Road to Seduction (Kimani Romance) (3 page)

He and Joe were almost twins, physically and professionally.

Isabella could marry a man exactly like Eric.

Isabella had chosen a man exactly like Eric.

The last thought stuck in his mind, insisting that he acknowledge it even as he sautéed the shrimp.
Isabella had chosen a man exactly like him.
Slowly, bit by bit, feeling as though he was battling a great mental deficit, he tried to connect the dots.

Dot one: Joe was Isabella’s type.

Dot two: Joe and Eric were alike.

Dot three: if Joe and Eric were alike, and Joe was Isabella’s type, then, by extrapolation…Eric was also Isabella’s type.

Dot four…Dot four…

He struggled but couldn’t get to dot four no matter how hard he tried.

Looking around, he checked Izzy’s progress. Having finished with the salad, she’d mixed up a batch of brownies and was getting ready to put them in the oven.

“Don’t forget to spray the pan,” he told her.

“What?” Izzy froze, the mixing bowl poised over the rectangular baking pan. As though waking from a trance, she glanced down and looked mildly surprised to find a bowl and spatula in her hands.

“Oh. Sorry.” She put the bowl down and reached for the cooking spray.

Eric turned back to the shrimp and stirred. His turmoil grew as other, more provocative thoughts came, crowding his brain to overflowing:

He was suddenly unattached. Isabella was suddenly unattached.

Why did those two things seem monumentally significant? They’d both been unattached at the same time before—hadn’t they? Yeah, he was sure they had. Well…maybe not.

Izzy had had a few long-term boyfriends, including some jerk named Al in college, and then she’d had long periods when he didn’t think she’d dated anyone, but he—well, to be honest, he generally had a flavor of the month, with next month’s flavor on the horizon. But right now he couldn’t think of another flavor he wanted to sample. Was that all there was? He
really
hoped not.

Taking the shrimp off the heat, he turned off the burner and shot Izzy a covert glance. With the brownies safely transferred to the oven, she was now enthusiastically licking the batter-covered spatula and had a smudge of chocolate on the tip of her nose. Something tightened in Eric’s chest as he watched her.

God, he didn’t want her to go. Not to Africa, not to be Joe’s wife.

He wrestled with the Pandora’s Box he didn’t want to open but couldn’t leave alone. No possible good could come of what he wanted to say next, but he couldn’t
not
say it.

“You’re pretty messed up about that Joe thing, aren’t you?”

Izzy hesitated and then moved to the sink to rinse the brownie bowl. “I’ll be okay.”

This threw him for a loop. Could you be okay after someone you cared about cheated on you? Having never been in love—or anything close to it—he didn’t know how these things worked, although his cousin Andrew (two years ago they’d discovered that Andrew wasn’t technically his cousin, but Eric still thought of him as such) and his wife, Viveca, had seemed to fall in love pretty quickly, if not instantaneously, and he sure didn’t think Andrew would be okay if Viveca cheated on him.

“You’re better off without him. You know that, right?”

“I know,” she murmured, scrubbing the bowl clean with a soapy brush.

“And what’s this Africa business?”

She whipped around to glare at him with narrowed eyes, splashing bubbly water all down the front of her clothes. “You
listened?
”

Eric thought of doing the whole,
well, I might have accidentally heard a word or two while I was minding my own business in the bedroom
thing, but why bother?

“Yeah.”

“Unbelievable.” Defiant and outraged, she flapped a hand toward one corner of the living room, where a stack of flattened cardboard boxes sat, presumably waiting to be packed with her belongings. “I want to teach at the girls’ school in Johannes—”

“You already did that in college, Izzy—”

The funniest little look shot across her face and disappeared so quickly he felt sure he’d imagined it. “That was just one semester, for an internship.”

“—and people don’t just up and move to South Africa.”

“
I
do.”

“Why?”

“This is what I’m doing with my life.”

“Why?”

“Because those children are special and I can help them. I can make a difference in their lives.”

“But you’re a teacher here. You belong
here
.”

“I’m needed
there
. Kids here want a new DVD or the next computer game. Kids there want to
learn
. To have a chance. And many of them have lost their parents to AIDS. I can do the most good
there
.”

