The Laws of Attraction (12 page)

When the phone rang a few minutes later and the sound of his voice made her heart skip a bit, she was even more disconcerted.

“Where are you?” he demanded.

“At home, which you should know since you called here. Where are you?”

“In the boat about to head your way.”

“Are you crazy? It’s pouring outside.”

“So? Do you think you’re going to melt?”

No, but she would look awful. She had no illusions that soaking-wet hair would do a thing for her. “Maybe the fish need a day off,” she said.

And given the little thrill of excitement she’d felt hearing his voice, maybe she needed a day away from Josh to figure out this unexpected attraction that was developing. She couldn’t spend her life with some unambitious guy who spent his life fishing to no apparent purpose. This was an interlude. It had to be. Anything else was impossible.

“Okay, then,” he said in the easygoing way she found so comforting. “I’ll go back in, dry off and pick you up in ten minutes. We’ll go into Irvington for breakfast. I know a place that has strong coffee and homemade cinnamon rolls.”

Ashley groaned. He’d found her weakness, one she almost never indulged. “Make it fifteen,” she said. “I need to hop into the shower and pull myself together.”

“I’ll give you twenty minutes, then,” he teased. “I can’t possibly take you out if you’re not put together properly.”

By the time they reached the coffee shop in nearby Irvington, the sun was fighting its way through the thick gray clouds and the rain was tapering off.

“Want to eat first or explore the shops?” Josh asked.

She studied him with surprise. “A man who likes to shop? I didn’t know such a creature existed.”

“I couldn’t care less about shopping. I just want to see what sort of things make your eyes light up.”

Her pulse stuttered at the intensity in his gaze. She could not fall for this man, not right here on the streets of a town hundreds of miles from her home.

“We can start with the cinnamon roll,” she said lightly. “After that we’ll see how much more of my personality I’m willing to reveal by shopping with you.”

When they sat down in the surprisingly crowded coffee shop with its spotless decor and air that was filled with the scent of freshly baked dough and cinnamon, Ashley realized that this felt more like an official date than anything they’d done before. She had coffee dates all the time back home, quick, on-the-run encounters that demanded little more than small talk and served up
absolutely no expectations for the way they would end. They gave her the illusion of having a personal life without any of the complications.

Gazing across the table, though, she met Josh’s eyes and knew at once that this one was different. It was going to get complicated, simply because her feelings for him had gotten deeper without her even realizing it.

When she finally glanced at Josh, he was watching her as he idly stirred sugar into his coffee. “What?” she asked.

“You seem different this morning.”

“Different how?”

“More restless than usual.”

“Really? I was thinking earlier about how much I’ve learned to relax, thanks to you.”

He grinned. “You’re definitely better than you were, but you seem edgy today. Did something happen with your family?”

“No, not really.”

“They got off okay?”

She nodded. “Maggie called from the airport and said their flight was right on time.”

“Are they pressuring you to come back to Boston?”

“To be honest, we didn’t get into it that much,” she admitted. “Every time they brought it up, I cut them off and explained that I have to decide what’s right on my own.”

“But I imagine they still expressed an opinion or two,” he said.

“They’re my folks. Of course they want me back home, but they also want me to be happy.”

“And for you that means having a successful career,” he guessed. “Wherever that might be.”

She nodded. “I don’t know anything besides law, so I have to go where I can practice.”

“Lots of people change careers, if it comes to that,” he reminded her.

To her surprise, she said emphatically, “Not me. I want to practice law.”

Josh chuckled. “There you go.”

“What?” she asked blankly.

“I told you the answers would come to you when you least expect it and when you stop worrying everything to death. You sounded very sure of yourself just then.”

Ashley stared at him, then began to grin. “I did, didn’t I?”

“Now all you have to decide is where you want to live.”

“It may not be that simple,” she said, trying to be realistic. “A lot of other firms probably feel the way my old one did. They’ll want me but for all the wrong reasons.”

“You’re obviously an excellent lawyer, if you were able to win an acquittal for a man who turned out to be guilty. You may regret the outcome, but it doesn’t change the fact that you did your job very, very well. That’s bound to be attractive to a lot of firms.”

“That’s my point. I don’t want a job that’s tied to that.”

Josh reached for her hand. “Despite the time we’ve spent together, I can’t claim to know you well,” he said. “But I think I know enough to say that you care passionately about things. You did what you thought was right at the time in that courtroom. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, but you have to let the mistakes go or figure out how to rectify them. You can’t let them destroy you. That would be a waste.”

