we take a few minutes?” Matt called to Dan.
“Not right now,” Dan’s bored voice intoned. “Work on it at home. We’ve got to move on.”
“I couldn’t get into character tonight,” Maggie said in the car on the way home from rehearsal. “What’s wrong with me?”
Matt glanced at her. Her expression in the dim reflection from the dashboard light was woeful. She was stuck inside of her own head, that’s what was wrong.
He spun the steering wheel hard to the right, pulling into a side street. Maneuvering the car to the side of the road, he cut the engines and the lights, and they were plunged into total darkness.
“Matt—”
He grabbed her and kissed her.
“There,” he said as he let her go. God, he didn’t want to let her go. But that was probably why she was freaking out about kissing him in the first place. “That’s how long those eight bars of music are. That wasn’t so terrible was it?”
“No,” she said faintly.
“Good,” he said as matter-of-factly as he could manage. He started the car and did a one-eighty to get them back to the main road, glad that the car was too dark for her to see his face, because his eyes surely would have betrayed him.
Ten
Maggie read another selection from the endless pile of business reports as she ate a bowl of oatmeal. Matt sat across from her with a giant bowl of fruit.
She glanced up at him, and he smiled.
“Don’t you ever eat anything but fruit for breakfast?” she asked.
Matt laughed. “Wow, we wouldn’t do too well on the Newlywed Game, would we? No. The only thing I eat before noon is fruit.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes me feel healthier.”
Maggie gazed across the table at him, wishing he’d tell her why he’d been in the hospital three years ago. But whenever she brought the topic of conversation even vaguely in that direction, he changed the subject. Like right now.
“Speaking of newlyweds, your mother left a message on the answering machine. She wants us to come for Sunday dinner sometime next month. Talk about advance notice—I guess she figures this way we can’t make up an excuse.”
Maggie sighed.
“Also, we’ve got a rehearsal tonight,” he added.
She nodded. Great.
“We’re doing a run-through of the first four scenes,” he reminded her.
She nodded again, focusing her attention on her oatmeal.
He didn’t get the message. “You know that means we’ve got to go in there and do that kiss from the opening scene.”
The kiss. Oh, God.
“We should practice it,” Matt said. “Don’t you think?”
Maggie took a deep breath. “Yeah. We should. How about after lunch?”
“How about now?”
She looked at him, looked at the clock. Stevie was due to arrive in about fifteen minutes. “Okay.” Somehow that made her feel safe.
Safer.
She stood up and headed toward the stairs.
Matt followed. “Where are you going?”
“To brush my teeth.”
He caught her arm, pulled her in to him, and kissed her. His mouth tasted sweet, like watermelon and bananas with a hint of peaches thrown in.
“Yum,” he said. “Brown sugar is definitely better than mint at this time of day.”
Maggie’s insides were doing flip-flops. He hadn’t touched her since that kiss in his car after last week’s disastrous rehearsal. She’d thought she was getting over him—or at least used to him. But if all it took was one little nothing kiss to make her knees feel weak, she was in big trouble.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” Matt told her. He maneuvered her around as he spoke, going through it in slow motion, putting her into the right position for the best angle for the kiss. She tried to pay attention, but couldn’t. “Lucy is really nuts about this guy, despite everything she says. We should show that right from the start.”
As Maggie looked up into Matt’s golden-greenish eyes, she realized that she understood Lucy’s motivation perfectly. Because, damn it, she wanted Matt, no matter how hard she tried to deny it. Maybe that was her problem. This role was hitting too close to home. But maybe if she kissed him not as Lucy, but as Maggie—Maggie kissing Matt. He’d never know the difference, and she’d bring a certain authenticity to the role.
“Ready?” Matt asked.
“Yeah.” She smiled. She was ready.
She stepped away from him as per the stage directions, and he pulled her toward him. This time, her movement was fluid, and she seemed to flow into his arms. Her lips went up to meet his, and she kissed him with all the fire in her soul. Unable to remember any of the blocking he’d just explained, she put her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him.
She heard him groan, and felt his hands move down her back to the curve of her derriere, as he kissed her harder, more deeply. His thigh pushed against her, and she opened herself to him, wrapping one of her legs around his. The sensation of her bare skin against his made her ignite, and she pulled him even closer.
And still she kissed him. The eight bars of background music could have played over and over and over again.
He slipped his hand up underneath her T-shirt and she shivered at the touch of his fingers against her skin. But then his hand cupped her breast and her heart nearly stopped beating.
“Yo, dudes—Oops, looks like I’ve come at a bad time.”
Maggie and Matt jumped apart to see Stevie backing out of the room.
“We were just rehearsing,” Maggie said breathlessly, her cheeks heating.
Matt sat down at the kitchen table and put his face in his hands. When he glanced up at Stevie, his expression was black, with only a hint of amusement in his eyes to offset it.
“Oh, gee, I just remembered, uh,” Stevie said, “I’ve got to run some errands—”
“Oh, knock it off.” Maggie was annoyed. “It wasn’t what it looked like.” She turned to Matt, blushing again as she remembered the feel of his hand on her breast, but determined to be professional. “I think we sort of overshot the mark, but at least I wasn’t stiff.”
Matt fought the urge to laugh