Eric floundered, at a complete loss. For the first time in their relationship, he couldn’t understand Isabella. Her calm tone and determined expression told him he was getting nowhere, and his frustration level rose into the red zone. Maybe it was time to try a different tactic.

“And what about your personal life? What about getting married one day? Are you putting that on hold forever?”

She shrugged. “My life is leading me down a different path.”

“A different path?”

A hissing sound distracted him and he discovered that the pasta was boiling over.
Wonderful
. He snatched the pot off the stove and burned his hand in the process. Cursing, he nudged Izzy out of her spot in front of the sink and poured off the water. The resulting cloud of steam only made him hotter.

He glared at her, this woman who was systematically ruining
what was supposed to be several relaxing days of fun. “What’re you—a
nun
now?”

“I don’t think I’m ever getting married,” she told him.

Eric froze.
That
he understood. This statement sounded so unlike Isabella that a chill came over him. Looking at her over his shoulder, he swallowed hard and wondered why the hell Izzy’s position on marriage mattered so much to him.

It wasn’t like he was in the market for a wife. Why would he ever get married? So he could turn into a whipped, stoop-shouldered man like his father and his wife could turn into a Stepford Wife like his mother?
No thank you
. Not any time in the foreseeable future, if ever.

And yet…Izzy’s determination to remain single still bothered him, and that was the weirdest thing. He couldn’t just drop the subject, no matter how much he wanted to.

“Never say never, Iz.”

She didn’t answer.

In a day full of disturbing events, this small silence was the most troubling. He studied her.

Maybe it was the rigidity in her shoulders, or the flatness in those eyes that normally sparkled like the Hope Diamond. Maybe it was the utter lack of hope on her face, when she was a person who made Pollyanna look almost like a gloomy pessimist. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

Still…it gave him the answer he needed:

Nothing
. He would do nothing about his sudden attraction to Isabella. He would keep it to himself, and he would get over it. He would never—
never
—do anything to hurt her or their friendship, nor would he rock her boat right now when she was so vulnerable after Joe’s infidelity.

Izzy had enough on her plate without her best friend trying to get in her panties, and she didn’t take breakups well anyway. Back in college, when that idiot Al dumped her, she’d taken off for that semester in Africa in a clear knee-jerk reaction.

Hell, for all Eric knew, history was repeating itself here: Joe broke her heart, so she was leaving the country. Running and
hiding in Africa, just like she’d done before. Maybe that was the only coping mechanism she had. Whether that was the case or not, the last thing she needed now was Eric sniffing after her.

No matter how hard it was, and he suspected it was going to be
very
hard, he would keep his feelings under wraps. Doing anything else would be unfair and…dishonorable.

His silent vow made, Eric felt much better because he’d chosen the right path. And much worse because he wanted her in his arms with an aching desperation. He felt empty and wrecked.

He didn’t think he could shake it off any more than he could pitch for the Yankees. But…he would try his damnedest.

“Let’s eat,” he said. Case closed.

After dinner and cleanup, Eric talked her into watching
The Empire Strikes Back
again—it’s the best movie in the entire series, no question, he always said—and then they said their good-nights and Eric disappeared down the hall into the guest bedroom.

Inside her own bedroom, Isabella lit her fresh-linen-scented aromatherapy candle, took a shower, threw on her matching pink cotton tank and boxers, and collapsed onto the bed with the remote. As usual, the pillow-arranging ritual—a girl could never have too many fluffy pillows—took several minutes, but finally she relaxed onto the down-covered heaven that was her comfy duvet.

Zeus, his eyelids droopy from a long day full of play, trotted into the room from parts unknown with his enormous blue plaid dog sleeping pillow—the thing was easily twice his size—gripped in his teeth. He dragged it to his corner between the nightstand and the wall, yapped once and ran out of the room again. Isabella smiled after him. A minute later he was back, this time carrying his favorite transitional object, a fuzzy pink floppy-eared bunny called Fluffles. Isabella watched while he arranged Fluffles on the pillow and then collapsed in his usual position, with his head resting on Fluffles’s butt.

