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“So you kissed me because you’re not committed to anyone?”
“Yes. No.” He ran his hand through his hair. Two months of this, he’d be a basket-case. “I kissed you, that’s all. A kiss is just a kiss. It isn’t always an earth-shaking event.”
“Some of the girls said it was. And some of the books I read…”
Catarina looked down. Jake put his hand under her chin and lifted her face until their eyes met.
“Some of what books?”
“Never mind.”
“Come on, Cat. What books?”
She turned a pale pink. “The girls who went home for weekends, you know, sometimes they brought back books.”
Lady Chatterley’s Lover? The Story of O? Jake narrowed his eyes. “And?”
“And in those books…”
“What books, damn it?”
“Romance novels. In some of them kisses were—they were special.”
“Ah. Romance novels.” He let out a sigh of relief. How revealing could a romance novel be? “Yeah, well, they can be.”
“But they don’t have to be? You mean a man can kiss a woman for no reason?”
“No. Of course not. A man should always—he should always feel—he should want the woman to feel…”
“Yes?” Cat said softly. “Feel what?”
Years before, when he was just a kid, Jake and his pals had cut school on a bitterly cold winter day. They’d gone to one of the old factory piers on the Bronx River where they swam during the summer. There’d been ice on the river and he’d walked out on its frozen skin.
“Go, Jake!” the other kids had yelled.
And he’d gone. Five feet from shore. Ten feet. Before he’d suddenly felt the first delicate shiver of the ice under his feet.
Suddenly the cries had been filled with terror.
“It’s breaking up, man,” one of the kids had shouted. “Jake, Jake, the ice is breaking. Turn around. Head back!”
He had, because doing anything else would have been insane.
Still, there’d been that one mercurial instant when he’d hesitated, torn between the gut-loosening terror of knowing he was in danger and the indescribable high that came of flirting with it.
That was how he felt now, looking down into Catarina Mendes’s coffee-colored eyes. How he felt as he watched the tip of her pink tongue dart out and slick over her bottom lip.
One step forward. One touch. One more kiss…
“Jake?”
He dragged air into his lungs, then took a step back, away from her, away from the ice that threatened to buckle under his feet.
“Unpack,” he said in a low growl. “Change that damned brown sack for something else. Take a nap or pace back and forth. Either is fine with me. I’ll call you when supper’s ready.” He stepped out of the room, began to shut the door, then remembered what had started this scene. “You asked me about Anna.”
“Yes?”
“She’s my housekeeper. Married. Her age is someplace between fifty and infinity.”
