Aside from wanting to know how things were going for the brand-new mother, Holly was also desperately trying to keep her mind on something other than the fact that the diner had suddenly become a very romantic-looking place, what with all the lights out except the one close to the table she and Ray were occupying.
The only way it could have been even more so was if there had been candles in place of the overhead light. And that would have completely spelled her doom.
“Restless,” Ray answered. “You know Alma, she has trouble taking it easy, but she’s fine,” he told her, then added, “thanks to you.”
Holly shifted. Maybe coffee and pie was a bad idea. All sorts of thoughts were crowding her head, none of which had anything to do with the immediate conversation and everything to do with the man she was having it with. “I already told you, Alma did—”
Ray rolled his eyes. “Will you learn how to take a damn compliment, already?” he said, raising his voice as he cut her off. “Nobody’s going to think you’re getting a swelled head or an inflated ego if you just say thank-you when someone says something positive about what you did.”
Holly blew out a breath, then surrendered and murmured a small, “Thank you.”
The corners of Ray’s mouth curved as satisfaction entered his light brown eyes. “There. Was that so hard?” he asked.
Was it her imagination, or had the space between them at the table somehow gotten smaller? It had definitely grown more intimate.
“No, but—”
“Uh-uh-uh.” Ray wagged a finger at her, deliberately calling a halt to anything further she might want to say. “I want you to quit while you’re ahead.” His whole family wanted to thank Holly, and he wasn’t about to let her just dismiss what she’d done for Alma. “Besides, Alma told us that she’d felt faint, and from that gash on her forehead, I’m guessing she must have hit her head on the rim of the sink when she went down. If you hadn’t found her, who knows how long she would have been out?”
Granted, she’d shaken Alma awake, but there was no way the woman would have remained unconscious for long. “Most likely until the first really strong contraction seized her, would be my guess,” she told him.
It was his turn to shrug off a comment. Holly was just too damn modest for her own good, he thought. In this one area, she was the complete opposite of him. He liked to grab attention; she was apparently happier in the shadows. They could each stand to learn from each other, he decided—especially he from her—although he had no intention of admitting that. At least, not right now.
“All I know is that Alma said she wouldn’t have gotten through it as well as she did if you hadn’t been there for her. By the way,” he threw in nonchalantly between forkfuls of pie, “Alma and Cash would like you to be the twins’ godmother.”
Holly dropped her fork to her plate as she stared at Ray, for once not undone by the heart-melting handsomeness she saw there but by what he’d just told her.
“What?”
“Godmother,” he repeated slowly, enunciating each syllable. “You’re not familiar with the concept of godmother?” he asked, tongue in cheek.
“No, of course I am,” she retorted. “It’s just that—wouldn’t she want someone who’s closer to her to be the twins’ godmother?”
“Right now,” Ray said, laughing, “the only being closer than you is God. My dad wants to adopt you. And Cash asked me to tell you that he’ll be your attorney for life—for free. According to Alma—and Miss Joan—you stayed calm and collected throughout the whole process, from start to finish.” Then he added, “That went a long way in calming Alma down.”
He was looking at her strangely, Holly thought. Now what? Was there something he wasn’t telling her? Her mind scrambled around, attempting to discover an answer. She came up empty.
“What?” she asked him.
He hadn’t been aware that he was staring at her. He supposed that he was.
“I’m just impressed, that’s all. I still kind of think of you as that skinny little kid I went swimming with at the lake every summer.” And then he grinned at her. Really grinned.
She couldn’t take her eyes off Ray. When he grinned like that, it went straight to the very core of her. Something was up. Something that went beyond her helping Alma give birth.
“Now what?” she breathed.
“I just remembered,” he answered mysteriously.
It was like pulling teeth with this man. “Remembered what?”
The grin was turning downright sexy and just winding itself all through her system. She found it increasingly difficult to sit still and not fidget.
“That a few of the earlier times,” he told her, “we went skinny-dipping.”
“We were eight and nine,” she reminded him. “There weren’t any differences back then.” At least, none that she’d felt self-conscious about. Exactly.
“Oh, there were differences, all right,” he countered, a sexy, mischievous look entering his eyes.
She drew herself up, trying her best to look indignant and knowing that she couldn’t quite pull it off. “You’re just saying that to get under my skin and embarrass me.” But she could hold out only so long. “You noticed?” she asked in a hushed whisper. As clearly as she could remember, they were just eager to get into the water and cool off.
“As I recall, I was a red-blooded little boy.” He nodded. “I noticed.” Ray saw the color spreading through her cheeks at an amazing rate. “You’re going to blush now? Fifteen years after the fact?” he asked incredulously.
Really embarrassed now, Holly shrugged, looking away. “I didn’t think you noticed,” she mumbled.
“If I didn’t, I should have,” Ray told her, finally coming clean.
