“It’s not what you think,” he said.
“Maybe it’s not what you think. Ever thought of that?” Jacinta said.
She gave him a killer smile and exited. Liam shut the door and walked slowly to the dining room. It was empty. He frowned, then checked the kitchen, the living room and finally the games room.
Zoe was leaning against the edge of the pool table, rolling a billiard ball back and forth between her hands. She glanced at him when he came in. They stared at each other in silence for a long beat.
“I’m sorry for being such a pain in the butt,” she said finally. She was frowning. He bet she hadn’t had a lot of practice apologizing.
“Consider it forgotten.”
“Thank you for getting your friend to look at my stuff.”
He wondered how long it would be before Zoe referred to her work as art. A while, he suspected.
“I rang a friend. It’s no big deal.”
She shook her head. “It is, and we both know it.”
Tension crackled in the air as they stared at each other again.
“I think I’d better go,” she said.
He didn’t try to stop her as she left the room. He’d done what he wanted to do—given her a head start. The small break she needed to get where she deserved to be. The rest was up to her and Jacinta and fate. It was time for him to step back and let Zoe go.
He followed her as she strode through his house to the front door. Her hair swung against her back, dark and silky. Her hips swayed from side to side. He breathed in her scent every step of the way.
She stopped on the threshold.
“I meant what I said. I’m sorry for being such a pain in the ass. Not that I like being treated like an idiot kid, but I understand how you might have felt I’d given you some justification to sneak around behind my back.”
He slid his hands into his jeans pockets.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
She nodded once and stepped out into the night. He forced himself to shut the door, all his reasons for keeping his distance circling in his head.
He had nothing to offer her. She’d wind up hurt. She deserved more.
Need beat a fierce counter-tattoo in his belly. He’d wanted her from the moment he set eyes on her in the Fords’ kitchen all those years ago, and he’d never stopped wanting her. Might as well ask the tide to stop turning or the sun from rising. Zoe Ford was his own personal siren, the one woman who had always been able to burrow beneath his skin.
But he’d let her go tonight. And he’d keep letting her go. If it killed him.
He walked toward the living room. His steps slowed as he registered something: he hadn’t heard Zoe’s car start up.
He turned toward the front door. Two strides and he had it open. Sure enough, her car still sat in his driveway. He could see her behind the wheel, could see her hands on the steering wheel.
She hadn’t gone home.
She didn’t want to go.
He started toward the car.
9
WHAT ARE YOU DOING? she asked herself for the hundredth time as Liam circled the car to the driver’s door. She’d left his house because she’d been dangerously close to giving in to the need to touch him again. She’d been sensible, so bloody sensible.
And now she’d ruined it by sitting out here in his driveway, waiting for him to do precisely what he was doing. Waiting for him to come for her.
“You idiot,” she told herself as he reached for the handle.
Cool night air rushed in as the door opened. She stared at Liam. His face was hidden in shadow, his eyes unreadable.
What did she want to see there, anyway? Need? Desire? Some sign that he felt as compelled to be with her as she was to be with him?
I don’t know what I want.
What a lie. She knew what she wanted. She was simply too smart, too cynical to imagine it was hers for the taking.
Liam sank into a crouch so that his eyes were on a level with hers. The weak glow of the interior light washed across his face.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
Yes. I don’t want to go home. I want to touch you and taste you. I want to imagine for just a little while longer that this might happen between us.
“No.”
Liam reached out and slid her keys from the ignition. He stood, the keys dangling from one finger.
“Hey,” she said, much too late.
“You want ’em? Come and get ’em,” he said. Then he walked toward the house.
She took a deep breath. She got out of the car. She followed him into the house. He was just disappearing around the turn in the staircase when she entered the living room.
She followed, her heart thumping loudly in her ears. Her thoughts kept time with her heartbeat: What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing?
He was pulling his T-shirt over his head when she pushed open his bedroom door. The smooth muscles of his chest and arms flexed as he tossed the T-shirt into a corner. She felt a little dizzy as his hands slid to the waistband of his jeans. His erection jutted large and proud as he pulled his jeans down.
