He was silent a moment. “That’s a very generous interpretation.”
“Maybe.” She set her empty teacup on the coffee table and stood. “I’m going to leave you to it,” she announced. She’d said more than enough.
He stood, too. “Thanks for the fish-gutting guidance.”
“Thanks for the fish.”
She clicked her tongue to get Mr. Smith’s attention. When he came to her side she slipped his lead on, then turned to face Oliver again.
There was something she wanted—needed—to say to him before she left. Otherwise she might never have the opportunity to do so and it was definitely something he needed to hear.
“It’s her loss, Oliver. You know that, right?”
“You haven’t met the other guy.”
She wasn’t about to let him shrug off her words with a joke.
“I don’t need to,” she said, holding his gaze. “As you are very rapidly going to discover, there are a lot of women who would give their eyeteeth and probably a couple molars to have a man like you in their life. Don’t let Edie’s mistake become a judgment on you, okay?”
His cheeks were a little pink by the time she’d finished. “Thanks.”
She could feel the heat in her own face but she was glad she’d said it. “I’ll get off my soapbox now. Thanks for a great meal.”
She stepped forward, one hand landing on his shoulder to steady herself as she pressed a kiss to his cheek. It was the second time she’d kissed him like this, the second time she’d felt the rasp of his five-o’clock shadow beneath her lips, and she had to fight the very inappropriate urge to linger over the task.
He smelled good, like warm skin and amber and spices, and his shoulder felt very solid beneath her hand.
She let her hand drop to her side. His hand reached out to catch it before she could withdraw. Their gazes locked as his fingers wove with hers. For a long beat they simply stared at each other.
“Mackenzie Williams,” he said, so softly it was barely more than a whisper.
Then he leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers.
The world stood still. Her heart stuttered in her chest. She forgot to breathe. Then his mouth moved against hers and heat exploded in her belly and breasts and between her thighs. In that fraction of a second she knew how it would be between them—hot and wild and desperate.
It was too much. Too fast, too real, too confronting. She jerked backward so fast she lost her balance and would have fallen over if the door hadn’t been a mere foot behind her. As it was, she cracked the back of her head against it, the pain vibrating through her skull.
“Are you okay?” Oliver asked, reaching out to steady her.
She couldn’t look him in the eye, could barely force herself to lift her gaze to the middle of his chest.
“Yes. Fine, thanks. All good.”
“You didn’t hurt yourself?”
She could feel heat rushing into her face and chest. “No, no. I’m fine. Honestly.”
She reached behind herself and gripped the knob. It twisted beneath her hand, and she stepped around the door and out onto the porch.
“Mackenzie—”
“Good night.”
She didn’t look back as she disappeared into the cold darkness, her mind on one thing and one thing only—escape.
* * *
OLIVER STARED at the empty doorway, trying to work out what the hell had happened.
He’d kissed his first girl when he was fourteen years old. In the twenty-five years between now and then, he’d like to think he’d improved his technique a bit. He’d definitely like to think he was a little smoother, a touch more suave than the sweaty-palmed, horny dude who had led Diane Leeds into the corner at the school dance and stuck his tongue down her throat.
Apparently, however, if tonight was anything to go by—and he figured it was—he had more in common with his fourteen-year-old self than he’d like. Because he’d misread Mackenzie so spectacularly he’d sent her running from the building.
But not before she’d banged her head against the door, she’d been so eager to escape his attentions.
He mouthed a four-letter word and pushed the door shut. The crazy thing was, he’d had no intention of making a move on her when he’d invited her over for dinner tonight. Yes, he was attracted to her, but that didn’t mean he’d been primed for seduction. He’d simply been looking for some good conversation, a bit of company, a few laughs. But then she’d kissed his cheek and he’d looked into her eyes and seen what he thought was awareness—the same awareness he’d been feeling—and it had seemed natural and right and good to kiss her.
Yeah.
Mackenzie had all but left a vapor trail she’d hightailed it out of here so fast.
Good one, Romeo. Excellent work.
Clearly, kissing him had been the last thing on her mind. Not a stunning revelation when he considered that he’d spent the last hour of the evening going on about his ex. Sexy stuff, that. Nothing said Let’s get it on like a bitching session about your failed love life and how you’ve been done wrong.
Oliver let his breath out on a disgusted sigh. Honestly, he wasn’t fit to be out in public.
“Come on, Strudel. Bedtime.”
He patted his thigh and Strudel followed him through the house as he switched off lights. She leaped onto the end of the bed when they got to the bedroom and began sniffing around for the best spot to make camp for the night. He went to brush his teeth.
There was an echo of embarrassed color in his face when he saw his reflection. No surprises there—he’d been in the grip of a full-body blush from the moment Mackenzie had pulled away from him and the uninvited kiss.
Bloody hell, what a night.
He squeezed toothpaste onto his brush and cleaned his teeth with grim determination, unable to escape the live-action replay his brain insisted on feeding him on an endless loop: Mackenzie, jerking away from him, her head hitting the door with a resounding thud.
