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Was his plan working?
If so, then perhaps it was time to move to the next phase. He’d come too far in his plan to win her heart to turn back now, and clearly it was time to move their so-called research into relationship mode. He’d been a coward to put off approaching the subject with her this long.
Once she’d worked off some of her anxiety and sorted out her thoughts, she’d come in and he would lay it all on the line.
Come clean.
Tell her his true feelings.
Taking a deep breath, he turned to the kitchen. Maybe a nice, hot breakfast would soften her to his proposal.
God, he hoped so.
Sweat poured down Julia’s face and into her eyes. The bitter cold temperatures and wind of the previous week had given way to a gorgeous winter day. The sun was beating down and the ski hat on her head was far too warm for her strenuous exertions. The snow weighed a ton and she could feel painful twinges beginning in her arms and back from her aggressive assault on the wet stuff.
“Why shouldn’t my back and arms hurt? Everything else does,” she muttered as she considered last night’s fantasy for the thousandth time.
When Ross offered to play out her secret sexual dream, she had no idea how much she’d pay for the request. Her jaw ached from the ball-gag and she was so sore below the waist she couldn’t pinpoint where the pain was coming from.
Ross had given her everything she asked for and more and even in her aching state, she couldn’t find it within herself to regret a second of it. Last night had been the best night of her life and she fully expected to relive every minute of it in her fantasies for the next fifty years.
Her anxiety was not so much a result of their actions, but her feelings about those actions. She’d done the most foolish thing imaginable—she’d fallen in love with Ross Phillips.
Totally and completely, head-over-heels in love.
The kind of love that would never, ever die.
“How could I be such an idiot!” she repeated, the words becoming a mantra and the impetus for her forceful shoveling.
Her shovel hit the woodpile hard enough to rattle every tooth in her head. “Dammit.”
Glancing back, she realized she’d cleared quite a wide path from the door. Unable to face the man causing her such angst yet, she turned and started to attack the driveway leading to the road.
For the entirety of her adult life, she’d avoided the overpowering, overwhelming, all-consuming feeling of love. Now in the course of a week, Ross had broken down all her well-constructed defenses and wormed his way into her heart.
“No,” she whispered. Not a week. Ross had been tackling the walls around her heart for nearly a decade and she suspected he’d be most disturbed to learn that little tidbit.
God, if he knew what he’d done, he’d be out here himself clearing a path to freedom as fast as his arms could shovel.
The cold, hard fact was she’d been in love with Ross Phillips since the day she met him and that love had only grown as the years passed. Every novel she’d ever written had been a tribute to him—a coward’s way of expressing her feelings. She was sure he didn’t realize he was the hero in all her stories. He was her knight in shining armor, her sexy, devil-may-care pirate, and her hunky, irresistible lord all rolled into one. He was the leading man in every fantasy she’d had since she turned twenty years old.
Now, she’d made the mother of all mistakes and blurred the lines between fantasy and reality. In her dreams, she was safe from inevitable heartbreak. Allowing him into her bed and her body had been foolishness at its most extreme. By keeping her imaginings private and maintaining a platonic friendship with Ross, she’d managed to hold onto him longer than any other woman in his life.
The last thing Ross wanted from her, or any woman for that matter, was a permanent commitment. He was a confirmed bachelor, set in his ways. If and when he decided to settle down, it would be with a woman much more sophisticated and beautiful than her.
She was the girl next door, the little sister he never had, a pizza buddy, and in just seven days, she’d thrown all that away for a brief roll in the hay.
Well, maybe not brief.
And certainly not a roll.
More like tumbling headfirst off a cliff.
“Hell,” she said aloud as she continued to make her way to the road. She was too stupid to even regret her actions.
How could she ever feel sorry for what could quite possibly be the greatest sex ever in the history of fornication?
She blushed as she recalled the image of Ross bent over her body last night as she strained to take in all of him.
