and involuntarily Sean’s smile grew broader. “Gosh, guess you’ll have time, after all, won’t you?” he asked.
“Uh,” she replied eloquently. “I, um… Actually, I… That is, I need to… Ah…”
“Excellent,” he said. “I know just the place.”
Before she could object, he reached across the table to curl his fingers gently around her upper arm, silently urging her body—if not her spirit—toward the space between two tables that obviously served as an entry to the booth. Autumn stammered a few more half-formed—and, he was certain, halfhearted—protests, but Sean easily disregarded and dismissed each one. He kept talking until the two of them were a solid twenty or thirty yards from the booth, then, still not convinced he had her completely in his thrall—go figure—he looped his arm through hers and pulled her closer still. And all the while, Autumn seemed to be too flummoxed to do anything but follow him wherever he might lead her.
Now if he could just keep her flummoxed for two lunar months, Sean thought, he would make Finn eat his dare.
Unfortunately for Sean, though, by the time he’d picked up two box lunches for them at the Rotarians’ booth, snagged a couple of lemonades from the Girl Scouts’ booth, and reached the fountain at the heart of Gardencourt Park—the nauseatingly romantic one that looked like an urn full of flowers spewing water all over a bunch of buck-naked cupids—Autumn was becoming decidedly less flummoxed. And damned if she didn’t dig in her heels and tug her arm free of his, just as he deposited their lunches and lemonades on a two-seater wrought-iron bench that sat near a privacy-providing sweep of wisteria tumbling completely uninhibited—and almost blindingly purple—from a fat hedge behind it.
“Mr. Monahan,” she began a bit breathlessly.
“Sean,” he hastily corrected her, reaching out to wrap his fingers lightly around her wrist once more.
“Mr. Monahan,” she repeatedly adamantly. She deftly maneuvered her arm to her side before he could grasp it, curled both fists ineffectually—and really rather adorably, Sean thought—at her sides and frowned. “I’m afraid I can’t accommodate your request right now. I have other things I should be doing besides eating lunch.”
“Sean,” he corrected her again. “I’m Sean. If you keep calling me ‘Mr. Monahan,’ you’re going to have me and all four of my brothers heeding your beck and call.”
The possibility of such a development seemed to make her feel queasy for some reason. “Oh, dear,” she murmured. But she said nothing more to enlighten him about her state of uneasiness, just looked a little pale and distressed.
Sean found her reaction odd. There were plenty of women in Marigold who would jump at the chance to have the interest—romantic or otherwise—of the Monahan brothers, in just about any number or combination. Autumn Pulaski, however, evidently considered such attention to be a fate worse than death.
“Sean,” he said for a third time, feeling frustrated for no reason he could name. “Call me Sean. Please.”
He couldn’t imagine why, but he really, really wanted to hear her say his name out loud. Maybe it was because she had one of those husky, breathy voices, the kind most men only heard when they were sitting in a dark movie theater listening to Kathleen Turner or Demi Moore or Debra Winger in Dolby stereo. The kind of voice that made even the simplest statement sound like an intimate suggestion, somehow, and turned a man’s name into a sensual promise.
When Autumn opened her mouth to speak, Sean braced himself for the sexual awakening he was sure would follow. But instead of uttering his name in that deep, smooth, languid way, she said, “I really should get back to the booth.”
“Why?” he asked. “Your employees looked more than capable of handling the crowd—which, incidentally, is thinning as we speak, because the lunch hour is drawing to a close—and it doesn’t sound like you’ve had lunch yet yourself.”
“I’ve been snacking all morning,” she assured him. “It’s one of the perks of the job. With all those snacks, I don’t need any lunch.”
He threw her his most salacious smile, dropped his eyelids to half-mast and adopted what he’d been told more than once was a very sexy demeanor. Mostly this involved hooking both hands on his hips, shifting his weight to one foot, flexing his pecs and biceps and tossing his head back with just a touch of arrogance. Okay, so that last part was more because his hair was in his eyes and in need of a trim, but it still went a long way toward completing the sexy demeanor thing—Sean was sure of it.
“Snacking,” he then began coyly, “is not the same thing as lunching, Autumn. When one snacks, one never completely satisfies one’s…hunger, does one, even if one snacks frequently? I mean, a little nibble here, a little nibble there… It’s never quite enough, is it?”
He took a single, leisurely step forward, bringing his body to within inches of hers. But he didn’t touch her, didn’t so much as reach for her, only continued to keep her gaze pinned with his own. And my, what a warm gaze hers was, too, he noted. There was no question that he had her full attention.
“Oh, sure,” he continued softly, growing a little warmer himself as he watched her, “snacks can be more…provocative. More…arousing. You get variety. You get a little taste of something exotic, something you might not normally…have. And there’s just something so tempestuous about the haste and the immediacy and the secrecy of a snack, isn’t there?” he added, dropping his voice to a level only she would be able to hear. “Snacks can be very titillating, Autumn, because they’re somehow more forbidden.
“But lunch,” he continued, wrapping his voice around the word in the same smooth way he curled his fingers loosely around her wrist to pull her body closer still, “is much more fulfilling. It requires greater commitment, greater attention to detail.”
He tugged her gently forward, until her body was flush with his, and waited for her to protest. But instead of protesting, she only opened one hand over his chest, splaying her fingers over his heart. And Sean could see by the way the pulse at the base of her throat leaped at the contact that her own heartbeat was every bit as rapid, as ragged, as his own.
“One takes one’s time with lunch,” he told her even more softly, his voice a scant whisper now. “Lunch is so much more satisfying. There are so many ways to enjoy it, and there’s so much to consume.” He dipped his head to very lightly nuzzle her temple, reveling in the little gasp of shock—and dare he say delight?—that escaped her at the contact. “You have to go slowly with lunch, Autumn,” he continued, his mouth right beside her ear now. “You have to be more thorough, taste everything you have on your plate. And you know, done correctly, lunch is infinitely more…pleasurable…than snacking.”
As much as he wanted to duck his head more and drag his open mouth along the elegant curve of her neck, somehow Sean found the strength to draw himself away. He didn’t go far, however, and he dropped one hand to the graceful curve of her hip. Again he prepared himself to be rebuffed, but Autumn offered no reaction one way or the other. When he’d pulled back far enough to gaze at her face, he saw that she was studying him with great preoccupation, even though he’d finished his dissertation on the different manners of…satisfying oneself.
Strangely enough, though, her attention seemed to be focused almost entirely on his mouth. A tremor of something hot and volatile shook him when he realized it, then nearly exploded when he saw how her pupils had grown larger, her cheeks more rosy, and how her lips had parted softly, as if she wasn’t—quite—getting enough breath.
She
