She was still smiling, and there was laughter behind her voice, but not at him. It was good-natured teasing at this point. “Yes, there were ‘poster people’ on my walls. When I was twelve.”
“Well, apparently, I skipped that stage as a teenager. If it’s any consolation, I was thirty when I put it up there, not forty.”
“So, what was on your walls when you were twelve? Dinosaurs?”
“Ha ha. Very funny. Although that would probably be less embarrassing than whatwason my walls.”
She shuddered at the thought of the boy bands she’d taped to her walls. What would be more embarrassing than dinosaurs or poster people? “What was on your walls?”
He sighed. “Nothing,” he mumbled.
“No way, Triumph. You don’t get to back out. What was on your walls?”
“Fuck.” He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “The Analytical Engine.”
She blinked. The what? “Is that a science fiction novel?”
He barked out a laugh, then turned his head on the pillow to look at her. “I wish. No. The Analytical Engine was the first computer ever designed. I had a huge poster of it, or a diagram of it, on the ceiling above my bed.”
She tried not to laugh. She really did, but there was no stopping it. “You had a poster of a computer above your bed?” That’s what she tried to say, anyway, between the loud guffaws and the interjections of “Ow! Ow! Ow!” at how much it hurt to laugh.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he agreed sarcastically. “I was the biggest geek in the universe. I get it.”
“Most boys would have had posters of girls in bikinis on their ceilings,” she told him as she worked her way through the giggle stage of the humor. “Did all those tubes and dials get your motor running?”
“Brat,” he said. There was no heat behind it, and his eyes were filled with humor. Then the smile faded as he turned back onto his side, his hand reaching out to her. Like the brush of dandelion fuzz, his thumb swept across her cheekbone. “You’re even more beautiful when you smile.”
She held her breath. Beautiful. He said she was beautiful. Not gorgeous. Not sexy. There was nothing wrong with those two words, but they were closer to lust and what a man would say if he coveted Guillermo’s woman. And the look in his eyes was heated, but instead of making her wary, it made her feel free. Like the person she truly was and the person she’d pretended to be the past ten years were two entirely different people from two separate worlds.
Staring into her eyes, he kept his thumb in a steady back-and-forth motion. She imagined that if this were a fantasy movie, fairy dust would follow behind it, based on how her skin tingled with each pass.
“When I worked on your legend, I had a crush on you. Pathetic, huh? Thirty-year-old man pining after a photo and a voice. Now, here we are a decade later, and I finally get to see that the legend far surpasses the fantasy.”
“The fantasy?” What the hell did that mean? Likefantasyfantasy? Like sexual fantasy?
“This is going to be TMI, and the timing is all wrong, but just your smoky laugh got me hard. It was a bitch and a half if there were people around.”
Inspecting his face closer, the words sounded like he joked, but his expression was dead serious.
“You had me at a disadvantage. I never got to see what you looked like. All I got were the jokes and the voice. Always pictured a sexy computer nerd with wire-rimmed glasses, reflecting the glow of monitors in the wee hours of the morning—pale, living off energy drinks, and listening to thrash metal.”
He chuckled. “Pretty close, except for the thrash metal. I only wear the glasses at home now when I read in bed.”
Now there was an image. Holy fuck. Glasses, a book, and six feet of handsome nakedness.
The quiet settled between them again, but this time it was comfortable. Talking without speaking. Being.
She wanted more.
Tentatively, she reached a finger up from where it lay on his chest to trace his upper lip. “They’re so soft.”
She watched his Adam’s apple bounce convulsively. “Asking isn’t normally my way, but this feels too important. If I kiss you again, will I have to apologize?”
She rocked her head from side to side the best she could on the pillow. “Kissing you right now is all I want to do.”
When his lips touched hers, instead of fairy dust, sparks zinged across her skin, like when a Fourth of July sparkler rained down on the flesh. It stung and tickled at the same time, creating an odd balance of pleasure and pain.
He didn’t kiss. He claimed. He dominated.
