SO MAYBE REFUSING to do Ralph’s bidding was the dumbest idea he’d ever had in his entire life, both before and after death. She’d been beautiful and desirable with her go-to-hell shoes and her perfect hair. In cutoffs and a T-shirt, and with her hair yanked back in a ponytail, and no makeup, she was close to irresistible. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he sent a silent thank-you in Ralph’s direction for that benefit. No, he probably wasn’t going to be able to resist her. He’d just have to hope her will was stronger than his.
She had the prettiest eyes. Pretty wasn’t a word most people would have used when they thought of Samantha—striking, gorgeous, beautiful were even too mild. But when she took off her dark glasses and looked at him, without the artificial shield of contact lenses, she’d looked vulnerable and almost…sweet. So sweet that he knew if he touched her he’d hurt her. So sweet that he knew he was going to have to try.
He glanced over at her in the passenger seat. She was clutching that ridiculous little purse in her beautiful hands, and he tried to wrench his mind away from what those hands could do, what those long, smooth legs would feel like wrapped around him.
“Why the swan?”
“I collect purses.”
“But the swan wasn’t just a random choice, was it?”
She looked at him. “No.”
“So were you too tall and gangly as a child and always felt like an ugly duckling and now you identify with the swan?”
“You’re not nearly as smart as you think you are,” she shot back. “I’m a swan who’d rather be a duckling. But you take what you’re handed and deal with it.”
“Ah, poor baby. It’s a curse being beautiful,” he said lightly.
She stared at him. “Go to hell.”
He laughed, resisting the impulse to say, Been there, done that. “Sorry. I’m not being suitably reverential.”
She pushed her sunglasses up on her forehead to look at him, and once more he got the full force of her eyes. “I don’t have the right nature to be beautiful,” she said. “But I also don’t like to waste things. I was given a certain gift, and I’ll nurture it and sell it for as long as I can. When it’s over I’ll take my money and move as far away from L.A. as I can.”
“And what will you do then?”
“Anything I damned please. So what do you do? I expect you’re in advertising like Aaron.”
“You really don’t like me much, do you?” he said.
“You really haven’t given me any reason to like you, have you?” she countered.
He racked his brain, but his mouth was already coming up with an answer. “I play piano.”
“For a living?” She sounded dubious.
He shrugged. “I write music. Soundtracks, some stuff for television. It keeps me relatively solvent.” It sounded oddly right even as he made it up on the spot.
“And you do all this someplace farther south and a lot hotter?”
He’d forgotten he’d said that. She must have been paying closer attention than he realized. “No, that’s just where I came from. Right now I live on a small island in Puget Sound. Fortunately I get to work long-distance.” He changed the subject. “So you don’t like being a model?”
For a moment he thought she was going to blow him off. But instead she put the sunglasses back on, and he could see a little of the tension leave her body. “It has its good points,” she said. “I make a great deal of money and I get to play dress-up. I was always into fantasy when I was a kid, probably because I was an only child. So now I get to dress up like a thousand different women and pretend I’m them, and then I get to go home and be me.”
“And who do you prefer?”
“Me,” she said with absolute certainty.
“So do I.”
“What?”
“Prefer you to the thousand different women. When you’re not trying to scare the hell out of me.”
“I don’t think anyone could,” she said, sounding slightly aggrieved. “So why did you agree to bring me up here? Surely you must have better things to do if you’re just in L.A. on a visit.”
“Nothing better to do. Besides, I like you.”
He’d really managed to astonish her. “You like me?” she echoed. “Men don’t like me. They want to sleep with me, use me, fall in love with me, but they don’t like me.”
“Oh, I want to sleep with you. But then, I only sleep with women I like.”
She looked uncomfortable, but she was the one who’d brought up the subject. “Isn’t it better to sleep with women you love?” she asked.
“Maybe. But it’s a little soon for me to be in love with you. If you want I can make the effort…”
She laughed then. “You’re being ridiculous. Besides, I know why you really agreed to drive all this way with me.”
“Do you?”
“I’m more observant than you think. You have a thing for Jasmine. I watched you with her last night—you were paying far more attention to her than you were to me.”
“You made it clear you could take care of yourself. Did it bother you?”
“Not at all. I love Jasmine, and you’d definitely be an improvement over Aaron. The two of you might…”
He’d been driving fast on the secondary road, and he hit the brakes a little too hard, so that the tires spun as they slid to a stop on the shoulder. “I don’t have a thing for Jasmine,” he said firmly. “I have a thing for you.” And because he couldn’t wait any longer he caught her face in one hand and kissed her, unbuckling his seat belt with the other hand.
Her mouth was cool, shocked beneath his, and she slid back against the leather seat as he leaned over her, letting him kiss her but not contributing in any way. He felt a moment’s grievance—her total passivity was enough to cool any man’s desire. No wonder she’d managed to stay a virgin for so long.