Stupidly, he’d thought the evening had actually been going okay, too, up until that point. Okay, Edie calling hadn’t been a highlight, but Mackenzie had given him some things to think about, some new perspectives. She’d challenged him and made him laugh and asked all the right questions.
When he’d come back into the living room with dessert to find her dozing by the fire, there had been that moment when she opened her eyes and looked at him and he could have sworn he’d seen desire in her eyes....
But apparently he knew dick about desire.
He was going to have to apologize to her. Preferably tomorrow, before things got too weird between them. She probably wouldn’t be signing up for dinner again anytime soon, but he would kick himself if he’d drawn a line through their burgeoning friendship with his ham-fisted attempt at seduction. Their normal lives might be a thousand miles apart, but she was the most interesting woman—the most interesting person—he’d met in a long time.
Spitting and rinsing, he gave his reflection one last disgusted glare before heading to the bedroom. Strudel looked at him from beneath her eyebrows as he got beneath the covers.
“Yeah, I know. I screwed up.”
Strudel closed her eyes and rested her chin on his shin. He crossed his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling and wondered how a person apologized for an unwanted, unsolicited kiss. On bended knee? Matter-of-factly? Wryly?
It would be great to be able to pull off wryly, but luck hadn’t exactly been running his way lately.
He closed his eyes. He would fix things with Mackenzie tomorrow. If it killed him.
And if he couldn’t... Well, he would rue the day his libido ruined a friendship that already felt pretty damn unique.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MACKENZIE SPENT a good hour mulling over her own ridiculousness after she got home, trying to understand herself.
Oliver had kissed her. He’d looked into her eyes and said her name as though it was a mystery and a wonder to him, and then he’d laid his
mouth against hers and kissed her. It had been a good kiss, too, full of potential and promise.
And she had backed off so quickly she’d smacked her head against the door.
She’d never backed away from anything in her life. She was a grab-life-by-the-scruff-of-the-neck kind of woman. A carpe diem kind of woman. And she liked sex. Not that she’d had much opportunity to enjoy it lately, all her energies having been focused on her recovery, but that was beside the point. She also liked Oliver. A lot.
She’d spent half the evening ogling his thighs and admiring his handsome face and generally basking in his reflected glory. She’d dressed nicely for him and worried about her limp hair and lack of makeup. Yet when he kissed her she’d been so overwhelmed by the experience that her only panicky thought had been to escape.
She winced as she pulled on her pajamas, thinking about how he must be feeling right now. God, she was such an ass-hat.
She climbed into bed and punched her pillow a few times. She needed to apologize to him, of course. Somehow she would have to make it clear to him that her out-of-proportion reaction was all about her and had nothing to do with him. She’d have to explain that under normal circumstances she would have been all over what he was offering.
The problem was, she was having trouble locating normal right at the moment. Her career was in limbo, her body a work in progress. She’d lost sight of so many of the things that used to be important to her, that used to define her. Maybe that was why she’d reacted so strongly. Maybe some deep, wise part of her brain had understood that she had enough on her plate right now without helping herself to a big slice of Oliver, as well. Maybe that was what her precipitous retreat had been about.
Maybe.
Not entirely convinced, she continued to chew on the subject until her tired brain finally loosened its grip and allowed her to slip into sleep.
She woke several hours later feeling hot and oddly unsettled. She flipped her pillow in search of the cool underside, remnants from her dreams licking at the edges of her mind.
A warm bed. A hot body. A man whispering in her ear. The insistent, wet pull of a mouth at her breasts. The delicate, questing slide of a hand between her legs...
Desire throbbed low in her belly. She realized with drowsy surprise that she was wet with need, her nipples hard against the soft fabric of her pajamas. She may have retreated from Oliver in real life, but in her dreams she’d apparently welcomed him with open arms.
How...confusing.
Still half-asleep, she allowed the images from her dream to wash over her. Warmth turned into heat as she remembered the dream. Oliver’s strong, dexterous hands roving her body. Cupping her breasts. Sliding down her belly.
She stirred against the sheets. Her heart was racing, her breathing shallow. It had been a long time since she’d felt this way, a long time since she’d thought of her body as anything more than a damaged machine she needed to rebuild and repair.
Tentative, she slid her hand onto her stomach. Behind her closed eyelids, she imagined it was Oliver’s hand as her fingers slipped beneath the waistband of her pajamas. It had been a while since she’d done this, too, but she wasn’t about to question the urgings of her body. She felt too liquid and needy and ready.
She allowed herself to think about the way Oliver’s face had looked tonight, lined by firelight. She thought about the way the soft, worn denim of his jeans had showcased his long, strong thigh muscles. She thought about the breadth of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw.
She remembered the taste of him, the warm, firm press of his lips against hers. She let her imagination fly as her hand slid lower—and stilled as her fingers found the ridge of scar tissue that ran between her hips and round to her right buttock.
The fantasy unrolling in her mind stalled. Her eyes opened. Suddenly, she was wide-awake.
Funny, but in the scene in her mind, her body was whole. Her hair was long, a sensual sweep over her shoulders, and she was confident and strong and empowered.
