She reached out and did as he suggested, sliding her fingers deep into his hair, lingering when she should have withdrawn. “You used to tug my hair all the time when I was a kid, remember?” At his nod, she ran her fingers through it again. “Yours is softer than I thought it would be.”
“Is it?” The tight sensation in his throat began to spread, reaching his chest, crawling along his abdomen and beyond. And she seemed to have no idea. Not good.
“This is really helping,” she murmured. “Thank you for agreeing.”
Yes. Thank you. His mind wasn’t nearly as happy as the rest of him was. It was currently kicking his ass from here to across the sea.
“Tell me what else I would do.”
As if he were a puppet—and he knew exactly what was pulling the strings, and it wasn’t his head—he kept digging a deeper hole. “Well, I might move a little closer.” He proceeded to do exactly that, sliding to within a few inches of where she lay. “Then I might stroke the side of her face, down her neck until I reached her shoulder.” His hand followed the route in time with his words.
As he touched her shoulder—he wasn’t even sure he’d applied any pressure to it at all—she lay back on the blanket, her eyes staring up at him. Waiting to see what was next on the agenda.
God help him, the words just seemed to keep coming. “Then...I might kiss her. Like this.”
With that, his head began its fatal descent, until his lips touched hers.
A BUTTERFLY’S WINGS.
That’s what Brad’s lips felt like as they brushed across hers once, twice, three times. The sensation was intoxicatingly gentle, barely there at all. She’d never been kissed like this in her life.
She wanted to open her mouth, to drag him closer and really feel his mouth against hers, but she was too busy reveling in this luscious new world—one she’d never known existed.
Until this very moment.
A strange sound came up from her throat, a cross between a whimper and a groan. A quiet plea for more? Whatever it was, it changed the dynamic between them. His whole body came to a complete standstill for several seconds before coming back to life. He went down on his forearms, her breasts flattening as he settled over her. Warm hands moved to either side of her face and held it still.
That was when she realized that not only had she moaned against his mouth, she was straining upwards as well, hoping to increase the pressure. Brad seemed determined to keep to the original pace, his weight physically keeping her from speeding things up.
And that torturous, traitorous kiss...
Not plundering. Not invading. Just a sweet, steady touch designed to drive her insane.
His name wound around in her brain, seeking an exit that didn’t exist.
Brad left her mouth, his lips brushing along her jaw in a long, slow journey that made her shiver with longing, made her insides coil tight in anticipation.
Oh, Lord, what was happening to her? The world was moving too fast and too slow, she was too hot...too cold.
Nothing was the way she’d expected it to be. The way it had always been.
“This is what I’d do.” Warm breath slid along her ear carrying words she strained to catch. “I’d kiss her. Until she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.”
She was already there. So there.
But before she had a chance to respond he was gone, cranking his body upright and dragging a hand through his hair, while she lay stunned, her breath coming in short, desperate spurts.
He gave a hard laugh, his eyes staring down into hers, pupils as black as she’d ever seen them. “See? That’s why I don’t do flirting. It doesn’t take much.”
Her sluggish brain struggled to process the words.
It didn’t take much to what? Turn her into a churning cauldron of need?
Oh, God. Was that what that was? He’d sensed what was happening with her—had been forced to back off before she reached for him with greedy hands? Before the light flirting she’d asked for suddenly turned to something much more serious?
He’d done exactly what she’d set out to do to Travis in that hotel room in New York City: seduce her.
And, unlike her failure with her ex, Brad had succeeded far too well. All it had taken had been one small touch.
* * *
Armed with a fresh cup of coffee, Chloe made her way across the street. She needed to get away for a little while and the tall shade trees of Central Park had beckoned her from the fourth-floor hospital windows all morning long. It was already warm but temperatures hadn’t yet rocketed enough to cause the horse-drawn carriages to stop operating, though they might later on.
She sat on one of the benches that lined the street and gave a sigh of relief. Maybe the constant drone of city sounds would help drown out the cacophony in her head. Her fingers went to her lips as the events of this past weekend swept over her again. Unlike her thoughts, no amount of noise was going to erase the sensation of Brad’s mouth on hers. Something that had followed her into her dreams, disrupting her sleep and making her feel edgy and irritable.
She hadn’t seen Brad since their arrival at the hospital that morning, and for that she was glad. So much for not letting things get awkward. That kiss had shot that plan to hell.
Not only was there no more flirting going on, there wasn’t much talking either. Well, except for shop talk. They could chat about patients and treatments until the wee hours of the morning and never hit on anything more personal than the glucose counts of such and such a patient.
Cade Coleman, on the other hand, had drifted in and out of the nurses’ station today without a care in the world, giving her a friendly wink from time to time. Hopefully Brad wouldn’t catch him and think she was practicing on the surgeon again. There was already some kind of growing tension between the men, and she didn’t want to do anything to make the situation worse.
Taking a sip of coffee, she leaned back against the bench, taking in the constant flow of cars. This world was so different from the one she’d left behind in Connecticut. Everything was bigger. The buildings. The traffic jams and construction. Even Central Park itself had seemed to stretch on for ever when she’d looked down on it from the upper floors of the hospital.
Instead of making her long for the familiarity of her county hospital, the movement and activity here seemed to energize her, making her feel alive in a way she hadn’t felt for a very long time. Maybe some of that was due to being free of Travis. But she wondered if it wasn’t the city itself.
Her cellphone went off. Glancing at the readout, she saw it was the hospital.
“Chloe Jenkins here.”
“Where are you?”
Brad’s
