And yet it wasn’t. His knuckle brushing her finger, the sudden heat in her eyes that put the lady in the red dress on the cover of that book to shame, made blood that had been running way too cold through his veins heat. He could suddenly feel the beat of his own heart and see her own pulse going crazy in the hollow of her throat.
Slowly, he reminded himself, but then was amazed how much discipline it took to move away from her. She looked nonplused when he rinsed out the dishcloth, put it in the sink, then took off his jacket, hung it on the back of a chair, sat at her tiny kitchen table.
She looked down at the tray she was getting ready. “I was going to bring this into the living room.”
“I’m a kitchen table kind of guy,” he said.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Nothing sexual,” he told her, “unfortunately.”
As he had hoped, she went scarlet. What he wasn’t prepared to deal with was his own sudden image of her. And him. And that kitchen table. Which did not look nearly sturdy enough to handle that kind of activity.
Look at her cheeks, man! She can’t handle that kind of activity, either! Yet. And that one tiny word, yet, almost swamped the discipline he was trying so hard to achieve.
“Do you have a deck of cards?” He was aware his voice was faintly hoarse.
“Cards,” she repeated, and then she scowled at the tray she’d been making, obviously flustered. Apparently she thought they were going to sit in her parlor with their pinkies out trying to think of things to say to one another. “Cards?”
“Playing cards. I’ll teach you how to play Ninety-Nine.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “And is that something sexual?”
It delighted him that she was always trying to throw out these tentatively racy lines, as if she talked about sex at one in the morning in her kitchen all the time, when she didn’t have a hope of pulling it off.
And at the same time, her words had the same effect on him as his knuckle brushing her forefinger. The tension in the room was becoming supercharged.
He contemplated that with amazement. Neither of them even had their clothes off! Not even a button undone at her prim little throat. It wasn’t even likely to happen! Yet. He felt as if he’d just run the Boston Marathon, his heart was beating so hard.
“No,” he said, “Unfortunately.” He warned himself not to play with fire, but who could resist playing with fire? “But if you’d prefer a little poker for clothing items, I’m game.”
She stared at him. She licked her lips. He really wished she wouldn’t do that. Then she glanced at the door. Contemplating running? Or going and changing into something more comfortable?
Slowly, he reminded himself sternly.
He laughed, hoping she wouldn’t hear the uneasiness, the temptation, the wickedness. “I’m kidding you.”
Ah, Kirsten. Always could be counted on to surprise. Because he had thought she would look relieved. Instead she looked indignant—as if she wasn’t good enough to play strip poker. He looked at the button at her throat. One hand, he thought. Just to get that button undone. He gave himself a mental slap. Don’t even go there, buster.
This was a good girl. The kind his mother had always dreamed of for him. Be worthy.
“At Christmas, my family sat around the kitchen table and played cards.” And not any evil varieties, either, he reminded himself. “Sometimes about fifty of us, sometimes just my brother, my mom and dad and me.”
It was an opening for her to say what her family traditions were at Christmas, but she was now carrying the coffee tray, tongue caught between her teeth as though her life depended on not spilling one more drop of cream. She set the things on the table, whirled away from him, pawed through a drawer, came out with a deck of cards looking amazed and pleased with herself that she possessed such a thing.
It was a souvenir deck, the wrapper not even off. He opened the cards, shuffled, while she poured coffee and then sat down. He was not unaware that Miss Pure-as-the-driven-snow kept glancing at his hands. She had definitely felt that tingle when they had touched, too.
She sat down, he dealt the cards, explained the values of each and the game to her. She caught on quickly, began to loosen up, just as he had hoped she would. He was able to get his mind out of the gutter, which he had hoped he would. By the third hand she was laughing, and he was focusing on the game.
“Don’t even try to cheat,” he warned her.
“I would never cheat!”
No, probably not. “My dad cheated,” he said, smiling remembering. “He was so competitive. He literally would cheat to win. A full-grown man, successful, mostly mature, could not stand to be beaten at cards.”
“That’s adorable.”
“Yeah. My brother, on the other hand, always had to play for something—quarters if my mom was around, anything else if she wasn’t.”
“Such as?”
“Golf tees, chocolate-covered raisins, his ball cap collection. We played for condoms on more than one occasion.”
Had he deliberately made her blush? Of course! But the price was his mind was right back in the gutter, right on the top button of her blouse. Think of your mother!
“And my mom,” he said, with a shake of his head, pretending he didn’t even notice Kirsten was choking on her coffee. “Hopeless at cards. Too busy making sure the chip bowl was full and the coffee topped up to concentrate. She never got the face cards right. Always played a Queen for a Jack. Nobody ever told her, though, because she’d get so excited when she thought she was going to win.”
