“You should’ve let me know you wouldn’t be needing my spare room after all, young man.”
Evan rose to his feet, nodding apologetically. “Yes, ma’am, I should have.”
“I worried about you until Charlie stopped by to tell me he saw your bike parked outside Lissa’s trailer last night.”
Tapping five, red-painted toes, she looked him over from his rumpled hair to the wrinkled shirttails hanging out of his jeans.
“Well, go scrape those cactus branches off your face. This hash turns soggy when it cools.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said again, hiding a smile behind the hand he rasped across his bristling chin. “I’ll get my shaving gear from my bike.”
Lissa stood as still as a rock until he returned from his brief foray outside. She didn’t say a word when he squeezed past her. Neither did he. But the lazy kiss he dropped on her nose before he headed down the narrow hallway to her bird’s-nest-size bathroom trumpeted its own message. Lissa’s cheeks scorched with heat as Josephine hooted and clapped her oven mitts together in pure delight.
“Way to go, girl! I was starting to think you’d never leave Paradise. Now I’ll get to watch you cruise out of town on the back of a Harley.”
“I’m not cruising anywhere, and certainly not on the back of a Harley.” Raking a hand through her bangs, Lissa attempted a muddled explanation. “This isn’t what it looks like.”
That earned her another hoot.
“Honestly. We just sort of…fell asleep.”
“I’d fall asleep in that man’s lap, too, if he’d sit still long enough for me to climb into it!”
She gave up, submitting helplessly to the pat on the cheek Josephine bestowed on her in parting.
“Paradise is a nice little bit of heaven for dried-up old coots like Charlie and me. You need more. You deserve more. Reach out and grab the gold ring, sweetie.”
Evan pushed the same general advice at her when he emerged from the bathroom a few moments later.
Lissa tried, she really tried, not to notice the fleck of shaving foam he’d missed at the base of his throat. The tiny blob would’ve been a lot easier to ignore if he’d gotten around to buttoning his shirt all the way up before he strolled into the living area. His skin gleamed like bronze through the wrinkled denim.
“Did Josephine leave?”
“Yes.”
Idly he finished the last of the buttons and shoved his shirttails into his jeans. “Have you ever tried her cornflakes hash?” he asked, tipping the cover on the dish to eye the oval-shaped loaf cautiously.
“No, but I can fix you some eggs and toast if you’d rather have something more traditional before you head back to San Diego this morning.”
He tipped her a smile in response to her obvious exploratory probe. “I’m not heading back to San Diego this morning. I’m going into LaGrange with you to scope out your father.”
Ignoring her sudden stiffening, he poked around in her cupboards for the plates.
“Better wash up quick,” he advised. “This stuff doesn’t smell half-bad.”
It smelled like onions, pork chops and cheesy cornflakes. Crazy as it sounded, Lissa’s taste buds had already sat up and taken notice. Her appetite had been off all week…because of the bone-melting heat, she’d determined, not Henderson’s departure from Paradise with his cat-eyed friend.
“About LaGrange. I don’t want to…”
“Go wash up. We’ll talk about it while we eat.”
He accompanied this brisk order with another kiss, this one on lips closed tight over teeth she hadn’t yet brushed. Lissa decided to wait until she finished in the bathroom to tell him she didn’t particularly appreciate his habit of issuing orders like a drill sergeant.
After a quick face-and-teeth scrub, she dragged a comb through her hair, exchanged her tank top for a sleeveless, V-necked T-shirt in a startling hot pink and returned to the kitchen.
“I don’t want to go into LaGrange this morning,” she announced, prepared to do battle if necessary. She needed time to sort out her feelings about the convenience store clerk who just happened to share her last name. A lot of time.
“Okay. I made coffee.”
Thoroughly suspicious at his easy capitulation, she took the mug he passed her and joined him at the table. The hash loaf, she noted, was now missing a good-size chunk at one end.
