Awakened by His Touch (9 page)

‘I’ll take you parasailing,’ he offered.

‘Down here?’

‘No... On my boat. If we do it then you need to come up to the city.’

Need to
. Which meant he wanted her to. ‘Why can’t you just motor down the coast?’

‘I work for Ashmore Coolidge, Laney, not for you. If you want to come out with me on
my
boat on
my
weekend off then you need to come up to
my
turf.’

Firm. Uncompromising. And totally reasonable under the circumstances. Her heart pumped out resentment. She’d fought all her life to get people to treat her like anyone else and now that someone was, was she getting snotty about it? Had she grown up feeling more entitled than she’d realised?

Elliott’s challenge hung out there, live and real.

‘Okay. Maybe I will,’ she said. Never one to back down.

‘Good. When?’

Sudden pressure—and something else—fisted in her belly. ‘When are you going out next?’

‘We were going to try for next weekend. Weather permitting.’

So soon? But she wasn’t about to admit how much that freaked her out. ‘Okay. Next weekend, then.’

Yikes...

‘How about I collect you from the train Saturday morning and drive you back down here Saturday night? Or you could stay over.’

Owen had once described the flashing lights of an ambulance that had passed and she saw them now, vivid in her imagination. She definitely heard them.

Or you could stay over
.

You know, just like that...

She ignored that part of his comment completely. Very grown-up of her. ‘I’m sure you’ve got better things to do with your Saturday night than chauffeur me around.’

‘Not really. Plus then I can finish up my review of your facilities and we’ll have something to decide.’

‘Um...okay, then?’

‘Is that a question or a statement?’

What was she doing? She was twenty-five years old, for crying out loud. Why was she letting him get to her like this? She wanted to flick her hair back defiantly but didn’t out of respect for the bee. Instead she just sat up straighter.

‘It’s a statement. Yes. I’ll take the train up next Saturday.’

‘Great. I’ll schedule it in.’

Elliott’s carefully moderated tone was pretty slick, but she’d been mining people’s voices for subtext her whole life. She could hear enthusiasm under all the nonchalance. The question was, was he pleased she was coming out on his boat next week or was he just pleased he’d got his way?

Yeah, well, good luck with that
. Hopefully, his super corporate training had prepared him for disappointment. Because squiring her around the city wasn’t going to change her mind one bit about taking Morgan’s global.

The tiny buzz past her ear was her only evidence that the bee had finished its pitstop and headed off back towards its hive.

‘At last!’ she groaned, lowering her aching arm and slipping her still honeyed finger between her lips.

‘You have honey in your hair.’

And before she could do much more than wince about how undignified that particular image was the slight rattle of the food containers on the picnic blanket told her that Elliott had braced a hand amongst them so that his other hand could brush against her forehead gently, plucking the offending lock away from her skin.

He lingered in that position, his knuckles gently brushing against her forehead. ‘Want me to pour some water on it?’

‘No. I’ll have a shower when we get home. Wash it out.’

Obviously.
Heck—you’d think she’d never been touched by a man before.

A few slight tugs on her hair told her he was removing the worst of it, but then he let his knuckles brush the rest of her hair back away from her face.

‘Your eyes look very blue up here,’ he murmured. All close and breathy.

All the better not to see you with.
‘What do they usually look like?’

‘Grey. Bottomless.’

Even shrugging felt almost beyond her as his knuckles curled and turned into fingers instead. Blue, grey... It was meaningless at the best of times, and this definitely wasn’t her brain at its best. It was completely fixated on Elliott’s fingers as they brushed—as light and soft as they had been for such a short moment the first time he’d come here—down her jaw.

‘Stay still...’

He took her clean fingers in his, raised them to his face, and placed them gently on his own cheek.

‘Knock yourself out,’ he breathed. Low, intimate. Just a hint of gravel.

Every part of her tightened up. She didn’t move her hand a single millimetre. But she didn’t take it off, either.

‘When I said learning someone’s face was something very personal I didn’t mean just for you.’

