“Do you kiss all your friends with the passion you used to kiss me?”
The memory of their passion—the wild, steaming passion that had flared between them every time they’d looked at each other, every time they’d touched, and especially when they’d kissed—brought a remembered heat to her body. She seized on anger to douse it.
“How dare you throw my adolescent mistakes back at me, today of all days! And it was only a few kisses. You make it sound as if it were a grand passion.” Damn it, it was once…to her. It could have been—if he’d been less like her father, if he’d been able to resist the temptations her father had succumbed to. She could still see the elated look in Mack’s eyes the night he’d come home from the casino rolling in money and reeking of whiskey. She blinked the bitter memory away.
Something shimmered in Mack’s dark eyes, but he said nothing, moving to a corner cabinet to extract a half-empty bottle of Scotch and two glasses. Suzie compressed her lips. So he still drank whiskey!
He poured some into both glasses and handed her one. “Here, sip this while I fetch you something to change into. I don’t possess a dressing gown, but I might have a tracksuit that’ll do. You’d better have a hot shower and get out of that wet garb before you get pneumonia.”
He strode from the room before she could argue.
She took a gulp of her whiskey and coughed. She hated whiskey and rarely touched it, remembering what alcohol had done to her father. And Mack could end up the same way, if he kept on drinking. But this, she told herself, was medicinal! She took another more determined gulp, taking comfort from the hot spirit as it coursed a fiery path down her throat.
Mack came back as she was about to take another reviving sip. He hadn’t wasted time changing and was still wearing his wet T-shirt and black leather pants.
“Here. This will have to do.” He handed her a gray tracksuit. “It has a drawstring waist, so you should be able to keep the pants up.”
She had a strange sense of déjà vu. Mack had been wearing a similar gray tracksuit—maybe even this one—the day she’d first met him. Like most things about Mack, their meeting had been dramatic and unconventional.
Her boss had sent her to a house in Mack’s street to deliver a new outfit to a client. She’d borrowed one of the company cars, which she wasn’t familiar with. Worse, it was a manual, not an automatic. As she was about to drive off after making the delivery, she’d reversed the car by mistake and had collided with Mack as he careered out of his front gate on his Harley—far too fast to stop in time, and looking in the opposite direction.
It was only a glancing blow, but Mack had come off his bike and crashed to the pavement. She’d jumped out of the car and rushed to him, her heart in her mouth, horrified to see blood all over his face. It was only a nosebleed, she’d discovered, but at first glance it had looked far worse. She’d insisted on taking him inside his house to tend to his wounds.
He’d been more apologetic than she had, berating himself for not wearing a protective helmet. He’d only been planning to ride up his street and back, he’d told her ruefully, to test some work he’d just done on his bike.
He’d been lucky. Very lucky.
So had she. Her stupid mistake could have killed him!
“Suzie?” Mack’s voice penetrated her musings, and she realized he’d just said something to her.
“Oh, sorry. What did you say?”
“I just said, you know where the bathroom is.” His dark eyes seemed to swallow her up, as if he were remembering their first meeting, too.
He turned away to pick up the glass of whiskey he’d poured for himself, tossing the contents down at a gulp, bringing a frown to her brow as the devil-may-care action reminded her of her father’s reckless drinking.
“I’ll change while you’re showering, Suzie,” he said as he led the way, “and then I’ll make us some coffee.”
She opened her mouth to tell him not to bother about coffee, that she wouldn’t be here long enough, but she snapped her mouth shut again. Where would she go? She couldn’t go home yet—her mother could be home by now, and she didn’t want to face her mother again tonight. She didn’t feel up to fielding questions or dealing with sympathy.
Mack certainly wouldn’t be offering her any sympathy.
He didn’t. His first words, after they’d settled into armchairs in the front room—she noted he’d removed the newspapers and magazines while she was in the shower—were, “What were you thinking of, Suzie, getting mixed up with a pampered pussycat like Tristan Guthrie? The jerk has no conscience and no backbone—obviously. And he’s never worked for anything in his life, as you must know—he inherited his money and his business success. He didn’t have to lift a finger.”
His voice dropped to a husky drawl. “As for passion—I don’t think he’d know the word, would he?”
As her breath caught, he leaned forward in his chair, his coffee mug cradled in his hands. He’d changed into faded blue jeans and a black polo shirt, which made him look marginally less tough than his black leather gear, while just as disturbingly masculine. But what he was saying was even more disturbing. She didn’t want to talk about passion!
“You must realize what an escape you’ve had, Suzie. Tristan Guthrie would have bored you to death. He’s far too weak and wishy-washy for a passionate—” he paused as Suzie’s eyes flew to his, sparking with hot blue fire. “—sorry…for an independent, strong-minded woman like you,” he amended.
“Is that why you checked up on him?” she snapped. “Because you thought he wasn’t right for me and you hoped you’d find some embarrassing skeleton in his closet?”
He didn’t deny it. “He struck me as too smooth, too smug, too picture-perfect. He didn’t ring true. I decided to dig around a bit and find out more about him.”
“You must have dug really hard…and deep…and low.” Her eyes told him just how low she thought him, for thinking of delving into her fiancé’s past in the first place—rightly or wrongly. Who did he think he was? Her keeper?
“I did. I checked records, spoke to people and finally found one of his fellow university students from ten years ago who mentioned this foreign woman he was with for a while. I delved a bit deeper and picked up rumors of overseas students marrying secretly to stay in the country. I thought it was worth following up. I examined marriage records, and bingo! Tristan Guthrie, large as life. But there was no record of any divorce.”
He settled back in his armchair with a satisfied smirk. Then, as if the whole sordid scandal was now explained, dealt with and behind them, he commented easily, “I’m glad to see you looking yourself again, Suzie. The curls, the natural face. You don’t need all that artifice and makeup. You’re beautiful without it. And I must say you look very fetching in my track-suit.”
Did she realize, he wondered, that it was the same tracksuit he’d been wearing when she’d knocked him off his bike on the day they first met? Not just off his bike—she’d knocked him off his entire axis. Through a whirl of stars, he’d found himself drowning in the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, eyes full of anxiety and compassion—for him. And when she’d opened her mouth to speak, his bedazzled
