Page 143 of Her Reluctant Hero
Who’d only gotten better with age. How was that possible?
Yes, part of the reason she hadn’t gathered her wits was because her ridiculous imagination kept wondering what would have happened if she’d stayed.
Now she opened the connecting door with equal parts trepidation and anticipation. Maybe more forty-sixty.
The dim light from her bedside lamp cast shadows over his face, shrouding him just for a moment before he stepped through the door, clean-shaven, bearing food, smelling better than a man had the right to smell. Apparently she had developed x-ray vision, because she could see right through his thin T-shirt, the kind he’d been wearing since she’d known him, to the muscular chest beneath.
“I hope you don’t mind if we eat in your room,” he said, holding the white bag aloft. “I’ve been working.”
Right. That could keep her mind off dangerous paths. She glanced past him into his room and saw yellow paper from a legal pad scattered from table to dresser to bed. “Writing?”
“Yeah.” He passed her to set the bag down on the table by the window and opened the drapes to look out on the beach.
“You don’t use the computer?”
“Computers have batteries that die.”
“Yeah, if you don’t plug them in.” She closed the door.
“While I don’t like to admit to being an absent-minded professor…” He trailed off as he unpacked the bag.
Enticed by the appealing spicy scent of the food but wary of the man, she moved closer. She tried to recall the last time she’d seen him clean-shaven. She closed her fingers against a desire to stroke the smooth skin, against the memory of how his strong back felt beneath her hands. “What is it?”
“Meat pie. Smells good.” He lifted a paper-wrapped package to his nose.
“Mm.” She sat, took the bottle of beer he handed her, careful not to brush his fingers with hers. The bed was not three feet away, and they were alone. She was too conscious of their past behavior whenever temptation presented itself, too conscious of how easily she remembered how he felt inside of her. She returned to that safe topic. “So did you get a lot of writing done?”Or did you obsess over what might have happened as I did?
He snorted. “It’s not as easy as I thought it would be.”
She took the thick, greasy meat pie in both hands and bit. The taste was even better than the smell, the sauce thick and spicy, the meat tender. “You’ve written before.”
“Articles.” He sopped up some of the grease from the pie with the pastry. “Not something meant to be four hundred pages long.”
“You’ve never been at a loss for words.”
“Talking is completely different.” He chuckled.
The rumble of it skittered right over her nerves. “So how far are you?”
He rolled his eyes and took a bite of pie, then set it on the waxy bag and held up his fingers. Six of them.
“Page six?” Adrian was not a procrastinator.
He wiped at his mouth with a paper napkin and nodded glumly. “It’s kicking my butt.”
Huh. Adrian Reeves never admitted defeat. “Can I read it?” Okay, where had that come from?
His eyes flashed in the dim light. “You want to?”
His agreement was shocking. He’d never allowed her to read his articles till they came out in the trade publications. A sense of competition had run deep between them; they’d be on the same digs, but submit separate papers on each. If her paper ended up in a more elite publication, well, the interlude would be unpleasant until he could best her with the next paper.
So she was surprised to find herself reading his work after a dessert of potato pone, a kind of bread pudding with sweet potatoes. She curled her legs in front of her as she tried to get comfortable in one of the low-backed chairs in his room, squinting to decipher his handwriting. She shifted, glancing at the bed. No, if she lay on the bed, which would be more comfortable, he would get the wrong idea. After the bit in the bathroom, she didn’t want to tempt fate. Or Adrian. “Your handwriting has gotten worse.”
Focused on the pad in front of him, he grunted. He’d slipped on glasses when she hadn’t noticed, silver-rimmed ones that, if she was honest, looked really sexy in a professorial kind of way.
She tapped the bridge of her own nose. “What’s this?”
He glanced up, his eyes incredibly blue behind the lenses.
