was responding now. Of course, her relationship with Trevor had come on the heels of the break-up of her engagement, when she’d been desperate to feel wanted by someone. But even then, she’d never wanted to be with him as desperately as she wanted to be with Eric now.
And the wanting terrified her.
She forced herself to ease away from him and when she spoke, she kept her voice light, careful to give no hint of the churning inside. “You know what? You’re as sexy as sin and when you kiss me, it makes my heart pound like you wouldn’t believe, but I don’t do one night stands with strangers.”
“I don’t, either…as a rule.” He slid his hands up her back, and she shivered as his fingers traced lazily along the ridges of her spine. “But there’s an exception to every rule.”
“And you think you should be mine?” she asked skeptically.
“I think you could be mine.”
She pushed his arms down, stepped away from him and temptation. “I might be a small-town girl, but even I can recognize a big-time con.”
He winced. “Okay, it did sound like a line.”
“You think?” What was even worse than the obvious script was how much she still wanted to give in to the desire thrumming between them.
“What I think is that, for the first time in a long time, I’ve met an interesting woman and I’m not ready to say goodbye to her yet.”
He sounded sincere, but if she’d learned nothing else from her failed relationships, she’d learned that she didn’t have a clue when it came to understanding the motivations of men. “Do you mean that?”
“Yes, I do.”
His voice was sure, his gaze steady, and despite the doubts and insecurities that swirled inside her, she wasn’t ready to say goodbye yet, either.
“I’m not working tomorrow,” she finally said. “If you wanted to meet me back here around ten, maybe we could spend the day together.”
“I’d really like that,” he said. “But I won’t be here tomorrow.”
Disappointment weighed heavily in her belly. “You won’t?”
“My plane’s scheduled to leave at 8:00 a.m.”
“You’re going back to Tesoro del Mar?”
He nodded, and though she regretted that it was true, she knew his leaving wasn’t any reason to throw caution to the wind and do something completely crazy.
“I guess this is goodbye then,” she said.
“I guess it is,” he agreed.
Then he tipped her chin up with his finger and brushed his lips against hers. It was a gentle kiss this time, as fleeting as their time together had been.
“Goodbye, Molly.”
“Goodbye.” She watched him cross the room. She watched as he flipped the lock and pushed on the door, and she felt all of her reason and common sense sweep through the open portal and into the night.
“Wait.” The word sprang from her lips without conscious thought.
He turned back. Waiting.
She could let him go—and always wonder what might have been. Or she could be wildly spontaneous and spend the night with a man whose kiss had singed her right down to her toes.
She’d always believed it was better to regret something she’d done than something she’d left undone, and while it was possible she’d wake up with regrets in the morning, she knew she would regret it more if she let him walk away.
Eric sensed the battle waging inside Molly and it took every ounce of willpower he possessed to keep his hand clamped around the handle of the door to keep from reaching for her again. If they were going to spend the night together—as he very much wanted them to do—it would need to be her decision. And he knew it wasn’t one she would make lightly.
She’d admitted that she didn’t date much, and he knew a woman as beautiful and warm and friendly as Molly didn’t sleep alone unless it was what she wanted. So what made him think that she would break her self-imposed rules to spend the night with him?
Chemistry.
It had crackled between them from the first moment their eyes had locked across the bar and had been building and deepening ever since. The sizzling kiss they’d shared was further proof of it.
His body was still humming from the after-effects of that kiss, or maybe it was almost three years of self-imposed celibacy that had everything inside him churned up. Whatever the reason, he knew what he wanted. He was just waiting for Molly to reach the same conclusion.
She looked at him now, her eyes locked with his, and she said only one more word.
“Stay.”
He flipped the lock on the door and moved back to her.
She met him halfway—her arms lifting to circle his neck, her body pressing against his, her mouth opening for his kiss.
His hands moved over her, hotly, hungrily. She gasped and sighed in response to his touch, and those sexy little sounds nearly snapped the last of his control. She was so eager and passionate, as hungry for him as he was for her, and it was an effort not to tear away her clothes where they stood and bury himself inside her.
The woman had him tied up in knots, desperate and aching with desire.
He cupped her breasts and felt her nipples pebble in response to the brush of his thumbs. She arched against him, a silent plea for more. Even through the layers of their clothing, the erotic friction of her hips pushing against his was almost too much.
She was sexy and sweet, giving and demanding.
And she was his.
The thought came from out of nowhere, the sudden drive to take and claim and possess both unfamiliar and undeniable.
He was leaving in the morning. They both knew they wouldn’t have anything more than this one night together. But he was determined to make it a night neither of them would ever forget.
This was crazy.
Even as Molly led Eric up the stairs to her apartment over the bar, she knew it was outrageously insane to even consider having sex with a man she’d never laid eyes on a few hours before, who would be leaving again in another few hours and whom she would probably never see again after that.
She didn’t care.
Right now all she cared about was getting naked with him.
And he wanted the same thing, if the trail of clothes they left in the hall
