Girl Gear 5: Wicked Games (16 page)

He took another chunk out of her heart when he finally said, "My breakfast meeting with Marcus West."

All-business, all the time. Why wasn't she surprised that yet again he'd taken refuge in the one thing he did have a handle on? "That rift seems to have healed nicely."

"Yeah, but finishing up with Marcus is making it really tough to schedule a start date with Warren Sill." Doug shifted where he sat, scooting even closer and moving a hand to Kinsey's thigh. "I'd been set to leave here the first of November, but now I'm not sure what I'm going to do."

He felt incredibly good there, holding her, his palm so warm and so large, his fingers so strong,
his
ease at touching her so compelling. "Will the
Denver
group have a problem with you splitting your time for a few months?"

He shook his head, shrugged. "I don't know. I haven't talked to them yet about this newest holdup. I'm not thrilled with the idea of dividing my energies. As far as work goes, I'd like to cut my ties here and go. A clean break, a fresh start and all that."

"And as far as
your
other ties? The ones that don't have anything to do with work?"

"You mean you?"

She nodded, because there was really no need to deny what was such an obvious truth.

He looked up and caught her staring. His face softened; his expression grew strangely sad. And then he leaned toward her and nuzzled his mouth to her cheek. "Trust me, darlin'. The thought of leaving you is making all of this damn hard."

This time it was Kinsey who couldn't think of anything to say. Not that she'd have been able to speak, anyway, what with sorrow lodged like a big red ball in her chest. How could the loss of a relationship-that-wasn't hurt like this?

After several more minutes of silence, it was Doug who asked, "Now what're
you
thinking?"

Way more than she wanted to share with a man who was about to walk out of her life. She cleared the tears from her throat. "Wondering how hard this move really is going to be for you, especially having to sell your part of Neville and Storey."

The bus reached the parking lot then, turned and rumbled through the entrance, shuddered to a stop. Doug didn't say a word. He seemed, in fact, relieved by the timely interruption of their arrival.

"Well?" she asked, because she wasn't ready to let the subject go.

"Well, what?" He stood and gestured for her to move out into the aisle.

Rolling her eyes, she stepped in front of him. "You have a terrible habit of avoiding what you don't want to talk about."

"Oh, this from the woman who refuses to say a word about what happened on Coconut
Caye
."

She was coming to realize how often he brought that up, and, not for the first time, wondered why. Whether his tactic was one of simply changing the subject. Or if all the things that had passed between them that night—the words and the deeds—were weighing that heavily on his mind.

"I said a word. Just the other night."

"Yeah. You said you were drunk. That doesn't mean you don't remember."

"And if I do remember? What difference is that going to make?" She stepped out of the bus onto the raised walkway, turning to Doug as he joined her.

"You tell me."

Tell you what?
Flow aggravating you are
?
"We've all done things and said things we regret later. Add alcohol to the equation and the possibility of those regrets rises considerably, don't you think?"

"I dunno, Kinsey. I'm not the one here who proposed marriage." Doug raised a hand to wave farewell to Izzy and Baron as the couple headed across the lot in the opposite direction.

Groaning, Kinsey waved, as well. This marriage-proposal-that-wasn't seemed destined to haunt her forever. "I did not propose. I just…"

"You just need to get a move on, sister." And then Doug actually smacked her on the bottom. "We'll talk about this after we settle up our bet. The Texans lost, which means you've got some bikini bottoms modeling to do."

Chapter 8

«
^
»

H
ands and arms tucked beneath and between her breasts, Kinsey leaned her forehead on the warm tiled wall of Doug's shower enclosure. Hot water and steam slicked her skin, stripped her muscles of tension, the worries from her mind.

On the drive back from the Texans game earlier, she and Doug had stopped for a quick dinner with Izzy and Baron, arranged via a cell phone call.

Starving as always, Kinsey had hoped that a break for food and from the subject of her drunken marriage proposal would wash that particular conversation from Doug's mind.

So far, so good.

Too good, unfortunately.

Once back at his place for the ridiculous bikini bottoms modeling session he'd teased her about, she'd followed him into his bedroom. Instead of pulling her swimsuit from wherever he'd stashed it, he'd pulled out his suitcase and started packing for his upcoming week away.

She'd simply sat cross-legged against the head of the bed, watched and listened as Doug talked of
Denver
.

He hadn't talked of anything else, as if his travel preparations required one hundred percent of his concentration precluding his focus from drifting, his attention from returning to the conversation they'd started hours before.

Minutes ago he'd taken a call from Marcus West, and the two men had continued to talk until she was certain Doug had forgotten her existence. So she'd decided a shower was just the thing to warm and wake her, not to mention numb her mind, which was racing to depressing assumptions she'd never intended to entertain. Assumptions such as the one that said she really was nothing to him but a temporary good time, when she'd been hoping to convince him otherwise.

Until tonight, until ten minutes ago, she hadn't realized how right Lauren's assessment had been of Doug as a workaholic. Sure, Kinsey knew that he stayed busy, that he commuted two thousand miles on a regular
basis, that
he worked his butt off to balance commitments in both cities. But all his teasing bikini-bottom talk … what had that been about if he'd only brought her here to hang out while he packed? Did he really consider her simply a decorative accessory for his bedroom? Had she been imagining that his interest seemed to be taking root in deeper emotions?

