Not inside more than ninety seconds and they were already talking about sex organs. Her famous control over every personal situation had slipped away as easily as water through her fingers. That was par for the course lately, considering her professional life had slipped beyond her control, too.
Of the two, she had to admit that, right here and now, the personal one bothered her more. This man did have a knack for keeping her off guard. She wasn’t used to it and didn’t like it— possibly because she feared he could make her like it too much!
“Why are you here?” she finally managed to ask.
“I really am curious about that box of yours.”
His husky voice and gleaming eyes made her heart flutter. Her pulse sped up, and her whole body went on alert. Her legs quivered and she wrapped the robe tighter around herself, suddenly feeling way too vulnerable.
She wasn’t scared of Mike. She was, however, scared of how quickly he made her forget all her resolutions to avoid any entanglements, especially entanglements with a man she feared she would dream about long after the hot sex was over.
“Why?”
“I’m wondering if you’re missing anything out of it.”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small book. She eyed it, recognizing the jade-green binding, and, of course, the art on the cover. Her mouth falling open, she looked from it, to him to her laptop case, which was on the coffee table. Hurrying over, she yanked it open and peered inside.
No book.
“It’s possible it fell out when you dropped that case in the parking lot yesterday afternoon.”
He was probably right.
God. Of course she couldn’t have dropped her keys, or a wallet or some sunglasses. No. It had to be a book nobody on this island had probably ever heard of, much less read.
Except Mike. Judging by the confident gleam in his eyes, she suspected he was aware of exactly what the book contained, and had been even before this particular copy had landed in his hands.
He was bluntly sexual, so confident, so self-assured. He would not be pushed around when it came to sex. He would try new things, explore all possibilities and not be shocked by anything as simple as some graphic illustrations.
He wouldn’t be told what to do. And when things grew too emotionally intense for her own comfort level, he wouldn’t back off simply because she demanded it.
He won’t just give you some orgasms and then leave right away because you don’t like sleeping with someone else in the room.
A leftover instinct from childhood. As a kid, she’d never been sure when she closed her eyes if she would wake up and find herself totally alone in their crappy apartment. Her parents had sometimes decided to go out and party, leaving her, even as young as age six, completely on her own.
As she got older, she preferred it when they left her alone and she tucked herself in. Going to bed
knowing
nobody would be there if she woke up during the night was much better than worrying and wondering about it.
Huh. A psychologist might speculate that was why she’d never slept an entire night in bed with a man in her whole life.
She forced all those ugly memories away. Callie had been telling her for a long time that she couldn’t let her shitty past determine how she conducted herself in the present, or in the future. But putting herself—her body, her pleasure, her safety, her emotions—at the mercy of someone else, was something she’d simply never learned how to do.
Taking a deep breath, she returned to him, twisting her hands on the belt of her robe, tightening it almost painfully around her waist. “That is my book.”
“Thought so.”
“Thank you for giving it back to me.”
“Well, some might consider it tampering with evidence. But it’s really not a problem.”
“I definitely wouldn’t want you to get into any trouble over it.” She’d hate to do anything that would jeopardize his new job and force him back to a life where he was shot at on a regular basis.
“Did it really fall out in the municipal parking lot?”
“Uh-huh.”
He tossed the book to her. She caught it in one hand, glancing at it, recognizing it down to the last detail.
“And you found it after I drove away?”
The slow shake of his head increased her tension. “I’m afraid not. Someone else did the honors.”
“Who?”
“A high school kid.”
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered.
He snickered, obviously not shocked by the schoolteacher’s language. “His mother found it in his room. She passed it down the line like a hot potato until it hit the town council.”
Lindsey felt as though she’d been punched. She stepped backward, almost tripping on the sash of her robe, and ran into the arm of the high-backed chair. She barely managed to stop herself from tumbling into it as she whispered, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I wish I were.” He shook his head, looking sad. “Mrs. Franklin was quite shocked by the, uh, pornography.”
