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Probably he wasn’t that good anymore, anyway. Probably he’d grown older and boring and wouldn’t spend hours kissing, licking and stroking every inch of her skin. Probably he wouldn’t still be able to torment her by bringing her to the very brink of climax over and over again until she would sob and beg him to take her over the edge. Probably he couldn’t take her over that edge a half dozen times in one night.
Probably she should kill herself right now before she started moaning just sitting here thinking about what it had been like to make love to this man.
“You okay, Caroline?”
“Fine.” Whose weak, breathy voice was that? Not hers, not the strong assistant producer who’d spent her week been barking orders and soothing feathers ruffled by Renauld Watson.
God, Mick reduced her to a sighing girl merely by sitting in the same room. She stiffened in her chair. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I’m family.”
Not her family. But he’d almost been, hadn’t he? If she’d gone through with it and decided to marry a man who was destined to break her heart over and over again, yes, he would have been.
The thought hurt her so much she had to drop her hands to her lap and press them against her suddenly tight and aching stomach. That was as close to her tight and aching heart as she could get without him suspecting how much he affected her.
“You do remember that Jared’s my cousin, don’t you? As a matter of fact, I’m pretty much responsible for him and Gwen hooking up.” He gave her a secretive smile that invited her to ask him to share a good story.
She didn’t ask. “Oh right. Feel free to visit your family in the inn. This is the production trailer. Essentially, my office.” Now she’d nailed the voice. The prissy, snotty, “get outta my life” voice she’d been going for.
It didn’t even phase him. He looked around and gave her a mournful shake of the head. “As far as offices go, this one pretty well blows, doesn’t it?”
She almost laughed but held it in and kept a straight face. “It’ll do.” Then she ran another weary hand over her face. “At least until the cast gets here later today and the door becomes a revolving one for them to come in here and complain.”
“High-maintenance, the contestants on these shows?”
“Oh, yeah.”
The very thought made her niggling headache grow stronger, until her temple began to throb and the back of her neck to ache. She dropped her head forward and stretched side to side, trying to straighten out the tightened muscles.
Mick was still sitting there when she raised her head. Looking at him, just looking at his face, her lips twitched, wanting to smile at the sight of him. In spite of her headache, her job, her stress level, she wanted to bask in that good humor of his, be destressed by one of his wicked jokes and soak up more of his smiles.
The man was born to make a woman smile. And say yes.
Not this woman.
“You should go.”
He didn’t move. “Caro, what’s going on?”
And suddenly, maybe because he’d called her Caro, not Caroline. Maybe because his expression was so concerned and tender, or maybe because she was overemotional, overtired, overstressed and oversensitive, she told him in a burst of complaints.
“This is a nightmare. The writers keep emailing changes. As of this morning I still don’t know who the killer is and I have to brief that person on their means, motive and opportunity tomorrow morning.” She paused for breath, then rushed on. “The lead camera operator looks like she stepped out of a Goth movie and I don’t know whether she wants to get a good shot or suck somebody’s blood.”
Now she was on a roll. “The director is not only absolutely impossible to deal with, he’s incompetent. And he’s flirting with the mayor’s wife. The host is flirting with the mayor. The ghosts won’t come out. The trees are too green. The inn is too clean. The mystery is too simple. The rules don’t make sense. And I’ve been sleeping lousy knowing you’re on the other side of the wall and wondering who I wronged in my last life to be tortured like this on my first big production.”
Mick didn’t say a word, didn’t smile at her confession, didn’t frown at her frustration, just watched her suck in a few deep breaths as she realized what she’d allowed to spill from her traitorous mouth.
“Finished?”
She nodded miserably.
Finally, he stood up and stepped closer. “You need a distraction.”
He grabbed her hands off her lap and pulled her to her feet, until they stood nearly toe-to-toe. Every inch of her body reacted, sparking to life, remembering what it was like to be a mere whisper away from this man, anticipating a kiss, a touch, an embrace. A long, exquisite night of passion. “What’d you have in mind?” she managed to ask, unable to help it as her mind filled with the amazing ways Mick could distract her.
“Turn around.”
The two words scraped across her skin like the touch of a man’s roughened fingertip. Arousing her. Promising something indefinable and incredibly desirable. She almost whimpered.