That woman didn’t exist anymore. Certainly that body didn’t. If something happened with Oliver, it would be this body he would sleep with, not the one in her imagination. There would be no silken, sexy hair to drape over his body and hers. There would be other issues to contend with, too. Physical limitations. She’d broken her pelvis and her hip, after all, and she still didn’t have a normal range of movement.
She freed her hand from her pajamas, all the urgent heat of her fantasy draining away as she understood—finally—why she’d retreated so strongly, so instinctively from Oliver’s kiss.
She was scared.
Scared that her new body wouldn’t be desirable to a man once he saw it in all its scarred, stitched and stapled glory. Scared that sex would be different, maybe even bad, thanks to her injuries. Scared that she didn’t know how to be sexy in her new body. Or how to be confident or sassy or brave.
Everything in her wanted to reject the admission. She’d built a career, a life, out of being brave and bolshie and ballsy. She didn’t do afraid.
But she knew she would be doing herself a disservice if she pretended otherwise. She needed to face this head-on, the way she’d faced learning to walk again, the way she’d faced so many of the challenges in her postaccident world.
Very deliberately, she retraced the path beneath her pajamas. She found the scar on her belly by touch, following it with her fingertips, absorbing the hard smoothness of it. There was no denying that it was not a pretty, delicate thing. Where once her belly had been flawless and soft, it was now bisected. The section where the ridge of tissue curled over her hip was puckered, an artifact of the healing process that the doctors had assured her would become less obvious with time. In broad daylight, it was nothing short of shocking, a violent slash across her body. It had saved her life, though, this slash. The surgeons had pieced her hip and pelvis back together and removed her damaged spleen and repaired her liver via it. Without it, she would be dead.
The same went for the mess on her shoulder. She ran the fingers of the opposite hand over the scar tissue there, reading the history of her injuries with her fingertips. Without this scar, she wouldn’t have the use of her shoulder and arm. Her life would be infinitely more complex and difficult. Yes, it was messy and ugly, thanks to the postoperative infection that had required an extra surgery to rectify, but the bottom line was that her arm and shoulder worked.
Finally, she lifted her hand to her hair. Her fingers found the scar on her scalp unerringly, tracing the wicked curve of it across the front of her head. This scar had enabled the surgeons to repair her fractured skull and stop her brain from swelling and damaging itself. Without it, she would be lost. Pure and simple, the best part of herself—the very essence of Mackenzie Williams—damaged beyond recognition or recall.
She let her hands rest on her belly again, palms flat. Probably it was only human to be self-conscious about the changes her injuries had wrought in her body. After all, most women had been trained and indoctrinated from a young age to find fault with their own appearance. It was practically a national pastime. But she’d worked hard for this body. She’d fought alongside the doctors to keep it alive. She’d struggled against pain and expectation to become strong again. She’d survived and thrived in this body, and she refused to be ashamed of it.
A surge of defiance curled her hands into fists. If she wound up getting naked with Oliver and he balked at her scars, then so be it. He would have revealed something about himself that it would be important and good to know before she made the mistake of allowing him inside her body. And if he didn’t...well, she’d cheated them both out of what had promised to be an amazing experience when she ran away from him tonight.
Next time, she promised herself. The next time Oliver kissed her, she would hang on to the pleasure and push away her doubts and insecurities. She would see this thing through.
Except, of course, that Oliver is about as likely to kiss you again as fly to the moon on the back of a winged
pig.
She closed her eyes as she remembered the expression on his face after she’d retreated from him. A man would have to be pretty damned insensitive or just plain deluded to risk that kind of rejection again—and Oliver was neither of those things.
Which meant if she was ever going to kiss him again, she would have to be the one to initiate it.
She made a sound in the back of her throat. As much as it ran against the grain to admit it, the thought of taking the initiative with Oliver, of being the aggressor, made her feel dizzy with anxiety.
She stared at the ceiling, momentarily filled with despair. Not so long ago, making a move on a man like Oliver would have been an exciting challenge. Right now, it seemed scary and fraught with peril. Everything after the accident had been hard, but she hadn’t expected sex and desire and romance to fall under that heading. Perhaps stupidly, she’d assumed that that part of her life would work as it always had. She was nearly forty, after all. Hardly an ingenue.
Maybe it really is a case of simply not being ready. Maybe you need to give yourself a break. Maybe being nervous and scared and self-conscious is only a stage you need to go through, like all the other stages of rehab.
She sighed and rolled onto her belly. Sometimes, the sensible voice in her head was simply too damn cool and rational and pragmatic.
Burrowing her head into the pillow, she closed her eyes and once again sought the oblivion of sleep.
* * *
OLIVER WOKE with the knowledge that he needed to apologize to Mackenzie at the top of his mind. For five minutes he lay in bed constructing the right words and phrases in his head, then he rose and headed for the shower. The sooner he got his self-appointed mission out of the way, the better.
It wasn’t until he was dressed and in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil that he registered it was still dark outside.
The Other Side of Us (Harlequin Superromance) Page 12