“I was only going to sneak a taste,” he admitted with a sheepish grin. “One sneak led to another. Josephine has a way with cornflakes.” He spooned generous helpings onto two plates. “Why the heck is she wasting her culinary talent and all those rhinestones in Paradise?”
“She’s in love with Charlie.”
Evan’s eyes widened. The forkful of hash halfway to his mouth stopped in midair.
A smile played at Lissa’s lips. She guessed he was trying to process an image of squat, barrel-chested Charlie and the Widow Jenks in a clinch. The mechanic would stand just about eye-level with Josephine’s magnificent cleavage.
“Is this, uh, a recent development?”
“I think it happened in 1956.” A full-fledged smile slipped out of Lissa. “Josephine told me he bent over to check the water in the radiator of her brand-new ’56 Ford Fairlane. She took one look at his buns and decided right then and there to stay in Paradise instead of driving on to California, as she’d intended.”
Josephine certainly hadn’t hesitated to reach out and grab for the gold, she thought, pushing the hash around on her plate. She’d lost her husband of one week, then found a love that had endured for four decades.
Still ruminating over Josephine’s parting words of advice, Lissa glanced up to surprise a wicked glint in Evan’s eyes.
“Sometimes one glimpse of really world-class buns is all it takes,” he told her solemnly. “The first time you climbed out of your pickup and bent over to pick up my wallet, I thought I’d died and gone to…paradise.”
Heat crawled up Lissa’s neck. She shoveled in a bite of hash and clamped her lips around her fork to keep from having to answer.
After that, they polished off their breakfast in relative silence. Evan finished his long before Lissa, then contented himself with a second cup of coffee and watching her pick her way through the hash. With each moment his gaze rested on her, she found it harder and harder to swallow. Her nerves were tap-dancing against her spine when he broke into her chaotic thoughts.
“So what do you want to do this morning if we’re not going into LaGrange?”
There it was again. That “we.”
“I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I have to finish…”
“That won’t work, Lissa. You can’t shut me out again. Not after spending last night in my arms.”
“Last night was…” She flapped a hand. “A fluke. A temporary weakness.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
She didn’t convince herself any more than her listener. Evan studied her face for a long moment, then pushed away from the table and reached down a hand.
“Let’s put it to the test.”
Lissa stared at his broad palm and blunt-tipped fingers with the same startled fascination as a rabbit coming nose-to-nose with a sidewinder. Surely to goodness he wasn’t proposing another session in the armchair? Or… She gulped. A trip down the hall to the bedroom?
Without warning, her womb contracted. So hard and fast her breath caught. The ripple effect spread like liquid fire through her lower belly. She gulped again and jerked her gaze up to his face.
The wicked glint was back in his eyes, as though he’d read her mind…or more correctly, the silent message her body was screaming at her. Rationally she refused to acknowledge the tight sensations at the juncture of her thighs. Irrationally every atom of her femininity ached to take his hand and lead him to her bed.
“Come with me, Lissa.”
She wet her lips. “Where?”
“You can trust me, sweetheart. Just like you did last night.”
<
br /> Could she trust herself?
“Take my hand.”
It was a test. She knew it. He knew it. Could she reach out, go for the gold? Now that she’d recovered from the awful emptiness learning about her father had caused last night, did she have the courage to walk into Evan’s arms again?
She pulled in a breath. Forced her heart to pump some blood to her frantic brain. Put her hand in his.
He led her from the table toward the hall…but not down the narrow corridor. Instead he opened the front door and flooded the trailer with dazzling sunlight. Still holding her hand, he guided her down the steps. Lissa blinked as morning heat engulfed her, not as intense as it would be in an hour or so, but dry and searing nonetheless.
Wolf scrambled out from under the trailer and lifted his gums in a warning quiver. He couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. Lissa couldn’t, either.
“Here, put this on.”
“What in the world…?”
“We’ll take a long cruise.” He plunked the electric-blue fiberglass helmet on her head and fiddled with the strap. “Blow away the cobwebs from last night and start fresh.”
