eyes were wide and her full, lush lips slightly parted. She ran her tongue around the edges of them, and her breasts rose and fell with the rhythm of her quickened breathing. The air between them seemed to hum with a powerful current of attraction, and he let his gaze drop to her mouth, lifting a finger to lightly press against her bottom lip.
She quivered for a moment, and he felt a small gasp escape her. Then, just as he was about to lean forward and seal his position with a kiss, she took his hand by the wrist and drew it firmly away from her mouth, all but flinging it out the window. “Thank you for the invitation but I’m not interested.”
Though a lick of something—anger, mixed with a scary dose of panic—shot through him, he forced himself to smile lazily. “You used to be interested,” he said softly. He reached in again and picked up her hand and brushed his thumb back and forth across her palm, trying to read her eyes.
But now she wasn’t giving anything away. Her eyes remained cool, hiding any hint of what she was thinking. “That was a long time ago,” she said. “I’ve grown up since then.”
“Ah, c’mon, Sophie. Just dinner.” He ran his eyes down the length of her body, chuckling when she pulled her hand away. “A little conversation, a little reminiscing...”
“No.” She dropped her guard and shot him a look of such bitterness that he mentally staggered back from the heat, singed by the anger in her eyes. “I’m not interested in being your entertainment when you come to town anymore.”
“It wasn’t like that.” He didn’t care for the way she made his actions sound so ... callous. He’d done it for her, dammit! “You were a lot more to me than just—”
“It’s not important now,” she told him, and the chilly finality in her tone infuriated him even more. “I have a life of my own now, and it doesn’t include you. That was your choice, remember?” And before he could come up with a response, she slipped the car into gear and started forward, forcing him to remove his hand or lose his balance and be dragged along with the vehicle as she drove away from the church without a backward glance.
His youngest sister Teresa was calling his name, and slowly, taking deep, calming breaths, he turned toward her, reaching for a smile though what he really wanted to do was punch something. Hard.
Okay, fine. Sophie didn’t want to go out with him. He could work around that, and he would. He’d figure out another way to get her to accept his presence in her life. She didn’t remember much about him if she thought he was going to give up and go away so easily.
Three
The knock on the door of her apartment startled Sophie.
She was sitting on the floor of her extra bedroom with a year’s worth of photographs spread around her. She always had taken lots of photographs, too many, really, because then she felt compelled to organize them in albums. So she’d spent the evening sorting them into piles of family, friends and work photos, and she was just about to begin the unenviable task of sliding them into sleeves in the appropriate albums when a hard rap at her door had her jerking her head up and pressing a hand to her heart.
Hastily, she rose to her feet and tiptoed through the piles of pictures. It was eight o’clock at night. Who could it be?
She’d had Sunday lunch with her family after church and spent a pleasant hour with the members of her big clan that were present, but around two she’d made her excuses and slipped out, feeling the need for some breathing room.
Maybe she’d forgotten something, she thought, as she put her hand on the knob and pulled the door the small distance it would open with the chain on. Or more likely, Mama had dispatched someone to drop off more food. Like she hadn’t already sent enough—
“Hello, Sophie.”
Marco was standing on her doormat. He was smiling, a crooked grin that reminded her of a little boy who’d been caught red-handed in an act of orneriness. But this was no little boy. He wore a light blue jean shirt tucked into a darker pair of jeans. The shirt emphasized the width of his shoulders, and at its open neck, dark, silky hairs curled out of the vee where the buttons weren’t fastened.
The bottom dropped out of her stomach and landed with a jarring thud deep in her abdomen. Speech deserted her, and she simply stood there staring, trying desperately to keep her eyes on his face and not examine the rest of him the way she had longed to since she’d heard he was home.
“Are you going to invite me in?” His voice was low and amused, and she felt herself flush. He probably knew exactly the effect he had on her. He certainly had at one time.
That thought stiffened her spine, and she cleared her throat. She unbolted the door and pulled it open, but she didn’t move aside to invite him in. “Marco. What are you doing here?”
He smiled again, easily, dimples creasing his cheeks, and a tiny fanwork of lines crinkled the corners of his dark eyes. “Visiting you.”
“I don’t want a visitor,” she said, too shaken to be diplomatic. “Go away.”
But before she could close the door in his face, he’d wedged his broad shoulders against it and pushed inside.
Her pulse sped up and she told herself the only reason she was breathing faster was because she was annoyed. But that didn’t explain the heat building in her belly and radiating down to warm the apex of her thighs.
If only he didn’t look so good, she thought, he’d be easier to resist. The fabric of his shirt looked soft and often washed; it clung to his heavily muscled chest and arms as intimately as she once had. At his lean waist, the jeans were buttoned beneath a dark leather belt. They fit him through the hips, snug and molded to the contours of his body in a manner that reminded her he was all man, and she swallowed as she hastily averted her eyes.
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