Georgia I used to know would never have made such a remarkable recovery from grief that she’d be ready to marry someone else so soon.”
“Recovery?” Her voice cracked with emotion and she felt the tears pricking behind her eyes despite her most stringent effort to keep them in check.“I fell apart almost literally! I didn’t sleep for weeks, didn’t want to eat or go out of the apartment. I wished I had died with you, Adam, because I’d lost everything that truly mattered to me.”
More, in fact, than you can begin to guess!
She squeezed her eyes shut, even though doing so meant the tears escaped and drizzled down her face.“I felt guilty. And angry. And alone.”
“You don’t know the first thing about being alone. You had your family.”
“Who were no help at all. My mother could scarcely contain her relief at being spared having you for a sonin-law.” Georgia swiped at the tears with the back of her hand, angry and appalled at the ease with which the misery was finding chinks in her armor.
Adam leaned over, plucked a tissue from the box on the corner of her desk, and passed it to her.“But your father must have cared. He was never mean-spirited like that.”
“He was sympathetic but…”
“Too henpecked to dare take a stand.” Adam nodded.“Yeah, I’d forgotten how thoroughly your mother and sister keep poor old Arthur in line.”
“Precisely.” She drew in a deep breath and managed to get herself under control again.“And that’s when I found out what a real friend Steven was.”
“Well, good old Steven,” Adam jeered softly.
“He saved my life,” Georgia shot back, declining to mention that it was thanks to Steven that she hadn’t hemorrhaged to death when she’d miscarried Adam’s baby in the kitchen of her apartment.“If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know how I would have gone on. I felt responsible for what had happened to you.”
“Rubbish!” Adam scoffed.“The prototype’s malfunction had nothing at all to do with you.”
“But I didn’t know that. I nursed the idea that you’d been too preoccupied over our disagreement to pay proper attention to what you were doing. The guilt festered, made more complicated by the reaction of everyone I met. Pity is a corrosive thing when it’s flung in your face every time you turn around. Steven saved my sanity.”
“So what are you telling me?” Adam wanted to know.“That you’re marrying him out of gratitude? That it’s no great love affair?”
They were the same questions that had kept her awake most of last night.“It’s not quite that simple,” she wailed.
“It is to me,” Adam said bluntly.“When a man finds himself staring death in the face, things become very simple. It’s a case of fight or go under. So do you love Steven, or don’t you?”
“Of course I love him!”
“Well, that’s one of the things I came back to find out. Now that I know, I guess you and I have nothing more to say to each other.” He rose and zipped up his jacket.“Have a happy life, Georgia,” he said, and turned away.
Eyes suddenly swimming again, she watched as he covered the distance to the front doors. Sometimes, it seemed that was what she remembered most vividly of all their times together: her watching as he walked away from her. And every time, it broke her heart all over again.
Let him go! the voice of sanity begged. Do it just one more time and you’ll never have to do it again.
Yes, she thought.
And promptly accused, in a woebegone little voice, “That’s what you did after we broke up, too. Just turned and walked away without even kissing me goodbye.”
HE STOPPED and turned back to face her. He looked at her long and thoughtfuly then, as he retraced his steps, said with ominous intent, “Did I really? Well, that’s one mistake I certainly don’t have to repeat.”
Georgia’s heart flapped around behind her ribs like a chicken trying to save its neck from the hatchet but Adam didn’t care. He just kept moving until he loomed no more than twelve inches from where she stood rooted to the plush blue carpet under her feet.
Trapped by the desk behind her and the reckless words she’d flung at him, she did the only thing she could without losing what was left of her pride. She tilted her head to one side and with regal condescension, offered him her cheek.
“Oh, no,” he murmured, capturing her face in cool fingers and turning it back toward him and bending his head to hers.“Not like that at all. Like this.”
As soon as he touched her, she fell apart. A soft roaring filled her mind, dimming her hearing and clouding her vision. Her legs buckled, sending her reeling into him for support. She grabbed at him blindly, intending only to anchor herself upright, and instead found herself smoothing her hands over his face in tactile renewal of its beauty.
His mouth lowered. She felt the warm drift of his breath against her lips. And then, in excruciating slow motion, he kissed her.
It wasn’t aggressive, as kisses between a man and a woman often were. There was no audacity, no thrusting invasion of privacy. He simply settled his lips on hers and let them rest there. Yet, for all that, it was a lover’s kiss, delicately, temptingly erotic. A hothouse flower on the brink of bursting into fragrant bloom—or more accurately, an echo so painfully sweet of a splendor she’d once known that she couldn’t bear to let it end.
She pressed herself to him, winding her arms around his neck and softening her mouth in acquiescence. A murmur escaped her—a plea for just a little more, just a little longer—soft enough that only he could hear it, yet able to deafen completely all those parts of her brain that were trying so hard to scream out a warning.
The hopeless, helpless longings she’d stored away, having found a crack through which to escape, took full advantage but she was too enthralled to notice. All she cared about was that Adam responded to her overtures by sliding his arms tightly around her and directing the seductive finesse he’d always employed so well to a different turn, one no longer defined by propriety.
His mouth grew bold, investigative, cajoling. As if she weren’t willing enough to surrender to its assault! He tested her lips, tasted them and, when they opened to him, accepted the implicit surrender they offered.
At least, she thought he did. Was so convinced, in fact, that it took a while for her to comprehend that he was declining after all. Not that he was so ungallant as to shove her away and remind her that she was supposed to be engaged to another man. He merely ended things. Slowly, regretfully even, but quite firmly, leaving her no choice but to abide by his refusal.
“Will that suffice?” he asked.
She wrapped her arms around her waist as the cool aftermath of his rejection infiltrated every pore of her skin to lay an icy wreath around her heart. Drawing in a great shuddering breath, she managed to nod.“Yes,” she said.
