RUNAWAY

by Christie Ridgway

  “Eight?” Owen asked softly.

  Her gaze dropped and she toyed with her fork, unwilling to let him see how his ability to connect the dots of her life made her just a little…nervous. “Close,” she said. “They’re all quite a bit older, though.” And then there were Zia Sophia and Nonna Angela, who were so old they thought girls still wore girdles and garter belts.

  Owen’s fingers tangled with hers on the tabletop. “So you were the runt of the litter?” His smile was kind. “Though I can’t imagine you being down for long.”

  That was her secret weapon. Never letting anyone see that she was down. Pretending, whether it was from within the pages of a book or within the home of some semireluctant relative, had been Izzy’s strength against insecurity. “Nobody can resist me for long,” she asserted.

  Owen’s fingers tightened on hers. “I’m a living example,” he said mildly.

  Bryce shot up from his seat. “Maybe I should get going on those dishes and then let myself out,” he said.

  “No.” Panic fluttered in Izzy’s chest. “No, Bryce. I made apple cobbler for dessert. You have to stay for that.” You have to stay and be the buffer between me and Owen. Though she knew he was desperate for entertainment, it was dangerous to allow it to be that kind of entertainment.

  “Stay, Bryce,” Owen ordered, his voice soft, his gaze fixed on Izzy’s face.

  Bryce stacked the plates. “Fine. I’ll take these downstairs and bring up—”

  “You’ll take those downstairs, load the dishwasher, do whatever scrub is necessary on the pots and pans and then bring up dessert,” Owen said.

  Without further comment, Bryce took the dirty dishes down the stairs. Owen looked after his brother’s retreating figure. “How much I enjoy playing the older brother card.”

  Izzy smiled. “You didn’t have to. I don’t mind dishes.”

  “But I find that at this moment I mind being deprived of your company.” He toyed with her fingers, braiding his with hers, unbraiding them, braiding them again. She felt every stroke and tickle, the nerve endings between her fingers seeming to stand on alert to absorb every cell-to-cell contact.

  Her breath shortened and she felt her breasts swell and the tips tingle. Did he notice?

  “I see what’s going on with you,” he said.

  She twitched. “What?”

  “You work too hard, Isabella,” he said. “Food, chat, flirtation with my brother.” The smile in his blue eyes said he was joking about that last bit. “You’re here with me, your husband. You don’t have to pretend anything.”

  But she’d pretended most of her life! Pretended feeling secure, pretended not minding being left behind by her parents, pretended a cheerful, friendly, you-can-be-comfortable-with-me attitude. She was supposed to be all that for Owen while he recuperated from his injuries. The runaway bride owed him that, after all.

  “You don’t owe me anything,” he said.

  Did he read minds, too?

  His fingers curled around hers, held tight. “Are you okay?”

  “I…I don’t know,” she heard herself whisper. But that wasn’t right, because until she met Owen, Isabella Cavaletti always knew that the way to keep others happy was to appear to be happy herself. The girl someone took in—and this wasn’t all that different, was it?—couldn’t afford to become demanding or temperamental.

  She steeled her spine and drew her hand away from Owen’s. “I’m completely fine.”

  He studied her face. “You’ve got that down pat.”

  Her heart seemed to sort of cave in on itself. No one had ever detected how often she acted a part. “I don’t—”

  Owen put two fingers over her mouth.

  Okay, it really shouldn’t feel like a kiss.

  It felt like a kiss.

  “You’ve been alone too long, Iz,” Owen said. His hand dropped from her lips and then he was leaning across the corner of the small table so that his mouth was just a breath from hers.

  “Not now. Now I’m not alone, Owen.” Her skin rose in bumps as if she were experiencing a cold breeze, while her skin actually felt fevered. “I’m…I’m here with you.”

  He smiled against her mouth. “Exactly.”

  But before the promise of a kiss could take her away from reality, Bryce saved the day. He strode back into the room. “Who’s ready for sweets?”

