Instead she watched him with great luminous eyes, and he saw her lips slowly part.
Apprehension shivered through his insides. He took another step…and another. Only a foot or so separated them now. And then she did move, but not away from him. Instead, she lifted one soft, scented hand and laid it alongside his jaw, a touch as cool and light as a flower. His heart began to pound.
“Leila—” With no spit at all in his mouth, it was all the sound he could manage.
She didn’t say a word, just touched one petal-like finger to his lips and shook her head. For a long and terrifying moment she looked deeply into his eyes, and he no longer felt the least bit logical or wise. Then she stretched way up on her tiptoes and kissed him.
His heart and stomach performed impossible acrobatic maneuvers and shimmers of panic danced behind his closed eyelids. His confidence had already evaporated. He snatched at a breath that seared the inside of his chest while every impulse and desire in him pleaded with him to give in…to kiss her back and then some. To carry her to his bed and make love to her for what was left of tonight and let tomorrow and the rest of his future—and hers—take care of themselves.
He might have done it. He wasn’t sure what would have happened, in fact, if he’d had both hands free. As it was, while one hand, already tingling with anticipation of the feel of her, hovered indecisively inches from her shoulder, his other hand, filled with the small leather case that held his toiletries, made a lump, a slight but significant barrier between his chest and hers. One she couldn’t ignore.
She drew back, one of her hands still resting on his shoulder, and looked down at it. After a long moment, her eyes came back to his. “I do not understand,” she said in a husky voice. “These are your personal things. Why do you need them? Where are you taking them? Now…tonight?”
The air seemed to back up in Cade’s chest. His tongue felt thick as he tried to explain. “I…uh, I thought I’d, you know, sleep in the guestroom—it’s just across the hall…” Why did he feel like an inept thief trying to explain the goodies in his sack, an unprepared schoolboy without his homework?
“But, this is your bedcham—bedroom.” She wasn’t touching him at all, now, but somehow he knew she was trembling. “Betsy told me. If you do not wish me—” She broke off suddenly, as if she’d been choked, and swallowed hard several times. Then he saw her body stiffen and her chin lift, and his own heart sank. With her face now pale and frozen as a statue, she said in a proud and quiet voice he’d never heard before, “If you do not wish me to sleep here with you in your bedroom, then you must tell me. It is I who should move to the guestroom, not you.”
“It’s only for tonight,” he heard himself say, as his free hand doublecrossed him by lifting to her cheek. He felt himself brushing it with the backs of his fingers, and it was hot and smooth, like the skin of a ripe peach. What the hell was he doing? And why had he ever imagined this would be easy?
“We are both so tired,” he gently explained, “and I’m pretty sure if we share a bed tonight, neither of us will get any sleep. There’ll be other nights….” Was it a lie? He didn’t even know for sure. And if it was, why did it come so easily to him? He wasn’t—or never had been—a dishonest man. “We’ll have plenty of time. When I get back. Tonight…you just rest, okay?” He ducked his head and touched his lips to her forehead. He’d never felt so confused and ashamed of himself. “Get some sleep,” he said huskily, and walked away and left her there.
Leila woke up in a very large bed and for a moment could not think where she was. She felt sweaty and her heart pounded the way it had sometimes done when she was a very little girl, waking from a nightmare she could not remember.
But she was not a little girl, and there was no Salma to stroke her hair and kiss her cheek and tell her everything was all right. And besides, she remembered it all, now. She was in Texas, in America, and the wife of a man named Cade Gallagher, whom she did not know. And did not understand at all!
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