“Then you didn’t notice,” she concluded. A sigh of relief escaped her.
“Maybe not,” Ray conceded. It wasn’t his intention to embarrass her over something so far in the past. However, the present was a different matter. He’d have to be blind not to notice her attributes now.
How was it that he hadn’t noticed until that evening he’d picked her up to go to Murphy’s?
His eyes swept over her, lingering on the tempting swell of her breasts as she struggled to regulate her breathing.
“But I’m noticing now,” he told her quietly.
She could have sworn his very words were dancing along her skin, making her feel unseasonably warm. Had the air shut down in the diner when the lights had been turned off? She couldn’t tell.
“Maybe it escaped your notice, but we’re not exactly skinny-dipping at the moment,” she pointed out, congratulating herself for getting the words out when her throat and tongue were drier than the Texas Panhandle in the middle of a July heat wave.
“But we could be,” he told her. “We’re not too far from the lake.”
“It’s the middle of December,” she said. Nobody thought about swimming in the lake in December.
“Water stays warmer than the land,” Ray reminded her, his eyes never leaving hers.
Why hadn’t he ever noticed before now just how really beautiful she was? Or had she gradually become that way, right under his nose, without his having been aware of her subtle metamorphosis?
He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he was noticing all that now, and it was hitting him where he lived, twisting his gut so that he could hardly catch a decent breath.
“I’m too tired to go skinny-dipping in the lake,” she told him. Besides, the last thing she wanted was to come off like some desperate, clingy female, eager to take any crumbs he was willing to toss her.
“Rain check, then,” he replied so seductively, it was really hard for her to concentrate.
Holly was barely aware of nodding her head. “Rain check,” she echoed, feeling light-headed again and disconnected from the rest of he
rself.
She forced her mind to focus on her surroundings, on conducting herself as if it was business as usual with Ray, and what was usual was that his attention was never focused on her.
But it was now.
Holly looked down at his plate and saw that he had eaten the slice of pie she’d served him. Automatic pilot kicked in, causing her to ask, “Would you like to have another slice of pie?”
His eyes remaining on hers, Ray moved his head slowly from side to side. Then, just before he reinforced his reply verbally, he reached across the table and took her hand, stopping her as she began to rise.
“No,” he answered, “I don’t want more pie.”
Why did that sound like a leading line? And why was she having trouble breathing, as if the very air in her lungs had turned solid and she couldn’t draw in any more air to sustain herself?
Don’t say it, don’t say it, Holly cautioned herself. It would just be setting herself up for a fall.
And yet, despite her self-warnings, she heard the words coming out of her mouth.
“Then what do you want?”
He rose then and for a split second, she thought he was going to leave.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he took her hand in his and silently coaxed her to her feet. Holly rose from her chair like someone caught in a trance, never taking her eyes away from him. Her heart began pounding so hard, she was surprised that she even heard him when Ray softly responded, “You.”
She swallowed, doing her best to unglue the words from the roof of her mouth. “I’m not on the menu,” she finally said through lips that were barely moving.
Ray smiled then, smiled right into her eyes as he said, “Good, because I like ordering things that are off the regular menu.”
A shiver shimmied up her back, then down again.
It made no sense, and yet, somehow, it did.
But she had no time to try to puzzle it out because the very next moment, Ray had framed her face between his hands and brought his mouth down to hers so softly at first, that she thought she was fantasizing, creating the scenario by allowing her mind to drift right into a vivid daydream.
And as her blood began to heat in her veins, the warmth of his lips penetrated her very being, making her head spin as wildly as if she was on a merry-go-round. She knew what she was experiencing was real. Moved by gratitude or opportunity or just reacting to happenstance, Ray was kissing her. Kissing her and simultaneously unraveling life as she knew it.
Going with the moment, she leaned into him, into the hard outline of his body as she wrapped her arms around his neck and gave herself up to the wild sensation roaring through her.
And the more she did so—the more she did so. Each step, each moment, led to another and another.
This, she was certain, would only happen once, and then Ray would come to his senses, apologize and they’d never talk about it again. She knew that as well as she knew her name—but she didn’t care.
All she cared about, all she wanted, was to have this one time, to allow it to turn into a memory that she could revisit again and again when she was feeling lost or alone, just so that she could experience the indescribable surge she was feeling right at this moment.
Holly groaned when his hands skimmed along the sides of her body, melted as his kiss deepened and then moaned when his lips trailed along the sides of her neck, weaving an array of soft, sensual kisses along every part of her that he came in contact with.
She could feel her very core quickening, yearning for his touch, for the union, however brief, that would forever have her belonging to him, no matter where life took either one of them. From this evening forward, she would indelibly be his.
Without being completely conscious of her actions, Holly began tugging at his shirt, her fingers nimbly working the buttons free from their confines, all the while kissing him with as much passion as she was receiving.
