Page 39 of Alone With You
She closed her thighs against a new, sore surge of wanting. “I am doing everything right, I believe.”
“Yes.” He leaned his crossed forearms on the table, having shoved his empty plate to one side of the cluttered table. “You’ve been doing everything perfectly.”
His words were more of a balm than he knew. One end of the open wound on her heart knitted tight, but she lowered her eyes so he wouldn’t see how good that made her feel, or how vulnerable she felt, or how little she trusted the strength of those stitches.
“That’s good to hear,” she said, licking a drip of maple off her thumb. “My etiquette teacher will be pleased I learned my lessons well. She wouldn’t approve of public lewdness.”
Jenny laid her fork on the side of her plate and pulled the straw out of her milk shake. Defying all propriety, she licked the dripping shake off the length of the straw, then sucked the rest through until it slurped.
Their gazes met across the table and her heart lifted. She felt saucy and wicked and sated andhappy.She had every intention of doing to parts of Logan’s anatomy what she was no doing with this straw, and he saw the promise in her eyes, and it was moving him to arousal. To think she hadn’t thought about her research or experiments in twenty-four hours. She traced Logan’s shin under the table and basked in his unflinching gaze. His attention, his interest, his laugh, his touch, all made her feel like the sexiest, most desirable woman in the world. It didn’t matter that it was temporary. They had another whole week together.
“So,” he said, clearing his throat and leaning back against the neoprene banquette. “You took etiquette classes as a girl.”
“I was taught how to greet dignitaries, how to set a formal dining room table, how to be a conscientious hostess. A throwback to an earlier time, though several of my friends did marry politicians.”
“Sounds more like finishing school for aristocrats,” he murmured, “brings images of pearls and white gloves.”
“We were required to wear pearls and gloves at tea-time. Very British. Of course, there were times when me and the girls would wear our pearls and our white gloves and not a stitch of underwear.”
Logan made a quiet choking sound, shifting his seat as if his shorts had just gone too tight. The story was a bald-faced lie, for she wouldn’t have dared do something so bold that might have got her expelled, if they’d ever been found out. But sitting with Logan, she would say anything to keep him on the pulsing edge of desire.
“You’ll do that for me?” he asked, setting his water glass aside. “Wear pearls and gloves and nothing else?”
“You bet.”
Logan shot up, dishes rattling, glassware clinking, as he leaned over the table to capture her mouth in a kiss that broke every rule of social. She rumbled a laugh under the kiss as Logan pulled away and called for the bill.
On the way home, somewhere along the side of the dark country road, Logan pulled over onto the gravel and drew her close, kissing her until she could barely breathe.
She could get used to this, she thought, as he urged her back in the truck’s cabin to stare up at his handsome face.
If only she could feel like this forever.
CHAPTER TEN
Abreeze flooded the cab of the truck as Logan eased the vehicle onto the country road. The cool night air swept out of the cab the scent of sex and heavy breathing. It tousled his hair and battered the edges of his half-unbuttoned shirt, left open in his rush to arrange his clothing before someone drove by to discover him and Jenny knotted together in the front seat. But as good as he felt right now—anddamnhe felt good, his whole body thrumming, warm from the inside out—there was nothing right about how fiercely he wanted to reach across the cabin to where Jenny lounged against the passenger seat door. He’d become familiar with every part of her body over the last twenty-four hours, but reaching for her bare hand felt like an intimacy he hadn’t earned.
Instead, he fixed his grip on the steering wheel and held tight enough for his knuckles to turn white as the healthy post-coital rush of endorphins seeped through him, giving rise a far more dangerous contentment. He had to keep his mind and his eyes on what mattered. This single country lane had no streetlamps. He could see no further than the cast of the headlights. He was driving the speed limit but he felt he was hurtling headlong into darkness far faster than he should be. Any minute something or someone could loom up into that light, and he wouldn’t have time to brake before the impact.
He’d never seen Jenny coming, that was for sure. Since Brazil, he’d made a point of living one day at time, looking no farther than the birds he could track through the lens of his camera. Seemed like the best prescription for what he was ailing from. But under this unexpected contentment, he was still the man he was before she loomed up out of the darkness to knock him senseless, even if the impact still scrambled his mind. He’d only known her for days. This thing between them was supposed to be limited to great sex. He had no right to hold the hand of this woman, to make any deeper promise.
The breeze had kicked up into burst of rain-heavy gusts by the time he drove into the driveway, his mind till turning in circles. He turned the engine off. Next to him, Jenny flexed like a sleep-roused cat.
“I don’t know about you,” she murmured in a silky voice, “but I could sleep for twelve straight hours.”
“Yeah,” he said, just before he hopped out of the truck to avoid the heavy-lidded look in her eye. They’d be sharing a bed tonight, that didn’t have to be said, yet already he was feeling a creeping uneasiness. What kind of message would he be wordlessly telegraphing when he pulled her against him in the darkness, not for another bout of mind-blowing sex, but just so her head would tuck under his chin, so he could fall asleep with the scent of strawberries in his head?
“Hey Logan, I left my sunglasses and shirt on the lounge chair out back this morning,” she said over her shoulder as she headed around the side of the house. “I’m going to fetch them before the wind carries them off.”
He nodded a reply, fiddled for the keys, and entered the cabin. Tossing the keys on a counter, he sauntered down the hall to the bathroom, flicked on the light, and splashed his face cold. With water dripping off his jaw, he stared at the unshaven man in the mirror, wondering how long he could stretch the little time he had with Jenny and pretend this was just about ground-shaking sex. With this trouble knotting tighter in his mind, he brushed his teeth, stripped to his boxers, changed the tangled sheets on the bed, and wondered what was taking his girl so long.
His girl.
Pulling on a T-shirt, he strode into the kitchen, shading his eyes against the glass to peer into the darkness through a back window. He didn’t see Jenny, but he saw light pouring out from his shed, flickering with the movement of her shadow. He jerked away from the window. A dark hand closed over his heart. She didn’t belong in there. She hadn’t been invited.
He gripped the doorknob and hesitated, the brass heating in his hands, vacillating between confronting her or just turning back to the bedroom and ignoring the intrusion. He didn’t want to explain himself. He’d told exactly three people the truth, and he never wanted to speak of it again. But his stomach knotted as he stood there, debating. There was no way to dodge the questions she would have on her lips, or in her eyes.
Gusts of wind tugged at his tee-shirt as he padded barefoot through the grass under a sky eclipsed of stars. Rain was coming, and soon. Stepping into the doorway, he found her seated on a stool inside, cradling one of his finished pieces in her hands. She looked up as he entered.
