Rescue Me

and blew him apart. He came undone. He kissed her. Devouring her with a hot hunger he didn’t even know rested in his soul. It burned him up in a raging inferno of primal need and longing. Bursting and unrestrained. Wild and out of control. His hands moved over her. Touching, pulling her against him as his mouth ate her up. He wanted to pull her in, eat her up, and never let her go again.
    “Vince!” She pushed him and took several steps back. “Stop it.” She raised the back of her hand to her mouth. “I won’t let you hurt me anymore.”
    His lungs ached as he pulled air deep, trying to catch his breath. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
    “But you will.” She opened the door to her Saab, but she wasn’t going anywhere. She was his. He could change her mind.
    He grabbed the top of the doorframe. “You said you love me.” He wanted her to love him. Wanted it more than he could recall ever wanting anything in his life.
    “I’ll get over it.” Beneath the light of the moon, a tear ran down her pale cheek. It punched him in the gut and he dropped his hand to his side. “Stay away from me so I don’t love you anymore. Stay away so I don’t feel anything for you anymore.”
    Sadie didn’t cry. Not on the day her daddy had died or the day she’d buried him. Vince watched her drive away, feeling numb and gutted at the same time. Helpless. Like when he’d tried to save Pete.
    The primal inferno raging through him turned outward. Real rage. The kind of rage he’d felt during the days after Pete had died. During the days he’d fought to get his hearing back and later after leaving the teams he’d loved. And the rage he’d felt the night he’d taken on a bar of bikers.

Chapter Nineteen
    S adie arranged the pillows on her bed and stood back to study her handiwork. Perhaps a splash of purple was needed. The next time she drove to Amarillo, she’d look for something at a bed and bath store.
    She looked around the master bedroom with a mix of sadness and peace. She’d made the room her own, with her white bedroom furniture and big white area rug, and she felt at home. Comfortable. Captain Church Hill still hung above the stone fireplace and her mama and daddy’s wedding photo sat on the mantel, but everything else had been taken out and stored in the attic. Everything but the silver brush and comb set she knew her father had given her mother on their wedding night. She’d found the set in her father’s sock drawer with an old string tie and had decided to leave both on her own dresser.
    The veterinarian had stopped by earlier and checked on Maribell. He and Tyrus had done an ultrasound on the fetus and learned that the mare would deliver a little stallion next fall. Somewhere in heaven, her daddy was doing a happy jig. Probably with her mama.
    Sadie moved from the room and down the hall filled with portraits, still unsure what she wanted to do with all those old pictures. She walked down the stairs to her daddy’s office and sat behind the old wood and hide desk that would definitely have to go. The old leather and Navajo chair was comfy and might stay though. She opened up her laptop and wrote “finding lost relatives” in the search engine. She had to find something interesting to fill her days. Fill the lonely void. She couldn’t call Vince to rescue her anymore, and finding a long-lost sister—if she had a long-lost sister—seemed like the right thing to do. If Sadie had been kept in the dark her entire life, what did her sister know? And if she really did have a sister, what was she like?
    Finding her was like flying blind. She didn’t know how to go about finding a long-lost person. She had a mother’s name, birth date, and hospital. The information of her daddy’s trust he’d set up and a bank account number, but she didn’t know what to do with the information. She didn’t know whom to trust with the information, either. It wasn’t something she wanted to get out. At least not yet. The only person she’d told was Vince, and that had been a total accident.
    She glanced up from the computer screen. Seeing Vince had been hard. Just looking at him made her battered heart ache all over for him. Then he’d kissed her with more passion and lust than she’d ever felt from him before. He’d packed more need in that kiss than all kisses combined. Probably because he hadn’t found a replacement for her yet, and it would have been so easy to kiss him back. To let him touch her and go