“I suppose.” She wasn’t quite ready to get her hopes
up that offers would suddenly start rolling in the minute she let it be known that she was available. At one time that would have been true, but not now.

“Of course, I don’t know why I’m trying to encourage you to go back,” Josh said, his expression rueful. “It would still suit me just fine if you decided you wanted to open up a private practice right here.”

Though she would never in a million years consider such a thing seriously, right here, right now, with his hand on hers and his gaze filled with desire, the idea held a certain appeal.

“Maybe we should just be grateful for the time we have,” she said slowly. Yet another answer was coming to her this morning, one that had been in the making since the moment they’d met. She held his gaze. “And maybe we should make better use of it.”

The heat in his eyes increased by several degrees. “Shopping’s out?”

“It is unless it’s the best way you can think of to spend the day.”

“Oh, no. I’ve got all the clutter around my house I need.” He gave her a long, intense look. “Want me to show you?”

She grinned, her heart suddenly light, her pulse humming with anticipation. Whatever complications arose because of this decision, she would find a way to live with them. This was about more than having a fling to forget. It was about reaching for something it was no longer possible to resist, something too special to ignore.

“Not as clever as inviting me to look at your etchings, but yes, Josh. The answer is definitely yes.”

A
s they neared his house, Josh tried frantically to recall just how many of his belongings were strewn all over the cottage. Fortunately, he was fairly tidy by nature. He was pretty sure he’d even washed the bowl he’d used for cereal that morning.

Still, he wanted Ashley’s first impression of his family’s home to be a good one. He’d noticed that the inside of Rose Cottage was immaculate. He imagined that it was much the way it had been before her grandmother’s death. He hadn’t seen one single personal item that was likely to belong to Ashley. Perhaps that was because she viewed her stay as being so temporary that she’d brought very little with her.

From the outside, Idylwild, which had been in his family for several generations, was very much like Rose
Cottage, at least as Rose Cottage had been back when Cornelia Lindsey had been seeing to its upkeep. He’d noticed lately that though the inside had been painted and the gardens finally manicured after years of neglect, there were still quite a few exterior repairs needed. His own family had been much more conscientious about keeping Idylwild in excellent condition. They’d replaced the old wooden clapboards with vinyl siding, added dark green metal shutters in place of the peeling wooden ones. The only holdover had been the quaint Victorian-trim screen door, which they’d refused to exchange for a more practical storm door.

Inside was a hodgepodge of wicker furniture, oak antiques covered with several layers of paint that had changed with the whims of various occupants and modern appliances in the kitchen. The art on the walls reflected the Madison family’s eclectic taste, from ridiculous paintings on driftwood to old watercolors from another era. Oddly enough, it all came together to achieve something cozy and lived-in.

Lately there were a lot more masculine touches, since it had been all but deeded over to him once his parents had moved to Arizona for the drier, warmer air.

Josh stood aside as Ashley entered, and tried to see the small, cluttered living room through her eyes. He had a feeling she preferred cleaner, more modern decor, probably something streamlined and sophisticated.

To his surprise, she immediately smiled and headed straight for a table of old photographs.

“Is there one of you here?” she asked, her curiosity evident.

“Several, more than likely,” he admitted, not sure
how eager he was for her to see him as the bespectacled nerd he’d been years ago. Fortunately the table had a lot of photos, many of them of his cousins, most of whom had been far more athletic and handsome than he’d been at sixteen. Given the dramatic changes he’d made physically, he suspected he’d be hard for her to spot.

“Come over here and show me,” she said after several minutes of studying and discarding picture after picture.

He grinned at her evident frustration. “No way. You have to try to pick me out of the crowd. Of course, if you can’t, I’m not sure whether I’ll be insulted or grateful. Meantime, I’ll get us some tea, or would you prefer wine?”

“Tea’s good.”

He left as her brow furrowed in concentration and she picked up each picture and studied it once more.

“Josh, are you sure there’s one of you here?” she called out to him eventually.

“Absolutely.” He poured the hot water over the tea bags and let them steep, then took the freshly brewed pot and two cups into the living room. “Any luck?”

She was holding a small wood-framed picture and studying it intently. “This one, I think. If I’m right about this one, then there are several more of you, as well.”

He walked over. “Let’s see.” He grinned when he looked at the image of his younger cousin. “Sorry. You lose. That’s my cousin Jim.”

“But he has your eyes and your mouth,” she said. She set the picture back, then met his gaze. “Have I mentioned how much I like your mouth?”

