Page 98 of A Soldier's Return

“Nothing. Never mind.” She turned away to run water in the sink for the soiled dishes.

Eben leaned against the counter next to her, enjoying her graceful movements.

“You probably would have been right out there with her in the middle of the night with a flashlight and a bucket looking for sand dollars, wouldn’t you?”

She gave him a sidelong look, then smiled. “Probably.”

“I let her get away with too much right after Brooke died and I need to set some boundaries now. Children needs rules and structure.”

“Is that the kind of childhood you had? Regimented, toe-the-line. Military school, right?”

He laughed, though he heard the harsh note in it and wondered if she did as well. “Not quite. I would have given my entire baseball card collection for a little structure and discipline. My parents were of the if-it-feels-good-just-do-it school of thought. It destroyed them both and they nearly took me and my sister along with them. I can’t do that to Chloe.”

Her hands paused in the sink and her eyes widened with sympathy. He shifted, uncomfortable. Where the hell had that come from? He didn’t share these pieces of his life with anyone. He wasn’t sure he’d ever even articulated that to Brooke. If he had, maybe she wouldn’t have expected so many things from him he wasn’t at all sure he had been capable of offering.

He certainly had no business sharing them with Sage. She was quiet for a long moment, watching him out of intense brown eyes. The only sound was the rain clicking against the window and the soft sound of their mingled breathing.

“I’m sorry,” she finally murmured.

He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I just don’t want to make the same mistakes with Chloe.”

“But you can go too far in the other direction, can’t you?”

“I’m doing my best. That’s all I can do.”

He didn’t want to talk about this anymore. With her so close, he was having a tough time hanging on to any coherent thought anyway. All he could think about was kissing her again.

But he couldn’t.

The thought had no sooner entered his head than he could swear he felt a soft hand in the small of his back from out of nowhere pushing him toward her.

She gave him a quick startled look then her gaze seemed to fasten on his mouth.

What other choice did he have but to kiss her?

Chapter Seven

She sighed as if she’d been waiting for his kiss and she tasted heady and sweet from the wine and the strawberries.

Having her in his arms feltright, in a way he couldn’t explain. On an intellectual level, it made absolutely no sense and every voice in his head was clamoring to tell him why kissing her again was a colossal mistake.

He shut them all out and focused only on the silky smoothness of her hair, her soft curves against him.

Her hands were warm, wet from the dishwater. He could feel the palm prints she left against his shirt, a temporary brand.

He had been thinking of their earlier kiss all day. As he drove to Portland and back, as he listened to his attorneys ramble on and on. Like the low murmur of the sea outside, she had been a constant presence in his mind. Their kiss that morning had been heated and intense, more so because it had been so unexpected.

This, though, was different. Eben closed his eyes at the astonishing gentleness of it, the quiet peace that seemed to swirl around them, wrapping them together with silken threads.

He still wanted her fiercely and the hunger thrumming inside him urged him to deepen the kiss but he kept it slow and easy, reluctant to destroy the fragile beauty of the moment.

“All day long, I’ve been telling myself a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t do that again,” he murmured after a long, drugging moment.

He could see a pulse flutter in her throat, feel her chest rise and fall with her accelerated breathing. She dropped her hands from his shirt, but not before he was certain he felt their slight tremble.

“I can probably give you a couple thousand more why I shouldn’t have let you.”

“Yet here we are.”

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