A leftover instinct from childhood. As a kid, she’d never been sure when she closed her eyes if she would wake up and find herself totally alone in their crappy apartment. Her parents had sometimes decided to go out and party, leaving her, even as young as age six, completely on her own.
As she got older, she preferred it when they left her alone and she tucked herself in. Going to bed knowing nobody would be there if she woke up during the night was much better than worrying and wondering about it.
Huh. A psychologist might speculate that was why she’d never slept an entire night in bed with a man in her whole life.
She forced all those ugly memories away. Callie had been telling her for a long time that she couldn’t let her shitty past determine how she conducted herself in the present, or in the future. But putting herself—her body, her pleasure, her safety, her emotions—at the mercy of someone else, was something she’d simply never learned how to do.
Taking a deep breath, she returned to him, twisting her hands on the belt of her robe, tightening it almost painfully around her waist. “That is my book.”
“Thought so.”
“Thank you for giving it back to me.”
“Well, some might consider it tampering with evidence. But it’s really not a problem.”
“I definitely wouldn’t want you to get into any trouble over it.” She’d hate to do anything that would jeopardize his new job and force him back to a life where he was shot at on a regular basis.
“Did it really fall out in the municipal parking lot?”
“Uh-huh.”
He tossed the book to her. She caught it in one hand, glancing at it, recognizing it down to the last detail.
“And you found it after I drove away?”
The slow shake of his head increased her tension. “I’m afraid not. Someone else did the honors.”
“Who?”
“A high school kid.”
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered.
He snickered, obviously not shocked by the schoolteacher’s language. “His mother found it in his room. She passed it down the line like a hot potato until it hit the town council.”
Lindsey felt as though she’d been punched. She stepped backward, almost tripping on the sash of her robe, and ran into the arm of the high-backed chair. She barely managed to stop herself from tumbling into it as she whispered, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I wish I were.” He shook his head, looking sad. “Mrs. Franklin was quite shocked by the, uh, pornography.”
“It’s not pornography,” she retorted, indignant. Seeing the twinkle in his eye, she realized he agreed and that his sadness had been exaggerated.
“But it is a bit much for polite Wild Boar Island society.”
She flipped open the book, eyeing the illustrations as the town council might. Tastefully drawn or not, that was a man sliding his penis into a woman whose sex was indicated with graphic slitlike lines. On the opposite page, a man’s head between a woman’s thighs, his exaggerated tongue stroking her mound. On the next, a woman on her knees, her lips wrapped around the tip of an erection.
The room suddenly got warmer. Lindsey swallowed, licking her lips, conscious of her quick pulse. She’d gone over these pictures plenty of times, had always viewed them with a sort of clinical detachment. They’d never left her breathless and shaky like she was now. Perhaps that was because she was being watched, oh, so closely.
She snapped the book closed and looked at Mike, noting his hooded eyes, his guarded stare.
“So, the town council, huh?” she asked, flipping her hair back over her shoulder as if she didn’t really care. “Are they heating the tar and plucking the feathers?”
“I asked Mrs. Franklin if she wanted me to put the stocks in the town square.”
“Ha-ha, very funny.” Catching her bottom lip between her teeth, she tried to imagine how this could be resolved, but honestly didn’t have a clue. “She came to you with it?”
“Yep.”
“And you immediately realized it was mine?”
“I suspected as much.” He walked closer. “It certainly seemed to fit in with your...collection.”
His searching gaze asked a thousand questions. He was curious, obviously confused by the incongruity of the woman she appeared to be—Callie’s friend, the teacher, the loner—with the woman who traveled with sex guides and cases of vibrators.
Lindsey rubbed at her eyes, wondering what to say, how much to share. She suddenly realized she liked having him here, no matter why he’d come. The last thing she wanted to do was drive him away with the truth.
But that was exactly what she had to do.
“Mike, I’m really not who you think I am.”
He shrugged, completely unfazed. “If you truly believe I haven’t figured that out by now, you must not rate my deductive reasoning powers too highly.”
“No, I mean I’m not the nice, small-town teacher you were talking about last night.”
“Did I say that? I must have been stoned.”
She snorted a laugh, wondering how he could make her giggle when the topic of conversation was so important to her.
“To tell you the truth, Lindsey, I really don’t care about that right now.”
“What? What about what you said...”
“I was just trying to justify how I was feeling about you.”
He had feelings? Oh boy.
“The truth is, I think about you all the time. I want to be with you all the time. Mrs. Franklin brought me that book, and I used it as an excuse to show up at your door at ten o’clock on a Saturday night.” He smiled. “It probably could have waited, but something about you, and the Kama Sutra, made me get in my car and slam the pedal down.”
“You don’t understand. This book was a gift from Callie. She said I needed to learn how to....”
He raised a brow, waiting for her to continue, obviously mentally filling in the blank. When she didn’t speak, he prompted her. “How to?”
“Be intimate,” she admitted, her voice little more than a whisper.
He didn’t tease her, didn’t make assumptions that she automatically meant physical intimacy. Because the Kama Sutra was about a lot more than that. It was a little dated, a little sexist, but the entire piece had many valid things to say about loving, sensual relationships, and not all of it was about sex.
“You have trouble being intimate with
