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“Fine,” she said, sounding so much like Janey, he wanted to laugh again. He didn’t. When you won, you didn’t gloat, so he just poured the wine and put the marshmallows, graham biscuits, and chocolate on a plate. The marshmallows were pretty bloody awful, and the biscuits were odd, more like weirdly sweet wallboard than any edible product, but the Swiss chocolate she kept on hand wasn’t bad, and the whole thing together managed to be surprisingly tasty, if you blanked any health concerns out of your mind.
If you had dark-chocolate digestives, now, and some good chocolate, too, shaved down with a knife so it would melt, and you put the marshmallows betweenthose …that’d be good. Especially with proper marshmallows. An indulgence, but he hadn’t had nearly enough indulgence lately. He wondered if Quinn had ever had any. He’d like to show her how.
Maybe he’d order some things online, and they could do a blind taste test. That would be fun. Especially the “blind” part.
Getting ahead of yourself, mate.Except that, for once, it didn’t feel like it. The way she’d looked at him when he’d taken his shirt off? It definitely hadn’t felt like it then.
Was she sitting down when he got back? Of course not. She was going around closing windows and saying, “The smell seems to be pretty much gone. Probably because Bacon is up in the attic. How bad was it when you put Troy to bed?”
He went out to close the windows in the sun porch and lock the doors. “Hard to say, because I think my sense of smell is permanently distorted. Troy still had Bacon on the bed with him, though. Said that if he didn’t, Bacon would be sad. True love, I guess.”
“A boy and his dog,” she agreed. “Hang on. I’m going to do my bedroom and bathroom. Otherwise, it’s going to be freezing in there by the time I go to bed. Maybe I should put on perfume, too. What do you think? It might compete, at least.”
He said, “Yeah, you should do that. You’ve got scent? That’s a nice thought.”
“I’m notcompletelydevoid of feminine qualities,” she said. “Just mostly. I have three kinds. Of course, one of them I got when I was about sixteen. I’ll put on the soft one, how’s that? It’s my favorite.”
“The soft one sounds good to me,” he managed to say. She headed out to the bedroom, and he watched her go, then put another log on the fire, turned down the dimmer switch on the lights, and poured the wine into oversized glasses with stems so fragile, you had to take care to pick them up gently enough, especially if your hands were big and you weren’t used to handling anything that delicate anymore. He watched the crimson stuff pour out, rich and dark as blood, and thought,Take care with her. Move slow.Which, fortunately, was exactly how he wanted to do it. Slow, and sweet, and strong. Burning her down, and going along for the ride.
The low light was good. And the couch. And the fire.
Quinn was going to be even better.
26
NOT BURNING IT DOWN
Quinn stood in front of the mirror hung on her closet door and sprayed perfume on her wrists, then the back of her neck and over her hair. The cozy fragrance, like almond cookies on a summer day with the scent of flowers perfuming the air, made her feel a little like sitting over a huge latte in her sweats after a hard workout and a hot shower, her muscles blissfully tired and her mind so relaxed. Of course, the back of your neck might be a weird spot to spray perfume, but she’d read that it tasted terrible if you got it in your mouth, so you shouldn’t spray it on the sides of your neck or your cleavage or …
Wait. Was she actually planning on Beckett kissing her neck? And her non-cleavage? That hadn’t been anything close to the plan, but if she had another glass of that rich, oaky Cabernet, after, yes, a hard workout at the gym after work—she’d discovered it was better not to spend too much evening time around Beckett, the last hour being one painfully obvious example—too much laughter, a long, hot shower, and pizza with pesto sauce, and was sitting by the fire with him, wearingperfume …
He smelled amazing, she’d realized all over again this week. Comforting, and just … delicious. Wednesday night, for example, when she’d been pounding chicken breasts and he’d been chopping vegetables. His hair had still been damp from his shower, because she’d been right that it was almost the first thing he did after coming through the door with the kids. He’d been wearing a soft gray T-shirt and old button-fly jeans, the kind of clothes that cupped every part of a strong man’s anatomy and showed you, if your gaze strayed anywhere close, everything he had to offerbesideskiller arms. His feethadbeen bare, cold floor or not, so she’d been right about that. He didn’t seem to feel the cold as much as she did, which was odd, wasn’t it, when she was the one from Montana?
