by Cindy Gerard
She now knew everything about him from his shoe size to his shorts size and some embarrassing childhood stories in between. A two-hour dining experience, for Pete’s sake, and the sum total of the new information he’d discovered on the elusive Ms. Stewart was what he’d picked up before they’d left her house. She’d pay for that, he decided as he walked her to her door. She’d pay good.
He knew her game. He’d sensed her withdraw into herself on the drive home. The fear was taking over again. He could feel it. She would tell him good night, offer a chaste kiss, and send him home to a cold shower.
Well, he had a surprise for her. He was going to kiss her senseless as punishment for making him sing like a snitch in an Elmore Leonard novel. Then he was going to leave her with her own fire burning and let her figure out how to put it out. That would fix her.
He hadn’t yet made his move when she very quietly, very nervously asked, “Would you like to come in?”
He was so stunned by her invitation, he didn’t remember replying. He must have, though, because the next thing he knew, he was standing inside her foyer and she was hanging up his coat.
“I had a wonderful time tonight,” she said breathlessly as she turned back to him.
“Yes. It was nice, wasn’t it?” he heard himself respond in a voice that sounded like he’d just swallowed a mouthful of tacks.
Watching her carefully, he saw her draw in a deep breath, raise her chin, and lick the last of the gloss off her lips. That innocent gesture rocked him all the way to his toes . . . and to other places he was trying desperately not to think about.
“I—I was hoping,” she went on hesitantly, “that . . . maybe it didn’t have to end just yet.”
He was sure he’d only imagined what she’d said, and chalked it up to delusional hysteria. But when he met her eyes and saw a glimmer of hope—or was it apprehension?—flash through their beautiful dark depths, he knew he’d heard her right. He knew what she was offering.
It was all he’d hoped for. It was all he’d fantasized about for weeks.
And it was all wrong.
He wasn’t sure why, but he knew it was wrong.
With a pinched little smile, she reached for his hand. Hers was trembling as she led him down the hall to her bedroom.
She flipped on the light and left him frowning in the doorway as she walked to her closet, then removed her heels and hung them neatly on a shoe rack. Peripherally aware of white-upon-white decor, from the carpet to the drapes to the bedspread on the old brass bed, he watched her in a dazed state, trying to figure out what was wrong with this picture.
“January—” he began, but stopped abruptly when she crossed the room to him, presented her back, and in a small, controlled voice asked, “Could you get this for me?”
A man could take only so much. Intoxicated by her bold maneuver and by the scent that had been driving him crazy all night, he reached for the tab of her zipper, and, enjoying every pale, cool inch of flesh he revealed, slid the zipper down.
Like an automaton, she slipped the dress off her shoulders and stepped out of it. He’d seen black lace and silk stockings before, but he’d never seen them on January. He swallowed hard and felt his testosterone level hit a new high.
He’d been wrong earlier. Her legs weren’t endless. They were all pale satin skin and firm supple flesh, and they ended at the exact spot he wanted to touch and taste and claim as belonging only to him.
She was exquisite, every man’s erotic dream. And she was his for the taking.
He whispered her name as he spun her around and hauled her hard against him. He would have been aghast at his own lack of finesse if he hadn’t been so lost in the wildfire her mouth ignited.
When the kiss ended, he was reeling and already working at the knot of his tie. Yet as he watched her walk calmly back to the closet, where she proceeded to hang up her dress and tuck it carefully into a garment bag, it hit him what was going on.
What he was going to do about it was a measure of how far gone he was on this woman. He cursed under his breath, closed his eyes, and kissed sweet relief good-bye.
Five
January counted to ten, drew a shaky breath, and closed the closet door. She didn’t have to look at Michael to know he was watching her every move. His bold, silent shadow filled her bedroom doorway. The heat from his eyes seemed to touch every pulse point, every inch of skin she’d so brazenly revealed.
She didn’t feel so brazen right now. She felt exposed and vulnerable as she crossed silently to her bed—her lily-white virgin’s bed that had never held a man’s weight, had never taken a lover into its waiting warmth.
Resolved to see this through to the end, she turned back the bedspread with a trembling hand, silently damning Michael for not helping her. He’d picked a fine time to play the hesitant suitor. Why was he just standing there? Her plan had extended only as far as getting him to her bedroom. He was supposed to pick up the action from there. He was the one with the experience, the one who’d been forcing this issue all along. Where was that cocky, exasperating flirt when she needed him?
With a determination fostered by the last of her bravery, she turned to face him.
Still he waited just inside the door.
Her heart tripped clumsily, then slammed against her chest. “Michael?” She paused, gathering her courage once more. “Aren’t you coming?”
His eyes darkened before he dropped his chin to his chest and expelled a deep, weary breath. A soft, self-mocking chuckle escaped him as he looked back up at her and shook his head. “Not tonight, January. Much as he regrets it, Mr. Hayward will not be coming tonight.”
She blinked as his deliberately crude meaning registered. She understood rejection; she’d grown up with it. This was rejection at its elemental best.
