by Sally Felt
Why was it so hard?
Kim hadn’t made promises. She wouldn’t expect him to—unless they were dating. Which they shouldn’t. For pity’s sake, she’d slept with the man once and was trembling for more. What would she be like after actually dating him?
For sure, she shouldn’t stay here at his place where she risked being seduced by the candlelight and escalating favors he readily offered. Sleeping on the couch in his own home. Asking his brother for help.
He climbed walls with his bare hands and used a video camera to search a sewer pipe. He didn’t get along with his own family. How could she understand a man like that?
She splashed water on her face and emerged from the bathroom every bit as confused as she had been going in.
Kim had left the louvered blinds open. Between the candles, the lightning and light from nearby high-rise buildings that hadn’t been affected by the power outage, there was plenty of light to see Kim had changed into dark, loose pants and a white muscle shirt. He gave her a hanger so her suit might be wearable in the morning and didn’t stare at the way his t-shirt caught on her hips, both of which she appreciated. The shirt was smaller than she’d expected, but then, the last man’s t-shirt she’d worn had been Steven’s.
It covered her. It was soft. It was Kim’s. It would do just fine.
Kim had thrown a sheet over the loveseat and he held a chenille afghan in his hand. For all she loved he was making the gesture, there was no way he could be comfortable there.
“You’re too tall,” she said. “Let me have the sofa.”
He shook his head. “I’ve slept in smaller tents.”
“This is your home.”
“You are my guest.”
And with that, she had to let it go. She respected the role of host too completely to do otherwise. She climbed into the big bed while Kim moved from dish to dish, blowing out the candles. She wondered what sort of wish he might make, or whether his family even did that sort of thing.
His family. “Is he going to help?” she asked. “Your brother, I mean?”
“Of course. He’ll be by in the morning. We’ll go to your house in force.”
Kim had become a lean silhouette at the foot of the bed. It was easier to see his white shirt than his face. The room smelled of smoke and hot wax. Nothing about this night seemed real except for the moments Kim had had his arms around her.
His silhouette disappeared behind the loveseat where he presumably tried to arrange his long frame for the night. Earlier, she’d been relieved to have his ear, his shoulder, his help. Now she was relieved he was saving her from herself. If he’d continued kissing her, she’d be wrapped around him. And then where would they be? Her more attached than ever—unless she decided he was a pig after all, going for a sexual opportunity he’d promised not to pursue.
Thanks to his gallantry, they’d get a good night’s rest instead. Imagine—a man with strength of character, a man with more strength than her.
“Thank you, Kim,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
She lay on her back in his bed, looking at the odd shadows on the exposed industrial works in the ceiling. “Tell me about him? Kerry?”
“Family man, generous guy. You’ll love him. Everyone does.”
“It’s nice to hear you say that, but I thought you might help me understand how he got on your bad side. I mean, it’s just us here, in the dark. You can be honest.”
Fabric rustled beyond the foot of the bed as Kim made another, unseen adjustment. “Kerry always knew he’d take over his father’s business. He likes certainty. He likes plans to be checked and double-checked. So it made him nuts to see me graduate high school without having diagrammed a life for myself.
“He said if I’d go to college, he’d pay for it.”
Generous was putting it mildly. And Isabelle couldn’t see the problem with a man trying to help his kid brother prepare for the future. But she’d asked for Kim’s confidence and it seemed rude to contradict him.
“After the first semester, he told me my grades had failed to impress him and started checking up on me, even calling my girlfriend to see how much I’d been studying. After the second, he called a summit to discuss my major and draw up plans for improving my academics in the fall.”
Well, calling the girlfriend was intrusive. She’d give him that much.
“What happened?” Isabelle asked.
Kim’s laugh was harsh and humorless. “I told him to keep his money. Dropped out. Apprenticed as a plumber, became his worst nightmare.”
