promised,” he protested. It was halfhearted, and his eyes warmed with lust and want, watching her the same way he watched everything else. Not liking it, not comfortable, but unable to stop.
“I didn’t promise. You assumed,” she answered, flirting dangerously, because she didn’t want him to stop. She liked the want in his eyes, the way it made her heart pump with courage instead of fear. She liked the powerful heat in her blood.
Suddenly he was very close, a whisper’s breath away. His legs were nearly brushing hers, the muscles in his arms tense with frustration. All she had to do was move one inch …
“Woman, you are the gate of Hell, the temptress of the forbidden tree. You are the first deserter of the divine law.” The words were low and raw and she’d never felt so completely aroused in her life.
“Cecil, again?” she whispered, inching closer.
“No, Tertullian.” His eyes met hers, fogged with desire. For her.
“Anytime,” she whispered, feeling the curling tension inside her, the budded nipples straining against her T-shirt, begging for attention.
His astute gaze rested on her T-shirt, and his mouth strained as well, causing her nipples to harden in a completely Pavlovian manner.
“I should go,” he announced, moving away from her, and she told herself she was glad. Relieved, even.
“The work is calling,” she rationalized, trying to keep her mind focused on important things like her future career in journalism, instead of the length and width of his sexual prowess.
“Yes,” he agreed, but he still wasn’t leaving, and he showed very little intent of going so, and she could feel the panic growing inside her, in direct proportion to the needy urge to lean in a little closer, ease into that completely planned yet seemingly arbitrary moment when two lips collide.
Do not fall for this, she reminded herself. Ignore the sexy man with trouble simmering in his eyes. He wanted sex, his body nearly hummed from it, and unlike the twenty-four-year-old drummer with a passion for cartoons, this one would give her a night full of screaming orgasms, and then break her heart, most likely at the same time because he seemed to be that talented.
“Who are you?” she asked, thinking that if he was going to break her heart, she wanted to know his name.
“Aaron.”
“Aaron who?”
“Smith.”
“Really?” she drawled, not bothering to hide the sarcasm.
“It’s actually Jenkins-Smith, but that seemed pretentious, so I just use Aaron Smith.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Smith. I’m Jennifer Dade, and from now on, I’ll try to stay out of your way.”
It was a desperate hint that she wasn’t in his way, that he was sitting on her rock, and if he truly wanted all that solitude and privacy that he kept blustering about, then he’d have to act a little less … stimulated. Not that she was complaining. Much.
“I should go,” he repeated, but he moved closer, and his eyes were on her mouth, and Jenn felt herself go hot, then cold. “Normally I like to ignore everyone else. It makes my life much more comfortable.”
“Why can’t you ignore me?” she asked, because she needed him to. She did not need this, but she couldn’t ignore it. She couldn’t ignore him.
He brushed a gentle finger across her brows. “You look at me with those busy eyes, always digging for your version of the truth, but grasping for the first clichéd insights into the psyche because it’s easy and it makes your deadline, and it doesn’t matter that there isn’t always some three-point paragraph that explains who we are. You think there’s always an answer, always a reason, but sometimes people are simply the way they are.”
It was not what she wanted to hear, not what she had hoped to hear, and all those roiling emotions finally erupted. “And that’s why you can’t ignore me, because you just can’t? The Twinkie defense? I had to be me. I was born to be bad. No, there’s always a reason. You just don’t want to tell me.”
She thought he was going to leave. Thought she’d finally done it. Finally chased him away, but instead he looked with all the wretched want in his eyes. All the lonely hunger, combined with the same painful recklessness that she felt in herself.
“I wrote about you. This afternoon, I came home and spewed out reams of pages about someone with your face, your eyes, your hair.”
“How did it end?” she asked, breathlessly tempted by the drama of it.
“You threw yourself in front of a train.”
“Why?”
“You are the mariner’s albatross, Ahab’s white whale, the magnificent obsession. In the end, there was no alternative. You had to die,” he said, sounding miserable and baffled.
But then his fingers reached out, touched her hand, such a small gesture, such a telling gestured. Sometimes sex was scratching an itch, and sometimes sex was the very human need to touch someone. All the phones, all the gadgets, all the machines in the world that mimicked human contact, and yet nothing came close to the absoluteness of sex.
“You like me, don’t you?” she asked, twining her fingers through his, locking them there.
“I don’t want to like you,” he admitted. “You’re very happy and sure of yourself and you like machines without souls.”
“I don’t want to like you either,” she admitted, as well.
“But you do?” he asked. His eyes met hers, uncertain and unhappy and still hoping that she would say yes.
“Women don’t like men like you,” she said because she knew that unhappily hopeful was bad. Very, very bad. It spoke of vulnerabilities, and wounds, and manly suffering that had plagued women for thousands of years.
“What sort of man is that?”
If he were any other man, she’d have thought he was fishing, needing a stroke to his ego, but he didn’t have those insecurities. Tragically like every other woman before her, she was falling for it in spades. “You want some three-point analysis that sums you up in fifty words or less?”
“Yes.”
She chose the less dangerous answer. “You’re brilliant and hurt and your writing draws you into humanity, but humanity repels you at the same time, and you can’t reconcile those two aspects and it frustrates you.”
“Do you know what frustrates me?” he asked.
“What?”
“How badly I want to kiss you. I hate your mouth. I love your mouth. When you talk all that blather, it’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Why don’t you kiss me?”
“Because it won’t stop.”
“I