  Chapter Six

  A s he drifted off to sleep that night, Owen was aware that Bryce had interrupted a crucial moment by bringing in the apple cobbler. During that meal with his brother he’d realized that despite her runaway status, not only was Izzy sexually attractive to him, but he also plain liked the woman. Her good humor, her knowledge of odd facts—Mondagreen!—and her moments of emotional vulnerability appealed to him on more than just the libido level.

  As Bryce left that evening, she’d kissed him on the cheek. When she’d wished Owen good-night shortly afterward, she hadn’t touched him at all.

  Which made him admire her brains, too. When the most permanent thing in a woman’s life was her P.O. box, then she had no business getting too tangled up in the man with whom she shared a marriage certificate.

  They were really going to have to do something about that, he thought, closing his eyes….

  He was standing on the roof of a burning structure. Adrenaline pumped through his veins as it did during any firefight. But there was an added kick to the natural drug flooding his system, because this time, he knew. This time, he was keenly aware that at any moment he’d take an elevator fall and drop into the maw of a many-tongued beast roaring in the depths below his fireproof boots.

  Jerry was going to fall with him.

  He peered across the roof and through the smoke toward his friend. Maybe he could warn him. “Jerry! Jerry!”

  His gaze found the other man. Oh, God. His heart shuddered. Jerry was out of uniform! Instead of being protected by full turnout gear as Owen was, the other man was in jeans and a T-shirt. Were those flip-flops on his feet?

  Owen started yelling again through his mask. “Jerry! Get the hell off the roof! Jerry! Jerry!”

  His buddy looked up, finally heeding Owen’s frantic calls. A grin broke over his grimy, ash-darkened face. He gave Owen a jaunty salute, and then—

  The roof opened like the gates of hell and Jerry was gone.

  “Jerry!” Owen scrambled toward where he’d last seen his friend, but felt the surface beneath his feet give. He was going down, too. His stomach rose toward his throat as he fell. Bad, he thought. This was going to be—

  He jerked awake.

  Disoriented, breathing hard, he jackknifed to a sitting position. It was darkness surrounding him. Not smoke. Not fire.

  His bed. His bedroom. He’d survived.

  Only Jerry was dead.

  He fell back to his pillows and flopped his forearm over his eyes. God. His mouth was dry and he felt as if he’d just finished a five-mile run with Will and Jerry dogging his every step as they always did during physical training.

  But Jerry would never run another step.

  Owen groaned, squeezing his eyes tighter shut, though aware that couldn’t stop the replay of his dream and of Jerry, that second before he’d fallen through the roof. His grin. His happy-go-lucky wave.

  His death.

  Owen shoved the covers aside, needing to get out from under their suffocating weight. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He needed more air, water, something.

  Before Bryce had left that night, he’d moved the furniture to give Owen objects set at strategic distances apart so he could use them for support as he hobbled to the bathroom. He reached for the first, but instead of his fingers finding the edge of the bedside table, his cast swiped the lamp. It hit the floor with a deafening crash.

  “Damn!” he cursed, then dropped back to the mattress. There wasn’t much hope that Izzy hadn’t heard the noise. He had no doubt that she’d come running.

  The light in the hallway between the bedrooms snapped on. Th
ere was a pattering of footsteps, then his door popped open. “Owen!”

  “I’m fine,” he said, maneuvering himself beneath the blankets again. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

  She took a few steps inside the room. “What happened?”

  “I’m clumsy,” he said, glancing over at her. Then his heart stopped. He didn’t know what he would have thought Izzy would wear to bed. A T-shirt big enough for a linebacker? A granny nightgown?

  Even his libido couldn’t have come up with something like this. Below her tumbled hair, her body was mostly uncovered in a pair of babydoll pajamas—he knew the term from a long-ago former girlfriend who’d worked at a lingerie store—that was a filmy, spaghetti-strapped top worn over a matching pair of boy shorts.

