it’s inevitable a man’s mind goes certain places when a woman slips down her dress like you just did.”
“No need to apologize. I’m not completely without my wiles.” She fluttered her lashes. “But let’s do the energy experiment first. Place the quartz here.” She tapped her chest between her breasts.
So, with as much fortitude as he could muster—but really, it didn’t require anything more than that lash-fluttering invite—Dane pressed the stone against Eryss’s chest. His fingers brushed her warm, supple breast, and he sucked in a breath to imagine stroking his tongue along the skin. Tasting her. He met her gaze and, while she wasn’t smiling, he felt the acceptance and smile in her eyes. He relaxed—and the sudden shock of an electrical charge forced his fingers from the stone.
Eryss caught the rose quartz in a palm.
“What the—” Dane touched his fingertips together. Grabbing the stone from Eryss, he turned it over, checking for compromise. “Felt like I’d touched an electric fence. A weak one, but...”
“That was the energy of the crystal aligning with my chakra. It felt great, you holding it against my skin.” She took the stone from him and replaced it in the copper bowl. “But I suspect, given the proper amount of time, you’ll find a way to refute what you’ve just experienced.”
He wouldn’t refute the experience. Because he had felt the energy. But...how? Okay, sure, if he went deep he knew there were scientific claims that stones and trees and even flowers carried measurable energy. A particle detector could pick up radiation from stone. He’d verified as such many times in the lab. But never by merely placing a rock to a woman’s chest.
“Dane?”
“Good trick. We should change the subject,” he suggested. Because while he welcomed a good debate, he wasn’t stupid. Arguing semantics about make-believe magical stuff would never get him the girl.
“Yes, we should,” she agreed. “A new topic. How about we discuss your distraction.”
“My distraction?”
“You and that fourteen-year-old boy haven’t stopped staring at my boobs since you sat down to eat.”
“Ahem.” He rubbed his jaw. “I confess, the view is distracting. Man, do I sound like a creep.”
“I don’t mind your distraction.” She tickled the lace framing her décolletage. “I did put on a low-cut dress for a reason.”
“It’s working. From the pine nuts in the pesto to the soft music and candles, I am feeling the seduction.”
“Excellent. I have more candles lit in the conservatory. Let’s move out to summer, shall we?”
“What about the dishes?” Dane gathered up the plates and silverware. “I’ll rinse them quickly for you, and I see you have a dishwasher.”
“A man who insists on doing dishes? Now you’re seducing me. I’ll meet you out among the wild!” she called, and her pink skirt swept the air with her exit.
Dane made quick work of the dishes, a skill his mother had taught him. He could never leave a table now without cleaning up. He wiped off the butcher-block table, grabbed his glass of water, considered it, then checked the fridge. There was a bottle of corked wine, three quarters full. He pulled it out, selected two goblets sitting next to a blue calcite crystal from a shelf, and...he walked over to the table and picked up the rose quartz from the bowl.
Turning it over and inspecting it carefully revealed the many beautiful striations and cracks. It was cold to the touch but warmed in his palm. He knew nothing about chakras, but was aware the woo-woo folks had assigned seven chakra points to the body and each were color-coded and meant various things regarding health and welfare. A bunch of hoodoo nonsense.
And yet, he had been physically repulsed from holding the quartz.
“Interesting,” he muttered, and set the rock down on the table.
* * *
While Dane was putting away the dishes, Eryss lit the emerald candelabra and turned off the main light. The conservatory glowed softly and smelled like the newly bloomed freesia, her favorite flower when it came to fragrance. It flooded the room with a heady perfume.
When he wandered in, barefoot, she smiled. She’d like to see him in a wet suit peeled down to his hips, revealing abs and, she suspected, a hairy chest, for tufts of dark hair peeked out the top of his white shirt.
He poured two goblets of wine—good man for taking the initiative of bringing in the wine—and handed her one. He sat on the couch and stretched his feet over the grass.
“You know, I’m a bit of a scientist myself,” Eryss confessed. She sat beside him and sipped the wine. “Formulating the beer recipes takes math skills, knowledge of yeasts and bacteria, and boiling points and the gravity of sugar. One miscalculation of time and temperature during the boil and I’ve got something so bitter even the triple IPA aficionados will spit it out.”
“Sounds complicated. I’ll stick with drinking the finished product.”
“And you,” she said. “You are more connected to nature than you want to believe.”
“Oh, I do believe in that connection. Electric rocks aside. Surfing is more about knowing the water and myself than any logical reasoning. Though math is involved when calculating a point break or peak. Okay, we connect in the middle ground. And I’ll give you the rose quartz adventure. I do know some scientific research has been done on crystals and their energy. But I’m still going to pass on the tarot reading.”
“Fair enough.”
“I think we should focus on the intentions we both presumably have for this night.”
“Intentions?”
Dane took her glass and set it in the grass and then leaned in to kiss her. He tasted like wine and pesto. He slipped his fingers through her hair, then kissed her cheek and down to the base of her earlobe, where she could feel his pulse against hers.
“Life. Energy. Atoms,” he whispered.
“Don’t think like a scientist, Dane. Respond with your body, not your brain.”
“I thought that’s what I was doing.”
He slipped the sleeve from her shoulder and kissed her there with a soft moan that mined a deep and animal part of her. Eryss tilted back her head and wrapped her legs about his hips, pulling him down onto her. His hot mouth landed on the upper curve of her breast, and his fingers carefully pulled back the velvet to expose more and more of her breast without quite going to the nipple. He lingered on her skin, tracing it with his tongue as if designing runes. She felt it all the way to her toes and back up to her pussy, which was already warm and wet for him.
After unbuttoning his tweed vest, she slid her hands up under the crisp white shirt beneath, her fingers gliding through the dark hairs and around his rib cage, which was strapped with tight muscle.
“For a science nerd,” she said against his mouth, “you’re ripped.”
“It’s the surfing. I can’t