Time to turn the mood to something more restful. “His worst nightmare is to have a plumber in the family? Strikes me as a very good thing.” She smiled as she said it. He wouldn’t be able to see it, but it should color her voice.
“Dropout, blue collar, working stiff.” His clipped words defined the sharp line he drew between himself and his brother.
“I’m a working-stiff dropout too, if it helps,” she said, then wondered why she had. Though it was technically true, she never thought of herself in those terms.
“And Kerry didn’t need to hover like that,” she added. “I mean, he’s not your father. And if you didn’t ask for his help…”
“Exactly!”
She could hear his relief at being validated. What would it be like to live in the shadow of a successful older sibling, subject to his well-meaning charity? She liked gifts as well as the next person, but she had her pride.
“Thank you again for calling him. I hope you don’t have cause to regret it.”
“Really. Don’t worry about it. I hope it helps.”
Minutes passed in silence and lightning continued to bathe the room with staccato blasts of blue-white light. Kim had said he’d slept in smaller tents. Isabelle hadn’t slept in a tent since her Girl Scout days in middle school. It had been fun, then. Maybe it could be fun again, with the right company. Of course, Kim probably camped way high up on mountains or something.
More minutes passed without sleep. Occasional sounds at the end of the bed convinced her Kim wasn’t sleeping either. Well, how could he, tall as he was?
“Kim?”
“Yes?”
Damn. She was right. Isabelle sat up but still couldn’t see over the back of the loveseat, couldn’t see him. “Sleep in the bed,” she said. She heard him draw breath to argue and overrode him. “I’m not sleeping and I won’t sleep as long as I know you’re not sleeping.”
“What?”
“Get in the bed. Please.” She blushed at her word choice, but Kim wouldn’t be able to see that in the dark. His silhouette appeared at last. He materialized into white muscle shirt on shadowed flesh and dark, indistinct, pants-covered legs. She pulled back the covers in invitation. He slipped in.
Electricity slid through her body as if the bedding had carried a charge from the friction of his body onto the sheet. Then, as the covers settled over them, she could smell him, a subtle scent that made her think about last night—made her want to taste his skin.
Maybe asking him to bed had been a bad idea.
No. She could do this. They were grown-ups, both of them clothed, and it was a big bed. No reason why flesh should ever touch flesh. “There,” she said, “now we can both sleep.” Her voice sounded so sure, and yet she turned her back to him and faced the window to minimize the chances of catching his scent again. She only had so much willpower.
“Good night, Isabelle,” Kim said.
“Good night, Kim.”
She woke with her head on his chest, her arm draped possessively over his warm body. The storm seemed to have ended. It was still very dark.
It wasn’t like her to snuggle in her sleep. If she had gotten all the touching her body had wanted before going to bed, she likely would have left him alone. As it was, she clearly couldn’t trust herself to share a bed with Kim Martin.
She lifted her head from the warm softness of his shirt and eased away from the hard whipcord body beneath it. When she saw the w
ay shadows pooled in the architectural perfection of his face, she nearly lost her resolve, but somehow, she managed to slink from the bed without waking him and reorient herself in the relative safety of the loveseat. With the chenille afghan to make it feel cozy, it wasn’t bad at all. Except for not having a sexy, exciting man in it, a man who had every advantage here tonight and yet wasn’t pressing any of them.
Kim could be relationship material after all if they made it to morning with their clothes on. And if there were no smarmy platitudes, like the kind Steven had used, and Daniel before him, she’d know Kim deserved something better than what he’d seen from her. A little of her heart. A helping of trust to go along with her lust.
She only had to make it until morning.
* * * * *
Kim woke alone, which made it easier to resist rolling over and taking Isabelle into his arms and kissing her until she agreed to stay a week, which was the first thing that had entered his head on waking. Seemed likely she was in the bathroom. He debated staying where he was until she was through in there—maybe she would come back to bed—and cashed out his last willpower chit by getting to his feet instead. He was nearly to the kitchen when he realized Isabelle hadn’t been in the bathroom. She was asleep on the loveseat.