  She must have noticed his sudden, tongue-hanging-out interest. Her bare feet shuffled a step back as one arm flew up to cover her chest. “I pack light and I pack, um, little,” she said. “I get, uh, hot at night.”

  “I’m not touching that remark. And don’t look so nervous, because I’m not planning on touching you, either,” he said, scowling. Just before he’d nodded off, he’d been glad he’d managed to keep his mitts off her, right? Though that was certainly the last of the sleep he’d get tonight, thanks to the disturbing nightmare followed by this chaser of an electrical jolt to his libido.

  “Can I get you something?” she asked.

  “Water, if you wouldn’t mind,” he said, trying to sound more human. “There’s a glass in the bathroom—and my robe on the back of the door.”

  In a few minutes she was back, and she handed him the full glass and then leaned down to pick up the lamp and replace it on the table. His flannel robe was belted around her waist and its hem hit her shins. He breathed a sigh of relief, and then another when she straightened. The plaid lapels criss-crossed at her throat, effectively covering her from neck to nearly toes.

  He downed half the water in one chug and then set the glass on the bedside table. “Thanks. And again, sorry to have disturbed you.”

  She stared down at him. “You’re not going to be able to get back to sleep, are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “But it does matter.” She sat on the edge of his mattress. “You need a lot of rest because your body’s been traumatized, not to mention your psyche—”

  “Psyche?” he scoffed. “I’m a man, sweetheart. I don’t have a psyche.”

  She didn’t even pretend to find him funny. “Your mind, then. When a friend dies like that—”

  Something hot rose from his belly like a red tide. “I told you to stay out of my head, Izzy.” Yeah, he was physically weakened, not to mention impotent against the damn dreams and the dark moods that were blanketing him, but he didn’t want her pecking at his broken pieces. “Just go away.”

  He knew he sounded like an abrupt, ungrateful SOB again. Just what he was.

  With only the light from the hall filtering into the room, he couldn’t read her expression. Her body language said “stubbornly staying,” as she didn’t move her cute little butt an inch. “How about a bedtime story?”

  “For God’s sake,” he ground out.

  “No, really. Let me tell you about Melvil Dewey. Did you know he was instrumental in siting the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York?”

  “Never knew, never cared,” Owen answered.

  His dismissal didn’t dismiss her. For a second he’d thought he’d won his solitude, because she stood up. But then she made her way around the king-size mattress to the other side of the bed. Under his astounded gaze, she propped the pillow against the headboard and stretched out beside him. There was a healthy thirty inches or so between them, but hell, they were sharing the same bed!

  “Well, then this should have you snoring in no time,” she continued calmly, as she crossed her legs at the ankles. “While Melvil was working in the library at Amherst, he started designing a hierarchical system for the books that would classify all human knowledge. He came up with the decimal-based scheme. There are ten top-tier or ‘main’ classes that are divided into ten subordinate sections. Each one of those one hundred subordinate topics are broken into ten more divisions. That’s a thousand sections that can be referred to by an integer. And each of these numbers can be infinitely divided again using fractional numbers. Now…”

  He tuned her out then, though the fact was his attention had begun to wander when she’d said “decimal-based scheme.” Not that he had anything against numbers. But with her so close, her slender figure flat against the same mattress that supported him, he could only think of her body. He could only think of that slip of nightwear she wore beneath his utilitarian robe. It was apricot colored, he thought, which reminded him of Bryce’s chocolate-and-apricot fairy, which only made him think of all the flavors of Isabella Cavaletti. The ones he knew, and the ones he’d yet to sample.

  The disturbing nightmare, his frustration over his physical condition and her irritating stubbornness over not leaving him alone with his sleeplessness, all of those were receding as Izzy took over the forefront of his focus. He could smell a faint note of her perfume, he could sense the warmth of her skin just a few inches away, he could hear her words wash over him, which made his mind jump to her mouth and the way it felt against his. Pillowy soft, with that wet heat inside.

  Oh, God. That made him think of Izzy’s other hot, wet places. His erection hardened to full arousal.

