by Lori Foster
She glanced down at the black-haired, serious and controlled-looking man in the photo and kept her eyes open while Fiona yawned and groaned.
“No,” her friend said, finally. “I didn’t go home with him. Now would you piss off.”
A man came through the glass doors alone. Right general age and he had black hair, but he was nothing like the photograph. His hair was a mess. His face was shadowy with stubble, giving him a disreputable look. He moved slowly, but she liked the way he walked, with a kind of rolling gait, as though he were getting off a boat rather than a plane. He stood as though he were about to fall asleep on his feet, his gaze searching out someone. Then their gazes connected and she felt her heart flop over.
No photograph could have captured the blue of his eyes. They were the dark, smoky blue of a wailing sax at some bar at three in the morning, with a half drunk whiskey and a smoldering cigarette. They were so tired, and so lonely in a cynical way that she wanted to fix everything for him and kiss his hurts better. It was an odd reaction for her to have for a stranger, but he didn’t even look like a stranger, she thought with a spurt of recognition.
He held a briefcase in one hand and a black suitcase in the other. She glanced back at the photo and back at him, every hormone in her body doing a victory dance.
“Oh, my God,” she said into the phone. “He’s gorgeous.”
“I dunno,” her friend said in her ear. “He was all right looking, I suppose, but that shirt! I thought he’d—”
“What are you going on about? You can’t see him.” She’d have to remember never to wake Fi early on a Saturday again. “I’ve got to go.” And she ended the call, while Fiona was in the middle of something.
Mark Forsyth’s gaze had paused only briefly on hers and kept going, but whew, what could happen to a person’s pulse in a few seconds.
Slowly she rose and approached. Could she really be this lucky and find that she was being asked to look after just about the sweetest sexpot she’d ever seen? Taking a deep breath, she said, “Mark Forsyth?”
He looked at her for a moment and a crease formed between his brows as though he weren’t quite sure what his name was. She wanted to kiss the frown away.
Please turn the page for a sizzling preview of
RETURN TO ME
by Shannon McKenna.
Available right now.
“Excuse me, miss. I’m looking for El Kent.” The low, quiet voice came from the swinging door that led to the dining room.
Ellen spun around with a gasp. The eggs flew into the air, and splattered on the floor. No one called her El. No one except for—
The sight of Simon knocked her back. God. So tall. So big. All over. The long, skinny body she remembered was filled out with hard, lean muscle. His white T-shirt showed off broad shoulders, sinewy arms. Faded jeans clung with careless grace to the perfect lines of his narrow hips, his long legs. She looked up into the focused intensity of his dark eyes, and a rush of hot and cold shivered through her body.
The exotic perfection of his face was harder now. Seasoned by sun and wind and time. She drank in the details: golden skin, narrow hawk nose, hollows beneath his prominent cheekbones, the sharp angle of his jaw, shaded with a few days’ growth of dark beard stubble. A silvery scar sliced through the dark slash of his left eyebrow. His gleaming hair was wet, combed straight back from his square forehead into a ponytail. Tightly leashed power hummed around him.
The hairs on her arms lifted in response.
His eyes flicked over her body. His teeth flashed white against his tan. “Damn. I’ll run to the store to replace those eggs for you, miss.”
Miss? He didn’t even recognize her. Her face was starting to shake again. Seventeen years of worrying about him, and he just checked out her body, like he might scope any woman he saw on the street.
He waited patiently for her to respond to his apology. She peeked up at his face again. One eyebrow was tilted up in a gesture so achingly familiar, it brought tears to her eyes. She clapped her hand over her trembling lips. She would not cry. She would not.
“I’m real sorry I startled you,” he tried again. “I was wondering if you could tell me where I might find—” His voice trailed off. His smile faded. He sucked in a gulp of air. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “El?”
The gesture tipped him off. He recognized her the instant she covered her mouth and peeked over her hand, but he had to struggle to superimpose his memories of El onto the knockout blonde in the kitchen. He remembered a skinny girl with big, startled eyes peeking up from beneath heavy bangs. A mouth too big for her bit of a face.
This woman was nothing like that awkward girl. She’d filled out, with a fine, round ass that had immediately caught his eye as she bent into the fridge. And what she had down there was nicely balanced by what she had up top. High, full tits, bouncing and soft. A tender, lavish mouthful and then some, just how he liked them.
Her hand dropped, and revealed her wide, soft mouth. Her dark eyebrows no longer met across the bridge of her nose. Spots of pink stained her delicate cheekbones. She’d grown into her eyes and mouth. Her hair was a wavy curtain of gold-streaked bronze that reached down to her ass. El Kent had turned beautiful. Mouth-falling-open, mind-going-blank beautiful. The images locked seamlessly together, and he wondered how he could’ve not recognized her, even for an instant. He wanted to hug her, but something buzzing in the air held him back.
The silence deepened. The air was heavy with it. She didn’t exclaim, or look surprised, or pleased. In fact, she looked almost scared.
“El?” He took a hesitant step forward. “Do you recognize me?”
Her soft mouth thinned. “Of course I recognize you. You haven’t changed at all. I was just, ah, surprised that you didn’t recognize me.”
“I didn’t remember you being so pretty.” The words came out before he could vet them and decide if they were stupid or rude.
Based on her reaction, he concluded that they were. She grabbed a wad of paper towels from the roll on the counter, wiped up the eggs and dropped the mess into the garbage pail. She dampened another paper towel. Her hair dangled down like a veil. She was hiding.
“What’s wrong, El?” he asked cautiously. “What did I do?”
She knelt down, sponging off the floor tiles. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“But you won’t look at me,” he said.
She flung the soggy towel into the garbage. “I’m called Ellen these days. And what do you expect? You disappear for seventeen years, no letter, no phone call, not so much as a postcard to let me know you weren’t dead, and expect me to run into your arms squealing for joy?”
So she hadn’t forgotten him. His mood shot up, in spite of her anger. “I’m, uh, sorry I didn’t write,” he offered.
She turned her back on him. “I’m sorry you didn’t, too.” She made a show of drying some teacups.
“My life was really crazy for a while. I was scrambling just to survive. Then I joined the Marines, and they sent me all over the map for a few years while I figured out what I wanted to do with myself—”
“Which was?” Her voice was sharp and challenging.
“Photojournalist,” he told her. “Freelance, at the moment. I travel all the time, mostly war zones. By the time I got things in my life more or less straightened out, I was afraid …” His voice trailed off.
“Yes?” Her head swiveled around. “You were afraid of what?”
“That you might have forgotten me,” he said.