Had he done something to her last night, something he didn’t remember? He hoped not. He needed to have kept that promise if he were going to be someone she could believe in.
Someone she could love.
The idea scared him a little less in the morning light, a welcome surprise. It didn’t hurt that Isabelle looked both safe and comfortable. Well, safe in the sense she hadn’t had to stay in her recently-broken-into home. With her legs bared all the way up to rich, plum-colored panties he wouldn’t be seeing if the orange t-shirt hadn’t hiked up and the blanket hadn’t fallen to the floor, she didn’t look safe from him. She looked curvy and soft and warm in the morning light.
And comfortable. And asleep. He picked up the afghan and draped it over her. He must have had one more willpower chit than he’d thought.
He used the bathroom, then started some coffee. He didn’t have a thing in the refrigerator that could count as breakfast food. Leftover delivery, a jar of salsa, some beer, some bottled water and a bottle of stuffed olives left by a past girlfriend who’d been on a martini kick. Most mornings, he’d have a power bar and a banana and call it done. Today he didn’t even have any bananas. He hadn’t expected to have Isabelle here. He should run out and get them something, but she woke before he found the will to leave.
Remembering how he’d startled her last night in the lobby, Kim let her be as she sat up and got her bearings. When she seemed to both see and focus on him leaning against the kitchen counter, he said, “Good morning, beautiful.”
She ran a hand through her hair and laughed. She did a double take at the windows. “Hey, it stopped raining.”
She stood up, a corner of the afghan in either hand. As she faced the window, she treated him to one of her remarkable stretches, arching her back, her hands slowly rising. The afghan rose too, preventing Kim from seeing whether the t-shirt was exposing additional creamy flesh, but her silhouette was easy to see through the blanket, backlit by the window. Isabelle Caine welcomed the day with arms outstretched and head thrown back in a giant yawn, a lioness ready for a day of hunting. Magnificent. He hoped to see her bring down the jackass who seemed bent on making her life hell, maybe even help if she’d let him.
“Is that coffee?”
While he was dreaming, she’d come nearer. Deliciously nearer, and without the afghan to hide her still very bare legs. “Yes,” he said. He even managed to get out a couple of clean cups. “If you need cream, you’ll have to give me a minute to run to the mechanics shop next door. If we’re lucky, they might even have donuts I could steal.”
“It smells great,” she said, sounding happily muzzy with sleep. It made her entirely too sexy, especially wearing that half-smile as she inhaled deeply and began to weave drunkenly, her muscles not yet fully coordinated. She grabbed at his shirt for support, fell against him and sighed.
He couldn’t make himself push her away, but until he was sure she was operating on her own, he couldn’t cuddle, either. So he reached over and around her to pick up and pour the coffee, letting her continue to lean against him.
“Thank you,” she said, accepting the cup he offered.
For a time, they stood hip to hip at the kitchen counter, blowing on hot coffee and sipping. Easy. Right. Comfortable. But it was only an illusion with seductively orange breasts. They hadn’t even slept side by side, and he needed to know more about that. “You were on the couch.”
“Mmm.”
How to ask this. “I didn’t—I mean, I wasn’t a bad host, was I?”
She looked at him quite seriously, frowning. He started to sweat.
Her mouth formed an “O” and her forehead cleared. “You’ve been a wonderful host and a perfect gentleman.”
He relaxed.
She kissed him.
He tensed, confused and more than a little concerned. He was officially out of willpower. If she meant this as an “I’m so glad we’re friends” kind of kiss, he was screwed.
She was frowning again. “And you’ve changed your mind?” she asked.
“About what, Isabelle?”
“Wanting to date.”
“I have not changed my mind. I haven’t even aired it out on a chair overnight.”
She snorted. She wrapped her arms around him and rubbed her cheek against his chest. It might not be as recognizably erotic as her stretching against him in bed the other night had been, but he wasn’t just coming off the best sex of his life here, so its rating got a lift, so to speak—which she had to recognize, given the way she was pressing against him.
