by JoAnn Ross
“Well, speaking of my clothing,” Kirby said with a sharp-edged briskness he imagined she might have used in her police work. “As much as I’d love to sit around and chat all day, I need to take a quick shower, change, and get to work so I can contact other New England agencies to see if anyone’s reported a missing person.”
“Good luck with that,” Nate said.
“It can’t be that hard,” she said. “He didn’t exactly beam down from outer space, like one of those green men everyone was talking about yesterday.” She pulled out her phone, pointed it at Sebastian. He heard a click.
“What was that?”
“I need a picture to send around.”
“Is it necessary?”
“Well, I could describe you, but since you’re standing right here, and I assume you want to fill in more blanks in your life, a photo seemed to make more sense.”
He was starting to realize when she was being sarcastic. She was also reminding him more and more of his sister. They’d be friends, he realized. If they’d ever meet, which was improbable. He was also uncomfortable about having any record of his visit end up in the planet’s archives.
“I suppose that is logical,” he said.
“Gee, thanks,” she drawled. “I guess all my police training hasn’t entirely gone to waste.”
“You’re speaking ironically.”
“Bull’s-eye. Give the man a stuffed moose.”
“Well,” Nathaniel said, obviously wanting to escape the argument that was brewing, “we’d better be getting back to the lab. Could you drop Sebastian by the lab on your way into town?”
“Are you certain that’s wise?” Frowning, Kirby turned toward Sebastian. “After all you’ve been through, you should at least spend today in bed.”
Sebastian found the suggestion vastly appealing. As long as Kirby joined him in that warm, wide bed. Unfortunately, for many reasons, including his understanding with her brother, that would not be possible.
“I’m feeling very well now, Kirby,” Sebastian assured her. “Thanks to your good care.”
“But still—”
“I’m a doctor, Kirby,” Nate reminded her. “I promise to keep my eye on him all day, in case he starts feeling shaky.”
“You won’t notice. Not if you’re in the throes of scientific creation.” The spark of annoyance in her eyes had been replaced by seeds of worry.
“You needn’t worry,” Sebastian said. Not accustomed to such personal consideration for his well-being from someone who wasn’t his immediate family, he was moved by her concern. “I promise not to overtax myself. But it’s important that I join your brother at the lab, and I would be very appreciative if you would drive me there this morning.”
“Scientists,” she huffed with very real frustration. “You’re all crazy.” She shook her head, turned away, and marched into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
“Well, I take it that was a yes,” Whitney drawled.
The obvious derision in her tone irritated Sebastian. “Her concern for others is commendable.”
“Concern?” Whitney laughed at that. “Oh, I think it’s a great deal more than concern that has Kirby forgetting her manners.” She smiled up at Sebastian as she rose and began pulling on her gloves. “I’ll see you later.” Waggling her fingers, she left the kitchen.
Nate stood in the open doorway, letting cold air into the house as his gaze went from Sebastian to the closed bedroom door, then back to Sebastian.
“Your brotherly concern is unnecessary,” Sebastian said quietly. “I have already promised not to hurt her.”
“I believe you mean that.” Nate’s expression was grim. “But if you were to stick around Earth for a while, Sebastian, you’d realize that humans—especially the female of the species—are, by nature, subjective, emotional, and highly unpredictable. Which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to deal with them in an objective, quantitative fashion.”
“My mother is a terran,” Sebastian felt obliged to point out. “From your planet.”
“Seriously?” Observing the glint in Nate’s eyes, Sebastian had the feeling that scientific curiosity had just temporarily overridden Nate’s concern for his sister’s emotional well-being.
“Most seriously,” Sebastian assured him. “Although intermarriage is rare between the ruling classes on Logosia, my father broke tradition by bringing back a bride from one of his diplomatic missions to Earth. Both Rosalyn, my sister, and I are half-terran and half-Logosian.”
“I can’t wait to get you on an examining table.” Outside, Whitney called to him, complaining about waiting in the cold. “I’m coming,” Nate called out to her.
Then, just when Sebastian thought the conversation was over, Nate warned, “Don’t hurt her.”
And then he was gone, wading his way through the snow to the black machine.
12
This was ridiculous, Kirby told herself as she stood in the shower that, up until this morning, had only been used by her brother and her. She didn’t even know Sebastian. Not really. He was merely a man she’d rescued in the line of duty. There was nothing personal in their relationship, for heaven’s sake.
Well, there had been that unsettling incident this morning, when she’d awakened in his arms. But that had merely been an anomaly, two people forced to share a bed, caught up in their own sensual dreams. It could have happened with anyone.
But it hadn’t. It had happened with Sebastian Blackthorne, and although she’d sworn never to get involved with another impossibly good-looking man again, Kirby recognized her own vulnerability. Which was why she’d had to go outside when she’d heard the shower running. Just imagining him naked, with hot water streaming over his broad shoulders, his washboard torso, his flat stomach, strong, muscled thighs, and impossible-to-forget morning erection, had caused a spike of hormones that had her irrationally wanting to strip off her own clothes and join him beneath that water.
