by Nora Roberts
Just as she'd imagined. Just as she'd wanted.
Desires she'd ruthlessly buried broke the surface and screamed into life. Riding on the thrill, she dragged at his shirt until her hands found the hot, bare skin and dug in.
Man and muscle.
He found her breast, had her arching in delicious pleasure as his teeth nipped over shirt and bra to tantalize the flesh beneath, to stir the blood beneath into feverish, pulsing life. Everything inside her
went full, and ripe, and ready.
As senses awakened, slashing one against the other, in an edgy tangle of needs, she gave herself over to them, to him. And she yearned for him, for that promise of release, in a way she hadn't yearned for in
so long. She wanted, craved, the heat that washed through her as the possessive stroke of those labor-scarred hands, the demanding crush of those insatiable lips, electrified her body.
She wanted, craved, all these quivering aches, these madly churning needs and the freedom to meet them.
She rose with him, body to body, moved with him, flesh to flesh. And drove him toward delirium with that creamy skin, those lovely curves. In the softening light, she looked beyond exquisite lying against
the dark spread—that bright hair tumbled, those summer-blue eyes clouded with pleasure.
Passion radiated from her, meeting and matching his own. And so he wanted to give her more, and take more, and simply drown himself in what they brought to each other. The scent of her filled him like breath.
He murmured her name, savoring and exploiting as they explored each other. And there was more, he discovered, more than he'd expected.
Her heart lurched as those rugged hands guided her up, over, through the steep rise of desire. The crest rolled through her, a long, endless swell of sultry heat. She arched up again, crying out as she clamped
her arms around him, pulses galloping.
Her mouth took his in a kind of ravenous madness, even as her mind screamed—Again!
He held on, held strong while she rode the peak, and the thrill her response brought him made him tremble. He ached, heart, mind, loins, ached to the point of pain.
And when he could bear it no longer, he drove into her.
She cried out once more, a sound of both shock and triumph. And she was already moving with him,
a quick piston of hips, as her hands came up to frame his face.
She watched him, those blue eyes swimming, those lush lips trembling with each breath as they rose
and fell together.
In the whole of his life, he'd never seen such beauty bloom.
When those eyes went blind, when they closed on a sobbing moan, he let himself go.
* * *
He was heavy. Very heavy. Stella lay still beneath Logan and pondered the wonder of being pinned, helplessly, under a man. She felt loose and sleepy and utterly relaxed. She imagined there was probably
a nice pink light beaming quietly out of her fingers and toes.
His heart was thundering still. What woman wouldn't feel smug and satisfied knowing she'd caused a
big, strong man to lose his breath?
Cat-content, she stroked her hands over his back.
He grunted, and rolled off of her.
She felt immediately exposed and self-conscious. Reaching out, she started to give the spread a little
tug, to cover herself at least partially. Then he did something that froze her in place, and had her heart teetering.
He took her hand and kissed her fingers.
He said nothing, nothing at all, and she stayed very still while she tried to swallow her heart back into place.
"Guess I'd better feed you now," he said at length.
"Ah, I should call and make sure the boys are all right."
"Go ahead." He sat up, patting her naked thigh before he rolled out of bed and reached for his jeans.
"I'll go get things started in the kitchen."
He didn't bother with his shirt, but started out. Then he stopped, turned and looked at her.
"What?" She lifted an arm, casually, she hoped, over her breasts.
"I just like the way you look there. All mussed and flushed. Makes me want to muss and flush you
some more, first chance I get."
"Oh." She tried to formulate a response, but he was already sauntering off. And whistling.
FIFTEEN
The man could cook. With little help from Stella, Logan put together a meal of delicately grilled tuna, herbed-up brown rice, and chunks of sauteed peppers and mushrooms. He was the sort of cook who dashed and dumped ingredients in by eye, or impulse, and seemed to enjoy it.
The results were marvelous.
She was an adequate cook, a competent one. She measured everything and considered cooking just
one of her daily chores.
It was probably a good analogy for who they were, she decided. And another reason why it made little sense for her to be eating in his kitchen or being naked in his bed.
The sex had been ... incredible. No point in being less than honest about it. And after good, healthy
sex she should've been feeling relaxed and loose and comfortable. Instead she felt tense and tight and awkward.
It had been so intense, then he'd just rolled out of bed and started dinner. They might just as easily
have finished a rousing match of tennis.
Except he'd kissed her fingers, and that sweet, affectionate gesture had arrowed straight to her heart.
Her problem, her problem, she reminded herself. Over-analyzing, over-compensating, over-something. But if she didn't analyze something how did she know what it was?
"Dinner okay?"
She broke out of her internal debate to see him watching her steadily, with those strong jungle-cat eyes. "It's terrific."
"You're not eating much."
Deliberately she forked off more tuna. "I've never understood people who cook like you, like they do on some of the cooking shows. Tossing things together, shaking a little of this in, pinches of that. How do you know it's right?"
If that was really what she'd been thinking about with her mouth in that sexy sulk, he'd go outside and
eat a shovelful of mulch. "I don't know. It usually is, or different enough to be right some other way."