So he was astonished to hear himself say, “I’m confused. You said you’d changed your mind. About sleeping with me.” Since when had he become Willpower Man?
“I did? Oh, I did. Can I change my mind again?”
Did that mean yes or no? It was hard to think with her this near. “How ‘bout I just shut up?” He slid his fingers into her hair and brushed his thumb over her jaw.
“Good idea.” She seemed to find his mouth interesting. She put down her coffee and took his away from him. She continued to watch his mouth as her fingers made a tickly trail from the hollow of his throat to the “V” of his undershirt. She tugged until he could no more have resisted kissing her than he could defy gravity.
Luckily, that seemed to be exactly what she wanted.
He took her in his arms. He took her to bed. He kissed her until she squirmed and rolled and tried to get away. He learned he could take one of her delicate ears entirely into his mouth and that it made her laugh. He learned she didn’t like him to touch her breasts, but loved to have his mouth on her. He learned his fingers were far more welcome in the soft, molten folds between her legs. He learned a wider range of the sounds of her ecstasy and hearing them only sharpened his hunger to hear more.
And when at last he was buried deep in her body, embraced by the liquid heat of her, he learned his own ecstasy seemed to have no limits. That Isabelle Caine could take him on an unimaginably scenic climb that made him want to weep even as he threw himself against her in a primitive, bone-crushing dance.
He lay beside her, drenched, spent, euphoric. Wishing he never had to close his eyes so he wouldn’t miss a second of her special beauty in the morning light.
Damn.
So this was love.
Chapter Thirteen
Isabelle tingled as if her blood were laughing, dancing, getting gloriously, messily drunk. Kim lay just barely beside her, the two of them still pressed together, both still so heated and slick it was hard to say where her skin ended and his began.
Mere moments earlier, it had been impossible.
Kim was unquestionably the most fun she’d ever had in bed. Imaginative, silly, thorough—very thorough—and infectious in his enth
usiasm. And yet, when her head lolled his direction and she saw the way he was looking at her, laughter was the farthest thing from her mind. It wasn’t silly, that look. Wistful, maybe. Tired, probably. Tender? Tender seemed a fair choice for the depth and stillness in his beautiful, ringed eyes.
Fair or not, it caught in her chest and made her heart skip a beat. She wanted nothing more than to lie here and have him look at her like that all day. She kissed his calloused palm with as much warmth as she could spare without choking on emotion. He smelled like her, tasted like her. He could probably say the same of her.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, touching her lips with rough fingertips.
“How amazing it is that two people as different as we are can lose our boundaries so completely.”
“Are we so different, Isabelle?”
She laughed at the idea they might be the same, she and a man who danced on walls, taught kids to take on risky adventures and lived in a condo with no room to entertain friends or even a real kitchen.
Smiling softly, likely a sign he would soon drop off to sleep, he said, “I’ll prove it. We’ll go slacklining. It’ll make you crazy, and I kind of suck at it, but you’ll get a taste of why I love climbing. We’ll get dirty in the great outdoors. Laugh ‘til it hurts. And guaranteed, no heights.”
“Sounds horrible,” she said, grinning. “It’s a date.”
“At last, a date!” He glanced heavenward as if in thanks and pulled her close for a lingering kiss.
At last, a good guy. A nice, unbelievably sexy, good guy.
And, mmm, so accommodating.
A brisk knock at the door pierced their bubble of bliss. Kim frowned. The knock repeated. Realization came over his face and he said a word she’d not heard him use before. He rolled to look at his bedside clock and said it again.
He leapt out of bed. “It’s Kerry,” he said. He disappeared behind the curving concrete wall and reappeared, holding her suit on its hanger. She stood up on the bed and took it from him. “I am so sorry, Isabelle. I should have kept track of time. Please forgive me.”