been walking since—”
Taking matters into his own hands, he took her arm and guided her outside. “Don’t you ever get tired of telling everyone how independent you are?”
As far as she was concerned, he was trespassing now, butting in where he had no business being. “No,” she said stubbornly, “I don’t. People have a habit of forgetting that I’m independent, because I’m still walking around with ‘dew’ all over me.” Her eyebrows narrowed. “Wasn’t that the way you put it?”
Yup, he was right. She was mad at him. He’d probably insulted her because he hadn’t kissed her. But insulting her had been the furthest thing from his mind.
“Not quite.” Kevin supposed apologies were in order. “I didn’t mean to get off on the wrong foot with you.”
“You didn’t get off on any foot at all.”
If her glare was any colder, Kevin had a feeling he would have had to have been thawed out with a bon-fire. “Then why do I have the impression that you’re annoyed with me?”
She walked faster to her Jeep, refusing to look at him. “I’m not.”
“One thing I was always good at,” he told her tolerantly, “was spotting a lie.”
Reaching her vehicle, she spun around to face him. “So now I’m not just a baby, I’m a liar, too?”
No one could ever accuse him of having a glib tongue. But at least it was an honest one. He threw himself on her mercy. “This isn’t coming out right.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t come out at all.” She yanked open the door to her vehicle. The sooner she got out of here, the better. She didn’t know what had come over her before, all but throwing herself at Kevin. Maybe she just liked exercising her feminine wiles, she didn’t know. All she knew was that she’d felt humiliated when he said he wasn’t going to kiss her. “Good night, Kevin.”
He caught her by the shoulders, turning her around to face him. “And maybe it should.”
Captured between his hands, she was standing very close to him. So close that he could feel her breath as it entered and left her body. So close that he found his thoughts rebelling against the perfect order he’d filed them in. Anticipation telegraphed itself along the nerves that networked through him.
He continued to stumble through his apology, wishing for all the world that just once, he could have been granted Jimmy’s smooth way with words. Jimmy was the operator in the family, not him. “If you’re angry because I didn’t kiss you—”
He’d pressed the wrong buttons. Or the right ones, depending on whose point of view was being observed. In any event, her blue eyes flashed at him: two tiny white-hot bolts of lightning aimed straight at his heart.
Furious, June yanked her shoulders free of his hold. “The hell I am. You think an awful lot of yourself, don’t you, Quintano?”
“No,” he told her quietly, his eyes never leaving hers, “I think a lot of you. A lot about you,” he admitted softly without meaning to.
The next thing he knew, his hands were back on her shoulders, holding her in place. Gently.
A second after that, he lowered his head and brushed his lips against hers.
Softly, wistfully. Achingly gentle.
All of her life, she’d tried to be tough. To be one of the guys, except with curves, although she’d played down the latter, hiding them beneath jeans and overalls because, other than on her own terms and fleetingly, the last thing she wanted was to enter this male-female game that always came at such high stakes.
Sure, her brother and sister seemed happy now, far happier than she’d ever seen her own mother. And her grandmother was never happier than when she was involved with a man.
But that wasn’t her way.
She wasn’t going to get tangled up in anything that had the capability of stripping her soul down to the last layer, of mortally wounding her so that she couldn’t recover, the way her mother hadn’t recovered after her father had left them.
The others thought she was too young to remember. But she remembered. Vividly remembered. The image of her mother, pale and wan, sitting by the window and staring vacant-eyed out at the lonely terrain, waiting for a man who never returned, waiting until the day she died, was firmly imprinted on her brain.
And it wasn’t going to happen to her.
Ever.
When she kissed a man, she kissed him on her own terms and then went on, free-spirited and unaffected. That had always been the case, without exception.
Except, that wasn’t happening now.
This wasn’t on her own terms and she wasn’t moving on at the moment of contact, wasn’t being disinterested or bored.
What she was being, was melted.
The very gentleness of the kiss was causing a huge core meltdown within her. So much so that she had to wrap her arms around Kevin’s neck and hold on for all she was worth before there was nothing left of her but a warm puddle pooling at his feet.
And when the kiss deepened, as neither of them had planned it would, it ensnared both of them even as they struggled to break free.
The woman tasted of desire and all that was forbidden, all that he’d denied himself these long years. All that he’d missed.
Without meaning to, he kissed her harder, longer, and felt himself falling down a winding abyss filled with every northern light that had ever been conceived.
And the path back to firm ground had disintegrated.
“He is kissing her!”
Excited, Yuri waved Ursula over to the window just as she’d completed her rounds, bidding Max and April goodbye.
“Come, Ursula, you are missing it.” He waved to Ursula again.
Enthused, Ursula elbowed her way through the crowd, moving far more swiftly and gracefully than women half her age. Her eyes were eager as she joined her current beau.
From his vantage point, Yuri had a clear view of the parking lot where June had left her vehicle. And where the young woman and Kevin were now standing, oblivious to the rest of the world.
The trim salt-and-pepper beard on Yuri’s cheeks spread widely as he pointed to the couple outside.
Ursula wiggled into the space right before him, then sighed.
“About time.” She nodded her approval. “Handsome devil.” Looking over her shoulder, Ursula slanted a glance at the man behind her. “Not as handsome as you, of course.”
“Of course,” he echoed, humor curving his generous mouth.
“But
