interfering in her life yet again.
The only problem was having sex with Ian wasn’t nearly as simple as all that and she needed a few minutes to remind herself why.
But then she remembered she was already running late and that she really didn’t have time for this, and damn Jena and her sex-fiendish ideas anyway. “Never mind—”
“I already have plans,” Ian said at the same time.
Well, that really stank, didn’t it? Before she could retract her loaded question, he’d turned her down cold.
Marie absently wondered how the planets were aligned and just which one of them had it in for her this morning.
“Well, then,” she said, trying to shrug off the uncomfortable sensation sticking to her skin along with the sizzling heat produced just by being close to Ian, “I guess I’ll see you around the courthouse.”
“How about tomorrow night?”
Marie stared at him, her nipples bunching into tight points. “I already have plans,” she lied.
His grimace could match, if not better, any of hers. “There’s something I think you and I need to discuss.”
That got a suggestive smile out of her. “Oh? And would that conversation include words?”
His eyes held the onset of one of his killer grins.
“I’ve got to get going,” she said and rounded him. She also needed to have her head examined. What was she thinking, leading Ian Kilborn to believe she was interested in anything more than throwing darts at his picture on her wall? No matter how much her body vibrated like a divining rod whenever he was within a hundred feet of her?
She purposely kept her back straight as she hurried down the hall. Okay, so maybe she didn’t really have his picture on her wall. Well, not now, anyway. But she had at one point. She’d used her father’s copy machine to blow up Ian’s senior class picture and had hung it under a poster of Shawn Cassidy inside her closet door. Whenever she’d had a bad day, she’d take Shawn down and have at it with the darts she’d swiped from her brothers’ dartboard in the garage.
Of course, the look on her mother’s face when they’d painted her room later that year and all the holes in her closet door had been revealed was absolutely priceless. Marie had told her they must have termites. Her mother called in the exterminators the next day.
Marie finally rounded the corner, then leaned against the wall out of sight of Ian. She didn’t check to see if he’d watched her depart because she was afraid of her reaction if he hadn’t.
“Miss Bertelli. I was afraid you weren’t going to make it.”
Marie nearly jumped out of her skin as a young man addressed her.
She drew in a deep breath and tried for a smile for her client, the owner of a small computer programming company being sued for copyright infringement.
Business. All business. That was going to be Marie Bertelli for the rest of the day.
And if she was just a wee bit afraid that might be the inscription on her gravestone…well, she wasn’t going to go there now.
IF IAN KILBORN NEEDED A reminder of just how small the world really was, running into Marie Bertelli was exactly the stimulus. It was midafternoon but he felt like he was still standing in the courthouse hall watching her walk away from him. Puzzlement, interest, and a deep burning sensation combined to completely distract him.
Thirteen years since they’d met and he still couldn’t figure out what, exactly, the attraction was. But, oh boy, was there ever one. He’d been seventeen, she’d been thirteen, and one little blink of her blue eyes had rendered him little more than putty in her hands right from the start. And while he held off stripping her of her virginity until she was eighteen, it still took little more than a blink to get him hot and bothered all over again.
Only he’d never let her know that. He scratched the top of his head, then smoothed his hair back in place. The reasons for keeping her in the dark had varied over the years. From the ridiculous adolescent excuse of never letting anyone know they had power over you, to the irrational adult fear of rejection that was crazy but very real just the same.
There had only been a brief two-year stretch when she’d been banished to the back of his mind and then only for geographical reasons. Chicago was a long way from Albuquerque, and further still from L.A. Yet that hadn’t stopped him from having the occasional white-hot dream about her, or catching a glimpse of a woman and thinking it might be her even though she was at least thirteen hundred miles away.
Sex, pure and simple. That’s what he’d told himself then, and that’s what he continued to tell himself now. There was something exciting and unforgettable about forbidden desire. About wanting something you knew you shouldn’t and going after it anyway. She’d been thirteen and the youngest daughter of a family renowned for getting physical with the guys chasing after her if they didn’t take the first verbal hint. But that hadn’t stopped him from thoroughly kissing her—and wanting to go much further. But five years later at her brother’s college graduation party, he’d done just that in her parents’ pantry of all places.
Then there was his own Irish-Catholic family and their twisted ideas on procreation and how it should only be done with another Irish-Catholic.
Ian leaned back in his chair and grinned, thinking about how very small the world was. And as he glanced at some papers on his desk, he knew he had a very good reason to think that way.
He’d been careful about his attraction to Marie and had been spared not only the scrutiny of his own family, but the verbal and, thus, the physical reminders that little Marie Bertelli was off-limits to everyone except whoever her family approved of. Which was nobody in the neighborhood where they both lived. And, he suspected, nobody in the world—especially since he’d heard the story of what went down nearly three years ago with the groom from Italy.
It was shortly after Marie’s taking off for L.A. that he’d accepted a job offer from a college friend in Chicago.
A high-profile case sat on the corner of his desk. Ian eyed the file, glanced at his watch, then at his calendar.
Ah, a very small world, indeed.
And Marie was about to find out just how small.
AT LEAST SHE WASN’T wearing the blue poofy dress.
Marie considered the very sad state of her life as she got out of her Mustang in the sweeping driveway of her parents’ house. The two-story white stucco looked like it could have been at home in the Mediterranean or the southwest and stood a testament to large family life. This was where Marie had grown up. And the place she still called home even if she couldn’t live there anymore.
It wasn’t difficult to figure out what she was doing here. She’d gone straight home to her apartment after calling it a day to find the refrigerator she’d bought secondhand on the fritz and what she had planned to make for dinner not fit for a bad date. Her mother had called just as she’d discovered that and waved insalata malfitana in her front of her hungry face, reminding her that not only had she not had dinner but that farsumagru o briolone was her favorite, not Frankie Jr.’s.
Okay, so she was weak. The way