She reached for the hem of her tank top and pulled it over her head. Seconds later she kicked her own jeans to one side. Her panties were next, then her bra. Liam watched her, his gaze smoky.
She walked across the space that separated them and didn’t stop until she was pressed against his body, her breasts flattened against his hard chest, his cock pressing into her belly.
She opened her mouth to tell him what a big mistake this was, but he kissed her. His hands smoothed down the sides of her body and onto her backside. She murmured restlessly as his fingers slid low over her cheeks, dipping between her thighs to where she was wet for him.
“I can’t get you out of my head,” Liam said as he began to kiss his way across the arch of her eyebrow. “I want you all the time, Zoe.”
She shivered as a single finger slid inside her. Her muscles clenched around his invasion, wanting so much more.
“I’m sorry about yesterday. I shouldn’t have pushed. And I shouldn’t have gotten angry,” he said.
She didn’t want to talk about yesterday. She didn’t want to think or talk at all. She pushed him backward until he was on his back on the bed. Then she straddled him and reached for his cock.
Only the fullness of him inside her would satisfy the ache she felt. She slid onto him with one smooth tilt of her hips. He let his breath out in a rush. She began to ride, lifting her hips to the point where he almost slipped free before driving herself down on him, taking him as deep as he could go.
One of his hands began to tease her breasts, plucking her nipples, rolling them, squeezing them.
His other hand slid between their bodies to the hot, wet place where they were joined. She let out a moan of encouragement as his thumb found her clit, gliding over and over it as his cock stroked her from the inside.
“Come for me, baby,” he said, his voice very low and deep. “Come for me, Zoe.”
Her back arched. Desire tightened inside her. She closed her eyes as the tension inside her became almost unbearable.
Then she was awash with pleasure, her body rippling with it, milking him, her muscles tightening around him. She felt him thrust up into her once, twice, three more times, then she felt the hot rush as he came.
He wrapped his arms around her and drew her down to lie across his chest. He was still inside her, still a part of her. A warmth that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the way he caressed the nape of her neck and cradled her so gently crept through her.
Her cynical self curled its lip.
You’re riding for a fall, it shouted in the back of her mind.
She knew she should listen. She’d been hurt so many times before. But this was Liam. He’d always been her weak spot.
They made love twice more before she gathered her clothes and dressed in the dark. She’d waited until Liam’s breathing was deep and steady before rolling from the bed, but she could feel him watching her as she tugged on her jeans.
Neither of them said a word as she collected her car keys from the bedside table. What was there to say, after all? They both knew that it had been a mistake.
They made the same mistake the next night, after dinner with Jacinta at the exclusive Vue du Monde restaurant in the heart of the city. Zoe felt acutely self-conscious in her one decent dress—black, discreet, conservative—and good-girl high heels. Jacinta and Frederick were studies in slick minimalism—perfect hair, perfect business suits, perfect everything. Only Liam looked like himself in a pair of dark denim jeans and a black silk knit T-shirt. His only concession to the venue was a jacket in fine charcoal suede. Somehow, without asking, Zoe knew that Jacinta had bought it for him. Which meant that they were lovers—or had been, at some time in the past.
She told herself she didn’t care, that what he did when he wasn’t with her wasn’t her business, just as what she did when he wasn’t around wasn’t his. But the moment they were alone in his car on the way back to her apartment, she’d been unable to stop herself from asking what Jacinta meant to him and if the other woman knew Liam was screwing Zoe at the same time that he was doing her.
Liam had pulled over on the side of the road without saying a word and hauled her into his lap.
He didn’t let her go again until she was sweaty and trembling from the hottest, fastest climax she’d ever had. He’d zipped himself up and driven her the rest of the way home, and once again neither of them had mentioned what had happened between them. She wasn’t sure what he was thinking—ignore it and it will go away? Make hay while the sun shines?—but she’d long ago faced the fact that she had no control where he was concerned.
It didn’t matter what she told herself. It was no longer enough to remember his words—I’m not good relationship material—or the lessons life had taught her regarding men and her unsuitability for a long-term relationship. She craved Liam. At work, she listened for the sound of his voice. When she wasn’t with him, her fingers itched to pick up the phone. Every moment her mind wasn’t busy with the mechanics of whatever she happened to be doing she defaulted to thinking about him.