Which was when she’d changed into jeans, put on her boots, and gone out into the snow to feed the birds, who were noisily reminding her that she was late.
Now, as she rubbed the bar of soap into a lather, then ran the bubbles over her own body, her unruly mind imagined that same water flowing over Sebastian Blackthorne’s naked body.
In her fantasy, her hands became his. Trailing down her throat, over her collarbone, her shoulders. Her breasts had become so sensitized from her erotic thoughts the pulsating massage spray was nothing like its usual invigorating morning wake-up. Instead, the water created a sensuality that bordered on pain as it hit wet skin that felt as if it were tightening beneath her fingertips.
Her stroking hands went lower over her quivering stomach, until she was inches from attaining bliss. Then, like a bolt from the blue, she remembered that she’d left the object of her sexual frustration in the other room.
“Damn.” Reaching up, she changed the setting to a gentler rain flow, finished her shower in record speed, and rubbed away at her body with the towel in a less-than-effective attempt to scrub the naked hot man out of her mind.
* * *
She’d just gotten dressed when there was a knock on the bedroom door. “Kirby?” the all-too-familiar deep voice called. “Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s just hunky-dory,” she called back.
There was a moment’s silence. “May I come in?”
She was pinning on the five-sided star that her father had proudly worn for thirty-two years. “I’ll be right out.”
Vulnerable she might be, but she wasn’t a total idiot. Not so much that she’d be alone in her bedroom with a man who could, with a single glance, create such havoc to her senses.
Of course, he hadn’t gone away. When she opened the door, he was standing there, observing her with his probing dark gaze that, as impossible as she knew it to be, seemed to be able to look inside her mind.
“Whitney upset you,” he diagnosed.
“I’m not that easily upset.” Which was
true. Usually. But there’d been nothing usual about the past fourteen hours. “I told you, Sebastian, I just get bad vibes from the woman.”
“So do I.” Without waiting for an invitation, he crossed the room and stood in front of her.
“Do you?”
“Absolutely.” Kirby heard the honesty in the single word, saw it in his eyes. “But I have a feeling that this is about more than bad vibrations,” Sebastian suggested.
“No, really—”
When she would have turned away, he caught her chin in his hand. Closely, calmly, he examined her. “What’s wrong, Kirby?” The warmth of his touch sent a new flood of emotions bubbling through her.
“It’s just that she’s so damn thin.”
“Yes. She is.”
He didn’t have to agree so fast, she thought miserably. “And I’m not.”
“That is also true.” His gaze, as it moved from her face to take a slow, judicious tour of her body, set her nerves to ringing like bells inside her head. “I still do not understand.”
She ran an agitated hand through her hair, frustrated with him, with herself, with this unsettling situation she seemed to have found herself in. “Forget it. It’s not important.” She didn’t have any body issues, dammit. Except when she was around Whitney, who, if it weren’t for her flat chest, could’ve been a body double for Angelina Jolie.
Freeing herself from his light hold, she backed away.
“What if I told you that I find your body very appealing?” Sebastian took a step toward her. “Just as it is.”
Kirby took another backward step. “If that’s supposed to make me feel more comfortable around you, it doesn’t.”
“I was afraid of that.” When she continued to back away, Sebastian matched his steps to hers. “Your brother told me that you’d been married.”
The backs of her knees were pressing against the bed where she’d awakened in his arms. Short of scrambling over the top of the mattress or using some of the martial arts skills she’d learned in Venice, she was effectively trapped.
“So?”
“He also informed me that your husband hurt you.”
“Nate had no right to tell you that.”
“I think he did.” Sebastian argued. “As your older brother, it’s only logical that he would want to protect you. And ensure that this didn’t happen.”
“That what didn’t happen?” But she knew. Oh, yes, how she knew exactly what he was talking about.
“This.” He lifted a hand to her cheek. “Me wanting you. You wanting me.”
“Well.” Kirby blew out a harsh breath. “You certainly don’t beat around the bush, do you?”
Sebastian grasped the meaning an instant before the translator decoded it for him. His knowledge of English idioms, he considered with a burst of un-Logosian pride, was improving. “No. I don’t.”
In contrast to Whitney’s ice, Kirby was heat. From the bright sunset color of her hair to her golden complexion, to her full rose-hued lips, to the intriguing color that rose periodically in her cheeks, as it was now.
Her scent, which was much like the soap he’d used in her shower but even more fragrant, was surrounding him like an enticing ether cloud, while her skin was soft against the palm of his hand. Sebastian’s mind was in a disorderly, tangled turmoil. He’d never been so distracted. So on the edge of being out of control. Even when he was, technically, breaking the rules of scientific exploration, during those last minutes as Rosalyn had sat at his command console, programming in the codes he’d spent years developing, he was never, ever out of control.
Except for that moment when he’d been breaking apart, only to hear her warning him that he was destined for an entirely different place and time. Perhaps the leap through time and space had injured his brain.
And if that were the case, was such damage temporary? Because if it proved to be permanent, his situation would be much, much worse.