But he had no intention of starting the car again, of doing anything, until he could get her to kiss him back. It wasn’t a matter of obeying Ralph’s orders, it wasn’t a matter of pride. He just had a sudden, desperate need for her to kiss him.
He put his tongue against her lips, tasting them, then pulled back, looking into the opaque darkness of her sunglasses. “You don’t like kissing?”
“Not much,” she said coolly.
“Then you haven’t had the right man kiss you.” He put his lips against hers, softly. He made no demands, he was in no hurry, just small, lazy kisses against her soft mouth, clinging for a moment, then releasing, touching her with his tongue, then brushing the side of her mouth.
She wasn’t as cool as she had been. He put his mouth against the side of her neck and he could feel her pulse moving fast beneath his tongue. He moved his mouth up again, to her lips, and he pushed her mouth open with his, just a little bit, nudging her, teasing her, as he could tell her breathing was growing more labored. Maybe he was just taking her breath, but he didn’t think so. He would have given ten years off his life to touch those small, perfect breasts beneath the thin T-shirt, but then he didn’t have any years left. And her mouth was enough for now.
Particularly when he felt her lips move beneath his, just slightly.
He pressed a tiny bit harder. She opened her mouth for him, and he couldn’t stand it anymore—he had to use his tongue.
She jumped, and he could almost feel her try to reach for that Zen-like passivity, but he was having none of it. He knew how to kiss, and it had been too damned long since he’d kissed a woman. And he didn’t know if he’d ever wanted to kiss a woman as much as he wanted to kiss Sam.
The tiny noise she made was almost enough to make him explode. It was the unmistakable, delectable sound of desire, coming from deep inside her, half a moan, half a growl, and he wondered whether he could manage to get her out of those raggedy cutoffs and into the back seat.
Her hand came up and touched his face, just as he was about to reach for her seat belt. Her skin was cool, her fingers trembled, and the touch was the merest hint of a caress.
It was enough. He drew back, breathing hard, to stare into her opaque sunglasses. “Not Jasmine,” he said. And he started the car, pulling out onto the empty road without looking.
SAM TRIED TO SLIDE down further in her seat, but her legs were too long—there was no more room in front of her. She crossed her arms over her chest as she realized in sudden horror that not only was she not wearing a bra, but her nipples were hard and sticking out against the thin cotton.
She wanted to wipe her mouth. No, she wanted to touch her mouth, to see if it felt any different. She kept her arms tightly crossed over her chest, hugging herself, shaken and unsure.
She glanced over at him as he drove down the highway. He didn’t look as if he’d spent the past five minutes kissing her into a puddle of mindless need. Unless you looked at his mouth, and she certainly didn’t want to be doing that, because she couldn’t look at his mouth without wanting to feel it against hers again.
The silence between them was making it even worse. She summoned her coolest voice. “You kiss very well,” she said. “You must have had a lot of practice.”
He glanced over at her, a faint smile drawing her eyes to his mouth again. “And you haven’t had much at all.”
She wasn’t quite sure how to react to that. “Are you saying you don’t like kissing me?”
“Oh, no. I like kissing you very much indeed. You make it very interesting.”
He wasn’t improving things all that much. “I didn’t think kissing was supposed to be merely interesting.”
“If you want me to pull over again I can demonstrate just how intense interesting can be.”
“No!” She sounded panicked, and she didn’t care.
“All right,” he said calmly. “We can play later.”
“We cannot!”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t! Ever!”
“Never?” he murmured.
He couldn’t know. No one could really know—most people thought she had a secret lesbian lover stashed somewhere, or else they thought she was so kinky her sex life was clouded in mystery. No one knew that not only did she not have a lover, but that the only thing deviant about her sex life was that she was still a virgin.
No one would believe her if she told them. And why should she? She had no intention of having sex with anyone right now, and when she decided to she planned to have plenty of time to get to know the guy first and give him advance warning that she hadn’t done it before. The last thing she was going to do was hop into bed with a stranger she’d known less than twenty-four hours.
Even if, inexplicably, she wanted to.
None of this made any sense. She liked big, capable men, not slender, elegant ones. She needed a long time to get comfortable with a man, and this man put her in a strange, restless state that was unnerving. That made her wonder what his skin would feel like against hers.
She had nothing against sex, premarital or otherwise. She’d come close a couple of times, years ago, but in the end had backed out, much to the disgust of the boys involved. By the third time she decided not to let it get to that point, not unless she was absolutely certain, and she hadn’t even been tempted in God knew how long.
She wasn’t tempted now—that would be insane. It was just that he knew how to kiss. But it was just a talent like any other, like playing the piano or painting or playing tennis. One that improved with practice. He must have kissed a lot of women to be that good, and she didn’t need to start having feelings for a man who used women like that.
But if he kissed that well, what would sex be like with him? Anyone who could put that much sensuality into the touching of mouths would likely be quite extraordinary when it came to actual intercourse.