His heart kicked up a notch. “Not that I recall.”

“You have very sensual lips.” She grinned. “Or maybe I just see them that way because you’re such an incredible kisser.”

His ego took a satisfying lurch. “Incredible, huh?”

“Mind-boggling, in fact.”

Josh leaned down and touched his lips to hers in the slightest brush. “When I kiss you like that?”

“That’s nice,” she said. “But then there’s this other thing you do.” She held on to his shirt and skimmed her tongue across his lower lip. “Something like that.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Like this.”

His mouth closed over hers. When her lips parted on a sigh, his tongue invaded. She still had a lingering hint of cinnamon and sugar on her lips, the scent of it on her breath. She was clinging to his shirt, her eyes dazed by the time the kiss ended.

“Mind-boggling,” she murmured breathlessly. “Maybe we ought to find that bed before my knees give way.”

He laughed. “There’s no rush, darlin’. I just made tea.”

Her gaze smoldered. “Forget the tea.”

Josh swallowed hard. “Forgotten,” he said at once, scooping her into his arms.

“How’s the rest of your memory? Think you can find your way to the bedroom?”

“There are four bedrooms in this house,” he said lightly. “I may not be thinking clearly, but I’m bound to stumble across one of them.”

He found his own, of course, and was relieved to find that he’d tossed the covers back in place after yet another restless night. When he lowered Ashley to her feet beside the bed, he very nearly had to pinch himself to be sure this moment wasn’t a dream. He wouldn’t go so
far as to say he’d had a crush on her forever, because it hadn’t been like that. It had been impossible—at least for him—to fantasize about anything real with a girl who was so far beyond his reach.

But he’d wondered about her, wondered about all of the D’Angelo girls who were always laughing, always having spirited adventures with the most popular boys in town. The reality, as it turned out, was better than anything he’d imagined. This flesh-and-blood woman made him long for things he’d never expected to want so much…a home, a family, a future that didn’t involve nonstop work to get ahead. He’d never had those thoughts as a teenager. Nor had he had them as recently as last week when he’d still been debating taking things to the next level with Stephanie.

Ashley, however, promised to provide endless fascination. As a girl, from his vantage point of distance and teenaged longing, she’d seemed strong, intelligent and invincible to him. She was all of those things as a woman, but she was also vulnerable, and that made her seem accessible in ways he’d never dared to dream about.

She touched him, then, her fingers grazing the bare skin of his chest, then dipping lower. The memories fled, replaced by a sea of sensations in the here-and-now. Need exploded inside him, but patience—years of it, or so it seemed—kept his hands steady and slow.

She didn’t seem to want slow, though. She moved restlessly against him, taunting him deliberately, moving aside his careful fingers to strip away clothing in an anxious rush. She barely gave him time to appreciate her naked beauty before she was pulling him onto the bed.

Josh was no fool. As much as he wanted to linger
over every caress, to savor every touch, he caught on to her edgy, almost desperate mood and gave her what she wanted. He pinned her hands loosely above her head, then looked into her eyes, searching for her soul. It was there when he entered her with one hard thrust, all the need, all the desire, all the raw wanting that any man could ask for.

She came apart at once, shuddering beneath him, surrounding him with slick, pulsing heat. He smiled into her eyes.

“That one was for you, darlin’.”

She gave him a lazy, satisfied smile of her own. “And now?”

“And now we’re going to do this again,” he said.

“Oh, really?”

“And this time it will be for both of us.”

He waited for her body to grow still, waited for the longing to rise once more in her eyes and then he began to move, slowly at first, letting the sweet tension build, until she was pleading with him for yet another release.

“In time,” he murmured. “In good time.”

Given her penchant for control, he wasn’t surprised when her body tried to take the decisions away from him, but he was more determined. He held her in place, his rock-hard arousal sheathed in her, not moving a muscle until she calmed, her gaze alert and filled with interest in what he had planned.

Satisfied that he had her full and captivated attention, he began to move again, this time responding to her little cries of pleasure with deeper, harder thrusts until the rhythm was no longer his—or hers—to control. They were both caught up in the passion, in the frantic need.
He was pretty sure they were going to go up in flames, if something didn’t happen to lessen the mounting heat, the sweet, powerful friction that was driving them wild.

Josh had no idea what it would take to send them flying, but he hadn’t expected it to be a smile. Ashley’s lips curved ever so slightly into a Mona Lisa smile of purest satisfaction and he came undone. The smile spread as she came with him.

