Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It (18 page)

With a sense of sickening clarity, she realized it was. Why had she madethat dessert, of all desserts? She could have made something, anything, else. She would have liked to lie and say she didn't remember, but she no longer took even minimal liberties with her sense of honor.

"Yes."

His smile was knowing, his expression smug.

She managed not to grit her teeth with an effort of will. Striving for an air of cool she did not feel, she removed her lightweight denim jacket and laid it casually over the back of a white leather overstuffed chair. She'd gone for relaxed informality in her attire and wore a pair of well-worn jeans and a pinkHenley shirt tucked in. She figured she couldn't have gotten any less sexually suggestive in her attire.

Turning around to face Marcus, she had to wonder if he agreed. His eyes burned with latent male hunger as he intently studied her. What had he found to stir such blatant sexual desire in her androgynous clothing? For the space of an entire minute, she could not move or break her gaze away from his.

Then he spoke. "Ronnie."

Just that one word, but so full of desire that she leaned against the back of the sofa for support.

"Dinner, Marcus. You promised." She couldn't help the breathless sound of her voice, but she didn't let that bother her.

She thought she was doing pretty good remaining upright and capable of any speech at all under such intense male scrutiny.

He closed his eyes and took a deep shuddering breath before exhaling just as slowly. "Dinner. Right."

Opening his eyes again, he turned toward a hallway that must have led to the kitchen. "The grill's warmed up and it won't take any time at all to cook the steaks."

"Great." She exhaled a sigh of intense relief at his apparent willingness to stick to their bargain, because she didn't think she had the strength to do so on her own. "I'll fix the salad."

He led her into a bright, well-appointed kitchen about twice the size of her own. She sighed. She'd give a lot to have a kitchen this big to experiment with her baking in, but she'd gone for other considerations when renting her current apartment. Things like price and the number of bedrooms.

Jenny deserved space that she could call her own after spending so many months in the invasive atmosphere of hospitals. Even though it had meant renting an older apartment with smaller, shared living areas, Veronica had readily signed a lease on the three-bedroom unit in the mostly residential neighborhood.

Marcus pulled a glass bowl with plastic wrap over the top from the fridge. 'The salad's done."

Looking at the table in the adjoining dining alcove, Veronica noticed that the table had already been set as well. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Keep me company while I grill the meat." He opened the sliding door to a small balcony and stepped out.

She followed, wishing she'd left her coat on. The brisk spring air made her shiver, even through the thick cotton of her shirt, and she was made uncomfortably aware of the sheer fabric of her bra. She stepped closer to the barbecue for warmth, hoping her tightening nipples would not be too noticeable.

She crossed her arms over her chest protectively. "It's chilly out here."

He turned his deep blue gaze on her and smiled. "I can keep you warm, honey. You just have to say the word."

She stepped back hastily from the barbecue and him. "I'll get my jacket."

His laughter trailed after her as she fled into the house. She thought she heard him call her a coward but wasn't sure and she wasn't about to go back right that minute and ask. Stopping to don her jacket in the ultramodern living room, she tried to get hold of her seesawing emotions. One minute she felt absolutely certain that the last place she would ever find herself would be in Marcus's bed and the next she wanted to grab him by the hand and drag him there.

Coming back out onto the balcony a minute later, she found her sexual nemesis lounging casually against the half wall. Blue sky and water in the distance made an impressive, but nerve-racking backdrop for his intimidating height.

Her stomach lurched and her heart sped up. She wanted to grab him by the front of his brightly colored shirt and yank him away from the wall.

"Marcus, get away from there. What if the wall doesn't hold?"

His eyes widened with amusement. "I'm sure the building was put together with the prospect of inhabitants leaning against the railing a time or two."

Her hands curled into fists at her sides. Feeling really foolish, she averted her gaze from him. "Yes, of course."

She knew he was right. Her unreasonable fear of heights had always embarrassed her; she didn't understand why she had this fear. When her parents were alive, her dad, who walked exposed steel girders ten stories high, would tease her about it. As she'd gotten older, she'd learned to control her reaction for the most part.

But she still overreacted to the sight of a loved one anywhere near a cliff edge, or a glassed-in wall on an elevator. She'd had to grit her teeth and pray her way through every jump her sister took off the high dive when Jenny had been involved in swimming competition before her disease had put an end to all sports activities.

Marcus pushed away from the balcony wall and came toward her, stopping less than a foot away.

Reaching out, he tugged her face toward him with a blunt finger angled against her chin. "You're frightened of water. You're nervous about heights. You're terrified of me. Is there anything you aren't afraid of?"

She opened her mouth to speak, but one look into his mesmerizing blue eyes and she couldn't remember the question. "Wh-what?"

He smiled, his eyes going the color of theCaribbean Sea just before sunset. "Never mind. It's not important."

He started lowering his head. His lips were centimeters from her own when his earlier words came back to her.

In a desperate attempt to head off his kiss, she blurted, "I'm not afraid of water and I'm not terrified of you."

She was terrified of what he made her feel, but she wasn't about to admit that salient fact.

He stopped his descent but didn't pull back. "You would never go swimming with me."

