Silence behind her. When she turned to him, his face was entirely blank. Maybe he wasn’t curious about anything. Except he had asked about her.
“There really isn’t much to tell,” she said.
“So let’s start with why you took the contract job.”
This part was easy enough. She slowly stirred the sauce, inhaling the scent of tomato, basil, and garlic, melding with spicy sausage. “I wanted a change of pace.”
“Moving from Chicago to Walkers Ford for a change of pace is like throwing a speeding semi into park.”
“Denver to Walkers Ford was about the same,” she observed.
It was his turn not to answer.
“It’s not forever,” she said, when he obviously wasn’t going to respond. “I went to library school intending to be a librarian. Instead I went to work for my stepfather. This is a sabbatical, of sorts.”
“I hear you on the phone when I get home late,” he said.
“I’m still working for my sister,” she admitted, “so I end up on calls at odd hours.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a sabbatical,” he said.
She shrugged. “It’s just easier to get Freddie what she needs than trying to train someone else to do what I do. I wasn’t supposed to be gone as long as I have been.”
Nina Simone’s sultry voice drifted from the living room, where Alana had put her iPod on the speaker set. Perfect seduction music, sophisticated, raspy longing melding with the Bolognese as she set the platter of spaghetti, the sauce, bread, and the salad on the table between her place and Lucas’s. His fingers brushed hers when he passed her the bread, warm skin against hers, his knees bumping into hers under the table.
But he didn’t back up, so she didn’t either.
“You want to know what I think happened?”
“Sure,” she said.
“People don’t move to small towns, even temporarily. They leave them. Sometimes they come back to raise kids here. Usually they come back because they’re running away from something.”
“That’s what you think I’m doing?”
He used his spoon to twirl his spaghetti onto his fork and ate the mouthful before he answered. “It’s good,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I’m not sure. You don’t seem like someone with something to hide.”
“I made a mistake in Chicago,” she said.
“Because?”
Because one of these things wasn’t like the others. One of these things didn’t belong in the perfect political picture, and that thing was me
.
“It’s a long story,” she said with a smile as she speared some arugula and feta.
“People say that when what they really mean is ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’”
“It’s in my past,” she said. “This is my present.”
“Will he be in your future, when you go home?”
“No,” she said firmly. “He will not.”
Nor will anyone like him, because I’m going to learn how to deal with men.
Flushing to the tips of her ears, she looked up at Lucas, and found him eyeing her across the steaming Bolognese.
Oops.
“You’re tricky,” she said. Her small-town police chief had questioning techniques from Denver’s interrogation rooms.
“I can’t see you making a mistake in your work, let alone one bad enough for you to essentially flee your hometown.”
“Making a mistake with a man, however, that you can see?” She’d intended the words to come out liltingly, and they did. Mostly.
“Don’t let my amazing powers of deduction overwhelm you. There’s only two areas of life where people make bad mistakes. Work and love.”
Which one brought him here,
she wondered.
“Did he hurt you?”
“Is a cop asking or the man I invited over for dinner?”
“Same person.”
There were so many ways to hurt a person, she realized. So many. She set her fork down, and thought about the simplest way to explain what had happened between her and David. “It was a misunderstanding, and partly my fault. My boyfriend asked me to marry him in a rather spectacular proposal, and I said no.”
“You didn’t want to marry him. How is that a mistake?” His expression sharpened. “Unless you decided you did want to marry him, and that’s the mistake.”
“No! I didn’t want to marry him. I just . . . couldn’t figure out how he’d thought I did want to marry him.”
Lucas lifted an eyebrow. “Go on.”
“I went to an all-girls boarding school through high school. A women’s college after that. While most girls were learning to flirt, or at least getting comfortable with boys, I was learning Latin and reading my way through the library. I’m not . . . savvy,” she said.
“That explains the kiss for fixing the sink.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
He put down his fork and swiveled sideways to brace his back against the wall and his forearm on the back of the chair. Eyes heavy-lidded and knowing, he looked at her. “Tell me what you want.”