It was the first time remembering them had been like this: like entering their embrace, feeling the love that had been their lifelong gift. He knew he was making a choice, right then, right there, to live in the love rather than in the pain of those final moments. He knew he was making the choice deliberately, and he knew he was making it so that he would be worthy of loving again.
“Want to see their pictures?” he asked.
“Oh, yes.”
He took out his wallet, realized he had not looked at these particular pictures for a long time. He passed her the one of Brian.
“He looks just like you,” Kirsten said, and then touched the picture with gentle fingertips, as though she could touch his brother’s face.
“If he looks just like me, how come he always got the girls?”
“I don’t believe you.”
He grinned, passed her the picture of his mom.
“Oh, Michael, I know exactly what she was like. Chocolate chip cookies and homemade cold remedies. Lots of scolding, too, I bet.”
“My right earlobe is still longer than my left one from her pulling it so frequently. See?”
Kirsten studied his earlobe. “I can clearly see.”
Unfortunately it was just like touching her hand, just like even thinking of her and that kitchen table, or her and a couple of hands of poker. The air was suddenly charged, as if she was nibbling on his ear, instead of just looking at it.
He looked back at his wallet, remembered, with effort, what he was doing. “And this is my dad.”
“Handsome, hmm? Runs in your family.”
He’d always known that. That he was good-looking, and that women usually thought so. Still, hearing it from her, he could feel himself puffing up dangerously.
If she looked at his ear again, there was no telling what might happen next!
But she didn’t. She looked at the pictures for a long time, studied them, passed them back. “I’m sorry I’ll never meet them.”
“Yeah,” he said, relieved by the change in mood. “Me, too.” Then he put the pictures away and dealt another hand of cards. He taught her how to shuffle, but she bent the cards so badly while she was learning that it was like playing with a marked deck.
An ideal time to up the ante. “Want to play for something?” he asked.
“Like what?”
Kisses. “I have a dirty mind. You think of something.”
The a
dorable flustered look, the blush and then, as if she had a few ideas she didn’t want him to know about, either, she said, with way too much enthusiasm, “Tea!”
He felt a sigh within himself. Tea. That was the kind of girl he was dealing with. Totally new. And yet refreshing, too.
“I’ll cover your tea with a—” She was holding her breath, terrified he’d say condom. “A quarter,” he said. “I only have about two bucks worth, so take it easy on me.”
An hour later he found himself in possession of a mountain of bright individually wrapped tea bags with names like Mango Madness, Blueberry Beauty, Peach Passion.
And he resigned himself to the fact he’d succeeded. He’d been a gentleman. The only passion he was going to see tonight was the peach-tea-bag variety.
He stretched, reached for his jacket, stuffed the pockets full of tea bags. “I’ve got to go, Kirsten. Big day tomorrow. Impossible Dream Number 25, an igloo for Ishmael.”
She walked him to the door, the ease that had developed during the card game evaporated from her. At the door she started looking everywhere but at him. He made it easy for her. He reached down, took her chin and kissed her lightly on her mouth.
It was just like touching her hand, only a hundred times worse. It made him want to taste her, to touch her, to know her as completely as a man can know a woman.
“Good night,” he said, and bolted out the door.
It wasn’t until he was wiping yet more snow off his vehicle that he realized something troubling about the evening: he had given her everything.
And she had given him nothing in return. He didn’t know one thing about her family, or their traditions. He still didn’t know what she wanted for Christmas. He turned and looked at her window. She was watching him, and even though it embarrassed her that she’d been caught, she waved.
He lifted his hand and waved back. But he wondered, why couldn’t she tell him the truth? Why was it she could make Christmas so special for everyone else, all the while she couldn’t accept one single thing for herself?
Kirsten watched until he drove away. Had she, somewhere in her heart, hoped for a moment like the ones they had just shared?
Well, not exactly like that. Hadn’t she hoped, that despite her determination to make decisions rationally, that he would force her hand, sweep her away? That he would come, like this, in the night, only masterful, take her in his arms, kiss her until she couldn’t breathe? Or think?
Shut off her mind, a mind that was frightened, and scarred and that demanded complete safety and security.
Instead he had played cards with her, told her about his family, gone slowly with her, as if she was a teenager on her first date. Or maybe even worse than that. Maybe Michael was relegating her to the dreaded position of friend .
But whatever he was doing, Michael Brewster had not treated her like a mature woman. Or at least not the way she expected he would treat a mature woman. Even a woman as wary of love, feelings, as she was didn’t want a man like Michael treating her like his best buddy.
Though she was far from knowing what she did want from their relationship, she knew it wasn’t that!
And she knew what she was going to do about it: what any red-blooded all-American girl would do about it. She was going shopping.
