selling kisses. I was merely trying to get my money’s worth.”
“Twenty dollars,” she murmured, curious about him. “Do you always throw money away like that?”
She licked her lips when he continued to stare at her mouth as if he were thinking of starting the kiss all over again. “I didn’t consider it a waste.”
“It was too intimate for a public kiss.” She frowned at him. “And you didn’t quit when I pulled your hair.”
“I thought that was because you were excited, too.” He shook his head. “That never happened to me before.”
“What?”
“Getting lost in a kiss like that.”
Jon took in the delicate picture she presented. The heat, which hadn’t gone completely, surged anew. He wanted to strip her of the angelic outfit and find the devilish imp he detected deep in her gorgeous eyes.
“Black Irish,” he murmured, mesmerized all over again.
Her eyebrows lifted in question. They were as black as her hair and lashes, with a pronounced arch like a gull’s wing.
“That’s what my grandmother called my grandfather. He had Irish blue eyes, but hair as black as sin. She said it was the Spanish blood that got mixed in from sailors washing ashore after the defeat of the Armada.”
Anne smiled with delight at his story. She saw his silvery gaze flick to her lips once more. She remembered the taste of him when she’d tried to protest the kiss she could see coming but couldn’t get the word out in time.
With an effort, she resisted an urge to lick her lips again to see if she could still taste him there. That kiss had rocked her…right to her toes. A first for her, too.
His mouth was intriguing. The bottom lip was slightly fuller than the top. Both were well-defined, as if outlined by the artist who’d carved him from living marble.
“Keep looking at me like that and you might go into a real faint at my next kiss.”
Her heart did a tap dance against her chest. The pull was there between them. She backed off, using humor as a defense. “Yeah?” she challenged. “I’m waiting with a worm on my tongue.”
His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “A what?”
“Bated breath. Haven’t you been watching the reruns of ‘Mork and Mindy’?”
“No. I don’t have time for things like that.”
“Aha. An all-work, no-play, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy,” she mocked.
He ignored her light humor and gave her another perusal. “You have very tempting dimples.”
She lifted a hand to her mouth. “I’ve heard them described as cute, but tempting?”
Jon sat on the sofa beside her, crowding her so that his thigh pressed against her knees. “Yes, tempting.” He touched the tiny dimples that winked in and out at him as she talked or smiled. They were at the corners of her mouth. “They focus attention on your mouth. Make me think of other things I’d like to do to it…to you…with you.”
The dimples winked, disappeared. “I’d advise you to curb your, uh, impulses. This town is pretty straitlaced.”
He leaned closer and noticed that she didn’t flinch. Brave. He liked that in a woman. “Are you?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You kissed me back.”
Anne shook her head. “I did no such thing. That was an accident when I touched your lips. I was trying to tell you not to act on what I could see in your eyes.”
“Which was?”
“Lust, clear as the nose on your face.”
“I wasn’t the only one who felt it,” he insisted. “You moved your lips under mine. And your heart was beating like sixty against my chest.”
For a moment, she thought of all the possibilities—falling in love, kissing, teasing, laughing, sleeping together, waking in each other’s arms. Having a home, children…well, it was a lovely thought, but those things were never to be, not for her.
She had the family curse.
For a moment, the old resentment rose. Because of her heart, she hadn’t been in the school band. She hadn’t been a cheerleader. She hadn’t played basketball or soccer.
Fragile, delicate little Anne, who mustn’t become overexcited, overheated, overjoyed. Poor Anne, who’d fainted when the captain of the football team had given her a smothering kiss one time. She’d been fifteen. It had been her last date while in high school. All the guys had been afraid she’d have heart failure and her aunt would kill them because of it.
Her mother’s heart had given out during childbirth. Two cousins had died from weak hearts almost at birth. She had a heart murmur, which wasn’t terribly serious in itself, but it was an indication of the family trait.
She wouldn’t pass it on to her children. To force them into a restricted life when all the world was there to be discovered, to watch them die before they’d hardly lived, to see them fall in love, marry, then die before their children had a chance to know them the way her own mother had? No, she simply wouldn’t, couldn’t do it.
But sometimes she thought of the possibilities.…
She stifled the regret. She’d learned long ago to be stoic about life, to laugh at its foibles before it laughed at hers.
She gave her companion a mocking smile. “My heart always beats fast when I’m being accosted.”
He stood, putting a couple of feet between them. His gaze licked over her like fire. “Accosted?” He gave a snort of laughter and his lashes dropped to dangerous levels over his eyes. “I’ve hardly begun. How about some lunch? The hot dogs at the bazaar looked pretty appetizing.”
She blinked at the change in topic. “Why should I want to spend my time with a known criminal?”
“I paid good money for that kiss. I didn’t steal it,” he reminded her, his mouth turning up attractively at the corners. He thrust his hands in his back pockets and rocked back on the heels of his scuffed boots as he watched her.
“I was speaking of your assault.” She stood and slipped her sandals back on. “Yes, lunch would be fine. My aunt and uncle must have heard about the kiss by now. It will reassure everyone to see me whole and well. Also, it might save you from getting beaten up by my more ardent protectors if we’re seen together.”
This time he blinked in confusion as she jumped from subject to subject with no pause. She grinned at him.
He lifted her left hand. “Those ardent pals of yours haven’t put a ring on your finger.”
“How observant of you,” she murmured, pulling away and running her fingers through her hair to smooth the heavy waves into place. She felt vibrantly
