by Anna Durand
Despite that need for control, he let me pick the destinations for our sightseeing tour. I whipped out my phone periodically to photograph his bafflement. The voodoo museum in the French Quarter tested his ability to adapt, or at least to mask his unease, especially when we explored the display of fat candles in glass holders, which bore images of voodoo deities with names like Elaggua. After that, I took pity on my stuffy Scot and suggested we stop in at a less-exotic museum, the Historic New Orleans Collection.
The assemblage of seven historic buildings seemed more his speed, and he took to the exhibits with a fascination that twinkled in his beautiful eyes. We surveyed the displays of period clothing and weapons, oohed and ahhed at the restoration work on the buildings, studied the artwork on display, and got our exercise strolling from one building to another. Rory grew more at ease the more we explored the buildings and got rather animated when discussing the nifty period furnishings. My guy had a thing for old-timey swag. It was totally adorable.
Not my guy. Why on earth had I thought of him that way? My companion for a day or two, that's what he was.
After a trip to the National World War II Museum, where Rory regaled me with stories of his grandfather's aerial exploits during the war, I needed a break from the past. As much as I dug history, the time had come for fun of the more tangible variety.
Outside the war museum, I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
He gazed down at me, brows lifted.
"We've done the history thing," I said. "Are you up for something a bit more audacious?"
"This would be your attempt to make me have fun."
"Yep." I slipped my arm under his, looping it around his bicep. "Think you can handle it?"
"I can." He ducked his head to meet my gaze. "If you're expecting me to become more like you, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed."
"Like me?" I nudged him with my elbow. "What am I like?"
"You are open and free, unafraid of what anyone thinks of you. I admire that, but I will never be like you."
"Do you want to be?"
He raised his head, lips working as if he were mulling his answer. After a moment, he resumed his collected demeanor. "I'm comfortable the way I am."
I noted he hadn't said no. Being comfortable with the status quo didn't mean he wanted to stay that way. As we headed for his rental car, I wondered if Rory had invited me—silently, even subconsciously—to show him the benefits of being like me.
With some effort, I convinced Rory we should have lunch at SoBou, a Cajun restaurant in the French Quarter. I cajoled him into trying gumbo with me, though I'd never had the soup before. Rory seemed to like it, grudgingly, but when I offered him a bite of my oyster taco, he reared back as if I'd shoved a rotting squirrel corpse in his face.
Lip curled, he'd said, "No thank you."
I waved the taco in front of his mouth. "Come on, Rory, live a little. One bite won't kill you."
"Oysters can be appealing, but not in a…taco." He spoke the word with a disdainful tone, then barred his arms over his chest. "Again, no thank you."
"This is a vacation day. Take a risk." I touched the taco to his lips. "One teeny bite."
He rolled his eyes heavenward, sighed, and lowered his arms. "All right."
Leaning forward, he took a dainty bite of the taco and chewed with extreme care, like he thought the food might explode in his mouth. He swallowed and sank back in his chair. "Happy?"
"Yes. Wasn't awful, was it?"
"Not entirely." A mischievous glint sparkled in his eyes. "You do realize oysters are thought to be an aphrodisiac."
"Guess you'll find out later if that's true."
I'd gotten Rory to try something new. Check off one box on my to-do list for getting him to loosen up.
A new question occurred to me. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-nine. I'll be forty in a month or so."
I gave him an assessing glance. "You don't look forty, but you act ninety."
"Thank you," he said crisply, the twinkling in his eyes a contrast to his tone.
"Don't worry," I said, "your stuffiness is cute, and kind of a turn-on."
"I feel the same way about your silliness."
Once we'd finished our meal, I hopped up from my chair. "Buckle up, we're off to our next stop."
Rory got up and stretched. "What now?"
"I want to drive a Lamborghini at over a hundred miles an hour." I grabbed his hand. "Come on, there's a place where you can do that."
His eyes bulged, and his face went slack.