‘I know. But I’m hoping since I just played with your hair I’ve broken the ice sufficiently.’

‘Sufficiently for what?’

‘That you might be comfortable enough, now, to let your fingers see what I look like.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’d like you to know.’

‘Why?’

His puff of breath tickled her wrist. ‘I have no idea.’

The raw, confused honesty of that disarmed her enough to spread the fingers of her right hand slightly and spider them gently up his face. The rasp of a half-day’s stubble teased her sensitive pads and resonated deep down inside her. Incentive enough to move away from the strong angles of his jawline across towards his nose. She kept her trajectory upward so that she bypassed his lips.

Pure survival instinct.

Nose: pretty much where you’d expect to find it, and with the slight kink he’d told her about. Strong wide brow with eyebrows a heck of a lot tamer than her father’s.

‘Did you cut your hair?’

‘No. Why?’

‘You said your hair fell down over your brow.’

His fingers came up to guide hers further upward, to where his hair sat neatly corralled against the buffeting winds.

‘Is that...?’ She frowned at the very thought. ‘Is that bee wax?’

‘It’s a hard styling wax. Commercial.’

She hadn’t pegged him for a manscaper. ‘Styling wax doesn’t get any manlier just because you put the word “hard” in front of it.’

‘Surely Owen and his mates use product in their hair before a big night out?’

Her fingers paused on his forehead and she wondered that he’d consider a few hours with her on the farm as worthy of grooming. ‘We’d be lucky if they
combed
their hair before a big night out.’

‘Why are you frowning?’

‘Just thinking of a potential market. Hair wax.’

The shift of facial muscles under her fingers suggested he was smiling, but his voice confirmed it. ‘Can’t keep a good businesswoman down.’

She raised her other hand and put both sets of fingers to work exploring the texture of his hair, rubbing the waxy residue between her thumb and forefinger. Getting a sense of it.

‘Interesting.’

‘My hair or my face?’

Right. His face... That was what she was supposed to be doing. Not playing with his thick hair.

She fluttered her right hand back down past his eye and along his cheekbone, and then—when she couldn’t delay the moment of truth a moment longer—quickly traced her middle fingers across his
‘I’m told I have kissable
’ lips. They parted just slightly before she could leave them and breath heated her finger-pads for half a heartbeat.

‘So there you go,’ Elliott rumbled, then cleared his throat. ‘Now you’ve really seen me.’

A nervous smile broke free. ‘And played with your hair for longer than is polite. Though what do you mean,
really
seen you?’

‘You know how I sound, how I smell and how I feel. That’s pretty much all your available senses taken care of.’

‘Well,’ she began, ‘I haven’t—’

Stop!

At the very,
very
last moment her brain kicked into gear and slammed her throat shut on what had been about to come tumbling out.

I haven’t tasted you yet.

She was thinking about her four senses. That was all. But there was no way she could even joke about it without it sounding like the lamest come-on ever. Not after she’d just had her fingers in his hair, all over his mouth. Not after she’d spent a relaxed afternoon testing out the waters of flirtation and had had the honey equivalent of foreplay down in the extraction sheds.

‘You haven’t what?’

His voice, his breath, seemed impossibly closer, yet he hadn’t moved the rest of his body one inch.

‘Nothing. Never mind.’

‘Were you going to say
tasted
?’

‘No.’ The denial sounded false even to her. And it came way too fast.

‘Really?’ His soft voice was full of smile. ‘Because it sounded like you were.’

‘No. That would be an inappropriate comment to make in the workplace.’

Yes. Work. Good
.

‘Luckily, we’re on our lunch break.’

She clung to her only salvation. ‘It’s still inappropriate.’

‘I agree,’ Elliott murmured. ‘Then again, that ship sailed when I asked you to touch my face, so what else do I have to lose?’

Her brain was dallying dangerously over his ‘touch my face’ and so it missed the meaning in his words until it was too late.

