When she raised her gaze she realized for the first time that he’d also taken off his shirt before coming to her rescue, so his torso was as bare as his feet.
All it took was that single sight to start wild things happening inside her.
His belly was flat and rose into that ever-broadening vee of his chiseled, muscular chest, shoulders and bulging biceps. His nipples were tiny whiskey-colored knots, and the sight of them didn’t help what was happening to her in pure, primitive response to that gloriously masculine physique.
Trying to ignore her own careening senses, she yanked her eyes up to his face.
His oh-so-handsome face.
His oh-so-handsome face that wasn’t exactly at an angle that allowed her to meet him eye-to-eye.
Instead he was taking in the sight of her just the way she’d been staring at him.
When she glanced down at herself she found that what he was seeing was her own pink cotton shirt shrink-wrapped to her body, leaving nothing of her lacy bra or the swell of her breasts or her taut nipples to the imagination.
“We better get dried off,” she said in a voice that was unintentionally breathy.
Even though it had been unintentional, she knew the cause. Rather than being embarrassed by her exposure the way she should have been, or having the inclination to cross her arms over her chest and slouch into them for concealment, she had the inordinate urge to straighten her shoulders in invitation of something more than his heated gaze.
Adam finally dragged his eyes upward but not without what seemed like the same difficulty.
“How about I make a fire and we meet back here to chase away the chill?” he suggested in a voice that was as deep and quiet as hers had been breathy.
She knew it was foolhardy to agree to that when she felt what she was feeling, but she heard herself say, “Sounds good.”
“Go on, then,” he prodded with a poke of his chin in the direction of the stairs.
He didn’t move, though.
He stayed where he was and watched her go. Watched every step she took and was still watching when Victoria reached the top of the stairs and sneaked a glance down at him.
Make an excuse and beg off, she told herself when she saw the look in his eyes even from that distance. A look of appreciation, of admiration, of hunger.
Instead she said, “I won’t be but a minute,” before reluctantly leaving his range of vision to go into the attic bedroom.
It’s just sitting by the fire, she reasoned as she peeled away her wet clothes, overlooked underwear and just pulled on plain gray sweatpants and an absolutely unsexy matching sweatshirt that zipped up the front and left a hood trailing down her back.
It’s just sitting by the fire in sweats. It’s not tempting fate.
But she wasn’t altogether convinced of that as she toweled her hair, brushed it smooth and left it loose around her shoulders. Everything that had awakened at the sight of his naked chest left her champing at the bit to get back down to him. And no matter how much she tried to rationalize the situation, tempting fate was just what it seemed she was doing.
Still, she couldn’t stop herself.
That hunger she’d thought she’d seen in Adam’s eyes was echoed in her. A hunger for a little pleasant time to counteract the last two days of cold war. A hunger for sitting by that fire she could hear crackling downstairs, to sit there without the animosity that had been their companion around the fireside during their camp-out. A hunger for conversation and socializing and ending the isolation and loneliness that that cold war had made her feel.
A hunger for him.
But just for his company, she qualified firmly. Nothing more.
Talking and company were not kissing. Talking and company could be accomplished across a distance. That distance she was still sure she could maintain.
And the little dab of lip gloss she added when she’d finished brushing her hair? She only did that because her lips were parched.
Adam had changed clothes, too, by the time she got back downstairs. Like her, he’d put on a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt.
It was hardly striking attire, yet it did strike Victoria.
There was an intimacy in the relaxed clothing they both wore. But seeing them on Adam in particular, Victoria couldn’t help feeling as if it somehow signified a tumbling of walls, a stripping away of barriers, so that what remained before her was the man alone. The essence of what he’d been all those years ago when she was so smitten by him.
With the fire raging on its own, Adam took the cushions off the couch to set in front of it. Then he turned the coffee table onto its side so they could use it as a backrest.
“I poured us some brandy,” he said when he noticed her return, pointing to two small glasses of the amber liquid on the hearth. “I thought that would help get rid of the chill from the inside.”
Brandy. A roaring fire. Both of them dressed in hardly anything at all. And Adam being nice and thoughtful and heart-stoppingly terrific-looking.
It was a potent combination Victoria knew she was all too susceptible to.
Still she couldn’t do anything but accept the glass he offered and sit on the cushions with her back against the coffee table.
Adam sat beside her then, his long legs bent at the knees to brace his arms—the way he’d been sitting against the tree on Wednesday, watching her deal with the horses.
For some reason Victoria didn’t understand, she was enthralled by the sight of his wrists—thick, strong, speckled with hair, and inexplicably sexy.
“You know,” he said once they were both settled and had had several bracing sips of brandy, “I really thought I was going to get into that water and find out you were bluffing.”
“It would have been a good one on you,” she agreed because the note of levity in his voice—and the brandy—allowed her to relax.
“And probably just what you figure I have coming.”
She merely smiled at that.
“I’ve had a pretty rotten disposition this week,” he admitted.