As they slowly fell back to earth, Josh cradled her against his chest and fell into the deepest, most contented sleep of his life, only barely resisting the urge to whisper that he’d fallen in love with her. Only the shock of that, the wonder, kept him silent. That and the fear that even after what they’d just shared, she wouldn’t feel the same way.

“Do you have any idea how intimidated I was by you?” Josh asked Ashley as they lay side by side in his bed after making love for yet a third time during the long, lazy afternoon. The rain had started once again and was beating a staccato rhythm on the old tin roof.

Taken aback, Ashley stared at him. Of all the things he’d said and done since they met, this was the one that most astonished her. “Intimidated? Why?”

“Because you’re one of the totally unattainable D’Angelo sisters, the most beautiful, most intelligent one. When I was sixteen, I never in a million years would have dreamed we’d be together like this.”

She was even more astounded by that. “You knew me when you were sixteen?”

He laughed. “Hardly. I knew
of
you. Every boy in three counties knew who you were. You and your sis
ters breezed in here every summer and left behind a trail of broken hearts each fall. Your poor grandmother was constantly apologizing to all the mothers.” He regarded her intently. “Is that what you’re going to do to me? Will I wind up being your autumn fling?”

His tone was light, but Ashley heard the note of real concern behind it. “You know I can’t make any guarantees right now, Josh. This is what it is, for as long as it lasts. We have to agree to that, or it’s pointless to even start.”

He gave her a wry look and ran a hand over her hip. “I’d say we’ve already started.”

Indeed, they had. Ashley hadn’t felt this way in a long time. Her body was still quaking inside from the power of what they’d just shared. And based on the shiver that Josh’s light touch had just sent over her, she was eager to try it again. Before she could indulge herself, though, she wanted him to explain how they’d never met.

“Why didn’t we know each other back then?” she asked him, tracing the outline of his wickedly clever mouth. “It’s not as if we were living miles and miles apart.”

“You and your sisters were way out of my league,” he said with a self-deprecating smile. “It was sort of like the difference between standard-issue white bread and one of those crusty loaves of olive bread that come from a gourmet bakery. No comparison.”

Her gaze narrowed. “Are you saying we were snobs?” The possibility rankled, most likely because she feared there might be some truth to it. Look at the judgments she’d been making about men her entire adult life. Look at how stunned she’d been that Josh had slipped
past the careful screening system that tended to weed out anyone she deemed unsuitable by some ridiculous standard that combined ambition and success to the exclusion of character.

He shook his head. “Not at all. I just wasn’t on your radar. That’s obvious, since you couldn’t pick out my picture from those photos in the living room. I was the one with glasses and a pained smile.”

She immediately remembered a picture that had charmed her. The boy, barely a teenager, had looked miserably self-conscious as he gazed at the camera. “I know exactly which picture it is,” she said. “Wait.”

She scrambled from the bed and ran to get it. “This is you,” she said, holding it out to him when she’d returned.

He winced as he looked at it, then nodded. “That’s me, all right.”

“You were a cutie,” she said.

“Please. If you believe that, then you have a very broad definition of the word.”

“You were a cutie,” she repeated. “I can’t believe I never spotted you.”

“That was as much my fault as yours. I was shy and got along better with the characters in books than I did with real-life girls my own age.”

“That’s amazing,” she said.

“What? That I turned into this sexy stud muffin?”

Ashley couldn’t contain the laugh that bubbled up. “No, that I missed knowing you back then. I’ve always had a thing for shy bookworms.”

Josh scoffed at her. “Kenny Foster was about as far from a shy bookworm as this region ever produced.”

She blinked at the mention of a name long forgotten.
“Kenny Foster,” she repeated. “My gosh, whatever happened to him?”

“You didn’t keep up with him?”

“Obviously not.”

Josh grinned. “Just as well. You’d have had to defend him on an embezzling charge. His fingers got a little sticky down at the bank.”

“You’re kidding! My dad always said he had shifty eyes.”

“Your dad’s obviously a very wise man.”

She met his gaze. “Want to know what he says about you?”

His expression sobered. “I don’t know. Do I?”

“He thinks there’s something fishy about a man who never goes to work.”

To her surprise Josh didn’t seem to take offense.

“If only he knew,” he said dryly.

“Knew what?”

“That this is the first time off I’ve taken in five years.”

She studied him with surprise. “Really?”

“No lie.”

“Me, too,” she said, holding up her hand to give him a high five. “I don’t suppose you’re having the same kind of career crisis I’m having, though.”