But then again, she didn’t know what ordinary intercourse was like, so why bother fantasizing about anything else?
She pushed her sunglasses up on her forehead and squinted into the bright afternoon. She was moderately nearsighted—she could do without her glasses but it made life more complicated. The leaves overhead dissolved into a gentle blur of green against the blue sky, and the highway stretched out as a gray expanse in front of them. She glanced at her companion, but he was close enough that she could see him clearly. Far too clearly.
She’d been in various stages of dress and undress with some of the most beautiful men in the world, both gay and straight, and she’d never been so fascinated by someone’s face and body. His skin was a faintly golden color, not really tanned, more a natural pigment, and his long black hair was silky straight against his neck. He had high cheekbones, a narrow nose and the most beautiful mouth she’d ever kissed. But beauty had never been that valuable a commodity as far as she was concerned. She knew just how ephemeral it could be, and how utterly random, a simple combination of genes and luck. It was ridiculous to be swept away by an accident of nature. She thought of all the men who’d wanted her over the years, simply because she looked the way she did. She’d never understood it. But she couldn’t keep from looking at Gideon. Wondering what it would be like to…
“It’s going to rain,” he said. He must have felt her eyes on him. A faint smile played around his mouth.
“It never rains in California,” she said firmly. “Besides, there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”
He said nothing as the first bolt of lightning split the sky, followed by earthshaking thunder. He’d turned the windshield wipers on before the first torrent slapped the window, and he slowed his dangerous pace just slightly.
The weather wasn’t improving things. The darkness and heavy rain made the interior of the car feel smaller, closer, more intimate, and intimacy was the last thing she needed from the stranger beside her. Who didn’t feel like a stranger at all.
“Did you do that?” she asked suspiciously, knowing how ridiculous it sounded.
“Do what? Control the weather? I get enough rain up in Washington that I wouldn’t be looking for more.” It was coming down in sheets of water, washing across the road.
“It’s dangerous when it rains down here. All the oil on the road gets very slick.”
“I have no intention of getting into an accident. We’re on a rescue mission, remember? What good would we do Jasmine if we ended up in a ditch?”
She bit her lip to keep silent. Never in her life had she been jealous of another woman, but even bringing up Jasmine’s name might encourage him to…to try to prove his lack of interest. And she didn’t want that to be the reason he kissed her.
She didn’t want him to have any reason at all to kiss her, she reminded herself. None at all.
“You never did tell me where you disappeared to last night,” he said after a while.
“I went to the Animal Emergency Center with the chef. He was almost as traumatized as poor Choux-fleur, and he needed moral support.”
“And since you hate dogs you decided to go with him.”
“I don’t hate dogs,” she admitted. “I usually have five or six roaming around the place. I’m part of a rescue network.”
“In your spare time?”
“Hey, standing around and looking beautiful isn’t that onerous a job,” she said in a flippant voice. “And we already agreed that I drink alcohol, eat red meat, like dogs and have a thousand other sins.”
“Do you? Name one.”
“I get easily irritated by strange men asking me rude questions.”
“I’m not that strange.” Another bolt of lightning snaked down from the sky, uncomfortably close. “You want to tell me exactly where we’re going?”
“It’s a glorified cabin up in the mountains. Aaron uses it for sex.”
“Really? When did you have sex with Aaron?”
“I didn’t!” She shivered at the very thought of his meaty, thick-fingered hands touching her. “I came up with Jasmine for a Fourth of July picnic last year.”
“And you still remember the way?”
“I’ve got a good sense of direction. I’m not about to get lost with you in the back end of beyond.”
He said nothing. It was dark in the interior of the car, and he’d taken off his sunglasses, but his eyes were trained on the road ahead. Which was just as well—his eyes were almost as unnerving as his mouth.
The rain was beating down in a steady rhythm and the hum of the tires on the wet road vibrated beneath her. She could feel her eyelids begin to droop, and she tried to force herself into alertness. But she’d had a long, long night, and Rags had woken her early this morning, and right now all she wanted to do was sink down further in the soft cocoon of darkness and sleep.
“Go ahead,” he murmured. “This stuff is going to slow us down—we won’t get there for another couple of hours. You may as well sleep.”
She wanted to ask him how he knew how long it would take them to get to the cabin. How he knew how long it would rain. But she was too tired to summon the effort, too tired to keep her arms clasped so tightly around her body. “All right,” she said sleepily, leaning her head against the door. “I hope I don’t snore.”
“Don’t you know? One of your lovers would have told you if you did.”
One of her lovers. She wasn’t so sleepy that she was going to let the truth slip. He wouldn’t believe her anyway. “My lovers have all been much too polite to say anything.” She yawned, snuggling down lower in the seat.
“Glad to hear it. There’s nothing more desirable in a lover than proper manners.”
She should have responded, but she was on the verge of sleep. Knowing she’d dream of dangerous kisses.