Maybe he couldn't get inside her head, but he had to figure whatever was in there had to do with sex, or the ramifications of having it. But they'd play it her way for the moment. "If I'm going to cook, and since I don't want to spend every night in a restaurant, I'm going to cook, I want to enjoy it. If I regimented it, it'd start to piss me off."
"If I don't regiment it to some extent, I get nervous. Is it going to be too bland, or overly spiced? Overcooked, underdone? I'd be a wreck by the time I had a meal on the table." Worry flickered over
her face. "I don't belong here, do I?"
"Define here."
"Here, here." She gestured wide with both arms. "With you, eating this really lovely and inventive meal, in your beautifully designed kitchen in your strangely charming and neglected house after relieving some sort of sexual insanity upstairs in your I'm-a-man-and-I-know-it bedroom."
He sat back and decided to clear the buzz from his head with a long drink of wine. He'd figured her
right, he decided, but he just never seemed to figure her enough. "I've never heard that definition of
here before. Must come from up north."
"You know what I mean," she fired back. "This isn't... It isn't—"
"Efficient? Tidy? Organized?"
"Don't take that placating tone with me."
"That wasn't my placating tone, it was my exasperated tone. What's your problem, Red?"
"You confuse me."
"Oh." He shrugged a shoulder. "If that's all." And went back to his meal.
"Do you think that's funny?"
"No, but I think I'm hungry, and that I can't do a hell of. a lot about the fact that you're confused. Could be I don't mind all that much confusing yo
u, anyway, since otherwise you'd start lining things up in alphabetical order."
Those bluebell eyes went to slits. "A, you're arrogant and annoying. B, you're bossy and bullheaded. C—"
"C, you're contrary and constricting, but that doesn't bother me the way it once did. I think we've got something interesting between us. Neither one of us was looking for it, but I can roll with that. You
pick it apart. Hell if I know why I'm starting to like that about you."
"I've got more to risk than you do."
He sobered. "I'm not going to hurt your kids."
"If I believed you were the sort of man who would, or could, I wouldn't be with you on this level."
"What's this level'?"
"Evening sex and kitchen dinners."
"You seemed to handle the sex better than the meal."
"You're exactly right. Because I don't know what you expect from me now, and I'm not entirely sure what I expect from you."
"And this is your equivalent of tossing ingredients in a pot."
She huffed out a breath. "Apparently you understand me better than I do you."
"I'm not that complicated."
"Oh, please. You're a maze, Logan." She leaned forward until she could see the gold flecks on the green of his eyes. "A goddamn maze without any geometric pattern. Professionally, you're one of the most creative, versatile, and knowledgeable landscape designers I've ever worked with, but you do half of your designing and scheduling on the fly, with little scraps of papers stuffed into your truck or your pockets."
He scooped up more rice. "It works for me."
"Apparently, but it shouldn't work for anyone. You thrive in chaos, which this house clearly illustrates. Nobody should thrive in chaos."
"Now wait a minute." This time he gestured with his fork. "Where's the chaos? There's barely a frigging thing in the place."
"Exactly!" She jabbed a finger at him. "You've got a wonderful kitchen, a comfortable and stylish bedroom—"
"Stylish?" Mortification, clear as glass, covered his face. "Jesus."
"And empty rooms. You should be tearing your hair out wondering what you're going to do with them, but you're not. You just—just—" She waved her hand in circles. "Mosey along."
"I've never moseyed in my life. Amble sometimes," he decided. "But I never mosey."
"Whatever. You know wine and you read comic books. What kind of sense does that make?"
"Makes plenty if you consider I like wine and comic books."
"You were married, and apparently committed enough to move away from your home."
"What's the-damn point in getting married if you're not ready and willing to do what makes the other person happy? Or at least try."
"You loved her," Stella said with a nod. "Yet you walked away from a divorce unscarred. It was broken, too bad, so you ended it. You're rude and abrupt one minute, and accommodating the next. You knew why I'd come here tonight, yet you went to the trouble to fix a meal—which was considerate and, and civilized—there, put that in the C column."
"Christ, Red, you kill me. I'd move on to D, and say you're delicious, but right now it's more like demented."
Despite the fact he was laughing, she was wound up and couldn't stop. "And we have incredible, blow-the-damn-roof-off sex, then you bounce out of bed as if we'd been doing this every night for
years. I can't keep up."
Once he decided she'd finished, he picked up his wine, drank thoughtfully. "Let's see if I can work my way back through that. Though I've got to tell you, I didn't detect any geometric pattern."
"Oh, shut up."
His hand clamped over hers before she could shove back from the table. "No, you just sit still. It's my turn. If I didn't work the way I do? I wouldn't be able to do what I do, and I sure as hell wouldn't love it. I found that out up north. My marriage was a failure. Nobody likes to fail, but nobody gets through life without screwing up. We screwed it up, didn't hurt anybody but ourselves. We took our lumps and moved on."
"But—"
"Hush. If I'm rude and abrupt it's because I feel rude and abrupt. If I'm accommodating, it's because
I want to be, or figure I have to be at some point."
