by Leanne Banks
She sat at a table for two next to the window, and her smile could melt the fury of a Tasmanian devil. Unfortunately, she was smiling at the man sitting across from her. The same man who held her hand in his.
Eli ground his teeth together. Then he crossed the room.
“It’s no big deal,” Andie said. “I should have been paying better attention.”
Dr. Warren Koch frowned. “You’re sure you don’t want me to look at it and see if you need stitches?”
His concern was cute. She stifled a laugh. “No. I don’t think I need one of the nation’s top neurosurgeons stitching up the equivalent of a bad paper cut.”
A shadow fell over the table, and Andie glanced up. Her eyes widened and her heart took a dip. “Eli,” she said in surprise.
“Andie,” he returned with a stiff nod.
His eyes glittered with anger, his gaze moved from her eyes to her hand, which Warren Koch held. If Eli were the crazy aggressive physical type, she’d have feared for Dr. Koch’s gifted hand. She assured herself that Eli was an evolved man. Nothing would happen. Still he’d never reminded her more of a Viking explorer than at this moment. Muttering a little “Oops,” she removed her hand from Warren’s. “Dr. Warren Koch, this is Dr. Eli Masters. He’s a scientist at the research center.” She gave Eli an encouraging smile. “Dr. Koch’s in neurology.”
“Hello,” Eli managed and shook Warren’s hand. Andie sensed it had been a stretch for Eli to do that much. Holding her gaze, he pulled a chair over to the table and sat down next to her. He slid his thigh next to her leg, then leaned closer, letting his shoulder brush hers. Andie stared at him.
“Nice to meet you.” Warren nodded. “You’re doing some impressive work over there. How do you know An—”
Ignoring Warren, Eli covered her mouth with his. With no time to brace herself, Andie’s heart clutched in her chest. His lips were warm and passionate, his kiss thorough. Want and need spilled through her, seeping past her refortified defenses. Just when she thought she would drown, he pulled away.
His electric green gaze still locked onto hers, he said to Warren, “I had the good fortune of moving next door to Andie.” he took her hand. “I’ve been stuck in the lab, so I couldn’t see her.”
Pushing his chair back, Warren gave a discreet cough. “Well, uh—” He cleared his throat again. “Excuse me while I make my rounds.”
Struggling to breathe, Andie blinked and jerked her gaze from Eli’s. She opened her mouth to say something to Warren, but he was already three tables away.
She sighed and pressed her hand to her forehead. She didn’t dare look at him. The room was still whirling. He put a rose in her field of vision, his strong hand encircling the delicate stem.
“For you,” he said.
Swallowing over the lump in her throat, Andie accepted it. “Thank you.” Feeling the eyes of her co-workers on her, she was struck with a wave of self-consciousness. Her cheeks were probably the color of her ripened Big Boy tomatoes. “I didn’t expect to see you today.”
“He was holding your hand,” he said in a carefully neutral voice that conveyed a world of masculine anger.
Looking at the ceiling, she lifted her bandaged palm for his inspection and stifled a sigh. “He was concerned about my scrape.”
Eli enveloped her hand in his. “Are you okay?”
She finally looked at him. “Yes.”
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
Fighting an overwhelming sense of turmoil, she let out a long breath. “Yes.”
He raked his hand through his hair. “If this has something to do with us not seeing each other for the past couple of weeks—”
“Three weeks,” she corrected.
He arched an eyebrow and gave her a considering look. “Except for the lab, my life might as well have stopped.”
Andie shrugged. “My life didn’t.” Unprepared for a full-scale emotional discussion with Eli, she arranged her plate on the tray, fully intending to leave. “And I’ve got to get back to work now.”
When she stood, he did, too. “We need to talk.”
Andie looked at him and got the odd impression that he would like to sling her over his shoulder. He gazed at her with an intensity that wouldn’t be denied. Her stomach knotted. “Not now,” she told him.
“Tonight.” His voice was as flexible as granite.