Engulfed in a heated haze, Holly felt him coaxing her back, guiding her out of the dining area and toward the rear of the diner, toward the one place that contained an overstuffed sofa.
The office where she did her inventory, where Tina Davenport, the doctor’s wife, worked on the accounts and out of which Miss Joan ran the whole business.
Holly knew they shouldn’t be in here. And they definitely shouldn’t be doing what they were doing in here, but as she undid his belt buckle and pulled his belt free of the loops on his jeans, she knew that this time, decorum was not what she was after. Before something happened to call a halt to it, she wanted to have Ray make love with her once, just once.
And after thinking it was never going to happen, that he would always be chasing other women and never her, it was finally, finally happening.
* * *
HE WANTED HER.
She was breaking down his resistance as if it was constructed out of wet tissue paper, crumbling apart on contact.
Not that he had much resistance. He never really had, at least, not when it came to the fairer sex. But this was Holly. Holly, his friend, his pal, the keeper of his secrets...and, he just now realized, all this time she’d had a big secret she’d never even hinted at, never shared with him.
He had never guessed that there was a hot, smoldering woman just beneath the calm, precise surface. A woman he would never have dreamed existed.
But she did exist. And he found her exciting beyond words.
One thing was leading to another as if by some unseen design, and before he knew it, Ray realized that he’d removed the light blue uniform he had grown so accustomed to seeing Holly in. As it dropped to the floor, it unveiled a body that both stimulated him and, in a strange way, humbled him.
“You’re right,” he whispered against Holly’s ear, as he brushed more ardent kisses along her skin. “You have changed since we went skinny-dipping. Changed a great deal.”
The tone of his voice brought joy rushing through her heart to a degree she hadn’t thought remotely possible. If she’d loved him before, she was insanely in love with him now.
Rather than answer or say anything at all, she began to kiss him with the passion she had tried to hold back, the passion she’d struggled to restrain all these years whenever she talked with him.
There was no holding back anymore because, as his hand brushed along the more sensitive places on her body, eruptions began to happen, one after the other, one feeding into the next until she thought she’d just die from the exquisite ecstasy of it all.
Twisting and turning into his touch, wanting more, not certain if she could really withstand more, Holly opened the eyes that she hadn’t realized until this moment she’d closed and whispered with effort, “Make love with me, Ray. Make love with me now.”
His grin went straight to her heart as he pushed her back onto the sofa. “I thought that was what I was doing,” he said in a teasing voice.
But his eyes were serious as he loomed over her. Balancing his weight on elbows that framed either side of her on the narrow sofa, Ray drew his hardened torso along her damp body, first lowering his mouth onto hers, then lowering his body, sealing it to hers as he entered her.
The brief moment of resistance he found there had him stunned. His first inclination was to draw back, and he would have had she not wrapped her legs around him and held him in place.
It forced him to go forward rather than retreat.
And then, there was no place for thought, no place for hesitation or noble efforts. There was just the all-consuming flame of desire.
Responding to the way she moved beneath him, he undertook an ever-increasing tempo, his hips prompting hers to go faster, faster, until he was all but panting as they raced up to the very top of the peak.
The magnificent release engulfed him.
He didn’t even feel pain when Holly bit down on
his lip in response to the wild surge that coursed through her veins.
And as he descended, his pulse continued to beat erratically. It took a while for his head to stop spinning.
And throughout it all, he held Holly close to him, afraid she might disappear if he didn’t, even as disbelief at what had just transpired echoed through his brain.
Chapter Fifteen
Euphoria still had a very tight hold on her as Holly’s pulse hit a more rhythmic, steady beat.
But despite the incredible, lighter-than-air euphoria, reality was beginning to elbow its way into her consciousness.
And reality was tightly bonded to fear.
Fear of the future, of what lay ahead as far as her friendship with Ray was concerned.
They had never been members of the “friends with benefits” club, at least not in the standard manner. The benefits that could be garnered by having her for a friend were that she would go to the limit and beyond in any capacity that was necessary when it was necessary, strictly to help him, with no thought to her own well-being.
This, however, wasn’t part of that package or even remotely implied as a “benefit.” Much as making love with Ray had thrilled her, she was terrified that the very act had brought irreversible consequences with it. Consequences that would ultimately spell the loss of his friendship.
Trying to blot all of that from her mind for just a little longer, Holly curled up against him, treasuring the warmth radiating from his body to hers. She gloried in the sound of Ray’s heart beating not quite calmly beneath her cheek. She wished with all her heart she could find a way to just freeze time, to make it stand still at this moment indefinitely. This was the absolute perfect high point of her life. It was not going to get any better than this, and most likely, Holly felt, it would only go downhill from here.
“You didn’t tell me.” Startled, she both heard and felt Ray say the short, accusing sentence.
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