True Colors

by Judith Arnold

  Chapter Ten

   

  He’d had the hotel room in Cambridge lined up. He’d had a plan for dinner with Stan Weisner and an invitation for drinks with MIT’s president, who generally treated Max as visiting royalty whenever he visited his alma mater. Max had written some very large checks to the school. The president went out of his way to make him feel welcome.

  Ordinarily, he would have accepted the president’s invitation and enjoyed dinner with Stan. But he’d wound up taking a rain check on both engagements. He’d told himself he wanted to return to Brogan’s Point because he’d left his toothbrush at the Ocean Bluff Inn.

  Yeah, right.

  Arriving back in town, he’d driven directly to his house at the top of the hill and found it empty. Not sure where Emma might be, he’d steered back down the hill in the direction of the inn. Slowed at an intersection by Brogan Point’s modest rush-hour traffic, he’d spotted the Faulk Street Tavern on a side street off Atlantic Avenue—a stolid, unpretentious building, no neon sign calling attention to it, no velvet-rope crowd lining up to get in. What the hell, he’d thought. Instead of having a drink with MIT’s president, he could have a drink with some of the locals. Until he sold his house, they were technically his neighbors.

  He didn’t want to acknowledge his hope that Emma might be inside. It was too silly, too crazy. He’d driven to Cambridge to put some distance between her and himself, yet he’d spent most of the day thinking about her. About her fiery hair and her flinty personality, about how he’d wanted to kiss her. About how he’d agreed to let her paint his portrait. He was a rational man, a computer whiz, a business mogul—and she was like an insidious virus, invading his software and making him behave in ways that made no sense.

  He parked, entered the pub—and yes, Emma was there. Seated at a booth with a man, leaning toward him, engrossed in an intimate conversation with him. The man appeared to be about Emma’s age. He was dark, scruffy, a bit dangerous-looking in a black leather jacket.

  Max immediately felt like an idiot. He’d been fantasizing about Emma, agreeing against all reason to let her paint his portrait when he ought to be furious with her for living in his house without his permission, and running a damned school there, too. And meanwhile, she was involved with some other guy. Shit.

  But then she stood, walked from the table, and saw Max. And that stupid jukebox song began to play again. True Colors.

  She walked directly toward him. She looked fearless, and beautiful. Her baggy jeans failed to conceal the sweet curves of her hips and the length of her legs. Her eyes were wide, her tantalizing lips shaping a half-smile that made him want to kiss her even more.

  She reached him and her smile grew fractionally larger. “They’re playing our song,” she said.

  “Is that really our song?”

  She shrugged. Her smile was tentative yet inviting, warm yet slightly apprehensive.

  “Can you—” he angled his head toward the door “—step outside for a minute?”

  She glanced over her shoulder to another table—not the table she’d shared with the guy, who, Max noticed, had also abandoned the table and was now standing with a police officer at the bar, but another booth where Monica Reinhart sat nursing a glass of wine. Emma held up a finger, signaling Monica that she’d join her in a minute, and then let Max hold the door open for her.

  The evening air was pleasantly cool, briny from the ocean breezes drifting up from the beach beyond Atlantic Avenue. Two couples strolled up the block, talking and laughing, and edged past Max and Emma to reach the bar’s door. Max waited until they were inside and he and Emma were once again alone on the shadowed side street. He waited because he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. He waited because the dusk light had an orange glow that made Emma’s hair shimmer like curls and swirls of flame.

  Then he stopped waiting. He cupped his hands over her shoulders, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her.

  Her mouth tasted even more delectable than it looked, sweet and soft, like the flesh of a nectarine. Her lips parted and her hands skimmed his sides and circled around to his back, holding him close. She kissed him as eagerly as he kissed her.

  This was why he’d declined the MIT president’s invitation, and told Stan he couldn’t remain in town for dinner. This was why he’d skipped checking into the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge. It had nothing to do with buying a damned toothbrush. It had been this. This obsessive, encompassing, mind-boggling need to kiss Emma.

  He wasn’t sure how long the kiss lasted. Minutes. Hours. An eternity. Less than an instant. What he was sure of was that when they finally came up for air, he believed he wasn’t the same person he’d been before.

  “Max.” Her voice was softer that a breath, so soft he couldn’t tell if she was angry or upset or turned on, or all of the above.

  “Should I apologize?”