His lips—the ones she’d gone to so much trouble to avoid touching—pressed lightly onto Laney’s—half open, soft and damp and warm—before moulding more snugly against her. Sealing up the gaps. It took her a moment to acclimatise to the feeling of someone else’s breath on her lips and he took full advantage of her frozen surprise to open further and gently swipe the tip of his tongue over her hyper-sensitive and suddenly oxygen-deprived lips.

Elliott Garvey was
kissing
her.

Not that it was her first kiss, but it had certainly been long enough between drinks that she’d virtually forgotten what it felt like to have a man’s mouth on hers. How it felt and how it smelled and—her whole body just about melted—how he
tasted.
Her senses were flooded with the lime spritzer they’d just been drinking, and fine cheese, and a whole under-palate of
oh, my freaking goodness!

Elliott Garvey was kissing
her
.

Instinct made her stretch her neck to fit against him better just as he might have pulled back—before she could think better of it, before she could let him go. She lapped at the heavy weight of his bottom lip, adding her breath to his and letting her tongue slip against his teeth. His hand speared in amongst her thick hair and curled warm and strong around her skull.

They tangled like that for moments—exploring, testing—his tongue gently asking and hers honestly answering. Sighing against the smoothness of his hot flesh. Deciding it wasn’t enough.

Elliott pulled back the moment she opened to him, his voice thick-breathed and guttural on her name. Cool coastal air rushed into the vacuum caused by his rapidly withdrawn kiss.

‘Your eyes are closed,’ he breathed.

Another instinctive adaptation, apparently, because she hadn’t meant to close them. She concentrated on opening them now. And on staring exactly where his should be as if that would help her somehow read his expression—to back up the Morse code of his rapid thumb-pulse against her scalp—so she could know what he was thinking. Whether stopping was what he’d wanted to do. Whether he’d been as engaged and excited by that kiss as she had.

Whether she’d just made a massive arse of herself.

‘Wow.’ Not only could she not trust herself to say more, she had no idea in the world what the right thing to say was.

But it seemed he did. ‘Laney, I’m sorry.’

The cool rush of air was suddenly a bucket of cold salty water. ‘For kissing me?’

‘I didn’t mean for it to go that far.’

Okay...
‘How far did you mean it to go?’ And exactly how much thought had he given it?

Breath hissed out of him and he moved further back still. ‘Not that far. I was curious. I’d been wanting to do that all day. And I shouldn’t have.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’re
you
, Laney.’

Confusion stabbed fast and low in her belly.
‘Because I’m a client? Because I’m blind?’

‘Because you don’t kiss strange men every other day.’

Well, that was as good as a slap across the face. Was her limited experience so very tangible? She’d been completely lost in
his
kiss. ‘Whereas you kiss strange women regularly?’

‘Yeah, actually. If you really want me to answer that.’

No, thanks
.

‘You’re not a stranger.’

‘I’m not far off it.’

‘
You
kissed
me
,’ she pointed out, and then cringed at the defensive edge to her words.

His voice gentled. ‘I’m not sorry I kissed you, Laney. I’m just sorry it got as heavy as it did so fast.’

Surely that was like expecting the ocean to apologise for eroding the bluff. ‘Oh, really? What
is
the right time to get hot and heavy, in your vast experience?’

‘After one date, at least.’

It burned her that his voice could be tinged with humour. She guessed he
was
more used to casual kissing than she was. He sure recovered faster.

‘You have a very robust ego if you think I’m going to be going on a date with you.’

‘You have to. You promised.’

‘Parasailing is not a date. It’s a...’ What was it, exactly? It was a man asking a woman to go out on his boat. Known in normal circles as
a date.

If an eyebrow lifting could make a sound, Elliott’s somehow made it. She could
see
his twitch as clearly as if her eyes worked. That was how tangible his arrogance was.

Her chin lifted. ‘It’s an arrangement.’

‘Right—okay, then.’

‘So there will be no kissing after it.’

‘Understood.’

‘Just like there shouldn’t have been any today.’

‘I concur.’

She sat back more fully on her haunches and that was when she realised exactly how far forward she’d leaned to half-consume his tongue. Mortified heat flushed in a hot wave up her neck.