Isabella had just sighed with contentment, flipped to the Food Network to watch Paula Deen and was in the process of slath
ering her legs with her Bath & Body Works cream—Dancing Waters, of course—when Eric tapped lightly on the door.

“Come in,” she called without thinking, her hands gliding up her bent right leg.

Eric walked in and opened his mouth to speak, but the words died on his lips when he saw what she was doing. To her complete astonishment, he studied her with a burning lust he didn’t bother trying to hide.

A
warning bell rang in her mind—it was late, she was wearing skimpy jammies, they were in her bedroom, he was a man, she was a woman, they’d been drinking wine—but then time ground to a halt and it was too late for any remedial measures, like sliding her legs under the duvet.

She looked right into his eyes and delicious goose bumps erupted over every inch of her skin. Her heart stopped and then began the kind of furious gallop that made people reach for the phone to call 9-1-1. Stunned and frozen, she waited, not breathing, to see what Eric would do. The stark hunger in his face and intense interest in those dark eyes were not expressions she’d ever seen before, but, God help her, she liked seeing them now.

This was not Eric her friend. She knew that right away. This Eric was a complete stranger, someone she’d never before laid eyes on, a being as foreign to her as an alien just arrived on his spaceship. This was Eric the man, and he looked like he was excruciatingly aware of her as a woman, for the first time in their relationship.

He started at the bottom and didn’t miss one millimeter of her body. His slow gaze traveled up past her feet and calves, paused on her thighs and then continued up to her breasts, where it stopped and lingered.

As though a switch had been flipped, her breasts swelled to aching, until it felt as though all the blood in her body had been diverted to her nipples. They were pointed and prominent now, she knew.

Eric knew it, too. His gleaming gaze zeroed in, as though he understood how her tank top abraded the sensitive buds every time her chest heaved for air, as though he wanted to suck her, hard, into his mouth as much as she wanted him to—needed him to.

Breathless with anticipation, she couldn’t think or move, and, worse, was forced to indulge in seconds of unadulterated staring because Eric was still the best-looking man she’d ever seen, bar none.

He’d changed his clothes for bed and now wore black shorts and had a towel slung around his neck. Not exactly Armani, but with a body like
that
it hardly mattered. He moved and the simple gesture of rubbing the top of his head caused a rippling chain reaction of muscles all over his torso. Those wide, sculpted shoulders and arms pulsed with sinew and he was so
beautiful
—so incredibly stunning—that she wouldn’t mind being struck blind at this very moment as long as she had this memory of him to sustain her through the darkness.

His lower body was as incredible. Butt, thighs, calves…muscles, muscles, muscles. Gleaming skin, too. Vast stretches of smooth brown skin, as though someone had taken a can of walnut spray paint to one of Michelangelo’s statues and then breathed life into it.

It wasn’t just the way Eric looked or looked at her that had her hot and bothered and tied her belly up in delicious knots. His masculine energy took up all the space in the bedroom, leaving none for the air she desperately needed to breathe.

Feeling feverish suddenly, shivery, she wished she’d turned
on the ceiling fan earlier. Yeah. Like
that
would help. Paralyzed, she waited for him to speak.

And waited…and waited…and waited.

Finally he gathered his thoughts. “I, ah—”

His voice was hoarse, so he cleared his throat and ran his tongue along his lower lip. That hot gaze flickered to her legs again and then abruptly snapped to her face, as though he’d realized he’d been ogling her. He flushed until his color was as bright as his glittering eyes.

“I forgot my toothpaste.”

Toothpaste
. Right.

This confession killed the sexual tension and left an awkwardness so excruciating she felt her cheeks flame.

“Oh,” she said. “Sure.”

Keeping her eyes lowered to the rug, she hopped down from the bed, hurried into her dark bathroom, and rummaged in the cabinet for the extra tube she always kept on hand. Nervous and clumsy, she knocked her plastic cup into the sink, where it clattered like a thousand metal trash cans. It took her two tries to grab it and three to replace it on the counter.

When she walked back into her room, she saw, to her uneasy surprise, that Eric was now standing right by the bed holding Zeus and absently scratching the rapturous creature behind his ears. Though Eric had been in her room millions of times before, he looked all around as though he’d never seen any of it and had to memorize every detail.