The breadth of his shoulders.
The depth of his voice.
His long, strong fingers.
Might as well admit to herself that she was lost, an absolute goner. As besotted and obsessed with him as she’d ever been when she was a kid.
She’d fallen in love with Liam Masters. Again. Despite all her determination not to. Despite her fear and her certainty that it would only lead to heartbreak.
She faced the ugly, terrifying truth as she watched Liam’s rear car lights fade into the darkness after he’d dropped her at her apartment post dinner and roadside sex.
She’d wanted him to stay. Wanted to invite him upstairs to her apartment and into her bed and her arms and her body. Wanted more of what he’d just given her in the car.
Who was she kidding? She wanted everything.
Nausea churned in her belly as she stripped her dress and stockings and underwear and stepped into the shower.
She wanted to cook for him in his too-big bachelor kitchen. She wanted to be the one to help him choose furniture for his dining room and his living room and all the other empty or underfurnished rooms in his house. She wanted to paint canvases for him to fill his house with color and life and energy. She wanted the right to walk into his office at Masters Mechanics and slide her arms around him and lift her face for his kiss, out in the open, for everyone to see.
She wanted to be his. And she wanted him to be hers.
She laughed into the shower spray, but it wasn’t funny. It was sad. And it was scary.
As she toweled herself dry and got into bed, she acknowledged that she wasn’t going to walk away from him. She’d tried to resist him and it hadn’t worked. She’d tried to contain their relationship to the merely physical, but that hadn’t flown, either.
Staring at the ceiling, her fingers once again tracing her scar over and over, Zoe understood that she was weak enough and needy enough and hopeful, God help her, enough to take whatever she could get of Liam’s life, mind and body. He liked her. He’d said it to her face, hadn’t he? He obviously cared for her—he’d given her a job, hooked her up with Jacinta. And he still seemed to desire her, if tonight’s display in the car was anything to go by.
It was enough. It would have to be. She would hang on to it and ride this thing out until the messy end. Then she’d get up and dust herself off again, as she had so many times before.
A single tear squeezed out from beneath her tightly closed eyelids. She felt it slide across her cheek and onto her pillow.
She’d tried to be smart, she really had. Somehow she’d wound up being really stupid.
ZOE WAS GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT. If he’d had any doubts about it, dinner with Jacinta and Frederick had well and truly put them to bed. Jacinta had confirmed that Zoe would have a show at her gallery in the first week of August. The pricing she was suggesting for Zoe’s works had made Zoe gasp. If even half her paintings sold, she wouldn’t have to work for a year. And if her work sold that well, the odds were good Jacinta would keep her busy with commissions and other shows. Zoe was set. A new career, a new direction. New faith in herself. A dream to pursue.
There was no earthly reason for him to keep playing guardian angel in her life. His mission to help her to happiness was over. It was time for him to take a step back. Stop sleeping with her.
Stop thinking about her. Every day he woke with new resolve to stand his ground and let her slip away. And every night he found some excuse to get his hands on her.
Monday night it was in the car on the way home from dinner with Jacinta and Frederick.
Tuesday night they both worked late at the workshop and he ordered pizza for dinner. By the time it arrived, he’d had Zoe on his desk, her cries echoing around the empty workshop.
Wednesday night her car wouldn’t start and he drove her home. She’d hesitated as she exited the car, then looked back over her shoulder and asked if he was coming inside.
Thursday night he got all the way home before he realized he was kidding himself. He called her up and asked her to meet him at his favorite Italian restaurant in Lygon Street, Carlton. They ate spaghetti Bolognese and crunchy garlic bread with the house wine. Afterward, he took her on a tour of the city on the back of his chopper, concluding with a circuit of the long, snaking roads that wound through Studley Park in the city’s inner east end. Parked at one of the lookouts that provided spectacular views of the city skyline, he’d kissed and touched her till they were both more than a little bit crazy. Then he’d taken her back to his house and made love to her for hours.