"Relax," I said. "You can sit and watch while I take all the risks. Or, you could be my copilot. How brave are you, Mr. MacTaggart?"
"Not that brave."
Chapter Seven
I reclined on the sofa in Rory's suite, my feet propped on the coffee table, my tummy full of good food—meaning everything a nutritionist would label as unhealthy. Rory had gone the boring health food route, ordering a Cobb salad. I chose an enormous ribeye steak, and to my surprise, Rory made no comment on my selection.
His salad lay half-eaten on the table.
My plate was empty, both because I'd been starving and because he had eaten a good portion of it. Stealing my food might've qualified as shunning propriety, except he'd politely asked my permission to taste my steak. Ah well, at least I'd gotten him to eat something other than salad. I liked a nice salad as much as anybody, but after a day of walking and seeing the sights and driving a supercar I needed serious protein.
For dessert, we'd shared a large piece of cheesecake. Two forks, of course. And he wouldn't let me feed him.
Now I lounged on the sofa waiting for him to return from the bathroom. Our trip to the Xtreme Xperience had left him shell shocked, I decided. While he'd observed from the stands, I'd donned a helmet and strapped in behind the wheel of a genuine Lamborghini. After a half-hour training session, I'd taken the supercar for a wild spin on the racetrack, with my instructor in the passenger seat. Three laps. Zeee-oom. Zeee-oom. Zeee-oom. When I'd finished, Rory had looked sick.
I'd patted his shoulders and said, "You weren't even in the car, and you look like you're about to throw up."
"You were driving very fast," he'd said, his voice a little shaky. "I was sure you'd crash into the wall and die in a hellish explosion."
Rory had feared for my well-being? A warm glow spread through my chest, and I couldn't stop myself from saying, "You are so sweet to worry about me."
He scowled. "I'd worry about anyone as reckless as you."
"It's adorably sweet, Rory."
"Stop calling me adorable and cute and sweet." His scowl had mutated into an exasperated look. "I'm a man, not a kitten."
When the man-not-kitten at last emerged from the bedroom doorway, I was in the midst of a big yawn.
"Long day," he said, leaning against the doorjamb. "Time for bed."
I stretched my entire body, arms above my head and toes extended. "Mm, yes, bedtime sounds good."
He drank in the length of me, from my bare arms and cleavage to the exposed expanse of my legs and my naked feet. His tongue darted out to slicken his lips, but when he looked at my face again, he maintained a neutral expression. "No sex tonight. You're exhausted, and so am I."
"We can perk each other up." I waggled my toes, lifting one foot to point my big toe at him. "Unless you're afraid you'll lose control again."
"I won't." He crooked a finger at me. "Come, lass. Time for sleep."
The way he'd amended the statement from bed to sleep might've disappointed me, if I weren't yawning again. This day had proved invigorating—and yes, fun—but I'd gotten more and more tired the longer I sat here. He was right. We both needed sleep.
Sharing a bed without any steaminess involved felt more intimate than getting down and dirty together.
Rory crooked his finger again.
I rose and stretched one more time, boosting up onto my tiptoes, and slapped my heels back down on the floor on another yawn. "We spent the day toge
ther, and now we're spending the night together with no sex. Sounds an awful lot like dating, wouldn't you say?"
"I don't date anymore."
Hands on my hips, I canted my head. "What do you call this?"
Rory scratched his cheek. "A casual fling, I suppose."
I strolled across the room to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. "Nothing about today was casual."
He speared me with a sharp look. "For me, it was."
Bullshit, my inner voice said. But if the guy needed to dismiss our day of fun and bonding in order to make himself feel safe, I wouldn't begrudge him his crutch. I'd met the real Rory today, and that man wanted to come out and play more often. The mystery of why he retreated into stoic mode intrigued me more than seemed healthy. I wasn't dumb enough to believe I could change him. His desire to spend a day with me, possibly two days if we stayed together tomorrow, suggested to me he wanted to shed his uptight facade.
