He couldn’t do this. How could he do this and look himself in the eye in the mirror while he shaved each morning?
But look where he was. Poised on the edge of total ecstasy. Inches away from paradise.
He pulled back, and she smiled up at him, hooking her legs around him, her hands slipping down to his buttocks and pressing him securely against her.
“John, don’t stop,” she whispered. “In case you haven’t noticed, I am coming on to you now.”
“I don’t have any protection,” he lied.
“I do,” she told him. “In my bedroom.” She reached between them, her fingers unfastening the top button of his jeans. “I can get it....”
Miller felt himself weaken. She wanted him. She couldn’t be any more obvious about it.
He let her pull his head down toward hers for another kiss, let her stroke the solid length of his arousal through the denim of his jeans, all the while cursing his inability to keep this from going too far.
He was a lowlife. He was a snake. And after all was said and done, she would hate him forever.
Somehow, Miller found the strength to pull back from her, out of her arms, outside the reach of her hands. “I can’t do this,” he said, nearly choking on the words. He sat on the edge of the couch, turned away from her, running his shaking hands through his hair. “Mariah, I can’t take advantage of you this way.”
She touched his back gently, lightly. “You’re not taking advantage of me,” she said quietly. “I promise.”
He turned to look at her. Big mistake. She looked incredible with her T-shirt pushed up and twisted around her waist. She was wearing high-cut white cotton panties that were far sexier than any satin or lace he’d ever seen. She wanted to make love to him. He could reach for her and have that T-shirt and those panties off of her in less than a second. He could be inside of her in the time it took to go into her bedroom and find her supply of condoms.
He had to look away before he could speak.
“It’s not that I don’t want to, because I do,” he told her. “It’s just…”
Miller could feel her moving, straightening her T-shirt, sitting up on the other end of the couch. “It’s all right. You don’t have to explain.”
“I don’t want to rush things,” he said, wishing he could tell her the truth. But what was the truth? That he couldn’t make love to her because he was intending to woo and marry a woman she considered one of her closest friends?
He had to stop thinking like John Miller and start thinking like Jonathan Mills. He had to become Jonathan Mills, and his reality—and the truth—would change, too. But he’d never had so much trouble taking on a different persona before.
“I’m not ready to do more than just be friends with you, Mariah. I just got out of the hospital, my latest test results aren’t even in and…” He broke off, staring out the window at the dawn breaking on the horizon, Jonathan Mills all but forgotten. “It’s morning.”
As Mariah watched, John stood up, transfixed by the smear of color in the eastern sky.
“I slept until morning,” he said, turning to look at her. He smiled—a slight lifting of one side of his mouth, but a smile just the same. “Whoa. How’d that happen?”
She smiled back at him. “I guess you’re going to have to admit that my silly relaxation exercise worked.”
He shook his head in wonder, just gazing at her. She could still see heat in his eyes and she knew he could see the same in hers.
He looked impossibly good with his shirt off and the top button of his jeans still unfastened. He was maybe just a little bit too skinny, but it was clear that before his illness he’d been in exceptionally good shape.
She could guess why he didn’t want to become involved with her. He was just out of the hospital, he’d said. He didn’t even know if he was going to live or die. And if he thought he was going to die…
Another man might have more of a live-for-today attitude. But John refused to take advantage of her. He was trying to keep her from being hurt, to keep her from becoming too involved in what could quite possibly be a dead-end relationship in a very literal sense.
But it was too late. She already was involved.
It was crazy—she should be pushing to keep her distance, not wanting to get closer to him. She didn’t need to fall for some guy who was going to go and die. She should find his shirt for him, and help him out the door.
But he found his shirt on his own, on the floor next to the couch. He slipped it on. “I better go.”
He didn’t want to leave. She could see it in his eyes. And when he leaned over to kiss her goodbye—not just once, but twice, then three times, each kiss longer than the last—she thought he just might change his mind.
But he didn’t. He finally pulled away, backing toward the door.
“I’d love it if you came over for dinner again tonight,” she told him, knowing that she was risking everything—everything—with her invitation.
Something shifted in his eyes. “I’m not sure I can.”
Mariah was picking up all kinds of mixed signals from him. First those lingering goodbye kisses, and now this evasiveness. It didn’t make sense. Or maybe it made perfect sense. Mariah wasn’t sure which—she’d never been this intimate with someone dealing with a catastrophic illness before.
“Call me,” Mariah told him, adding softly, “if you want.”
He looked back at her one more time before going out the door. “I want. I’m just not sure I should.”
SERENA WENT THROUGH the sliding glass doors, past the dining table and directly into the kitchen, raising her voice so that Mariah could hear from her vantage point on the deck. “Thank God you’re home. I’m so thirsty, I was sure I was going to die if I had to wait until I got all the way to my place.”
“Your place is not that much farther up the road.” Mariah glanced up from the piles of black-and-white photographs she was sorting as Serena sat down across from her at the table on the deck, a tall glass of iced tea in hand.
“Three miles,” Serena told her after taking a long sip. “I couldn’t have made it even one-tenth of a mile. Bless you for keeping this in the icebox, already chilled. I was parched.” She leaned forward to pull one of the pictures out from the others, pointing with one long, perfectly manicured fingernail. “Is that me?”
Mariah looked closely. Ever since her initial meeting with Serena, she had tried to be careful not to offend her friend by taking her picture. Or rather, she had tried not to offend Serena by letting her know her picture was being taken. Mariah had actually managed to get several excellent photographs of the beautiful Englishwoman—taken, no less, with one of those cheap little disposable cameras. Serena was incredibly photogenic, and in color, even on inexpensive film, her inner vibrance was emphasized. Mariah was careful to keep those pictures hidden.
