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“Stop!” She was smiling. “I get the picture.”
She wanted to push the cart at first, simply for the novelty of it all. Then she wanted him to explain the price comparisons and the meaning of the dietary listings on the back. What would normally have taken him less than thirty minutes became a two-hour tour of the grocery market.
When they finally had finished and he’d loaded the last of the groceries into the back of the truck, he swung into the driver’s seat and snagged his seat belt. Automatically he glanced over at her. Then he frowned.
“You shouldn’t be wearing your seat belt like that.”
“Like what?” She glanced down at herself, then back at him, clearly mystified.
He leaned across the seat, snagging his fingers in the lap belt she’d pulled over her belly and tugging it down beneath the bulge of his child to rest across her hips. “I’ve seen warnings about this. Pregnant women should be careful not to position the belt too high. If there was an accident, the belt could harm the baby.”
“Oh.” Her voice was slightly breathless.
With sudden, shocking clarity Rafe became aware of how close they were. His breath stirred the copper curls about her ears, and the arm he’d draped over the back of the seat was very nearly an embrace around her shoulders. His fingers, where he’d hooked them beneath the seat belt, rested against soft feminine flesh. He’d pulled the belt down as he’d spoken so that now his hand was practically nested in the warm pocket where her thighs met her body. His fingers were held firmly against her by the constriction of the seat belt.
She froze.
So did he, largely because his entire being was caught up in the battle raging inside him: the gentlemanly part of him that knew he should move away versus the purely male impulse to extend his fingers down and brush over the sensitive flesh he knew lay just beyond his loosely curled hand. It was a toss-up as to which one would win.
And then she took the choice from him.
Slowly, her hand came up and snared his wrist, her small fingers braceleting his hard male sinew, not even meeting around the thickness of his arm. It was clearly a signal to halt. She didn’t tug his hand away, though, only turned her head and tilted up her chin to look at him with wide, questioning eyes.
The desire to lower his head and take her lips was nearly too much for him to resist. But he’d promised her. No kissing.
Damn that promise!
Holding her gaze, he slowly, slowly slid his hand from beneath the seat belt fabric, caressing her flesh with the back of his hand as he withdrew, moving higher to let his knuckles lightly skim over a nipple, which elicited a swiftly indrawn breath from her. Not a moan, but not far from it, either.
Without a word, he slid his arm from behind her and turned his attention to starting the truck and pulling out of the lot. She didn’t speak the whole way home and neither did he, though he was hard-put to contain the elation dancing around inside him.
She’d said no more kissing, but she hadn’t said a word about touching—and she hadn’t objected just now to what had been a whole lot more intimate than some kisses he’d experienced.
What in the world had she been thinking? Or not thinking?
Washing up before joining Rafe to work on the recipe she’d copied from the television, Elizabeth held a cool facecloth to cheeks that burned at the very memory of his hard, hot fingers pressed firmly against her body. If she’d been naked, those fingers would have been nestled in the curling hair that protected her most private flesh.
If you’d been naked he would have been doing a whole lot more with those fingers.
She groaned and flopped the sopping cloth over her entire face. She was an imbecile. An imbecile ruled by her hormones. And she didn’t mean pregnancy hormones, either. She couldn’t even be in the same room with the man without her heart beating faster and her mind conjuring up vivid pictures of him embracing her, his body hard and demanding against her soft, yielding one.
Staying here in his home was the dumbest thing she’d done since…well, since she’d slept with a perfect stranger and gotten herself pregnant.
But in her heart she didn’t consider Rafe a stranger. Not then and not now. They might not know each other well, but her body and her heart knew all they needed to know to assure her that he was the only man she’d ever want.
She snatched the cloth off her face and stared at herself in the bathroom mirror.
Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no! She was not in love with Rafe Thorton.
He didn’t want her, at least not in any way other than the purely physical, and she’d promised herself she wasn’t going to weave any more foolish romantic fantasies around him.
But oh, it was hard to make her heart listen to her common sense. All her life she’d dreamed of a man who would breach the fortress of security around her and carry her off to a world where she could be just another ordinary person. These easy-flowing hours the past few days had given her more contentment than she’d known in her entire life.
She loved living in a single-story home with only a few bedrooms as opposed to an entire wing of bedroom suites with drafty hallways half a kilometer long. She loved the casual atmosphere in which one simply drove one’s car out of the garage and went to the market instead of calling a chauffeur. She loved everything about the life Rafe had created for himself, and that was part of the problem.
She couldn’t let his life-style confuse her. She couldn’t fall for him simply because he embodied the kind of life she’d always longed for in her most secret heart.
But this experience had been good for her in some ways. She was determined that her child wasn’t going to be raised in a hothouse environment. She wasn’t blind to the fact that she might always need discreet security, but she was determined to make as normal a life for her baby as she could.