A stunning rush of mortification ripped fresh wounds inside her. The accompanying pain cut that much deeper because she had no one to blame but herself.
She didn’t know what to say. She only knew what she wanted to do—disappear. Find a deep, dark hole and crawl into it.
Feeling like she’d been physically beaten, she walked on shaking legs to the closet and reached for her bathrobe. A strong hand grasped her arm, intercepting her.
“Let’s get something straight here, Counselor,” Michael said, turning her toward him. “I won’t be making love with you tonight, but it’s not because I don’t want to.” His gaze was fierce and unrelenting as it dropped to her mouth and lingered there before climbing slowly back to her eyes. “Make no mistake about it. I want you. I’ve wanted you from the first time I saw you.”
Confused and still reeling from the pain of his rejection, she tried to pull away. With little effort, he folded her tightly in his arms. “If you can’t make yourself believe what you hear, believe what you feel.” He hauled her flush against him, aligning his hips with hers.
She sucked in a harsh breath when she felt the hot, thick length of his arousal press against her belly. Then she felt him shudder, felt his slow, bold caress as he kneaded her bare buttocks until, as if he couldn’t help himself, his hands tunneled up under the straps of the garter belt.
She gasped and stiffened as he filled his palms with her bare flesh.
“Shhh.” He buried his face in her hair. “Just feel the heat, January. Do you feel it?”
She felt a fire! Not that low, slow, licking flame that had drifted through her blood the first time she’d looked into his eyes, but a wild, rampaging inferno ignited by the fit of his body to hers, by the crush of his hands on her skin.
Despite her attempt to fight it, a desperate yearning swamped her. She felt her resistance melt, her body relax and lean into his of its own will. Lifting her hands to his shoulders, she clung to his solid strength—only to have him grip her waist and set her firmly away.
“No, babe. This is not going to happen tonight.”
<
br /> Rejection slammed back full force. Whatever his game was, he’d gone too far. Out of sheer defiant pride, she kept her voice from trembling. “I think you’d better leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere until we talk.”
“I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“Oh, but you do,” he assured her as he snagged her robe and tossed it to her.
She clutched the white terry cloth to her breast and glared at him.
“Put it on.”
“Get out.”
“Not a chance. Not until you tell me what tonight was all about.”
“Tonight,” she began, shrugging jerkily into the robe and cinching the belt tight, “was obviously a mistake.”
“Why? Because I didn’t end up in your bed?”
She met his insult with her chin held high. “Because I was a fool to think I wanted you there.”
“Seriously? You wanted me there? You want to tell me why the sudden change of heart?” he asked softly.
At that moment, she couldn’t imagine why. She hated him! She hated herself more for having forgotten, even for a moment, what a bastard he was, what he’d done to her all those years ago.
“Okay,” he said reasonably when she refused to answer. “Let me tell you why. But first, let’s get a few things out in the open.” He walked to the bed, propped both pillows against the brass headrail, and turned to her. “You might as well get comfortable because this may take a while.”
She was no match for him physically, January thought. If he’d decided he was going to stay, she couldn’t make him leave. Resigned to that fact, she walked stiffly across the room and plopped down on the bed. The sooner she did as he asked, the sooner he’d be gone.
He sat beside her, facing her, forcing her to scooch her hips over to make room. Leaning back against the pillows, she wrapped her robe around her legs and drew them to her chest.
“You don’t have to take a protective posture with me, January. It’s never been my intent to hurt you. But you don’t buy that, do you? I’m not talking about physically hurting you. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that you know I’d never lay a hand on you in anger. But there’s something else, isn’t there? For some reason, you have always been sure I represent a threat to you. Someday I’ll find out why. Someday you’re going to trust me enough to tell me. And someday I’ll make you believe that whatever it is you’re afraid of could never happen.”
Before she could fully digest the implication of “someday” and the panic his softly but firmly posed promise incited, he began again.
“I’ve been up-front with you since day one. Well . . .” He shrugged and amended, “Maybe not from the first day. But that was because I didn’t know how deep I was into this until you threw me out on my ear. It hadn’t occurred to me that you might not feel the same spark I did. And when you made it clear you didn’t want to see me again, I realized I just couldn’t let that happen.”
She tried to look bored, but she was hanging on his every word, even as she loathed herself for listening. Plucking absently at the bedsheet, she avoided looking him in the eye.
The touch of his hand on her cheek brought her head up.
“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?” he asked, gently tucking a runaway fall of hair behind her ear.
If he’d said the house was on fire, he would have surprised her less. She felt her eyes widen reflectively, felt the heat of a thousand candles flood her cheeks with embarrassment.
Leaning toward her, he placed a soft, chaste kiss on her forehead, then rested his hand on her updrawn knee. “I think it’s beautiful,” he whispered. “I think you’re beautiful.
“It took a while for me to piece together what was going on,” he continued, caressing her leg through the heavy robe. “But finally I realized that nothing about tonight added up. You’ve been avoiding me for weeks, then out of the blue we have a dinner date. That should have been my first clue. That abrupt little turnaround without so much as a phone call or lunch between us.
