she couldn’t find it in her to reply, he stopped and turned to her. Cupping her shoulders in his hands, he searched her face. As she, in turn, searched his, she forgave herself for lapsing into speechlessness.
Sweet Lord, he was gorgeous. He wasn’t particularly tall—just under six feet—but at five-four she still had to lift her chin to look up at him. He wasn’t exceptionally muscular either, not like a bodybuilder. Instead, he was sleekly muscled, like a runner or a swimmer, a study in athletic fitness that combined conditioning and finesse to a honed perfection that overshadowed brawn any day. His black T-shirt and black shorts showed off tan arms and legs and lean, sinewy strength.
She knew what it felt like to be tucked into the warmth and power emanating from his body. She’d felt sheltered and protected while visions of a different kind of embrace—intimate, needy—further scattered her already fractured thoughts.
He wasn’t a workingman either, she decided, forcefully dragging her mind back to the moment. Nothing specifically told her that. It was more of a generalization of his overall presence that quietly spoke of money. That he either came from it or was made from it was as obvious as the blue of his eyes. From the artful style of his sun-streaked brown hair that he wore longer than respectable yet looked exactly right on him, to the cut of his formfitting black T-shirt, he wore wealth. It wasn’t overt. It was, instead, effortless. He was as comfortable with it as he was with his utter maleness, at ease with everything that he was.
The blue eyes that searched her face were thick-lashed and kind of dreamy, strategically set for maximum impact in that stunning, poster-perfect face. His cheeks were deeply tan and slightly stubbled, his jaw molded with love by a benevolent master.
His classic male beauty, however, had enough rough edges thrown in to save him from being pretty. A tiny crescent-shaped scar marred the corner of his full upper lip, and a nick split the arch of his dark eyebrow. Still, his face was so symmetrically sculpted it was almost painful to look at it, yet impossible to look away.
He was everything—everything—that a hero was supposed to be. Brave, gorgeous, wealthy.
Her heart sank on a reality check. A worthy heroine she was not.
The realization of who she was, what she was and what she wasn’t, melted over her like spent wax, starting at the top of her head and working its way to her fingertips.
“Are you still with me in there?” he asked with a lazy, amused grin that infiltrated her thoughts like a spelunker breaching a turn in an underground cavern.
“I…um…”
He chuckled, held his hand in front of her face and asked, deadpan, “How many fingers?”
She blinked, focused, and remarkably, the magic of speech returned. “Four and a thumb. At least that was standard issue last I knew.”
On second thought, magic may have been too strong a word when paired up with the words she’d just uttered. Obviously, her reply had spilled out before she thought, because if she’d thought, she wouldn’t be firing wisecracks. Shock, prompted by reality, made her forget to measure her words, police her reactions.
She reined herself in and clarified. “He didn’t hit me.”
He smiled again, gently this time, sort of a slow, concerned unfurling that dug deep grooves in his lean cheeks and crinkled the corners of his eyes. “But he wanted to. And that in itself is a violation.”
He had the most sensual mouth. His lips were generous and seemed to be perpetually tipped up in some semblance of a grin.
Too aware that she was staring again, she lifted her gaze to quite possibly the most expressive eyes she’d ever seen. In that moment, she read his pity through them and was ashamed.
“Oh. Oh, no. It’s…it’s not what you’re thinking. I’m not one of those poor women caught up in an abuse cycle.” Though he was a total stranger, she didn’t want him thinking that about her. “I ended our relationship months ago. He’s just not— Well, he’s not getting the picture.”
“And he’s not likely to anytime soon unless he has a reason to consider the consequences.”
Consequences. So far, she, not Jason, had been the one suffering the consequences of his unwarranted obsession.
It all caught up with her then. The fear of the past few moments. The utter sense of vulnerability and violation. The embarrassment of a public scene. And her dependence on this stranger to come to her rescue.
Jason had blindsided her. She hated him for that. She hated violence more. She’d felt as helpless against it tonight as she had as a child. And like a child, she’d frozen in the face of it.
She knew what that made her. Leslie Griffin, her sixty-years-young friend and co-worker, could argue all she wanted that Phoebe was heroic for overcoming her abusive childhood, for putting herself through school, for enduring and establishing herself as a solid, independent citizen. The truth, however, was that at heart she was a coward. For that failure alone, she hated herself almost as much as she hated Jason for putting her in this position.
“Well.” She squared her shoulders and rallied what pride she had left. “It’s my problem. I’ll figure out how to deal with it.”
“Think in terms of a two-by-four. Right between his eyes,” he said darkly.
“Do you all run on pure testosterone?” She blurted out the words before she could marshal them. Again.
She closed her eyes, pressed her fingertips to her temple. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
She didn’t know how to act around this man. If she wasn’t gaping in stupefied silence over his glaring good looks, she was bumbling out the most inappropriate things.
“I’m sorry. You saved me from a really bad ending here and I’m coming down on you for wanting to…” She paused, lifted a hand in the air.
“To add more violence to an already violent situation?” he suggested, an apology in his voice. “Unfortunately, sometimes that’s the only option.”
For the first time, something other than gentle amusement hardened his mouth. She saw and heard his anger but understood that it was directed at Jason. She also understood that he hadn’t judged her as harshly as she’d judged herself.
When she realized he was watching her with an absorbed intensity that relayed both concern and the same gentleness as his smiles, she drew in a deep breath and let it out.
“Well,” she said, feeling compelled to assure him, “I’ll be okay. He’ll give up sooner or later. In the meantime, I really don’t know how to thank you. Most people wouldn’t have stopped, and, you know, gotten in the middle of someone else’s mess.”
“I’m not most people.”
That much she’d already figured out. He certainly wasn’t like most of the people she knew at any rate. And he wasn’t anything like her. She was strictly struggling to be middle-class mundane. And he— Well, he wasn’t.
“So, what happens now?”
She let out a breath through puffed cheeks. “What does happen now?” she mused aloud before her brain synapses clicked into place. “Well, now I guess