He thought, What the hell, and topped off his wine. She'd barely touched hers. "What was next? Oh, yeah, you being here tonight. Yeah, I knew why. We're not teenagers, and you're a pretty straightforward woman, in your way. I wanted you, and made that clear. You wouldn't come knocking on my door unless you were ready. As for the meal, there are a couple of reasons for that. One, I like to eat. And two, I wanted you here. I wanted to be with you here, like this. Before, after, in between. However it worked out."
Somewhere, somehow, during his discourse, her temper had ebbed. "How do you make it all sound sane?"
"I'm not done. While I'm going to agree with your take on the sex, I object to the word 'bounce.' I don't bounce anymore than I mosey. I got out of bed because if I'd breathed you in much longer, I'd have asked you to stay. You can't, you won't. And the fact is, I don't know that I'm ready for you to stay anyway. If you're the sort who needs a lot of postcoital chat, like 'Baby, that was amazing'—"
"I'm not." There was something in his aggravated tone that made her lips twitch. "I can judge for myself, and I destroyed you up there."
His hand slid up to her wrist, back down to her fingers. "Any destruction was mutual."
"All right. Mutual destruction. The first time with a man, and I think this holds true for most women, is
as nerve-racking as it is exciting. It's more so afterward if what happened between them touched something in her. You touched something in me, and it scares me."
"Straightforward," he commented.
"Straightforward, to your maze. It's a difficult combination. Gives us a lot to think about. I'm sorry
I made an issue out of all of this."
"Red, you were born to make issues out of every damn thing. It's kind of interesting now that I'm getting used to it."
"That may be true, and I could say that the fact your drummer certainly bangs a different tune's fairly interesting, too. But right now, I'm going to help you clean up your kitchen. Then I have to get home."
He rose when she did, then simply took her shoulders and backed her into the refrigerator. He kissed her blind and deaf—pent-up temper, needs, frustration, longings all boiled together.
"Something else to think about," he said.
"I'll say."
* * *
Roz didn't pry into other people's business. She didn't mind hearing about it when gossip came her way, but she didn't pry. She didn't like—more she didn't permit—others to meddle in her life, and afforded them the same courtesy.
So she didn't ask Stella any questions. She thought of plenty, but she didn't ask them.
She observed.
Her manager conducted business with her usual calm efficiency. Roz imagined Stella could be standing
in the whirling funnel of a tornado and would still be able to conduct business efficiently.
An admirable and somewhat terrifying trait.
She'd grown very fond of Stella, and she'd come— unquestionably—to depend on her to handle the details of the business so she herself could focus on the duties, and pleasures, of being the grower. She adored the children. It was impossible for her not to. They were charming and bright, sly and noisy, entertaining and exhausting.
Already, she was so used to them, and Stella and Hayley, being in her house she could hardly imagine them not being there.
But she didn't pry, even when Stella came home from her evening at Logan's with the unmistakable
look of a woman who'd been well pleasured.
But she didn't hush Hayley, or brush her aside when the girl chattered about it.
"She won't get specific," Hayley complained while she and Roz weeded a bed at Harper House. "I really like it when people get specific. But she said he cooked for her. I always figure when a man cooks, he's either trying to get y
ou between the sheets, or he's stuck on you."
"Maybe he's just hungry."
"A man's hungry, he sends out for pizza. At least the guys I've known. I think he's stuck on her." She waited, the pause obviously designed for Roz to comment. When there was none, Hayley blew out a breath. "Well? You've known him a long time."
"A few years. I can't tell you what's in his mind. But I can tell you he's never cooked for me."
"Was his wife a real bitch?"
"I couldn't say. I didn't know her."
"I'd like it if she was. A real stone bitch who tore him apart and left him all wounded and resentful of women. Then Stella comes along and gets him all messed up in the head even as she heals him."
Roz sat back on her heels and smiled. "You're awfully young, honey."
"You don't have to be young to like romance. Um ... your second husband, he was terrible, wasn't he?"
"He was—is—a liar, a cheat, and a thief. Other than that he's charming."
"Did he break your heart?"
"No. He bruised my pride and pissed me off. Which was worse, in my opinion. That's yesterday's news, Hayley. I'm going to plug some silene armeria in these pockets," she continued. 'They've got a long blooming season, and they'll fill in nice here."
"I'm sorry."
"No need to be sorry."
"It's just that this woman was in this morning, Mrs. Peebles?"
"Oh, yes, Roseanne." After studying the space, Roz picked up her trowel and began to turn the earth in the front of the mixed bed. "Did she actually buy anything?"
"She dithered around for an hour, said she'd come back."
"Typical. What did she want? It wouldn't have been plants."
"I clued in there. She's the nosy sort, and not the kind with what you'd call a benign curiosity. Just
comes in for gossip—to spread it or to harvest it. You see her kind most everywhere."
"I suppose you do."
"So, well. She'd gotten word I was living here, and was a family connection, so she was pumping me.
I don't pump so easy, but I let her keep at it."
Roz grinned under the brim of her cap as she reached for a plant. "Good for you."
"I figured what she really wanted was for me to pass on to you the news that Bryce Clerk is back in Memphis."