She refused to shiver, quiver or give any other weak, feminine response. Who did he think he was bursting into her workplace and laying claim to her as if she were his? Then she saw it in his eyes.
He had damn well decided she was his.
Chapter Twelve
Andie almost didn’t answer the knock at her back door. The prospect of matching wits with a man whose IQ probably belonged in The Guinness Book of World Records didn’t make her day. She was still trying to recover from that public kiss in the hospital cafeteria.
She toyed with the idea of begging off. And just what could she use as an excuse, she asked herself cryptically? A killer paper cut?
Swearing, she walked to the door, fighting the notion that she was facing her doom. She was in control. This was her home, her body, her life. Taking a deep breath, she pulled open the door.
No romantic rose tonight.
He looked at her impatiently, emanating the darkest of moods. Dressed in dark shirt and jeans, he didn’t attempt small talk, and beyond his shoulder, she saw a flash of lightning in the sky. Even the weather was in sync with him tonight.
“We need to go to my house. Mrs. Giordano asked for the night off. She’s due. She’s put in a lot of extra time with Fletch.”
Andie hesitated, but the change in plans was reasonable.
“Better grab your key,” he told her. “It’s getting ready to rain.”
Her home, her body, her life. Two out of three wasn’t bad, she told herself as she reached for her key. But when she pulled the door closed behind her, Eli took her arm and the thunder rolled.
He guided her silently through the gate to his home, up the cracked sidewalk, through the front door, and Andie remembered the first time she’d made this same trip, the first time she’d felt the impact of his green-eyed gaze. Lightning flashed again, and she shivered.
He closed the door behind them and led her to the den. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward the sofa. “Would you like some wine?”
“Yes, thank you.” When he left, she meandered around the dark paneled room trying to dispel the gloomy mood by turning on another lamp and pushing the heavy drapes apart. It was useless. Even the sofa and two chairs were upholstered in dark burgundy. She wondered, and not for the first time, if Eli had bought the furniture with the house. She felt him return and her nerve endings stood at attention. He offered the wine and nodded, then shoved his hands in his pockets as he watched her.
“What’s going on?”
Andie took a quick breath. “It’s nice to see you, too.”
“We spent the night making love, and the next time I saw you, a neurosurgeon’s hitting on you.”
“There was a gap in time.”
“Not for me,” he said, his jaw tightening.
“Well, the rest of the world kept turning, Eli. And I’m part of the rest of the world. You can’t make love and not see someone for three weeks and expect to pick up everything exactly where you left it.”
He hesitated, then took a step closer to her. “Why not? Do you have a problem with my job?”
Andie’s heart tightened. “Not really. I think it was more a case of bad timing.”
He frowned. “How?”
To gain some time and space, Andie turned around to place her wineglass on the end table. Sighing, she wondered how she could possibly answer Eli’s question when everything was as clear as mud to her, too. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “We got very—close that night. When we didn’t see each other for weeks, I started wondering—” She bit her lip. “Started feeling—”
His hands encircled her shoulders. “
What?”
His low voice so close to her ear made her head spin. She closed her eyes against it. “I started wondering if we’d made a mistake,” she whispered.
He squeezed her shoulders, then turned her around. “A mistake,” he repeated in disbelief and shook his head. “I’m not getting this, Andie.”
“I don’t understand it either.” She felt impatient with him, with herself for not being able to articulate her feelings better. “I was disappointed when we didn’t get together on Sunday, but that was okay. The canceled dinner date bothered me a little more. Then you didn’t call for over a week, and when you did you asked me to take care of Fletch. The next time I heard from you was last week.”
Eli narrowed his eyes. “If you had a problem with taking care of Fletch, then you should have told me.”
Andie shook her head vehemently. “I adore Fletch. He’s a great kid. I tried to explain all this to Sam, and she brought up—” She stopped dead in the water.
He watched her. “Brought up what?”