"I didn't want you to see me in a swimsuit."

He laughed incredulously, the warm breath from his mouth fanning her lips. "I saw you in a lot less."

And she'd seen him the same way. Images of Marcus wearing nothing but his sexy smile took her breath right out of her chest. "That was after you asked me to go swimming."

He seemed to take that in. "I see. So, is there any chance I could convince you to share the pool on the basement level with me in the near future?"

Too tempted for comfort, she blurted out, "No!"

"Why?" His husky voice warmed her nerve endings just like a caress.

"I don't want to seeyou in a suit," she admitted rawly. She didn't think she could handle it.

"You said you weren't afraid of me."

"I'm not, but I'm also not stupid."

"So you admit the sight of my nearly naked body would be a major turn-on for you." His eyes challenged her while his scent and warmth tantalized her.

She refused to answer and remained stubbornly-mute. He darn well knew what the sight of his body did to her. She'd heard that women were not visual creatures, that the sight of a naked man was not supposed to be all that enticing, that what went on in their heads and hearts was far more important.

Well, all she knew was that the sight of Marcus without his shirt on had always sparked unbelievably hot fantasies, and the less he wore, the hotter those fantasies got.

She'd once admitted as much to him, expecting him to laugh. Instead he'd told her that she was the most incredibly special lover he'd ever had. Even memories of that sentiment brought heated moisture to the back of her eyes.

He gently pulled her glasses off her face, making her feel doubly vulnerable to his gaze. Stepping back, he laid them on the table by the grill and then returned to invade her personal space. Space that crackled with her need for him.

"You're going to see me in a whole lot less," he promised before letting his mouth finish its initial descent and lock onto hers.

And the world spun away as her entire universe shrank to encompass the taste of his lips and the feel of his body so close to hers. How had she ever thought she could refuse this? She needed Marcus like she needed the air she breathed, and for the past eighteen months, she had lived as if starved for life-giving oxygen. If she hadn't had Jenny and Aaron relying on her, she wouldn't have made it.

Monday night in his car had been the first time in over a year that she had felt anything resembling whole.

How could she withstand the temptation to feel alive and complete again after living the life of a ghost for so many months?

She parted her lips without thought and he took immediate advantage of her willingness to deepen the kiss. He explored her mouth with erotic savagery, the hunger so blatant in his gaze earlier now transmitted to his devastatingly talented mouth. She melted under the onslaught, allowing her body to press against his. Feeling the hard press of his masculinity against her stomach, she marveled at the rapidity and obvious firmness of his erection.

Trailing her fingers around his back, she slipped her hands under his shirt and explored the heated satin of his skin with starved intensity. His muscles bulged in rigidity as he shuddered under her exploration. She slid her questing fingers lower until she reached the waistband of his jeans. Without stopping to think, she continued until she had worked her hands under the denim. He wasn't wearing his usual snug knit boxers. She smiled a secret smile as she cupped the muscular curves of his butt and he groaned low in his throat.

She didn't know where this boldness had come from. She'd lived the life of a single parent uninterested in sex for almost two years.

She had ignored every male invitation and come-on, not that there had been that many. But the ones that had come had all been treated with the same level of cool dismissal. She just wasn't interested in making another mistake, she'd told herself. And now she had to face the truth.

She'd been waiting for Marcus.

Her body's response to him was too intense, too instantaneous for her to dismiss that truth. She had wanted him with shattering intensity eighteen months ago and she wanted him now. She pulled Marcus's body closer to hers and he spread his legs to encompass her. She lowered one hand until the tip of her fingers could reach the beginning of the soft flesh of his scrotum.

Pressing gently in a move she'd read about in a woman's magazine regarding the male "G" spot, during one of her sojourns in the hospital waiting area, she felt his entire body go rigid, and then he moaned in the most amazingly primitive way. She would have smiled at the success of her foray, but her lips were too busy melding with Marcus's.

The kiss, which had already been incendiary, went to molten lava in the space of a second. His lips ate at hers while his tongue explored the interior of her mouth with devastating efficiency.

Pulling back from the kiss for only a moment, he mumbled something irritably about her height. Then he locked one hand in her hair and his other forearm under her bottom and lifted her until their mouths could cling without him having to bend very much while aligning her intimately with him.

She was forced to release her grip on his backside and abandon her exploration of the newly discovered erotic zone.

Unwilling to give up contact with his skin, she dug her fingers possessively into the hair-roughened hard plains of his chest. Desperately needing more and not willing to remove her mouth from his to ask for it, she pressed the juncture of her thighs against his hardness and squirmed for better contact. Moaning raggedly, he took two steps forward and she felt the cool glass of the sliding doors against her back.

It seemed the most natural thing in the world to spread her legs and then lift them until she had locked her ankles behind his buttocks. Oh, Heavens, it felt good. Better than good. It felt mind-blowing.

He thrust his hips against her as if he were inside her and she experienced the most sensually frustrating pleasure imaginable. The two layers of denim felt like instruments of torture that prevented the kind of intimacy she desperately craved, skin to skin.

She wanted him inside her.

Breaking her mouth away from his, she gulped in necessary oxygen. "Please, Marcus."