Well, his moodiness was about to earn him a fat karate chop where it counted. She was not going to be ignored or treated like a flesh-and-blood Maxim model he kept around for times of horny frustration.

If all he really wanted was for them to remain friends, fine. They'd remain friends. They just wouldn't be playing friendly between the sheets.

And that sucked. That really, really sucked, because she enjoyed their closeness—even as she recognized that she'd reached a place where she needed more than that explosive physical intimacy.

She pulled in a deep breath, releasing it slowly as the water beat down on her left side and left shoulder, and sluiced over her back. Spray fizzed and spewed into her face; she couldn't even be bothered to move.

She was drifting in that gauzy place between consciousness and sleep, trying—and failing—to convince herself that her feelings for Doug were simply her imagination's romanticism run amok, when she heard the shower's frosted glass door slide open.

Roused from her lethargy, she listened for the latch to catch, remaining still and continuing to breath in the same relaxed rhythm though her skin began to prickle and burn.

She didn't want to make any sort of first move, or to lay into Doug when she wasn't sure her aggravation for his inattention was justified. It was quite possible she'd been borrowing trouble all of this time. That Doug was simply clearing his schedule, getting business out of the way in order to spend the rest of the night with her.

As long as she knew where they stood, she could handle the straightforward sex. But they were skirting the edge of too much strange emotion here. The ups and downs were nauseating and were wreaking havoc with her perpetual good mood.

When Doug moved to stand behind her, her mood instinctively lifted. Anticipation popped in the shower's sizzling steam—an anticipation all the more potent for her current unrest. When he pressed his body fully to hers, she came awake completely, shuddering as he replaced the soothing warmth of the spray with the heat of his body.

He placed his hands on the wet tile on either side of her
head,
surrounding her with so much of himself, she wasn't sure she still had it in her to breathe. This was so unfair, the way he took her apart when she had been working to keep herself together.

Nuzzling her neck, he ground his hips into hers, his erection already strong and seeking a place to settle. He followed his kisses with sharp nips, then with healing laps of his tongue, feasting on the skin of her neck until she thought she'd surely dissolve into a boneless mass of sensation.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled between bites. "I shouldn't have taken that call."

"Business is business," she answered, trying to remember that not five minutes before she'd been on the outs with this man.

"Business could have and should have waited." He dipped his knees, dragging the full package of his sex along the crevice of her bottom as he came slowly upright. "I'm sorry. That's all I know how to say."

She wondered if he was sincere, saying what needed to be said, or if an apology was only what he thought she wanted to hear. She went on to wonder if he'd take the next call that came even if it happened while they were in bed.

The thing was
,
sex shouldn't hurt. Not physically, not emotionally. Not with the sort of pain she was feeling in places she had no idea how to heal. And that meant what they were doing here together was no longer about sex.

It was about love.

Her heart lurched; her breath became hard to draw in. When she turned to him here in a moment, when she faced him again, looked at him again, when she let him into her body, she'd be doing it all because, without question, he was the man she loved. Truly loved.

The admission rocked her until tears welled in her eyes. She tried to breathe, and gasped instead, unable to bypass the hard knot of emotion bulging at the base of her throat. She didn't want to be in love, not when it made her feel wondrous one moment and miserable the next.

"Kinsey? Darlin'?" He pushed her hair away from her neck and nuzzled her nape. "You're not saying anything and you're starting to scare me here."

"If this is just sex, why are you scared?" she whispered, not sure if he would hear her over the rush of running water.

He did, and stopped the nibbling kisses though he didn't move away. Instead, he moved even closer and whispered into her ear, his voice a throaty echo of his normally upbeat tone. "How honest do you want me to be?"

"As honest as it gets," she said, before she finally turned to face him. Oh, but he was beautiful, a sight for her weary heart to hold close, though in this moment she felt a curious distance descend.

With her back pressed flat to the tiled wall, she settled her palms in the center of his chest, loving the feel of his smooth skin, the way the water heated him, the way his muscles were so strongly defined yet shuddered beneath her touch.

Steam rose around them from the water and from Doug's body like heat waves off a sun-baked road. She didn't even try to measure the level of heat in his eyes. It was a compelling and devouring sort of hunger, the need to take her, to possess her and own her, consequences be damned.

A hunger that had her blood running hot and her body opening to take him in.

For several long, silent moments he held her gaze without blinking, without moving a muscle but for the hard tic that pulsed in his jaw. She watched helplessly, hopefully, as his emotional battle fired and flashed, continued to watch as it fizzled.

It was when he pushed wet strands of hair from his face, looked down and away, that she knew it was finally over.

He was going to break her heart.

She closed her eyes, did her best to reach for an inward place of calm,
yet
knew she'd failed miserably when she had to struggle to speak. "Forget it. It's not that important."

"Since when has honesty not been important?"

Since
I decided being ripped apart was too much to take
. "Not honesty. My question. My question isn't important."

He shook his head. "Wrong. It is important. I've told you straight out that this isn't about a commitment, yet I still can't stop treating you like you belong to me. And, yeah. That scares me. It scares me a lot."

She was as contemporary as a woman came, but the idea of belonging to the man she loved? Anachronistic or not, she thrilled to the idea. "Yeah. I've noticed that belonging thing."

He slammed his palms to the wall on either side of her head and glared down, his chest heaving with raw, ragged breaths. "So why do you let me?"

"Because I love you."

That wasn't what she'd meant to say. That wasn't what she'd meant to say at all.