  “No.” She lowered her eyes and shook her head. The lush waves of her hair captivated him. He couldn’t stop himself from lifting a hand to the top of her head and stroking his fingers through the thick, fiery locks.

  She sighed, angling her head slightly, allowing him to caress the skin behind her ear. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you all day,” he confessed. “It’s crazy. I hardly know you, and what I know, I’m not sure I like.”

  That got a laugh out of her. “Well, I hardly know you, either. But one thing I do know about you is, you’re honest.”

  Not as honest as she believed, but he didn’t argue the point. Instead, he pressed a kiss to her hair, which was cool and silky against his lips, and then to her forehead, which was warm and smooth and made him want to kiss every square centimeter of skin on her body. “All right,” he murmured, then touched a kiss to the outer corner of her left eye. “I’ve got a king-size bed at the Ocean Bluff Inn.” A kiss to the outer corner of her right eye. “I also happen to own a house here in town, and I know it’s got a few beds in it.”

  Her sigh sounded almost like a purr, a deep vibration in her throat. She tilted her face so his mouth could find hers again. “No,” she said just before locking her lips to his.

  He kissed her for a long, luxurious moment, then pulled back. “No, what?”

  “No, I can’t go to bed with you.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?” He grazed her chin with a kiss.

  “Won’t.” She brushed her lips against the hollow of his neck. “You’re not my type, Max.” Her fingers flexed at the small of his back, sending an electrifying jolt of arousal through him. “I’m an artist. You’re a landlord.”

  “I’m a hell of a lot more than that.” He tightened his arms around her, pressing his hips to hers, letting her know what she was doing to him.

  She made that purring noise again. “You’re a businessman. You’re someone who cares about insurance and liability and stuff like that.”

  “And you’re someone who obviously doesn’t.” He smiled in spite of himself.

  “I mean, it’s not like we’ve got some grand relationship going.” Her hands slipped an inch lower on his back, and his dick grew an inch harder. “It’s just—”

  “Chemistry,” he said.

  “I was going to say animal attraction.”

  “I think chemistry, you think biology.” He used his thumbs against the delicate bones of her jaw to raise her lips to his once more.

  They kissed deeply, hungrily. Drawing back, she said, “Let’s call the whole thing off.” He must have looked appalled, because she grinned. “It’s an old song. ‘You say po-tah-to, I say po-tay-to.’ You think chemistry, I think biology.” She sang, “Let’s call the whole thing off,” in a lilting melody.

  “I like ‘True Colors’ better,” he told her—an admission that surprised him as much as her. He hadn’t thought he liked that song at all. Yet it had brought her across the tavern to him, hadn’t it? It had delivered her into his arms. For that alone, he loved it.

  “I do, too,” she admitted, edging back a step. She jerked her hands from him, a
s if they’d been glued to him and she’d had to exert herself to break the adhesive. Another step back, and he could see, even in the waning light, that she was flushed, her lips glistening, her eyes not quite focused. “I really have to go,” she said. “Monica is waiting for me.”

  That was a lame excuse, but he didn’t challenge Emma. If she didn’t walk away from him, she would wind up in his bed—either at the inn or at the house. And she wasn’t ready for that. Physically, maybe, but not emotionally.

  He wasn’t ready for her emotionally, either, but he didn’t care. He wanted her, anyway.

  He would have to wait. Maybe while he did, he would come to his senses and realize that pursuing anything with Emma, physical or emotional, was a stupid idea. In a matter of days, he would have the house listed. He would be back in California, living his life. An interlude of hot sex would be terrific, but he didn’t need it to survive, and he wouldn’t chase Emma if she didn’t want to be caught.

  She reached for the door to the bar, but when her fingers curled around the handle, she turned back to him. “About tomorrow, I have to go to the community center in the afternoon. They may have a room I could use as a studio. So come early.”

  Come early? Oh. Right. She meant come to the house. Because she was going to paint his portrait.

  And he was going to…what? Pose while she gazed at him and analyzed him and moved his hand this way and his leg that? He was going to sit as motionless as a vase or a bowl of fruit while she objectified him on a canvas?

  Of course he was—because he’d said he would. Because posing would mean spending more time with her, getting to know her better, maybe finding out that they were more than a conflict between chemistry and biology.

  Because while she was gazing at him, he could be gazing at her, imagining her naked, imagining her lying beneath him.

  Imagining her seeing rainbows when she came.