Her heart sank. She swallowed the bitter taste of a bad memory. “I really don’t want to talk about that.”
“Tough.”
“Okay, Paul.”
Like lightning, his expression shifted to hot anger, then he seemed to regain his control. “I think it’s time we had a little talk about Paul,” he said quietly.
“I don’t want to.”
“Believe me, I don’t think I could stomach the intimate details of your entire engagement. All I want is the breakup.”
She felt her cheeks heat. “The breakup was the worst part.”
“It usually is.”
The ruthless tone of his voice left her with a chill. Feeling as if a net had been thrown over her, she squared her shoulders and backed away from his touch. He was forcing her to reveal the most humiliating experience in her life. A surge of anger rolled through her. She would give him his answer, then leave.
Taking a breath, she stared at the ugly red vase on the entertainment center, determined to keep the story short and simple. “Toward the end of our engagement, I took care of Paul’s daughter when he had to work late. It was no problem. She played at my house, then Paul would pick her up. One afternoon, she went to a friend’s birthday party. As I was dropping her off, she remembered she’d left the present at home. I told her to go on, then went to the house and found Paul in bed with another woman.”
In retrospect, Andie felt a measure of pity for the woman. She shook her head. “I was so stunned I couldn’t come up with a thing to say. Paul said he could explain it all. It was just an unplanned fling. After that, it was as if my heart and mind slammed the door on him. I didn’t hear anything more. His mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear his voice. I just took off the engagement ring, dropped it on the floor and left.”
She couldn’t hear his voice, but to this day, she could still hear the ping, ping, ping of fourteen-karat gold bouncing on the hardwood floor. Shaking herself, she pressed her lips together. “There it is,” she said, desperately wanting to leave. “Short, but definitely not sweet.”
“I didn’t want sweet,” Eli said. “I just wanted the truth. And you believe I’m like Paul.”
Adamant, Andie shook her head and stared at him. “No. I don’t.”
He arched an eyebrow in disbelief. “The situation looks the same to me. I have custody of a young child, and you’ve taken care of him while I worked overtime.”
“It’s not the same. For one thing, we haven’t made any promises to each other. We’re not engaged.”
“How do you know I haven’t thought about it?”
Andie’s heart stuttered. “You’re crazy,” she managed in a husky whisper.
“Perhaps,” he said dryly. He cupped her chin. “Tell me, Andie, do I look like him?”
Shocked, she gasped. “No.”
“Do I act like him?” he asked, his voice deepening.
Confused by his persistence, she jerked away from him. “Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to make it look like you’re just like him? Except for being a single parent, you’re not,” she insisted. “You don’t look like him, and you don’t act like him. You don’t act like you want me just so I can take care of Fletch.” Her heart dipped and her voice softened. “You act like you really want me for me.”
“Because I do,” he told her in a rough voice. His face dead serious, he pulled her against his chest. “I told you before, and nothing has changed.” He took her mouth in a melting, mind-blowing kiss.
When he stopped, her head was spinning. She clung to his shoulders and squeezed her eyes closed. “I don’t know, Eli. Before today I had decided I needed some space, to gain some perspective and get control of my life.”
She heard his softly uttered oath of frustration just before he hauled her up in his arms and walked to the sofa. “We started having problems because there was too much space between us.”
She couldn’t deny that.
He sat down and held her on his lap. Sinking into his strong thighs, Andie experienced a sharp pang of déjà vu.
“I don’t want anything between us,” he said. His gaze dropped down to the ribbon holding the top edges of her shirt together. “There’s a term we use in the lab when we allow a collaborating lab team access to our data. It’s a very rare occurrence. Do you know what unlimited access is?” he asked, tugging gently on her shirt ribbon as he met her gaze straight on. “It means no boundaries, no secrets, complete and total sharing.”
Her chest grew tight. She could see the sand blowing across the boundary lines she’d drawn in his absence. The ease with which he obliterated her safe distance rocked her world.