She watched while his gaze touched the gray walls he’d helped her paint when she moved in four years ago, the white trim…the nightstands with pictures her family and friends…the candle…the blue and white paisley duvet on the bed, the pillows…the TV…the bed again. The bed…The bed…
The bed
.

Isabella couldn’t stand it—not the awkwardness, the tension or the unexpected and unwelcome heat in her body—anymore.

“Here,” she said.

Focusing on some vague point over his shoulder, she thrust the
tube at him and hoped he’d go back to his own bedroom where he belonged. When he didn’t take it right away, she made the mistake of looking directly at his face and immediately regretted it.

Eric the friend was back, and she knew him well enough to see that he was bewildered. Troubled. Those dark eyes and lowered brows told her he couldn’t figure out what’d just happened between them any more than she could, and his confusion touched her. Made her want to comfort him.

But she couldn’t do anything like that now. Anything involving Eric’s continued presence in her cozy room this late at night was way too dangerous, and she knew it.

He was too close. So close that his delicious, familiar scent—clean, fresh man, with sporty deodorant and a little spice thrown in, something from the Orient, she thought—blocked the candle’s fragrance. So close that she could see the tight pores on his face, the beginnings of stubble on his chin and the sparks of blue, green and yellow in those piercing eyes she’d always thought were purely brown.

“Thanks,” he said faintly.

His mission accomplished, he should have taken the stupid toothpaste and left. He didn’t. Instead, he stared at her as though he’d been hypnotized to forget all about the original purpose of his trip to her room and to linger as though he couldn’t bear to leave her.

Her frustration grew.
“Here,”
she said again, thrusting the toothpaste toward his chest, determined to get rid of him as soon as possible and by forcible expulsion if necessary.

He finally blinked. In slow motion, he grasped the top of the tube, brushing her hand in the process and holding—but not taking—the toothpaste.

For that one electrifying moment, as his hot skin touched hers and he stared into her eyes, her entire body sang with the beauty of Kathleen Battle at the Met. Sexual energy surged between them and it was both strange and right. That one touch of Eric’s hand was erotic, breathtaking and unlike anything else she’d ever experienced.

It was also way too much for her.

“Anything else?” Dropping her hand and her gaze, she backed away, hurried toward the bed, and busied herself with the useless task of fluffing pillows. “I’m a little tired, so—”

“I’m good,” he said, but
still
didn’t move. After a pause, he said, “I can’t believe Frank and Terri are getting married. Can you?”

She tried to grin, tried to pretend that feeling dizzying lust for him was normal, tried to put the desire behind them. But the new fever in her blood still burned hot and her hands still itched to glide over his skin.

It took her a long moment to answer. “I can’t believe Frank and Terri ever managed to graduate. Remember that all-nighter we pulled to help him finish some lit paper junior year? That wasn’t pretty.”

He made an uncomfortable sound that was part laugh, part snort, and then lapsed into staring again. A good four or five beats passed before he opened his mouth, and another three or four before his voice activated.

“Well…I guess I’ll just—”

“Yeah.” She spoke quickly and focused her gaze on the pillows…the bed…the dog…anything but him. “Good night.”

“Izzy?”

There was a plea in his voice, but she didn’t want to hear it. She
wouldn’t
hear it. If she heard it, she would look at him, and if she looked at him, she would go to him, and if she went to him they would make love. She knew it. There would be no stopping it. If they made love—
oh, man, she wanted to make love
—they would no longer be friends and, no matter what else ever happened between them, she always needed to keep Eric just as a friend.

“Good night.”

She kept her voice soft but firm, and it worked. He moved away and then the quiet click of the closing door told her he’d gone at last. Weak with relief, she collapsed on the bed, listened to the hot rush of blood in her ears, and waited for sleep to come.

It never did.

“Don’t touch that,” Eric said the next morning when they set out for her parents’ home in Greenville on the first leg of their trip.

Isabella snatched her hand away from the dashboard—cockpit, Eric called it—and shot him the angriest sidelong look she could manage.

