In the Garden Trilogy (31 page)

“Don’t mind hearing you talk.”

“Well, I’m done now, so what’s the next stop on the tour?”

“Guess this would be. I’m sort of using this as an office.” He gestured to a door. “And I don’t think you want to look in there.”

“I can take it.”

“I’m not sure I can.” He tugged her away, moved on to another door. “You’ll get all steamed up about filing systems and in and out boxes or whatever, and it’ll screw up the rhythm. No point in using the grounds as foreplay if I’m going to break the mood by showing you something that’ll insult your sensibilities.”

“The grounds are foreplay?”

He just smiled and drew her through a door.

It was his bedroom and, like the kitchen, had been finished in a style that mirrored him. Simple, spacious, and male, with the outdoors blending with the in. The deck she’d seen was outside atrium doors, and beyond it the spring green of trees dominated the view. The walls were a dull, muted yellow, set off by warm wood tones in trim, in floor, in the pitched angles of the ceiling, where a trio of skylights let in the evening glow.

His bed was wide. A man of his size would want room there, she concluded. For sleeping, and for sex. Black iron head- and footboards and a chocolate-brown spread.

There were framed pencil drawings on the walls, gardens in black and white. And when she moved closer, she saw the scrawled signature at the lower corner. “You did these? They’re wonderful.”

“I like to get a visual of projects, and sometimes I sketch them up. Sometimes the sketches aren’t half bad.”

“These are a lot better than half bad, and you know it.” She couldn’t imagine those big, hard hands drawing anything so elegant, so lovely and fresh. “You’re a constant surprise to me, Logan. A study of contrasts. I was thinking about contrasts on the way over here tonight, about how things aren’t lined up the way I thought they would be. Should be.”

She turned back to him, gestured toward his sketches. “These are another blue dahlia.”

“Sorry—not following you. Like the one in your dream?”

“Dreams. I’ve had two now, and neither was entirely comfortable. In fact, they’re getting downright scary. But the thing is the dahlia, it’s so bold and beautiful, so unexpected. But it’s not what I planned. Not what I imagined. Neither is this.”

“Planned, imagined, or not, I wanted you here.”

She took another sip of wine. “And here I am.” She breathed slow in and out. “Maybe we should talk about ... what we expect and how we’ll—”

He moved in, pulled her against him. “Why don’t we plant another blue dahlia and just see what happens.”

Or we could try that, she thought when his mouth was on hers. The low tickle in her belly spread, and the needy part of her whispered, Thank God, inside her head.

She rose on her toes, all the way up, like a dancer on point, to meet him. And angling her body more truly to his, let him take the glass out of her hand.

Then his hands were in her hair, fingers streaming through it, clutching at it, and her arms were locked around him.

“I feel dizzy,” she whispered. “Something about you makes me dizzy.”

His blood fired, blasting a bubbling charge of lust straight to his belly. “Then you should get off your feet.” In one quick move he scooped her up in his arms. She was, he thought, the sort of woman a man wanted to scoop up. Feminine and slight and curvy and soft. Holding her made him feel impossibly strong, uncommonly tender.

“I want to touch you everywhere. Then start right back at the beginning and touch you everywhere again.” When he carried her to the bed, he felt sexy little tremors run through her. “Even when you annoy me, I want my hands on you.”

“You must want them on me all the time, then.”

“Truer words. Your hair drives me half crazy.” He buried his face in it as he lowered the two of them to the bed.

“Me too.” Her skin sprang to life with a thousand nerves as his lips wandered down to her throat. “But probably for different reasons.”

He bit that sensitive skin, lightly, like a man helping himself to a sample. And the sensation rippled through her in one long, sweet stream. “We’re grown-ups,” she began.

“Thank God.”

A shaky laugh escaped. “What I mean is we ...” His teeth explored the flesh just above her collarbone in that same testing nibble, and had a lovely fog settling over her brain. “Never mind.”

He touched, just as he’d told her he wanted to. A long, smooth stroke from her shoulders down to her fingertips. A lazy pass over her hips, her thigh, as if he were sampling her shape as he’d sampled her flavor.

Then his mouth was on hers again, hot and greedy. Those nerve endings exploded, electric jolts as his hands, his lips ran over her as if he were starved now for each separate taste. Hard hands, rough at the palms, rushed over her with both skill and desperation.

Just as she’d imagined. Just as she’d wanted.

Desires she’d ruthlessly buried broke the surface and screamed into life. Riding on the thrill, she dragged at his shirt until her hands found the hot, bare skin and dug in.

Man and muscle.

He found her breast, had her arching in delicious pleasure as his teeth nipped over shirt and bra to tantalize the flesh beneath, to stir the blood beneath into feverish, pulsing life. Everything inside her went full, and ripe, and ready.

As senses awakened, slashing one against the other in an edgy tangle of needs, she gave herself over to them, to him. And she yearned for him, for that promise of release, in a way she hadn’t yearned for in so long. She wanted, craved, the heat that washed through her as the possessive stroke of those labor-scarred hands, the demanding crush of those insatiable lips, electrified her body.

She wanted, craved, all these quivering aches, these madly churning needs and the freedom to meet them.

She rose with him, body to body, moved with him, flesh to flesh. And drove him toward delirium with that creamy skin, those lovely curves. In the softening light, she looked beyond exquisite lying against the dark spread—that bright hair tumbled, those summer-blue eyes clouded with pleasure.

Passion radiated from her, meeting and matching his own. And so he wanted to give her more, and take more, and simply drown himself in what they brought to each other. The scent of her filled him like breath.

He murmured her name, savoring and exploiting as they explored each other. And there was more, he discovered, more than he’d expected.

