to her without being burned.
    “What did Len do to you?” he asked softly.

Eleven
    F or several heartbeats Archer thought Hannah wouldn’t answer.
    And so did she.
    Then she remembered the freedom she had discovered floating deep in the turquoise sea, and she wondered if she would ever find the courage of that freedom on land, face-to-face with the man she both feared and desired.
    “Len taught me to be careful,” she said finally. “Very, very careful.” Her voice was ruthlessly neutral, concealing the stark female hunger and the much more complicated yearning that coiled just beneath. “Not a bad thing to learn.”
    “There’s such a thing as being too careful.”
    “Sure, I’ll bet you know all about it.” Her tone was sardonic. “Turn around so I can check the bruises on your spine, the ones you got by being so bloody careful.”
    Despite Hannah’s brisk words, her hands were gentle as she turned Archer around. The simple heat of his body and the complex slide of his muscles beneath her palms made her wish that Len hadn’t taught her how necessary it was to protect her soft center beneath a harsh shell of experience. Touching Archer made her yearn for things she couldn’t name, only feel.
    “I was careful ten years ago,” Archer said. “I’ve regretted it as I’ve regretted nothing else in my life.”
    Hannah’s hands paused in their slow probing of his back. “What do you mean?”
    He moved so that they were facing each other again. The feel of her fingers sliding on his bare skin did nothing to cool his blood. When she lifted them, he had to bite back a protest. The depth of his hunger for her would have shocked him, but right now he could feel nothing except his own heat, see nothing except her eyes shadowed by a past he couldn’t change.
    Too late. Too damned late for everything except pain.
    “Len and I had a complicated relationship,” Archer said evenly. “I didn’t know how complicated until it was too late.”
    She frowned, not understanding.
    He lifted his hand, wanting to smooth the lines between her shiny brown eyebrows. Yet he didn’t trust himself to touch her in even so casual a way.
    And he touched her anyway, tracing the frown lines with a fingertip that was callused and gentle. Her eyes widened in surprise, but she didn’t pull back.
    “I was raised,” he said quietly, “in a big family with love and shouting matches and laughing and hugs, grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, parents and brothers and sisters, dogs and cats and car pools. Len was raised by an unloving woman who began life as a calculating piece of ass and ended up as a bitter, alcoholic whore.”
    Hannah listened with complete attention. She had often wondered about Len’s childhood. She had learned not to ask. She had learned so many things.
    And Archer was teaching her other things now, with the gentleness of his touch despite the blunt woman-hunger that had tightened his whole body.
    “When I found Len and told him who I was, he just stared at me,” Archer said. He brought up both hands, barely touching Hannah’s cheeks, tracing her sleek eyebrows with his thumbs. Her sudden breath brushed her breasts against his chest. He went still for an instant, then resumed the soft not-quite-caress of her eyebrows. “I told him that he was welcome in the Donovan household, that Dad had spent years looking for him.”
    “What did Len say?”
    “ ‘Too late, kid. Time only goes one way.’ ”
    She winced. “That sounds like Len.”
    “I tried to convince him to come home,” Archer said, looking at Hannah’s eyebrows, her dark chocolate eyelashes, the pink curve of her mouth. “He said he was already there.”
    “Where was he?”
    “In a hellhole in