She couldn’t tell him that she’d already started. That all it took was the feel of his knuckles brushing the underside of her chin to raise instant goose bumps. She remembered all too well the last time his hand had skimmed that particular patch of skin. At the dam. Just before he’d collected that Saturday Afternoon Special.
She was still trying to banish the memory when he slipped on his sunglasses and swung a leg over the saddle. Hauling the Harley upright, he popped its kickstand with his left heel. A flick of the key and a twist of the throttle produced a muscled growl that swiftly morphed into an unmannered roar. Reaching behind him, Evan patted the seat.
“Climb aboard and I’ll show you what this Hawg can do.”
“I’ve seen what it can do,” Lissa retorted, hanging back. “I haven’t forgotten what your back looked like when I picked you up.”
“Will it help if I tell you that was my first and only dive into a ditch in twenty-plus years of biking?”
“Well…”
His white teeth flashed against tanned skin. “Tell you what. If you collect any scrapes or bruises on this ride, I’ll kiss ’em and make ’em well…wherever they are.”
He made the promise with such an outrageous grin that she couldn’t hold back an answering chuckle. The laughter felt so good after the storm of emotions she’d experienced last night that she followed it up with the idiocy of climbing on the black-and-chrome beast.
With an order to Wolf to stay, she fumbled for the footrests and laced her arm around Evan’s waist.
It didn’t take Lissa long to figure out why mature and otherwise intelligent men like Evan Henderson might prefer a motorcycle over a car as a means of transportation. It was the ultimate male fantasy. Freer than the wind. Faster than sex.
The engine throbbed. Vibrations pulsed through spread legs. The wind tore at clothes. The babe on the back seat had to cling to the driver at every turn…particularly since the babe in question had never ridden a motorcycle in her life.
Evan navigated the sloping path down from the trailer, hit the main road and opened the throttle. Like a racing greyhound released from the gate, the bike leaped forward. It took Lissa a few miles to get used to the noisy rumble of the stock pipes, a few miles more to adjust to the sensation of all that lean, mean machine between her legs.
The feel of his back hard and smooth against her front added considerably to the novel experience. The bike didn’t come equipped with a back-rest, so Lissa rode with her hips nestled against his and her arms looped around his waist. She could feel every shift in his muscles, every flex of his thighs.
To her surprise, she soon caught the heady sense of power that came with running fast and low to the ground. They rode south, then west on a two-lane county road, the morning sun behind them and the desert ahead. Giant saguaros stood like sentinels on the rolling ridges. Rarer pipe organ cacti dotted the south-facing slopes. Gluttons for heat and light, the pipe organs bloomed mostly at night, but a few still showed their lavender-white petals. Clumps of prickly pear and cholla made a flashy display of their summer blooms, painting the landscape with splashes of brilliant yellow, red, white and orange.
Evan was right, Lissa thought as the wind teased strands of her hair from the helmet and whipped them around her face. The warmth of the sun on her back, the vast emptiness of the desert, the sense that they were alone in the universe…all combined to blow the cobwebs from her mind.
For the moment at least, the past lay behind her in Paradise. The future shimmered somewhere ahead, distant and unseen. The present was right now, right here…with the man who’d argued and bluffed and pushed his way past her defenses.
After a good half hour or more, he throttled down and slowed to a stop at a pull-off with a panoramic overview of the purple-smudged Castle Dome Mountains. Lissa was ready—more than ready—to swing her leg over the seat, remove her helmet and walk beside him on wobbly legs to the iron railing.
A metal sign attached to the railing provided detailed information about the topography and environment of the area, but Lissa ignored the rusted plate. Her concentration centered on Evan. The set of his shoulders in the wrinkled denim shirt. The strong, clean line of his jaw. The white lines webbing the corners of his eyes.
“What’s the verdict?” he asked with a smile. “Think I can make a biker out of you?”