Her heart lurched as those rugged hands guided her up, over, through the steep rise of desire. The crest rolled through her, a long, endless swell of sultry heat. She arched up again, crying out as she clamped her arms around him, pulses galloping.

Her mouth took his in a kind of ravenous madness, even as her mind screamed—Again!

He held on, held strong while she rode the peak, and the thrill her response brought him made him tremble. He ached, heart, mind, loins, ached to the point of pain.

And when he could bear it no longer, he drove into her.

She cried out once more, a sound of both shock and triumph. And she was already moving with him, a quick piston of hips, as her hands came up to frame his face.

She watched him, those blue eyes swimming, those lush lips trembling with each breath as they rose and fell together.

In the whole of his life, he’d never seen such beauty bloom.

When those eyes went blind, when they closed on a sobbing moan, he let himself go.

 

HE WAS HEAVY. VERY HEAVY. STELLA LAY STILL beneath Logan and pondered the wonder of being pinned, helplessly, under a man. She felt loose and sleepy and utterly relaxed. She imagined there was probably a nice pink light beaming quietly out of her fingers and toes.

His heart was thundering still. What woman wouldn’t feel smug and satisfied knowing she’d caused a big, strong man to lose his breath?

Cat-content, she stroked her hands over his back.

He grunted, and rolled off of her.

She felt immediately exposed and self-conscious. Reaching out, she started to give the spread a little tug, to cover herself at least partially. Then he did something that froze her in place, and had her heart teetering.

He took her hand and kissed her fingers.

He said nothing, nothing at all, and she stayed very still while she tried to swallow her heart back into place.

“Guess I’d better feed you now,” he said at length.

“Ah, I should call and make sure the boys are all right.”

“Go ahead.” He sat up, patting her naked thigh before he rolled out of bed and reached for his jeans. “I’ll go get things started in the kitchen.”

He didn’t bother with his shirt, but started out. Then he stopped, turned and looked at her.

“What?” She lifted an arm, casually, she hoped, over her breasts.

“I just like the way you look there. All mussed and flushed. Makes me want to muss and flush you some more, first chance I get.”

“Oh.” She tried to formulate a response, but he was already sauntering off. And whistling.

THE MAN COULD COOK. WITH LITTLE HELP FROM Stella, Logan put together a meal of delicately grilled tuna, herbed-up brown rice, and chunks of sautéed peppers and mushrooms. He was the sort of cook who dashed and dumped ingredients in by eye, or impulse, and seemed to enjoy it.

The results were marvelous.

She was an adequate cook, a competent one. She measured everything and considered cooking just one of her daily chores.

It was probably a good analogy for who they were, she decided. And another reason why it made little sense for her to be eating in his kitchen or being naked in his bed.

The sex had been ... incredible. No point in being less than honest about it. And after good, healthy sex she should’ve been feeling relaxed and loose and comfortable. Instead she felt tense and tight and awkward.

It had been so intense, then he’d just rolled out of bed and started dinner. They might just as easily have finished a rousing match of tennis.

Except he’d kissed her fingers, and that sweet, affectionate gesture had arrowed straight to her heart.

Her problem, her problem, she reminded herself. Over-analyzing, over-compensating, over-something. But if she didn’t analyze something how did she know what it was?

“Dinner okay?”

She broke out of her internal debate to see him watching her steadily, with those strong jungle-cat eyes. “It’s terrific.”

“You’re not eating much.”

Deliberately she forked off more tuna. “I’ve never understood people who cook like you, like they do on some of the cooking shows. Tossing things together, shaking a little of this in, pinches of that. How do you know it’s right?”

If that was really what she’d been thinking about with her mouth in that sexy sulk, he’d go outside and eat a shovelful of mulch. “I don’t know. It usually is, or different enough to be right some other way.”

Maybe he couldn’t get inside her head, but he had to figure whatever was in there had to do with sex, or the ramifications of having it. But they’d play it her way for the moment. “If I’m going to cook, and since I don’t want to spend every night in a restaurant, I’m going to cook, I want to enjoy it. If I regimented it, it’d start to piss me off.”

“If I don’t regiment it to some extent, I get nervous. Is it going to be too bland, or overly spiced? Overcooked, underdone? I’d be a wreck by the time I had a meal on the table.” Worry flickered over her face. “I don’t belong here, do I?”

“Define here.”

“Here, here.” She gestured wide with both arms. “With you, eating this really lovely and inventive meal, in your beautifully designed kitchen in your strangely charming and neglected house after relieving some sort of sexual insanity upstairs in your I’m-a-man-and-I-know-it bedroom.”

He sat back and decided to clear the buzz from his head with a long drink of wine. He’d figured her right, he decided, but he just never seemed to figure her enough. “I’ve never heard that definition of here before. Must come from up north.”

“You know what I mean,” she fired back. “This isn’t ... It isn’t—”

“Efficient? Tidy? Organized?”

“Don’t take that placating tone with me.”

“That wasn’t my placating tone, it was my exasperated tone. What’s your problem, Red?”

“You
confuse
me.”

“Oh.” He shrugged a shoulder. “If that’s all.” And went back to his meal.

“Do you think that’s funny?”

“No, but I think I’m hungry, and that I can’t do a hell of a lot about the fact that you’re confused. Could be I don’t mind all that much confusing you, anyway, since otherwise you’d start lining things up in alphabetical order.”

Those bluebell eyes went to slits. “A, you’re arrogant and annoying. B, you’re bossy and bullheaded. C—”

“C, you’re contrary and constricting, but that doesn’t bother me the way it once did. I think we’ve got something interesting between us. Neither one of us was looking for it, but I can roll with that. You pick it apart. Hell if I know why I’m starting to like that about you.”