“But it was the little things that finally gave you away, like the way you jump whenever I touch you. The way you stiffen then force yourself to relax before you let yourself enjoy a kiss. Look at me, January.”
His voice was soft and compelling. When she did as he asked, he smiled kindly. “Honey, a woman in the throes of passion simply doesn’t spend ten minutes hanging up a dress that should have been left in a puddle on the floor.”
Beyond humiliation, she linked her arms around her knees and buried her face between them.
He squeezed her leg and continued in that same consoling voice. “What you were going to pull on me tonight was a dirty, low-down trick. Not that I don’t appreciate the motive, but I won’t be used. I won’t be your experiment, or a convenient vehicle to get this little biological embarrassment out of the way. That’s what you’d decided, hadn’t you? If I was going to make such a pest of myself, you might as well get a little something out of the deal too. I’m right, aren’t I?”
Her silence rang like a self-indictment.
“I’m sorry, baby, but it just won’t work that way. Don’t get me wrong. I intend to make love with you.”
Her head came up at that.
“Make love,” he repeated with feeling. “Not take you to bed, not have sex with you. Make love with you. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
When she started to lower her head again, he stayed her with a hand under her jaw. “I forgive you for planning to use me. I even admire the courage it took to make the decision and follow through with it, when the very idea obviously scared you to death. But until you confide in me about what frightens you, until I feel you’re ready to make love and not just have sex, it’s not going to happen between us no matter how much I want it to.”
The hand that held her jaw slid down to her throat. His thumb stroked her skin in a slow, tender caress. “I need commitment here, January. I need some mutual trust, some honest caring. And even if it kills me, I’ll have it before I ever have you. What I feel for you is special and new to me. I’m not yet sure what it all means, but I know I won’t jeopardize what it might become by pushing you into something when you’re just not ready.”
January was too stunned to speak, too rattled by his declaration to absorb all the words he had spoken. Words like “commitment,” and “trust,” and “caring.” They were foreign and frightening, and they got all tangled up with her insecurity and the strange and uninvited warmth his promises implied.
“Consider this fair warning, Counselor. I intend to make you ready for whatever is intended to happen between us. You haven’t seen the last of me. Not by a long shot. And I haven’t seen nearly enough of you.”
His gaze still locked with hers, he lowered his hands to her waist. “Starting with tonight, you’re going to get used to me touching you, looking at you. Wanting you.” His fingers poised at the knotted belt. “Let me?”
Inside her head, that old censuring voice screamed a resounding No! But a new, needy voice whispered back his words like a litany . . . trust, commitment, caring. And Lord help her, she wanted to believe them.
She closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the pillows.
When he opened the robe, she didn’t stop him. When he slipped it one torturous inch at a time from her shoulders, reason, like sanity, slipped right along with it.
“You’re trembling,” he said in a gruff whisper. “I want you to tremble, but not because you’re afraid. I want you to shiver, but not from cold.”
She was anything but cold. She was on fire.
“Open your eyes, January. Look at me when I touch you.”
She swallowed hard and did his bidding. His eyes were so open, so beseeching, so breathtakingly blue as he touched a hand to her throat, where her pulse hammered wildly.
“This is where the trust comes in. K
iss me, January.” He urged her gently toward him. “Kiss me because you want to. Because it feels good.”
His whispered request nurtured a thrilling need to grow to aching proportions inside her. But even as the featherlight warmth of his breath against her mouth stirred the woman in her to a ripe awareness, an old and long-standing fear made her hesitate. “Michael—”
“Shhh. I know. You hadn’t planned to have to think about this, had you? It’s scary, but it’s only a kiss. Just a kiss. That’s all I want. You set the tone, you set the pace. Don’t think past that. Just take it one step at a time. We’ll get into the really scary stuff later.”
Stuff like commitment and trust and caring, she thought as those words again rattled around in her head like old bones. Deep down it was those words, not his touch, that scared her the most. His touch was somehow reassuring, something tangible and real amid the swirl of contradicting messages her brain was sending to her body.
“Please?” she heard him whisper.
“I . . . I’m not very good at this,” she mumbled.
He smiled. “Let me be the judge of that.”
It was his smile that finally did it, the openness of it, his wanting so thinly veiled.
Ever so slowly she leaned forward. Closing her eyes, she gently pressed her mouth to his. Then again with less hesitancy, because she couldn’t quite believe his lips were as firm yet as yielding as she’d first thought them to be. And because he was keeping his promise and letting her set the pace, she kissed him a third time.
By now she was fascinated by the taste of him, the heat, the intriguing scent that was unique to him. It made her think of exotic spice and old leather . . . and of dark, silken shadows and the heat of a softly flickering candle.
She kissed him once more and, touching her fingers to his face, explored the slightly abrasive stubble that darkened his impossibly masculine jaw.
His deep, throaty groan loosed a rich and melting warmth that sluiced through her thickening blood. When he trembled as if he, too, was struggling for control, a stunning sensual awakening swept her from breast to belly, stealing her hesitancy.