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She put her palms on his chest and leaned forward. “I’m sad and I hate feeling this way. I want to be blissfully happy for just a little while. To forget about the future and just live in the moment.”
Where she touched him, he burned. The curtain of her hair swung forward. Still damp from her swim, it brushed against his cheek. He gathered a handful and gently tugged.
“It’s not that I don’t want that, too,” he began and stopped. She couldn’t know that what he felt for her went way beyond physical attraction. “I just can’t see where that’s going to be good for either of us.”
Her hands stalked from his chest to his stomach. His muscles twitched in reaction to her touch, betraying him. He grit his teeth and focused on something less tantalizing than the slender thighs bracketing his hips or the heat of her burning into him through layers of cotton. Unfortunately with her current position, she dominated his field of vision.
“Is that my shirt?”
The last time he’d seen the white button-down, she’d been driving away from his house after they spent the night together. In his eagerness to get her naked the evening before, he’d torn the delicate fabric of her blouse and rendered the garment unwearable. Today, where her damp hair touched the fabric, transparent patches bloomed on her shoulder and chest.
“It is. Every time I wear it I think about you and the nights we spent together.”
Nic gripped the bedsheets, endeavoring to stay true to his word and keep his hands off her. Even if his position didn’t lend itself to a series of casual affairs, leaving a trail of broken hearts in his wake was not his style. On the other hand, he didn’t need the sort of complication a romance with Brooke would bring to his life right now. But since yesterday afternoon he’d become obsessed with all the ways he could touch her without using his hands, and since she’d arrived, he hadn’t brooded over the accident for more than five minutes.
“Tell me about the women who are dying to become your princess,” she said in a tone as dry as the California desert near the airport test facility. “Are they all beautiful and rich?”
“Do you really want to talk about this?”
“Not really.” Her fingers tickled up his sides toward his armpits.
In an effort to stop her before she made him squirm, Nic snagged her wrists and rolled her over. She ended up beneath him, her legs tangled in the sheets. Now that she was trapped in a web of her own making, this was his chance to escape. He should have immediately shifted away from her and put a safe distance between them, but her expression took on a look of such vulnerability that he was transfixed. Pressed chest to groin, they stared at each other.
“Touch me,” she whispered, digging her fingers into his biceps.
He flexed his spine, driving his hips tight into hers. She shifted beneath him, rubbing her body against his in a tension-filled rhythm. A groan ripped from his throat as her heat called to him. Today she smelled like pink grapefruit, stimulating with a sweet bitterness. His mouth watered.
“I promised I wouldn’t.”
“Then, kiss me. You didn’t promise not to do that.”
That would be following the letter of the law instead of the intent. “You should have been a lawyer,” he groused, surrendering to what they both wanted.
His lips lowered to hers. She opened for him like a rose on a warm summer afternoon. He kept the pace slow, concentrating on her mouth while ruthlessly suppressing the urgent thrumming in his groin. Her heart beat in time with his until Nic wasn’t sure where he left off and she began. Time was suspended. The room fell away. There was only the softness of her skin beneath his lips, her soft sighs and the growing tension in his body.
This deviation from his intention wouldn’t benefit either of them, but he’d grown sick to death of thinking in terms of what he couldn’t do, what didn’t work, what he stood to lose. He wanted to take joy in this moment and put the future on hold. Brooke had offered him a gift with no strings attached. He would face a lifetime of limits and restrictions soon enough. Why not go wild for a few minutes? Enjoy this exhilarating, vivacious woman who brought joy and laughter into his stolid existence. Who confounded him with her sassy attitude and liberated his emotions. For five years he’d fought against falling for her, afraid if he let her in he might one day have to leave her.
And he’d been right. No sooner had he risked his heart than he’d been forced to make a terrible choice.
“See, that wasn’t so hard,” she murmured as he broke off the kiss to trail his lips down her neck to the madly beating pulse in her throat.