Michael Brewster was going to take one look at her at the volunteer party and know she was as grown-up as he was. She thought of the way his lips had tasted, and how they made her feel, the way her heart had leaped at the merest brush of his hand. And she wondered if it was sensible for a girl like her to be playing with a force like that. And for once in her life she didn’t want to be sensible!
She had felt something shift in him that night when he had told her about his family and their terrible accident. There was a new warmth in him, an openness. It made him even more attractive than before—which underscored her own doubts about her suitability for him.
But could she not, just like Cinderella, have her one night, her one moment, before she had to live with the reality, again, that she did not trust love?
Kirsten found exactly the dress for a girl determined to have her one night as Cinderella.
Right in the middle of the store, on a raised platform, with a spotlight shining on it was a dress.
No, not really a dress, but a dream.
Red, it swept to the floor, in a shimmering wave of color. The line of it was intensely simple: form-fitting, a plunging bodice, a nonexistent back, a skirt that began to subtly flare out at the hip, until where it touched the floor it was a swirl of pure cranberry sensuality.
Kirsten knew as soon as she saw it that she had to have it. She could be transformed from frumpy to glamorous in one night, a Cinderella story, from ordinary girl to princess with the wave of, well, a magic credit card.
This was the kind of dress that opened a man’s eyes, and that took a woman from being relegated to the dreaded friend position to something quite different.
A dress like this invited a woman to play with her deepest secrets, to reveal her sexiest self. A dress like this would make a man absolutely helpless.
When she put it on, the dress did everything Kirsten had known it would and more. By the time she had shoes and some simple jewelry to go with it, she was over her whole Christmas budget by three hundred dollars.
And she simply did not care. The dress banished Kirsten the-practical, Kirsten-pure-as-the-driven-snow, Kirsten-as-Ms.-Santa. The dress welcomed a different Kirsten: bold, sensuous, mature, irresistible .
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ten days until Christmas…
MICHAEL had not worn the tux since his friend Brad’s wedding, and now that he was wearing it he felt distinctly stupid.
That’s where love got you , he thought. Dressed in a monkey suit, at the florist’s picking up a corsage. Tonight was the volunteer Christmas party, held in one of the smaller ballrooms of the very classy Treemont Hotel. The hotel donated the entire affair to the hardworking volunteers of the Secret Santa Society.
There certainly wouldn’t be room at their office to have a party. Every space, floor to ceiling, was now stuffed with gifts. It was giving Michael a headache trying to think how they were going to get all that stuff on the sleigh.
And that wasn’t all that was giving him a headache. Kirsten was mystifying. He’d told her his entire life story, and he felt as if he knew less about her every day. She didn’t open up about anything, not even with hints. Was it possible she didn’t feel as strongly about him as he did about her? Sheesh, he’d even managed to get her Knight in Shining Armor for Christmas.
That thought, that she might not care about him to the same extent he cared about her, clouded his mind as he drove up to her apartment.
But when he saw her, his doubt fled.
A woman did not dress like this for a man she did not care about! He stood staring at the woman who had opened the door to him, stunned.
It was not the Kirsten he knew from the Secret Santa Society, adorably unaware of her own attractions, or blissfully hiding them under a sweatshirt six sizes too large.
No, this Kirsten was gorgeous, her hair upswept, makeup making her eyes look huge, her cheekbones look glorious and her mouth look absolutely irresistible.
Little diamond gumdrops drew his eyes to her ears, and then the creamy, lovely lines of her throat, the dipping sensuality of the neckline of that dress. The dress hugged her gorgeous feminine lines—more gorgeous than he could have guessed, and he had done plenty of guessing. More gorgeous than he had assumed even when he had caught glimpses of her taut tummy, her fine long legs.
He felt like a schoolboy as he stood there gawking at her. “You look stunning,” he finally said. “Breathtaking. Ohmygod gorgeous!”
“Stop it,” she said, and when she blushed he was relieved to see his old Kirsten right there, just below that extremely sophisticated surface.
“If you want a guy to stop it, you don’t wear that,” he teased her. “Were you inspired by that book Lulu lent y
ou?”
That was better! He could get her cheeks to match that dress if he worked on it.
He had not told her about the corsage, but the florist had suggested white if he didn’t know the color of her dress. Now, he found himself fumbling with the box. Finally he had the corsage in his hand and was glaring at the bodice of the dress.
“Oh, boy,” he muttered. “Awkward moment.”
She laughed, her blush deepened. He took the corsage and the pin, and touched the fabric of that dress which was slippery and soft and sensual. He could feel the soft swell of her breast, even though he was trying desperately not to. If he got any hotter, he was going to have to ask for a pitcher of ice water before they left!
Cara Colter Page 12