She’d been in yoga pants and a Henley herself, but she was pretty sure she didn’t look anywhere near as good in those clothes as he did in his. He’d smelled like clean cotton and possibly basil, with a deeper, richer note underneath that she’d smelled from him before, which reminded her of … of something soft and just a little sweet, like the base notes of her perfume. Melted dark chocolate? Figs? A hardwood forest in summer, with the sun baking the bark, under the trees where the soil was deep and loamy? Whatever it was, that smell had to be his skin, because she’d smelled it strongest of all that night after they’d jumped on the trampoline, which was probably why she’d kissed him back.
That evening, even though he’d been zesting lemon and quartering artichoke hearts at her direction and not looking one bit carried away by passionate longing, she’d had to stop herself from burying her nose in his shirt and inhaling, and when he’d caught her looking, she’d turned away fast.
The basil’s got to be his shampoo,she tried to tell herself, but unfortunately, basil was one of her favorite smells in the world, and his sweet-deep scent actually made her knees go a little weak.
It was that thing—whatever you called it—that was all. Some term with initials that was about histocompatibility, where your body automatically selected by scent for the most dissimilar possible genetics from your own in order to produce the strongest offspring. And made you want to have sex with that person.
Even if it were true, which was debated in scientific circles, yourbodydid that,not your better judgment. The more you liked how a man naturally smelled, the more sexually attracted you were, but since that wasn’t about the guy’s sterling character or his intelligence or even his looks, it was pretty useless and even counterproductive. Especially since she and Beckett weren’t producing any offspring, strong or otherwise.
In fact, it was probably why womendidmake such bonehead choices about men. She knew better, so she’d just ignore that bury-my-face-in-his-neck thing. She could do that. She’d done it so far, hadn’t she?
Come to think of it, that was probably why he’d kissedherthat night.She’d never noticed that she smelled of anything in particular—other than chlorine, in her youth—but if she had histocompatibility—wait, was it histo-incompatibility? with Beckett, he’d have it with her, too. Which would explain why, after kissing nobody for two years, he’d chosen her to restart his sexual career.
What if he still smelled like that, though, now that Bacon’s rotting-corpse stench wasn’t hanging in the air, and he was sitting close to her in front of the fire in his soft, snug, button-front jeans, with his biceps showing under his T-shirt sleeves, looking at her out of those deep-blue eyes, with all his humor and strength and that hint of sadness behind them, andnotsmiling? If she had another glass of wine, she might kisshisneck.
She was not putting on music. Or dimming the lights. No way.
It would be such a bad idea. What if Janey came downstairs and found them? Nothing was resolved there. And even worse—what if she actuallysleptwith him, it was terrible despite the I-want-your-scent thing, and he had to live with her afterwards? It wasn’t like anybody had ever called her an intoxicating siren or accused her of sending them into a frenzy of lust, probably because she’d never faked anything she didn’t feel, and she felt self-conscious making noise during sex.
Shelikedsex—well, if the guy cared enough to make it any good—but she was probably a little too assertive about the exact way she liked it. In other words, about directing the action. She also didn’t moan or anything, and apparently, that put men off. But if she were more passive—were you just supposed toliethere?—and made the right noises—the kind you heard in movies, she guessed— just to make him feel better, wouldn’t that take her out of the moment? How was she supposed to have an orgasm if she didn’tfocus?How did other women do it, those actual intoxicating sirens who captivated a man with their purring sexuality? Were they just instantly orgasmic, or something? Could they hop right out of their own heads and into the moment without any need of focus or, let’s face it, a well-placed fantasy? If the guy hated you asking him to stop pumping away like he was getting water from a cistern and use his hand for a while, how was he going to feel about you suggesting that fantasy? When even moving into another position could put him out, because it was either too female-dominant for him or too submissive for her to feel comfortable assuming it, or worried that he’d make the wrong assumptions because of it, so she just … didn’t?
The truth was, she had no idea, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask your friends.
She tried not to remember what Craig had said on that last night, but there it was, crowding into her brain like an unruly, uninvited guest. She could discipline her body, and she could even discipline her mind—well, mostly. Not at this moment, perhaps. She’d never quite been able to discipline her emotions, though, and here they were again, including that worst one.