They sat in Eric’s pride and joy, a Mercedes SUV ML something-or-other. The gleaming black car had leather seats, a sunroof, a computer, satellite radio and enough bells and whistles for a respectable small aircraft. She was not allowed to touch any of them, not even, apparently, the knobs that controlled the air conditioning on
her
side of the vehicle. She supposed she should count herself lucky he’d let her sit in the stinking car at all without some sort of inspection to make sure her butt was worthy of the honor.

She’d had just about enough of Eric Warner.

He’d emerged from the guest bedroom this morning in a pissy mood, and it had gotten pissier as the hours wore on. He hadn’t liked the coffee she’d bought, hadn’t wanted Zeus to come along and possibly get hair in his precious car, and she hadn’t moved fast enough when it was time to leave. No doubt she was also breathing too loudly, blinking too often and looking out the wrong window.

“I’m hot,” she snarled.

He rolled his eyes behind his dark sunglasses. Without a word, he reached out and flipped a couple of switches and vents until a blast of arctic air hit her face, threatening the tip of her nose with frostbite.

“That’s too cold.”

“Dammit, Isabella.” Keeping one eye on the road, he did some more adjusting of knobs and whatnot.

“Don’t swear at me. I’m tired of your potty mouth.” She’d been getting a steady stream of
dammit, Isabellas
today, and she was sick to death of it. It wasn’t like she’d done anything wrong or was high maintenance or anything.

Well, sure, she’d made a couple of requests, but so what? Was
it a big deal to ask once or twice for the driver to pull over so the passenger could use the bathroom? Was it really a hardship for him to switch from one of his ten thousand preprogrammed jazz stations and let her listen to a little Celtic guitar for a while? Was it
her
fault she’d forgotten her purse at her apartment and they’d lost half-an-hour while they drove back to get it?
Of course not.

Maybe a walk down memory lane would help his mood. “Remember that time we drove to Florida for spring break? What was that—junior year? In a brown Honda Civic? That car was so old.”

“Yeah, I remember. You forgot your makeup case and we lost an hour going back for it.”

Isabella sighed. So much for distracting him with memories. “You’re going to need to stop soon.” She watched the green hills of Kentucky streak by her window and squinted against the sun’s glare. “Bathroom break.”

Another colorful curse. “We just stopped half an hour ago, Izzy. For God’s sake.”

“That was to eat. Now I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Well, why didn’t you go then?”

“Didn’t need to,” she told him. “And if I have to stop a thousand more times between here and Florida, you’ll just have to stop, won’t you?”

He seemed speechless with rage, which she found oddly gratifying after his snippy treatment this morning. All sorts of cords and veins in his neck throbbed with tension, and she could have happily watched them all day. But then she realized she was being childish, and, really, they couldn’t drive all the way to Jacksonville like this. With her luck, he’d kick her out before they even got to Greenville.

It was hard to believe that all this misery resulted from their interlude last night. In the cold light of day, the episode seemed so…surreal. It hadn’t really happened, had it?

The quivering, low in her belly, answered her.

Well, maybe it
had
really happened, but it was one strange,
never-to-be-repeated moment out of time that she was perfectly willing to chalk up to too much wine at dinner.

They needed to talk, she decided, smoothing the hem of her skirt and staring down at her scarlet-painted toes in their fancy jeweled flip-flops. A good talk cured most problems, so that’s what they’d do: talk, have a good laugh and move on with the rest of their lives. In ten minutes his black mood would be gone and everything would be back to normal.

“Look.” Feeling fidgety and needing something to do with her hands, she grabbed another cinnamon candy from her cup holder, unwrapped it and slid it into her mouth. “I think if we just talk about what happened last night—”

“Can you pick that up, please?”

“What?”

“The wrapper.” He loosened one tight-knuckled hand from the steering wheel and pointed to the red wrapper, which, sure enough, had dropped to the floor. “I don’t want a lot of trash in the car.”

“If you boss me around one more time, I’m going to jam this wrapper up your right nostril.”

“Don’t even try it.”

She snatched the wrapper from the floor and shoved it into his stupid little Mercedes trash can instead. “So we had an awkward moment last night. Big deal. We just need to talk it through, and then—”