and then the surrender in her eyes. She tilted her head back ever so slightly.
The silent invitation was clear.
Brandon brought his mouth down on hers.
Her pulse was already fast because she’d just barely escaped being struck by the careening sports car. But it might as well have stopped beating altogether in comparison to its speed the moment Brandon began kissing her.
Fireworks went off in her veins as his kiss registered and then deepened. Her head spun.
She’d read that exact sort of description once, had even mulled over it wistfully, despite telling herself that feelings like that didn’t happen in real life. Kisses were just that. Kisses. Lips touching lips. Skin on skin. Nothing more. Kisses had no secret powers, no ability to set rockets ricocheting through the heavens and through her as they simultaneously wiped out all ability to think. That was just literary license run amok.
But here she was, having it happen. To her. One moment, she was almost roadkill, the next, soaring through the afternoon sky, no longer bound by something so mundane as a mortal body.
He made her feel positively giddy, and she absolutely loved the sensation.
The attraction Brandon had initially felt for her flared. Momentarily vulnerable by the very real possibility of losing her had his reaction been a nanosecond slower, he’d kissed her.
And discovered himself in a whole different place than he thought he would be.
Control was extremely important to Brandon, because there’d been so little of it available to him when he was younger. When he attained it, he held on to control as if it was his very reason for existing. His very lifeline.
But just for a moment now, it slipped out of his grasp as this woman took him to heights he hadn’t expected and to sensations he hadn’t thought possible.
It was a major revelation to him.
Coming up for air, Brandon drew back and looked in wonder at the woman he’d brought along on this little field trip. Concerned that she might have been offended, he didn’t know whether or not an apology was in order. There was no way on earth he was sorry he’d kissed her. But he honestly didn’t know how she might react to what had just happened.
Unable to put up with the stillness any longer, he broke it by making an apology. “Sorry,” he murmured.
About? Was he sorry that he’d thrown his doors open to anyone and everyone? Or was it more personal than that? Was he sorry he kissed her?
“I already told you that you have nothing to be sorry about.”
“That was before—”
He was talking about before he’d kissed her, she realized. Straightening, her eyes never leaving his, she allowed her voice to interrupt his. “But it still applies.”
He relaxed a little, relieved that she wasn’t annoyed, that she didn’t think he had just taken advantage of her because the opportunity had presented itself. Nothing would have been further from the truth. If anything, he’d been the one to be taken advantage of. Not by her, but by his own momentary lapse into vulnerability.
He didn’t like leaving himself open like that. People who were open got hurt. That was why, ordinarily, he was locked up tighter than Fort Knox. Nothing and no one got through.
Because the last time he’d allowed himself to be open, to be vulnerable, he’d lost his heart to Jean, Victoria’s mother. At the time, he’d thought it was a good thing because it was for forever. Learning that “forever” was incredibly finite had been a cruel, hard lesson that had almost broken him. But he had learned it. It was a lesson that he meant never to forget.
But Isabelle had made him do just that, made him forget, if only for a moment.
He had to be careful that it didn’t happen again. Because he knew that the consequences would be too hard for him to endure.
“About that lunch you promised me,” Isabelle prodded cheerfully, sensing he needed to have his thoughts diverted. She nodded toward the old-fashioned building they’d passed at the corner.
“Right.”
This time, he looked both ways before placing a hand to her back and guiding her across the street. There’d been enough risks taken for one day.
“Oh, my God, the view from here is absolutely incredible!” Isabelle cried breathlessly. “It’s like looking into forever.”
“Looking into forever,” Brandon repeated, rolling the words around in his mind. “Might not make a bad title,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.
They had had their late lunch at the restaurant, which, she’d discovered, turned out to be even more quaint on the inside than on the outside. Afterward, they’d gone across the street to take in the view. There was a charming gazebo built strictly for that purpose. It had been there, Brandon told her, for as long as anyone could remember.
The freshly repainted gray, circular structure was perched on the edge of an embankment that overlooked the beach. The ocean stretched out from there for as far as the eye could see.
It was the ocean that had captured Isabelle’s attention. The waters were almost painfully blue and just slightly restless, its waves reaching out to the shore only to withdraw like a flirtatious southern belle, teasing her suitor and testing her feminine powers for the first time.
She could have stood here watching for hours. If she’d had the time.
“Do you come here often?” The moment she asked and heard her own question out loud, Isabelle had to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Brandon asked, more than a little amused. Isabelle’s laugh was captivating. Captivating and innocent, like having someone take his hand and draw him into a party.
“What I just asked you, that sounded like a line a guy usually says to a girl in a bar or a club.” Mocking the scenario, she made her eyebrows rise and fall wickedly before repeating the question using a far deeper voice than she had initially. “Come here often, honey?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” he purposely took on the feminine role and made his voice go up two octaves, approximating a falsetto. And then he went on more seriously in his own voice, “Driving up and down Pacific Coast Highway and looking at the ocean from here are a couple of ways I use to clear my head and get my creative juices flowing.”
From out of nowhere, there was the smell of rain in the air. It rarely rained in southern California in July, so Isabelle attributed the sudden damp smell to the wind shifting, ushering in the scent of the sea.
“In your quest for creativity, do you ever walk along the beach itself?” she asked.
“That’s my third way,” he confirmed.
Brandon glanced down at the shoes she was wearing. Her footwear was the one very impractical thing about her. Rather than
