door open.
Holy cow. He was even bigger without the distortion of the fish-eye, she saw when she glimpsed the man in person. And now he really didn’t seem like someone who would be delivering groceries for a living. Once she got a better look at his face, Avery decided he was more the kind of guy whose job would involve being onstage somewhere—probably stripping down to his altogether while hundreds of screaming, frantic women stuffed their grocery money into his G-string. He was staggeringly handsome, from his finely wrought mouth to his ruggedly chiseled cheekbones to his aristocratic nose to his oh-my-God eyes.
But somehow Avery suspected the harshness of his features belied good breeding, since she had more than a nodding acquaintance with that—both good breeding and harshness. In spite of his tattered attire, he held himself as if he were someone who knew the rules and regulations of proper dress—he just chose not to abide by them. There was a strange mixture of majesty and menace about him, as if he would have been equally comfortable wielding a martini at a high-society function or breaking someone’s knuckles as an enforcer for the mob.
It was his eyes, though, that she found most unsettling. An icy, almost opaque green, they made her think of the deepest part of the ocean—where swam the most mysterious, dangerous creatures—frozen over. Instead of repelling her, however, the look in his eyes made her want to draw closer to him. But it wasn’t just his good looks that generated such a response in her. It simply had been so long since Avery had experienced the simple pleasure of being close to a man physically. Especially one who looked like him.
“Where do you want these?” he asked without preamble.
Automatically she jutted a thumb over her shoulder. “In the kitchen. Please,” she added as an afterthought, nearly forgetting the good manners that had been hammered into her during her years of after-school etiquette and deportment classes at Madame Yvette’s School for Genteel Young Ladies in East Hampton. “Thanks,” she added with some distraction. Wow. His eyes really were amazing. And the overly long black hair spilling out from beneath the driving cap he’d turned backward on his head only made their color seem that much lighter…and that much darker, too.
But the guy didn’t follow her instructions, only stood on the other side of the door gazing back at her. Incisively enough that she began to feel disconcerted, a feeling she really hated. In fact, it had been years since she had felt disconcerted, and she’d almost convinced herself she was incapable of feeling that anymore. Along with discomfort and shame and humiliation and all those other things that had once been her constant companions. The realization that this man, simply by showing up at her front door, could rouse even one of them—and so quickly, too, damn him—bothered her a lot.
She was about to snap another order at him when he inclined his head forward and said, “Do you mind?”
“Mind what?” she asked.
“Uh, stepping aside?” he told her. “So I can get through.”
Only then did Avery realize that he hadn’t come forward because she was blocking his way by standing there stupidly ogling him. Gee, had she felt disconcerted before? That was nothing compared to the mortification she felt now. Especially since she was leering at him again, thanks to the velvety pitch of his voice, a sound that skimmed over her like rough-calloused fingertips on naked flesh.
Oh, yeah. She’d definitely gone too long without physical closeness to the opposite sex if she was thinking a man’s request for her to step aside was the equivalent of foreplay. Good foreplay, at that.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she apologized, moving to the side. “I…You’ll have to excuse me. I was working. My mind is still elsewhere.” Like on how the sound of your voice was making me orgasmic. “The kitchen is through there,” she added, pointing in that direction.
He sauntered past her, and she pushed the front door closed before following. As nice as his front side had been, Avery had to admit that the view from the rear—especially of his rear—was almost nicer. The faded jeans hugged his taut buttocks as snugly as Saran wrap—would that they were as transparent, too—swathing his lean thighs and calves. The leather of his jacket was cracked white in enough places to give it character, his shoulders broad and strong and hard-looking beneath it.
She bit back an involuntary sigh. She’d always loved a man’s back more than any other feature, liked how the muscles there were dense and plentiful and elegant and how the skin was smooth and warm and fine. She could have been perfectly content for days lying next to a naked man doing little more than running her open palm over his back. This man’s naked back, she was certain, would be spectacular.
When they entered her kitchen, she marveled at how much the room seemed to shrink with his presence. Funny, but she’d always considered the room to be larger than what most apartments in the city claimed. Unfortunately it was also messier than most apartments in the city, cluttered with empty cereal boxes and crumbled pretzel and potato-chip bags and dirty dishes that she hadn’t gotten around to putting into the dishwasher. Mostly because she hadn’t taken the clean dishes out.
Well, she’d been busy. Working. She had lots of work to do these days. Not to mention she was inherently lazy. In any event, there wasn’t even enough clear counter space for him to set down the groceries, so she muttered another apology and waved him toward the door that led to the dining room.
“Just put them on the table in there,” she said as she watched him head that way.
Where, she recalled belatedly, she had been working on Andrew’s gift, which was still sitting out in the open, where anybody could see it and get her into big, big trouble.
She started to call him back, then decided that if he was delivering groceries for a living, there was little chance he’d recognize what she was putting together on her laptop. So she let him go, crossing her arms over her midsection as she waited for him to return.
And waited. And waited. And waited.
Finally Avery took a few steps toward the other door and called out, “Is there something wrong?”
When she heard what sounded like the shuffling of paper, she bolted toward the dining room in a panic. She halted at the door, however, when she saw the delivery guy down on all fours, scooping up a sheaf of papers that he’d evidently spilled to the floor when he’d set the groceries down on the table.
“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” he said as he tried to straighten one piece of paper on top of another. “I knocked this stuff off when I set down one of the sacks. I hope I didn’t mess up anything you were working on.”
Only when her heart stopped slamming against her rib cage did Avery realize just how hard it had been pounding. Enough to make her light-headed. Though, truth be told, that might have been due to the fact that the delivery guy’s adorable butt was facing her, and bent over the way he was, she had an almost uncontrollable urge to go over there and sink her teeth into it.
Hoo-boy, she had to get out and meet some flesh-and-blood men. Though that might be a little difficult, since she was overcome with terror every time she even stepped out into the hallway. As it was, she tipped Billy the doorman to bring her mail up to her every day.
She gave herself a minute to calm down, then joined the delivery guy on the floor, gathering the papers closest to her. “Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “I was finished with that pile.”
It became clearer to Avery why he was working in the job he was as he tried to help her clean up. For every piece of paper she collected, he seemed to lose three, and although he tried to