“What makes you think I want you?” Kirby asked, shaking him out of yet another distraction. His thoughts and emotions had become like unruly atoms, bouncing around without anything to bond them into a coherent structure.
Her voice was steady, but as his thumb brushed against the fragrant flesh of her throat, he had proof that her pulse was not. “Don’t you?”
His feelings for her were highly illogical, atypical, and dangerous. Unable to resist the lure of her lips, he ran a fingertip over them. When they parted instinctively at his touch, Sebastian reminded himself that even an emotion-driven terran male would be cautious enough to take a pace back to consider his actions before stepping off the edge of a cliff.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was too stiff. Too gruff. But rather than try to soothe the situation with an apology that could end up making things even worse, and to give himself some much-needed physical and emotional distance, he backed away and began to roam the room.
“For what, exactly?” Her voice sounded as unsteady as his heart.
“I had no right to ask that question. Just as I had no right to touch you in such a familiar manner.”
Needing something, anything to do with his hands to keep them off her, needing to gather his scrambled thoughts back into order, he opened an opaque white jar. As he scooped a bit of the pink cream onto his thumb, Sebastian was struck with a sudden, almost uncontrollable urge to rub that fragrant cream into her smooth, round breasts.
“Then why does it feel as if you do?” Kirby asked with what he was beginning to understand was her unrelenting honesty.
Having acquired proof that he was not alone in these disorienting feelings had hunger hitting like the fiery jolt of a laser blast in the gut before sending flames downward to his groin. It took a Herculean effort, but Sebastian managed to ruthlessly control it.
“Nate will be waiting,” he reminded them both.
“And I need to get to work.” Her voice was calm and professional. The crackling energy emanating from her flower-scented body was not.
“To your police station.”
“Yes.” Her chin tilted up in a challenge, daring him to make one chauvinistic remark. “To my police station.”
He swept a gaze over her again. Despite the ugly uniform, she was the most desirable female he’d ever met. Which made him wonder if this was how his father had felt when he’d first met his mother.
“I much prefer what you were wearing this morning.” There were already too many lies between them. He intended to be as truthful as possible. “Those blue trousers and the tunic. Despite the wild animal.”
“That wild animal just happens to be Bananas the Bear, the University of Maine mascot. And I really hate to disappoint you, but jeans and an old college sweatshirt don’t exactly create an appearance of authority.”
“I can appreciate that.” He nodded. “But if you think that stiff and heavy uniform will make a man forget that you’re a woman—a very, sensual, desirable woman—Kirby Pendleton, you’re mistaken.”
As if pulled forward by some yet undiscovered Newtonian force, Sebastian came to stand in front of her again. His hand cupped her neck, slid into the silk of her hair she’d not yet tied back from her face, as she’d worn it on her police job yesterday.
“On the contrary,” he murmured, having to force the words from his strangely parched throat, “it makes a man want to strip it off, piece by stiff, ugly piece, and discover what soft, feminine secrets you are trying so hard to conceal.”
She did not melt into his arms. Nor did she pull away. She simply stood there, looking up at him. Watching. Waiting.
Sebastian lowered his lips to within a whisper of hers, then hesitated.
Here there be danger, the ancient explorer’s saying tried to make itself heard.
His logical mind, the part of him that knew this could be a fatal mistake, wanted to allow her to back away now. Before they found themselves in a situation that could not end well.
The emotional, often distressing human side to his nature, the part of him that had irrational
ly become linked to her from the moment he’d entered her fantasy and had been drawn into a place so different from his intended destination, knew she would not do the sensible, logical thing and move away.
The moment his lips brushed against hers, Sebastian realized exactly how badly he’d miscalculated. He’d intended to control the kiss like an experiment. After all, it was the not knowing how she’d taste that he’d found impossible to resist. Once he’d discovered the answer, he could move on. After observing her carefully, knowing that the ability to maintain control was important in a law enforcement professional, he’d assumed Kirby would be cool, collected, and sweet.
Sweet she most definitely was. But cool? Collected? There was nothing cool about the mouth that clung so hungrily to his. There was nothing collected about the hands that thrust into his hair. All his earlier hypotheses flew out the window as he felt the heat flare, the passion rise.
There was something mindless happening here. Something dark and dangerous. Something he couldn’t analyze. Sense was seeping out of him. Logic disintegrated. Sebastian found himself lost in a smoky, turbulent world unlike anything he’d ever known.
It could have been a minute, an hour, an eternity. When he finally took his mouth from hers, Sebastian realized that his hands, which had taken hold of her shoulders sometime during that heated kiss, were far from steady.
He craved her now.
Immediately.
Desperately.
He wanted to drag her to the bed or the nearest chair or even the hard wooden plank floor and strip away that thick, dark uniform she wore like a suit of armor and bury himself deep inside her warmth.
When he realized that sometime during that shared kiss, desire had gone blazing over the line into need, this time it was he who backed away.
“Well,” she said after a few seconds. She lifted a hand to her throat. “That was… um… certainly different.”
So she’d felt it, too. He’d wondered but had been too rattled at the time to read her emotions. “Yes. It was.”