  One wrist was in a cast, and he couldn’t put his full weight on his feet, but there was another part of him that was obviously in fine working order. And he couldn’t help heeding its sudden, insistent call to action.

  Setting his teeth against the erotic ache, he reached over with his good arm and found her hand with his. She jumped a little at his touch, but he soothed her by brushing his thumb across the top of her knuckles.

  “Um, Owen?”

  He caressed her hand again. “Keep going. I’m listening.” I’m lying, but what the hell? Because he could tell her temperature was climbing and he could hear the way her breath was coming quicker in response to his hand on hers. This was the instant magic they’d made in Las Vegas. Toying with the cuff of the robe she wore, he pushed it farther up her arm and let his fingertips drift after it, tracking a line from her wrist to the tender inside of her elbow.

  Her breath caught. He let his hand drift back, trailing it to her fingers and then back up again.

  Her legs made a restless movement, the edges of the robe opening to reveal her bare legs to a point just above her knees. His blood surged in his veins, as if she’d suddenly gone naked.

  His gaze traced the olive skin as if he were licking a line down her shin. Her legs moved again, and the robe revealed another few inches of Izzy’s thighs. Without thinking, he slid his hand around one of them, cupping the taut muscle on top and letting his fingers press against the sleek inner surface.

  He heard her swallow, then she valiantly continued with her sleep-inducing—hah!—lecture. “I think you’ll like this part the most,” she said. “He was an advocate for a simpler spelling system for the English language. At one point he considered writing his own name as M-E-L-V-I-L D-U-I.”

  He moved his hand, stroking her leg now, and saw the way her thighs parted ever more. Under the pads of his fingers, he felt her telltale goose bumps.

  “Um, Owen?” she said again, her voice fainter this time. “Do you…Are you…What are you thinking?”

  Of only one thing, for good or for bad. Only one damn thing. “I’m thinking ol’ Melvil would completely approve,” he said, “when I tell you that I would like to H-A-V S-E-X.”

  Izzy’s heart was beating harder than it had in those few seconds after she’d heard the crash of Owen’s lamp and made it to his bedroom to discover he was all right. Her skin was tingling from the slow washes of goose bumps rolling from the point where he touched her thigh. H-A-V S-E-X, her brain repeated.

  Desire had been pooling low in her belly from the instant he touched her h
and, and at that thought—having sex with Owen—the heaviness there throbbed.

  “We shouldn’t…We don’t…But…”

  “Yeah,” he whispered, his hand still tracing mysterious patterns on her skin. “All that.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because it’s a long, dark night. Because I remember what it felt like to dance with you in Vegas, and I think we’ll do this dance well, too. Because I could do with a little human contact.” He rolled on his side, and he lifted his casted wrist so those fingers could brush the hair off her forehead. “Take your pick, Isabella.”

  His palm flattened on her thigh, and he leaned close to press his mouth briefly to hers. “Take your pick or say no. Whichever you want.”

  But it was never the way she wanted! She’d spent the last few years trying to make things her way after a childhood of being passed off and shuffled over, in a manner that made her feel she had to be quiet or accommodating or easy to get along with, whatever the new living situation required of her. Only since she’d started her career in library consultation had she really been able to order her world the way that pleased her.

  And she’d never wanted to want a man like she wanted Owen Marston.

  But she did want him, and here he was, just inches away, his gentle touch sparking blazes along her nerve endings, like those signal fires that ancient peoples used to spread news.

  Of good tidings?

  Of danger ahead?

  “Just a little human contact,” he whispered again, and her heart squeezed, ridding itself of the last of her objections.

  It was the thing she needed, too—and often. Human contact, human comfort—the loving touch of a parent, even the playful shove of a sibling—would have been welcome during those lonely childhood years. Books were magic, and they had taken her away and given her hundreds of new worlds and new characters to be—but they couldn’t provide the warmth of a body. They were not a substitute for the strength and heat of a man to whom she wanted to offer her matching softness and need.