He stopped playing with the ribbon and gave it a swift decisive jerk, pulling it loose. “I want unlimited access to your mind and body.” His hot gaze fell over her. He didn’t hide his intentions. He didn’t hide his need. “Every minute of your waking time that you don’t spend at work, I want you to spend with me.”
Her heart banged against her rib cage. She opened her mouth to tell him he was presumptuous, that he was asking for the impossible, but he continued.
He bent down to kiss her where he had pushed her blouse apart. “I want every minute of your nonwaking time, too. I want to spend the night in your bed, and I want you spending the night in mine.” His mouth took a tender journey over the slope of her breast, heating her skin, building a fire inside her.
She was having trouble breathing. “You’re being unreasonable,” she managed.
“Tell me what to do about it. I don’t feel reasonable about you,” he growled. “I’ve admired the way you get along with Fletch. Hell, I’ve even envied it. But I don’t want you for Fletch, Andie. I want you for me.”
That last statement burst her fortress of glass into a thousand pieces. She was struck by the inherent strength in his arms and the aching, masculine vulnerability in his eyes.
“You’re right. I’m not reasonable, Andie. So tell me what to do about it.”
Her heart was a fist in her chest. He was overwhelmed by his feelings for her. She almost couldn’t believe it, but there it was, staring her in the face, clear as the desperate need written in his eyes and echoed through the edge in his voice. Gulping, she lifted her hands to either side of his stubborn jaw. “You’re not making this easy for me,” she told him in an unsteady voice.
“I could say the same of you.” He tilted his head so he could press his mouth to her palm. “Maybe we could change that.”
Heaven help her, he was dangerous. He made her want. He made her hope. “I absolutely cannot be with you every waking minute,” she told him as sternly as she could manage when she was melting into him.
“Every other minute,” he said.
“And every night is imposs—”
He covered her mouth with his hand. “Don’t make me compromise on everything. If you can’t promise to let me keep you locked in my bedroom for the next month,” he said with a hint of intimate humor, “then promise
tonight.”
She closed her eyes at the emotions unfurling inside her. “Oh, Eli, you’re doing it again.”
“Not yet,” he murmured with a sexy laugh. His hands slid beneath her shirt and tugged it loose. “But we will be soon.”
She sighed, accepting the inevitable. “Okay, let me get this straight. What have I agreed to? Tonight.”
He unfastened her jeans. “And Friday night. And—”
“You’re confusing me.”
“Thank God,” he muttered and kissed her, long and deep.
When they broke apart, she was ready to slip completely under him and his spell. His green eyes were full of arousal and something deeper than affection. “I have another request, Andie,” he said. “Be gentle with me.”
A lump formed in her throat. It could have been just a teasing request or even a sensual joke between them. Beyond the teasing sensuality, Andie saw that he was asking for more than physical consideration. He was concerned about what she could do to his heart.
She blinked back the burning sensation in her eyes. “I will,” she promised and she meant it.
That was all Eli needed. He scooped up the wine, carried her upstairs and dumped her on his bed. “You look good there,” he said, filled with satisfaction at the sight of her tousled hair on his pillow and her huge eyes focused on him.
She looked at him blankly. “Good where?”
“On my bed.”
He felt her gaze as he unbuttoned his shirt. “Do you want some of that wine now?” Pouring the Chablis into the glass, he offered it to her. “You didn’t touch it downstairs.”
She raised herself on one elbow. “I figured I would need every one of my brain cells for that discussion,” she said, making him grin. She took a sip, then offered the glass to him.
The simple gesture was eminently sexy to Eli. Instead of taking the glass with his hand, he lowered his mouth to it. Her eyelids swept down as she tilted the glass for him to drink.
He pressed his mouth to hers, dipping his tongue past her wine-moistened lips. Her taste was sweet and heady, making arousal pulse through him. He would have to fight the urge to gorge himself on her. Stifling a groan, he pulled away and stared at her. Her lips were wet, her eyes dazed, dark and sultry.