“It’s not pornography,” she retorted, indignant. Seeing the twinkle in his eye, she realized he agreed and that his sadness had been exaggerated.
“But it is a bit much for polite Wild Boar Island society.”
She flipped open the book, eyeing the illustrations as the town council might. Tastefully drawn or not, that was a man sliding his penis into a woman whose sex was indicated with graphic slitlike lines. On the opposite page, a man’s head between a woman’s thighs, his exaggerated tongue stroking her mound. On the next, a woman on her knees, her lips wrapped around the tip of an erection.
The room suddenly got warmer. Lindsey swallowed, licking her lips, conscious of her quick pulse. She’d gone over these pictures plenty of times, had always viewed them with a sort of clinical detachment. They’d never left her breathless and shaky like she was now. Perhaps that was because she was being watched, oh, so closely.
She snapped the book closed and looked at Mike, noting his hooded eyes, his guarded stare.
“So, the town council, huh?” she asked, flipping her hair back over her shoulder as if she didn’t really care. “Are they heating the tar and plucking the feathers?”
“I asked Mrs. Franklin if she wanted me to put the stocks in the town square.”
“Ha-ha, very funny.” Catching her bottom lip between her teeth, she tried to imagine how this could be resolved, but honestly didn’t have a clue. “She came to you with it?”
“Yep.”
“And you immediately realized it was mine?”
“I suspected as much.” He walked closer. “It certainly seemed to fit in with your...collection.”
His searching gaze asked a thousand questions. He was curious, obviously confused by the incongruity of the woman she appeared to be—Callie’s friend, the teacher, the loner—with the woman who traveled with sex guides and cases of vibrators.
Lindsey rubbed at her eyes, wondering what to say, how much to share. She suddenly realized she liked having him here, no matter why he’d come. The last thing she wanted to do was drive him away with the truth.
But that was exactly what she had to do.
“Mike, I’m really not who you think I am.”
He shrugged, completely unfazed. “If you truly believe I haven’t figured that out by now, you must not rate my deductive reasoning powers too highly.”
“No, I mean I’m not the nice, small-town teacher you were talking about last night.”
“Did I say that? I must have been stoned.”
She snorted a laugh, wondering how he could make her giggle when the topic of conversation was so important to her.
“To tell you the truth, Lindsey, I really don’t care about that right now.”
“
What?
What about what you said...”
“I was just trying to justify how I was feeling about you.”
He had feelings? Oh boy.
“The truth is, I think about you all the time. I want to
be
with you all the time. Mrs. Franklin brought me that book, and I used it as an excuse to show up at your door at ten o’clock on a Saturday night.” He smiled. “It probably could have waited, but something about you, and the
Kama Sutra
, made me get in my car and slam the pedal down.”
“You don’t understand. This book was a gift from Callie. She said I needed to learn how to....”
He raised a brow, waiting for her to continue, obviously mentally filling in the blank. When she didn’t speak, he prompted her. “How to?”
“Be intimate,” she admitted, her voice little more than a whisper.
He didn’t tease her, didn’t make assumptions that she automatically meant physical intimacy. Because the
Kama Sutra
was about a lot more than that. It was a little dated, a little sexist, but the entire piece had many valid things to say about loving, sensual relationships, and not all of it was about sex.
“You have trouble being intimate with people?”
She swallowed hard, trying to find the courage to admit to him what she had admitted to so few people in her life. “I have trouble
allowing
myself to be intimate with people. I don’t invite them in.”
“I see,” he replied, coming ever closer. And then closer still. Until his shoes nearly touched the tips of her bare toes. “The thing is, Lindsey, I think you
want
to invite me in.”
She didn’t have the courage to respond to that.
His long, strong leg brushed against hers, which was covered only by the silky robe. Beneath it, she wore a short, flirty nightgown that barely skimmed the tops of her thighs, and a long length of leg was revealed by the gap in the robe. The brush of his pants on her bare limbs was enough to make her weak and breathless, a little light-headed.
