Page 32 of No Kind of Hero
She smiled. “Do you think I’m pretty?”
“You know I do. I was about to go to lunch.” He hadn’t been, but he was now. “Twenty minutes on a bench by the lake. What do you say? You don’t mess yourself up, and I get to look at you.”
Something seemed to be funny, because he could swear she stifled a giggle that had a lot more to do with that girl who’d run up the driveway in her cowboy boots than with the shadowed-eyed, too-thin lawyer who’d stood in the lake beside him like even water couldn’t get her wet. “I don’t have any lunch,” she said, the corners of her mouth still trying to curve into a smile he was fairly sure he’d find irresistible. “But I could watch you . . . eat.”
The last word was barely a breath, and there was practically steam coming out of his ears. “Nah,” he said. “One sec.” He took off his hat and yelled up to José, “Lunch. Half an hour,” and got a flap of José’s hand and a grin. And then he grabbed his lunchbox and took Beth out the door.
When they got out onto the sidewalk, she flipped down the sunglasses she’d had resting on top of her head and matched her steps to his, walking so close her arm brushed his. He had to take her hand then, didn’t he? Since she was right there. And when he did, she moved in closer, sighed a little, and seemed to melt another couple degrees.
Taurus’s nearly obsessive attention to detail and dedication to getting the job done right allows shy, tender Virgo to relax and savor her pleasure.
Lunch,he told himself, and they headed a couple blocks over to the lakeside path, where he snagged a bench in the shade. Beth sat down, tucking one leg up under her, and touched a hand to those tendrils of hair. And her nails were lavender.
Her toenails, though were shell-pink. He wouldn’t have said he had a thing for feet. Before.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, and he was a little surprised. He’d expected her to open with an apology for not coming to help him paint, even though he’d never asked her to.
“Thinking your feet are pretty,” he said. “And that you got wild with your nails again. And that I like your hair. And that shirt.”
Another secret little smile. “The shirt’s Dakota’s.”
“Oh. I guess I never checked it out that well.” He checked it out this time, though. Was there anything more irresistible than that shadow between a woman’s breasts, all the more intoxicating because you weren’t supposed to look at it? Your imagination instantly went to what she’d do if you pulled that shirt down just a few inches and ran your fingers along the edge of a low-cut bra, then bent her back over your arm and kissed her there, where her skin was so soft.
At least his did.
He finally opened his lunchbox, handed her half of one of his sandwiches and his water bottle, and asked her, “So did you come by looking that hot because you decided you’d torture me some? If you did, it’s working.”
“Maybe.” She wriggled on the bench, and her shorts rode up a half-inch more. “I had a nice evening last night without you. Do you want to hear about it?”
“Only with everything I’ve got.”
She took a dainty little nibble on her sandwich, and he could tell she was wearing lipstick. Pink. He’d always loved kissing her long enough to eat her lipstick all the way off, and if he found a smudge of it on his white T-shirt later? He didn’t hate that reminder of where she’d been. Or how she’d gasped into his shoulder when he’d been kissing her neck, and she’d left that mark.
She said, “I started out lying in the hammock in a short skirt. I’d have had to be careful if it weren’t so private out there, but since I was all alone, I could let my skirt ride up all the way and not worry about what I’d be showing anybody who walked by. I was reading this book about a powerful man and a woman who liked him that way. It was very . . . detailed. All about the many, many ways he showed her his . . . power. And I enjoyed it a whole, whole lot. I drank a glass of wine while I did it, and then I took another glass into the bathtub with me. I had a long soak by candlelight, and I thought about my book, and about you, and I washed myself really well. I paid myself alotof attention.” She looked at him from under her lashes. “Is this interesting you?”
He tried to answer, but had to clear his throat. He grabbed for the water bottle, took a swig, and said, “I’m wishing you weren’t telling me at this exact moment. We’re in public.”
“Well, yes,” she said with that demure little Mona Lisa smile. “We are. I figured I could entertain you during your lunch hour better than . . . what are their names? Your crew?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He couldn’t remember anyway. The blood supply to his head had been diverted. “Tell me the rest.” ‘In public’ be damned.
She dropped her eyes, then looked at him out of the corners of them and touched the tip of her tongue to her upper lip, and he thought he’d explode. “I went into my bedroom,” she said. “Naked, and still a little . . . wet. I didn’t turn on any lights, and I didn’t close the curtains, because I wanted to see out, and I wanted to pretend that somebody could see me. Somebody I wanted to have . . . watch. I did some very slow, very stretchy yoga, and I kept my music on, and I looked at the moon. You could say I did some dreaming with my eyes open. All I know is, I enjoyed myself with every single inch of me. I let the poses wash over me and take me over. Take me deep.”
He may have forgotten to eat his sandwich. He may have.
She put a hand up and ran it along the neckline of his T-shirt, a feather-light touch, and said, her voice husky and low, “And do you know what I wished?”
He knew whathedid. “No.”
She was still touching him, nothing inappropriate about it. Her foot was tucked up under her thigh, and there was about an acre of slim leg and creamy skin on display right there, because the black shorts had ridden up so much, they might as well have been bikini bottoms. He looked down her shirt, then down to the juncture of her thighs, and burned hot.
“I wished,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, “for you.”
Finally, she took a bite of her sandwich. And he sat there and tried to breathe. Then he pulled out his phone, held it in his palm, looked down at it, and started to type.
She stopped eating, and she stopped looking like Alternative Beth, too. “That was my best effort,” she told him. “And you’re checking your messages?”
He shoved the phone back into his pocket and his sandwich back into his lunch box and said, “No. Sending one.” Then he stood up, took her hand in his, pulled her to her feet, and said, “Come on.”
