his chin as he shook his head.
“You were twelve, and I was saving you from kissing Tad Kipling, who I believe you referred to as ‘that sweaty-palmed toad from square-dancing class.’ You kids were playing spin the bottle in your mom’s basement and I pretended the bottle was pointing at me when I came downstairs to check on you, because I could see you squinching up your face at the thought of kissing him. I rescued you!”
She had forgotten. He was a man, and men never understood anything.
“You kissed me, and then two minutes later you were sucking face with Jessica Blackwell!”
Apparently she’d lost all control over both her brain and her mouth.
“Let me repeat. You were twelve. I was fifteen. Jessica Blackwell was sixteen. She had her own car and wore a 36D bra.” He nipped the wine glass out of her fingers before she could throw it at him. “I’m sorry, honey, but you never stood a chance.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she muttered and threw herself down onto the concrete floor so that she could stare morosely at the far-off ceiling. “I was twelve. Don’t expect rationality from a preteen.”
A light flashed.
She propped herself up on her elbows and glared at him as he dropped a camera into his lap. When did he bring that out?
“Hey! Don’t take my picture when I’m pouting. Jackass.”
He smiled at her and she felt herself blush. Damn it.
“Sorry. If it’ll help, I apologize for handing your heart back to you in pieces. In my own defense, I have to say that I wasn’t aware that I had it.”
“Yeah, you’re forgiven. I got over it in my twenties.” She waved a hand in his general direction. “I’m thirty-one. Old enough to know that the kiss wasn’t that good.”
She rolled onto her side, ready to laugh at the end of a good joke, the same way he’d done earlier after pretending to hit on her. Of course, she knew she was kidding herself when she called it joking. A part of her still felt like that twelve-year-old girl watching her crush drive off with the beautiful blonde girl who had the car and the boobs.
She smiled at her own foolishness and was about to sit up when two glowing gold eyes flashed out at her from beneath the couch.
“Hey,” she lowered her head back to the floor, “there’s a cat under here.” When she popped back up, J.D. was looking at her with raised eyebrows. Suddenly she remembered why she’d shown up on his isolated doorstep in the first place. “Right, you have a sick cat. What’s wrong with kitty?” She ducked back down to peer under the couch.
“I can’t believe you’re a vet, by the way. You couldn’t stand the sight of a bloody skinned knee when we were kids.”
“Yet another thing I got over,” she said and snapped her fingers at him. “The cat, J.D.?”
“How should I know what’s wrong with the stupid thing? It’s been under the couch ever since it walked in off the street a few days ago. The only time it came out was when it got cold in here. I found it sleeping in the ashes of the fireplace, so I stoked up the fire, cranked the heat up to eighty, and I’ve been sweating my ass off for two days while it hides out.”
Half an hour and two cans of tuna later, she had the cat in her lap, willing to trust her for the moment. She ran her hands over its body and looked up with a grin.
“Congratulations, J.D. You’re gonna be a daddy.”
Over his protests that he “couldn’t have a cat let alone kittens,” she explained that she’d send someone over with more food and some special vitamins the following morning. Meanwhile, she changed back into her suit and gathered up her things, having decided that it was definitely time for her to get going. She left him with some last-minute instructions.
“Keep her warm. That was a good idea. Give her all the tuna she wants tonight and refill the dish of water I put out if she finishes it. And J.D.?” She stopped at the door and turned back to look at him. He was standing in the middle of the room, leaning on his crutches, backlit again by the glow of the fire. Even now, with muscles that weren’t there when he was a teenager and longer, straighter hair that was still escaping from the blunt ponytail, there was no mistaking the graceful and supremely controlled kid she’d watched and wanted for years.
“Yes, Dr. Evil?”
“Better find something to call her instead of ‘stupid cat.’ She’s yours now.”
She stepped outside into the frigid March air and headed toward where her Jeep was parked at the curb, leaving him to muscle the door shut behind her. Plastic bags and old newsprint pages blew past her ankles in the winter wind.
“Hey Sarah.”
He was standing in the doorway, one hand outstretched as if to hand her something she’d left behind. She opened the car door and slung her bag into the backseat before jogging back up to the building.
“What, did I forget some—”
He grabbed the collar of her coat and yanked her up against him, his other arm a tight band across her lower back, pressing her hips into his. She thought she’d go cross-eyed as he bent down toward her, his mouth a hairsbreadth from hers. She could smell the cabernet on his breath and felt the warmth of it feather over her.
“I didn’t want you to go off thinking you’d had my best effort at kissing all those years ago.”
Then he lowered his mouth to hers and she closed her eyes as J.D. kissed her for the second time since she was twelve years old.
Chapter Two
Two weeks later, she was still feeling that kiss. She’d nearly rear-ended a canary-yellow VW Bug at a stop sign because she was daydreaming about the taste of his mouth.
It wasn’t fair.
She’d been waiting her whole life for someone to match the slow roll and tumble in her stomach that she’d felt when she was twelve and her brother’s best friend kissed her on the lips.
It was so unfair that the first and only person to make her feel that way again was that very same boy, now all grown up and far more dangerous than when he was fifteen.
Not to mention the whole “still married” thing.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t run into some good kissers in the years bookended by J.D. Damico. He wasn’t the first man to cup his hand against her cheek and slide his palm around to the nape of her neck, fingers tangling in her hair along the way. And he wasn’t the first man to grab the front of her jacket to pull her even closer. Or to pause for a moment, his mouth hovering over hers, to nip at her bottom lip.
But that mouth. Damn. The moment his lips pressed to hers it was like someone had slid a hand up her thigh and whispered, “Lie down with me.” And the sudden wash of wanting him was a sharp cramp that left her breathless. His tongue in her mouth was a tease. The moment had passed too quickly, leading her to do some tugging of her own. She’d wrapped her hand behind his neck to pull his