His voice held an air of command that sent heat flooding into her cheeks, but she didn’t look away. “Is it that simple?”
He shrugged as he trailed his fingers through the moisture condensing on his second bottle of beer. “Yeah.”
“I want to put him behind me.”
“Okay,” he said.
Her cheeks heated. “I shouldn’t have kissed you,” she said. “Becoming intimate confuses things. I’m leaving. We shouldn’t . . . I don’t want . . .”
To hurt you
was the unspoken end to that sentence, but the mocking amusement that filled Lucas’s eyes stopped her from finishing it. Of course she wouldn’t hurt him. She’d never seen a woman leaving his house in the morning, or coming over for dinner and a movie, but she wasn’t naive enough to think that meant Lucas was celibate. He spent nights away. Not many, as he obviously didn’t like to leave Duke alone. This man was too potent to be going without sex, and darkness clouded his eyes too frequently to think he’d get hurt.
As if he heard her mind turning this over, he said, “I’m not going to get hurt. Stop thinking about what you don’t want to do, and tell me what you do want to do.”
“I want to finish what we started last night.”
“Too general,” he said bluntly. “Be specific.”
The blush heated her cheeks as she looked at him. His five o’clock shadow dusted his cheeks and jaw like dark sand, and as time slowed and heated between them, she found she could name one very specific longing.
“I want to know what your beard feels like against my lips.”
He tipped his head in a c’mere gesture. With Nina Simone playing in the background, Alana got up from her chair and circled the tiny table. He adjusted the chair so she could straddle him, and straddle him she did. His thighs shifted under hers as she gently brushed her fingertips over the scruff. Nerve endings ignited in the wake of the soft, rasping sound of skin over bristle.
Pressing her hips to his was intimate. Simply spreading her legs to do just that was even more intimate. But the most intimate thing of all was touching his face with her fingers. His eyes darkened, but he didn’t move. One arm rested on the table. The other lay across the back of the little rolling cart that held her cookbooks. His legs sprawled into the narrow strip of linoleum between the table and the counters, his bare feet nearly to the baseboards. She couldn’t look directly into his eyes without her face heating unbearably, so she restricted herself to little glances, her gaze flicking from his flat abdomen to his throat to his eyes, then down to where her thumb grazed his full mouth. Her heart pounded slow and hard against her breastbone as she stroked from cheekbone over stubble to his jaw, then brushed her thumb across the spot where scruff met the edge of his lower lip.
The muscles in his face slackened just before his tongue touched the tip of her thumb. Her heart skittered against her ribs, then settled. Kissing his mouth suddenly seemed like too much too fast too soon, so she angled her head and bent to brush her lips over his cheek.
More nerve endings lit up, this time in her lips. A sweet heat ignited along her jaw. Never before in her life had a man like Lucas Ridgeway wanted to kiss her, let alone wanted her to kiss him.
Is that what this was? Could she call the brush of lips on skin a kiss? Hesitantly, she touched the tip of her tongue to the bristly hairs emerging from his cheek. His breath stopped, just for a moment, just long enough for his thighs to tense under hers.
He liked that. He liked what she’d done, so she kept on doing it, mouthing her way to his jaw, using teeth on his chin just to hear the rasp before she gathered her courage and lifted her mouth to his.
He didn’t shape his lips to hers, or try to take control of the kiss, but his body grew taut under hers as she nibbled and licked her way around his mouth, luxuriating in the paradox of rough scrape and soft heat. His breath heated her lips, somehow trickling along her nerves to her nipples, then lower to pool in her belly.
When she lifted her head, his eyelids drooped, and a heated flush stood high on his cheekbones. “How did it feel?”
“Scratchy.” She stroked her own lips with her index finger, feeling how the stubble brought heat and tenderness to the surface of the skin.
A corner of his mouth lifted. “I can go shave.”
She shook her head slowly and felt her hair slide free from her ear as she did. “I want to know how it feels other places,” she said.