I couldn't change him, but maybe I could help him.
The question was, should I?
My mouth gaped open on yet another yawn. I'd answer that question tomorrow. Right after I figured out whether he really wanted my help.
A fourth noisy yawn overtook me.
Rory swept me up in his arms and carried me to the bed, plunking me on my feet beside it. "Get ready for bed. For sleep."
"Aye-aye, sir." I saluted, earning a tiny upward tick of his lips.
He marched around the foot of the bed, yanked the drapes closed, and dug his wallet out of his pants pocket to toss it on the bedside table. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he began to untie his shoelaces.
While he carefully removed his sneakers, I kicked mine off and took hold of my shirt's hem to slide it up and over my head.
Rory bolted up off the bed. "What are you doing?"
"I sleep naked." The truth, plain and simple. But I might've been trying to tweak him a little, since he'd declared our day together had been casual and, by extrapolation, meaningless to him. Not that I bought his statement for one nanosecond.
He flung up his hands. "Ye cannae."
Interesting, I thought, how he spoke in a more casual way when he was excited or upset, or very relaxed. Right now, he was panicking.
Dressed in my bra, shorts, and socks only, I shook my head. "Honestly, Rory, how can you be such a prude after last night? We were both naked. All night. In this bed."
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, grasping the back of his neck. His gaze flickered down to my lacy pink bra, his nostrils flared, and he veered his attention to the pillow nearest him.
"Please," he said, "wear something to bed."
"Like what?" I flapped my arms. "Forgot to pack a nightie."
"You were planning to sleep in the nude in your communal hotel room?"
Rory gaped at me like I'd threatened to streak through his upper-crust hotel while screaming his name.
With a frustrated growl, I flung my hands up. "My roommates didn't care. Why should you? For pity's sake, we've had our hands all over each other's naked bodies."
His lips compressed into a slash as he stared at the wall behind me. After a moment, he whipped off his T-shirt and chucked it at me. "Wear this."
I caught the shirt. "Okay, but I have to take off everything else. Not sleeping in my bra, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you."
"Fine." He turned his back to me. "Undress quickly."
"I prefer sleeping naked, anyway. Hard to believe you're the same guy who tore my clothes off right there in the living room last night."
"That was different."
"Because you wanted to get in my pants then."
"I—" He made a noise that was part growl, part hissing sigh. "Change yer bloody clothes, would ye?"
I shimmied out of my shorts and panties, then unhooked my bra and lobbed it at him. It flopped onto his shoulder.
His entire body flinched. He took the garment between his thumb and forefinger with the delicacy of someone handling toxic materials, plucked it up, and dropped it on the floor.
Oh, he was no fun at all tonight. I must've burned out his frivolity circuits today.
I slipped into his shirt, loving the way it smelled like him. "Fit for viewing now, Mr. Fussy Pants."
Rory spun around. He zeroed in on the hem of the shirt, where it hung halfway down my thighs.
I plunked one foot on the bed and rolled my sock down, cast it aside, and repeated the procedure with the other foot.
His eyes stayed trained on me the whole time.
I crawled under the covers and stretched out on my side with my head on the pillow. Rory stripped off his jeans and climbed in beside me wearing only his boxers. He fidgeted until he'd situated himself on his side of the bed, facing me, with a gap of a foot between us. I tucked my hands under my cheek on the pillow.
He lighted a fingertip on my upper arm, trailing it back and forth along my skin. "You mentioned you're a computer programmer. What is it you do?"
"Programming, duh." I resisted the impulse to wiggle, despite the way his fingertip stimulated my skin. "It's technical and very, very boring."
"I'd like to know. Do you create software?"
With a restraint that amazed even me, I didn't point out wanting to know about me proved this hadn't been a casual thing today. "I work for Travellis Games, a company that makes software for everything from the latest Kor the Space Viking game to online poker and digital slot machines. I don't really create anything, though. I fix what other people create. Debug code, rejigger scripts, that kind of thing. It's mind-numbing at times and always tedious."