“I’ll let you know when I work the rubber out of my legs and the squashed bugs out of my skin.”
Grinning, he rested his hips against the rail and reached out to thumb a speck of something off her cheek.
“You look good in squashed bugs.”
“Ugh!” She wrinkled her nose, wet a finger and scrubbed at the spot. “Did I get it?”
“You got it.” Angling his hips, he drew her between his thighs and treated her face to a long, lazy scrutiny. “You look good even without bugs, Lissa.”
His hands rested lightly on her waist. She could feel their weight on the swell of her hip. Feel, too, the strength in his forearms when she curled her hands around the lean muscle.
Before last night, she wouldn’t have allowed herself the pleasure of this contact. Before their ride through the hot, clean desert morning, she would have eased out of this too-intimate embrace and put a safe distance between them.
Now, the cobwebs had cleared and she knew she wanted nothing more of life at this particular moment than his mouth on hers. Taking her courage in both hands, she smiled up at him.
“You look pretty good yourself.”
He cocked a brow. “No gnats decorating my chin?”
“No.”
“No dust caked in the corners of my eyes?”
“Uh-uh.”
“You sure? Maybe you’d better take a closer look.”
The husky thread that wove through his voice sent a thrill down her spine. She expected him to draw her into him, fully anticipated that he would nudge her forward another inch or two and bring their bodies into contact. A few seconds passed before she realized he was waiting for her to take the next, gargantuan step.
Her heart in her throat, Lissa slid her palms up his shirtsleeves. Inched closer. Tangled her fingers at the back of his neck.
“I can’t see a thing wrong from here.”
“Oh, baby,” he got out on a half groan, half laugh. “Neither can I.”
That was all the encouragement she needed. Rising up with a slither of cotton against denim, she angled her mouth to his. Greed burst in her at the first touch. Pleasure followed, swift and sweet.
She could have lost herself in the kiss. The earth could have spun and the sun blazed down until they were both baked as brown as Josephine’s cornflakes casserole and Lissa wouldn’t have noticed. It barely registered on her spinning senses when Evan’s hands glided down and tugged at the hem of her hot pink top.
While his hands worked their ro
ugh magic on her bare back, his mouth traced a line down her throat. She arched her neck, gasping in pleasure as he nipped at the straining cords, then gasped again when his busy hands slid around her ribs to her breasts.
How did he do it? she wondered desperately. How did he flame her skin with just a touch? Ignite needs she hadn’t felt in…in…ever! They surged upward from deep in her belly, speared into her chest, wild and urgent and all consuming. Lissa’s hammering heart beat a desperate message to her brain.
Go for the gold! Just this once.
Let down your guard and grab at that shiny ring.
She wanted to. Sweet heaven above, she wanted to. Shaking with need and nervousness, she cleared her throat.
“Evan.”
“Mmm?”
“How fast does the Hawg go?”
His head lifted. “How fast do you want it to go?”
“Can you get us back to Paradise before either one of us wakes up and realizes how insane this is?”
He went still for three heartbeats, maybe four. Then he scooped her up in his arms, strode back to the bike and plopped her on the rear seat.
“Buckle the helmet and hang on tight, sweetheart. We’re gonna smoke some tar.”
Chapter 12
Later, much later, Lissa would admit that she buckled on the helmet nursing the secret belief that the fire in her veins would cool to a reasonable simmer during the long ride back to the trailer. That sanity would return, and she and Evan would both realize how crazy it would be for them to tumble into bed together.
They hardly knew each other! He was a lawyer, for Pete’s sake, a life-form she had particular cause to loathe. He zipped in and out of Paradise on a whim, disturbing the peace she’d worked so hard to achieve. On top of that, Lissa still hadn’t sorted out her anger and hurt over the news he’d brought her about the man who’d fathered her. The last thing she needed was to complicate her life further by giving in to this insane urge to come apart in Evan’s arms.
The Harder They Fall (Intimate Moments) Page 12