The hand resting on the kitchen table flexed, then he exhaled and it relaxed. Trapping her gaze with his, he palmed her ass and snugged her up against his erection. One hand still cupping his jaw, she steadied herself on his shoulder and bent to kiss him.
Chemistry incinerated the air between them. It was hot and sliding and wet, but better than the slick stroke of his tongue on hers was the way he didn’t rush things. He sat back, his hand flexing on her hip, yes, but he simply sat there and let her kiss him. Slow and not at all sweet, not until she nipped at his lower lip. Then his hand slid into her hair, gripped the back of her head, and held her for the same treatment.
Lightning flashed from her mouth straight to her sex. She jerked back to stare wide-eyed at him, but his hand stayed on her hip and head, his brown eyes unrepentant. The message was clear: she wasn’t going anywhere, and she better be ready to take whatever she dished out.
“More,” she breathed.
With a twist of hips and shoulders he surged to his feet and pressed her into the narrow space between the fridge and the door to the dining room. She wound her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck, the better to revel in the sensation of his arm under her bottom and that delicious, sensitizing scruff against her mouth.
When her hands scrabbled at the back of his T-shirt, he leaned into her, using his chest to keep her in place and reached back to haul his shirt over his head, then drop it to the floor. Greedily she skimmed her palm up his ribs, feeling bone and muscle shift as he ground against her.
A car door slammed across the street. Lucas dragged his mouth from hers and peered over his shoulder at the screen door. “Better take this somewhere more private.”
His voice was a low rumble that rasped like velvet against her nipples and sex. “Agreed,” she whispered. She expected him to set her on her feet, but instead he carried her down the short hallway to her bedroom. Again, she expected him to put her down, but instead he bore her backward onto the bed. The sensation of hips between her legs, a warm, lightly furred male chest and broad shoulders looming over her, and those deep brown eyes sent a kick of arousal against her chest.
“Tell me what you want now.”
• • •
WHEN ALANA’S EYES
widened, Lucas gave himself a hard mental shake.
Slow down. Forget that it’s been months since you had sex. It’s only been a couple of days. Maybe even a couple of hours. This woman thinks she can hurt you. That’s how inexperienced she is. She can’t see who you are, what you are. If you rush her into anything she’s going to furl up like a flower.
Alana had covered the bed with an old-fashioned chenille spread tucked over the pillows. Spring twilight darkened outside the windows, casting soft shadows over the dresser and the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Roller shades with beaded fringes covered the windows. In an effort to make a house with a frankly ugly kitchen more appealing to a tenant, he’d stripped the wallpaper before she moved in, and painted the walls a soft white. The room felt old-fashioned, delicate, much like Alana.
The contrast between ladylike furnishing and demeanor and the tension thrumming between them seeped into his veins to pool in his cock.
He didn’t add words to the heated air quivering between them. He just let the silence stretch between them, let her decide. He knew how to wait out suspects. Some days he felt like if he never had to speak another word, he’d be good with that. Words didn’t fix anything, and more often than not, he found the wrong ones.
He made a conscious effort to dampen his usual intensity, breathing slow and deep, forcing his hands to relax on her hips, leaning back imperceptibly. He also knew how to use his body to intimidate and coerce, and while turning it off wasn’t easy, he tried. His reward was the slow seep of trust and arousal back into Alana’s face. The muscles around her eyes relaxed as her lids drooped, and her mouth softened into a fullness he found sexy as hell. She rarely wore anything more than a lipstick one shade darker than her lips. Damned good thing, too, because she had the kind of wide, full mouth men dreamed about.
She peered up at him through soft black lashes. “Anything I want?”
No way in hell could this woman come up with something he wouldn’t do, so he nodded without reservation.
“Lie down.”
The . . . request? Hardly. Command? Demand? Instruction? A little of all three? . . . surprised him when not much surprised him anymore. He tried to remember the last time a woman wanted to work him over, and failed. He tugged the spread down to the foot of the bed, stacked the pillows, then stretched out on his back. The light from the dim reading lamp beside the bed gilded her bobbed hair as it slid forward, but rather than hiding behind the curtain she tucked it behind her ear.