"Why do it if you hate the work?"
"In college, I loved writing code. But the jobs I got after graduation were all programming, not actual creative coding." I sneaked a hand out from under my cheek to pick at the seam of the pillowcase. "Being trapped in a cubicle forty hours or more every week, fixing someone else's creation, it gets to be a real drag after a while."
"You could find another career."
"Not that easy for us non-millionaires. Getting the training for something else takes time and money I don't have." I bit my upper lip to stave off a breathy moan, as his finger painted an invisible line of tantalizing sensations up to my shoulder. "My last job paid well enough, but I spent most of my income paying off my student loans. When the bosses ordered everyone to work longer hours, having fun became a rarity in my life."
He moved his hand away from my arm to close it over my fingers where they picked at the pillowcase. "You said your last job paid well, past tense. What about your current job?"
"Don't have one. Got laid off—downsized, as they say." I cuddled deeper into the pillow, and my chin grazed his knuckles. "I'd worked there longer than most of my coworkers, but I was the first to go."
"I'm sorry, Emery." He extended one finger to stroke my chin. "You deserve better."
"Why?"
His brows knit together. "Why? Because—You do, that's all."
Did he like me? I saw no other reason for his behavior.
A dangerous desire flickered in the back of my mind, a craving to spend more than a weekend with him. Yet I knew next to nothing about the man beside me.
"What do you do for a living?" I asked.
He pulled his hand away and inspected the bed's canopy. "Nothing interesting."
I tapped his nose until I'd reclaimed his attention. "If you won't tell me your occupation, at least tell me how many times you've had one-night stands."
"Not often," he said in a measured tone.
"How often?"
"Four times." He rolled onto his back. "Including you."
"Only four? I got the impression you do it a lot."
"Why would you think that?"
I shrugged one shoulder, all I could shrug while lying on my side. "You were so skilled at seduction, I figured you take strangers to bed all the time."
"No." He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. "My brother Aidan has convinced my
entire family I travel the world seducing hapless women. No one should ever believe Aidan, though. He thinks it's humorous."
Ahhh, so Rory had at least one sibling. A brother named Aidan. I felt outrageously victorious at discovering this tidbit.
I poked him with my knee. "But you were looking for a professional woman to whisk away to your suite last night."
He punched his pillow in a violent attempt to fluff it. "I meant to have a whiskey, enjoy the music at the bar, and find a companion for the night. I'd given up on the latter. None of the women I met interested me." His gaze flew to mine, his eyes simmering with desire. "Until I saw you."
I couldn't think of a blessed thing to say. Out of all the sexily dressed women in that bar, all the women he might've bumped into on his way there, he'd chosen me. "Why did you come back this morning?"
We stared at each other for a long moment, until he coughed and swerved his gaze to the window. "I have no idea why I couldn't walk away from you."
My curiosity peaked, but I realized he didn't want to talk about this anymore. I changed the subject. "I'd like to hear more about your family."
Rory punched his pillow again. Linked his hands over his belly. Squirmed. Smacked his hands down on the sheets.
"If you'd rather not talk about it," I said, "that's okay."
He rubbed his forehead. "It's all right. I have two brothers, Aidan and Lachlan, as well as three sisters. They are Fiona, Catriona, and Jamie. Lachlan is the oldest, and Jamie is the youngest. I'm second, after Lachlan."
"What about your parents?"
"Alive and well. Most of the family lives in and around the village of Ballachulish in the Highlands, where we were born and raised." He moved only his eyes to look at me. "What about your family?"
"My parents moved to Australia ten years ago, for my dad's work. My sister, Hadley, got married four years ago and moved to Germany. She has beautiful twin girls."
"You must not see your family often."
"Haven't seen any of them since Hadley's wedding."
Rory brushed the back of his hand over my cheek. "I can't imagine never seeing my family. Must be difficult."