“Always in control,” he murmured, his tone even, soothing. “Always sure of what you want and what you’re doing...is that it?”
“That’s some of it,” she admitted, slowly nodding. She couldn’t understand why her head felt full of cotton. Why was a response so hard to grasp? She may have been confused about what to say, but she was not at all confused about what she felt:
desire
.
“I suppose I should ask why. Maybe ask if that’s what the box is about—you always being in control and never having to let anyone get close enough to give you what you need,” he said, lifting a hand and rubbing the back of it along the V-neck of her robe. His knuckles brushed lightly across her skin, a touch as fleeting as it was evocative. Her nerve endings sang, every inch of her in tune to him.
Lindsey swallowed, feeling the excitement in the air, seeing it in his eyes, hearing it in his voice. She had no doubt he’d read that book before bringing it back, was certain he’d envisioned doing some of those things—or all of those things—with her. The tension between them had been undeniable and hot from the moment they’d met on the ferry, and they’d been shoving it away for days, with excuses and justifications.
That was all about to end, though.
Somehow, all the reasons she’d provided, all the excuses, the pithy rationale for steering clear of him, fell away. They didn’t matter anymore. Because, somewhere along the way, while they’d danced this dance of yes-and-no, maybe-and-never, I-want-you-and-I-can’t-have-you, she’d stopped wanting to steer clear of him. Stopped saying no, I can’t have you, and never. At least in her mind.
Lindsey was a scientist, a psychologist. She understood why people did the things they did. She hadn’t just been avoiding any involvement with Mike, or anyone else she met, during this “down” period in her life. She’d done the exact same thing during the “up” periods of her life, too. Even when things had been good, when her job had been rolling along and she’d had great money, a nice home, a promising future, she still hadn’t allowed herself to really let down her guard with any man. Ever.
Warning Mike off hadn’t been about wanting to protect her reputation or hide from the mess her life had become. It had really been about her need to stay in control.
She pushed people away. It was what she did, what she’d always done. Probably because she had gotten so used to being pushed and shoved and left to feel unimportant throughout her younger years. It had become a habit. She’d built walls long before she’d met Mike on that ferry to this place. Even though she’d sometimes lowered the walls to have sex with men, she’d never dropped them low enough to explore true intimacy, the kind that involved utter trust.
Hadn’t that been why Callie had given her that book?
And how interesting that it had ended up in Mike Santori’s hands, when he was the one man she’d met in, oh, forever, who she could really like. Admire. Trust.
The question was, would she trust him enough to be vulnerable, to give up her control and allow a man to get past her defenses to the
real
her?
“Let me be blunt, Lindsey,” he whispered, moving closer, until she felt his lips brushing her earlobe and his warm breaths coating her neck. “I’ll want answers later. But right now, I really don’t give a damn about who you are and why you travel with twenty sexy toys.” His hand moved to her waist and he cupped it tightly, his fingertips stroking the curve of her bottom, tugging her even closer.
“You don’t?”
“No.” A tongue on her throat. “I just want to help you play with them.”
She moaned softly, shocked, intrigued, so incredibly turned on by his blatant admission. He was through playing games, no longer toying—so to speak—with innuendo and suggestion.
He also wasn’t finished.
“So why don’t you drop that book and take me to your bedroom?”
She barely had time to let that command-masquerading-as-a-suggestion sink in before he was kissing her, his mouth hot and hard, open and hungry on hers. His tongue plunged deep, demanding everything she had, as if she was a land to be explored and he a conqueror. Every part of him made demands of her—his hands, his mouth, his words, his movements—and everything about her should have rebelled.
But nothing did. Nothing.
She simply did as he commanded. She dropped the book and melted into him, twining her arms around his neck, digging her fingers into his hair, holding him tight. She thrust her tongue against his, sucking, biting, begging. The kiss was as good as last week’s, only ten times hotter, more frenzied. Maybe that was because they knew that this time he wasn’t going to walk out the door with a raging hard-on, and she wasn’t going to go to bed and have a wet dream about what they might have done.