“Yes, you have.”
“I decided to cut it out, though. Completely.”
That confession made her look at him with surprise. “You did?”
“I still intend to work you like a ranch hand. That part hasn’t gone out of effect. But I think it’s time the bear in me hibernates.”
“How come?”
“It’s wearing thin.”
“You’re telling me?”
He had the grace to smile. “I don’t suppose you’ve had occasion to deal with a whole lot of contrary men, have you? You’re used to them fawning over you and falling at your feet.”
“Is that right?”
“I saw it for myself. All through school. Your daddy had to shoo away whole groups of them.”
While I only had eyes for you, she thought but didn’t say.
Instead she laughed and said, “That might have been true in school and in Whitehorn, but out in the rest of the world things aren’t quite the same.”
“You don’t expect me to believe you can’t get a date.”
“Dates I can always get. But relationships that really count? That’s another story.”
“Are you telling me I didn’t snatch you away from the love of your life?”
“Would you care if you had?”
His only answer was a negligible shrug. “I have been wondering why you aren’t married.”
Why she wasn’t married….
Now, there was a good question.
How could she answer it when she couldn’t say it was because of her feelings for him from long ago when she was an impressionable girl? That despite what had happened, Adam had been the standard by which she’d judged all other men. A standard no one had ever been able to live up to.
How could she answer that question when she couldn’t say she’d never run into another man with piercing gray eyes that seemed able to look into her soul and ignite heat with just a simple glance?
When she couldn’t say she’d never encountered another man with a body quite as phenomenal. A body that seemed to draw her like a magnet. A body—if she remembered correctly from their brief coming together in that kiss in her father’s barn—that seemed to have the perfect niches for her own.
How could she answer his question about why she wasn’t married when she couldn’t say she’d never met another man who had that certain something that he had—that same chemistry—that seemed to seep into her pores and wash away reason and rationale and most of her control?
Instead she said, “It just didn’t happen. There have been a couple of guys I liked, a couple who even proposed, but it didn’t go anywhere.”
Before he could delve any further to discover the truth, Victoria turned the tables on him. “What about you? Why haven’t you ever married?”
He thought about his answer as long as she’d considered hers before he said, “I guess I had ambition for everything but that. There hasn’t ever been time. Or maybe there hasn’t ever been anyone I wanted enough to spend the time on. Besides, it isn’t easy—after you’ve had a burning obsession for someone—to go on to other women. In any serious sense, anyway.”
He looked over at her then. Pointedly.
But Victoria asked anyway because she couldn’t believe how that sounded. “Who were you obsessed with?”
He grinned and wrinkled his brow at the same time, as if he’d thought he was being perfectly clear. “You,” he said over his brandy glass, toasting her with it.
“Me? How can that be when you barely had anything to do with me?” she asked, refuting what didn’t seem possible. Hadn’t she been the only one of them obsessed?
Adam finished his brandy and set the empty glass on the hearth again. Then he turned to face her, stretching one arm along the edge of the upturned coffee table behind her but without touching her.
“You were off-limits,” he said. “I knew that. I was trying to play by the rules. But that didn’t mean I didn’t live and breathe for every glimpse of you. That I didn’t know where you were and who you were with and what you were doing every minute. That I didn’t fantasize and dream about you and imagine other girls were really you when I was with them. That I didn’t wake up every day hoping you’d find a way to come around, to flirt, to talk the way you did sometimes. Why else do you think I got so easily carried away in that barn that night?”
“I always thought you were just like every other guy. Some girl keeps coming around, flirting with you, preening for you, you’re not going to turn your nose up at her whether you’re particularly enamored or not.”
“You were more than just some girl. A whole hell of a lot more.”
It was funny but after all the years that had passed and in the situation they were now in, Victoria wouldn’t have guessed that learning that Adam had actually liked her—been obsessed with her—could have an impact on her.
But it did.
She might as well have still been that teenage girl with the overpowering crush on the ranch hand’s son at that moment—that’s how much it pleased her to find out he hadn’t just been going along with a good thing. Because over all the time she’d known him, all the time since she’d last seen him, she’d always thought the attraction was one-sided. That he’d only kissed her that night in the barn because she’d secretly pursued him and made herself available.
Now, to find out he’d felt the same way she had, suddenly made everything seem changed somehow. In fact, if she’d had any idea that Adam had felt for her what she’d felt for him that night, she might have had more courage to speak up in his defense. As it was, she’d thought she would be admitting that she’d chased Adam, a boy who wouldn’t have given her the time of day any other way.
“You big, dumb jerk,” she said endearingly.
And that was how he seemed to take it, too, because he smiled a lazy, sexy smile as his penetrating eyes held hers, searched hers, heated her from the inside out.
He leaned forward to kiss her then and in that moment when everything seemed to have changed, so did that.
Victoria didn’t understand it, but she felt more free. She felt more entitled to that kiss. More deserving of indulging in that supple mouth that covered hers, that took command of hers, that urged her lips to part and her head to rest back in his cradling hand.
And indulge she did.
She answered his urging to part her lips. She met his tongue when it came to call. She let all thoughts of keeping any distance between them drift away. She let all thoughts of everything drift away so that, for the first time, she could just enjoy that moment and that kiss by that man she’d always had feelings for, feelings that seemed to burst into new life suddenly.
Without abandoning her mouth, Adam took her glass and set it somewhere else so she could reach around him when his arms wrapped her and he pulled her close.
She was only too happy to oblige. To press her hands to the hard wall of his back, to have her breasts flattened to that broad chest that had been so magnificently bare only a short while before.
Barriers between them really had been removed because that kiss was different than any that had come before—fuller, deeper, uninhibited and alive with a hunger unleashed. That hunger she’d seen in Adam’s eyes. That hunger she’d felt herself, although she’d camouflaged it and convinced herself it was something else.
But it wasn’t something else. It was pure, elemental, primitive hunger to be held against his big body, to be kissed by that incredible mouth, to be carried away on the waves of all he was bringing to life inside her.
And, oh, but he was good at it!
His tongue circled and chased and danced with hers and she met the challenge. She played every game, parried every thrust and even did some chasing of her own.
Because tonight, since things had changed, she wanted so much more than they’d shared before. She needed so much more.
Tonight she needed to know if all her imaginings, all her fantasies about him, were true.
She found her way underneath his shirt to his back, letting her palms glaze the tight satin of flesh over hard muscle, digging her fingers into the glory of that powerful expanse. Massaging his shoulders, his biceps, his sides, even daring to dip only her fingertips into the waistband of his sweatpants.
Maybe it was the insistence of that massage or the almost-frenzy that accompanied it, but Adam seemed to get the message that she needed more than kissing, no matter how wonderful the kissing was.
He slid the zipper of her sweatshirt down, just enough to slide one hand in to the side of her neck, caressing it with leisurely strokes that slowly eased downward, leaving a trail of delight until he finally reached her breast, closing that big hand around the burgeoning globe that had been crying out for just that.
Their kisses grew urgent and openmouthed as that adept hand did the most incredible, magical things to her. He found the tight kernel of her nipple with gentle fingers that traced around and around it, tugging, teasing, tormenting and then smoothing with a hot, tender palm until he drove her so wild she couldn’t help letting her head fall away from his kiss so she could gasp for the air she needed to moan in pleasure.
But Adam went on kissing her. The soft, sensitive underside of her chin, the arched column of her neck, the hollow of her throat, and lower still. He kissed a long, slow path to the swell of her breast, where the kisses stopped and only the tip of his tongue trailed the rest of the way until that glorious mouth captured her nipple, engulfing it in warm, moist velvet splendor. Sucking. Tugging with tender teeth. Flicking his talented tongue against the pebbled crest.
He eased her to lie back on the cushions, going with her so that the length of his body followed every curve of hers.
Victoria could feel the proof of just how much he wanted her making its presence known at her hip.
His hands s
eemed to be everywhere then—on her breasts, on her side, on her stomach where he slipped below the border of her sweatpants just far enough to reach a finger into her navel.
This is it, she silently rejoiced. He’s going to make love to me…
And she was willing. She wanted him to make love to her. She wanted to finally know what she’d only been dreaming about for what seemed like forever.
But that was when he stopped.
Not easily—that was clear. But more as if some greater force had yanked him away by the scruff of his neck.
Because all of a sudden he was gone.
He was up on one elbow, pulling up the zipper of her sweatshirt in a fast swipe before he dropped his head to hers and sighed a sigh that blew a hot gust of air into her ear.
“Time. We should take our time,” he said in a passion-raspy voice.
Victoria couldn’t help but hope he only meant to slow things down, maybe to move them into the bedroom, not to end them.
But those hopes were dashed when he pushed himself into a sitting position, then took her hands to pull her up, too, and said, “I think you ought to go to your room now. While I can still let you.”
Victoria raised her chin at him, tempted to refuse to go. Tempted to stay to see if he’d start again what every ounce of her being was crying out for him to finish.
But a tiny speck of common sense told her not to do that. It told her to cool off. To give herself that time he’d mentioned to think about what she’d learned tonight. To digest it before she took that final step from which there would be no return for either of them.
So she didn’t stay.
She stood, said a simple good-night that was almost inaudible, and headed for the stairs.
She only got as far as the second step when the sound of his voice stopped her.
“What do you say tomorrow we get away from here for a while? Go into Whitehorn? Have dinner?”
“Okay,” she agreed, only partially aware of what he’d said, while a bigger part of her waited for him to invite her back in front of that fire.
But he didn’t. When he didn’t say anything more, she finally climbed the stairs to the attic.
Even in her solitary bed moments later she could still feel Adam’s hands on her skin. His mouth on hers. The long, hard staff of his desire for her pressed so unmistakably to her side….
The Marriage Bargain Page 13