His Wedding Date (The Second Chance Love Series, Book 2) (23 page)

But he had touched her. It wasn't much more than a hazy impression in his mind—much like that of a dream—but he had touched her.

He wanted to touch her again. Brian gulped the coffee instead, even though it didn't seem to be helping him.

"Sure you don't want this?" Shelly said, offering him one of the buns.

He could only shake his head.

She tore off a piece of bun, then set the rest down in the box. Brian watched every move she made as she ate it, and he started to sweat, here in his own kitchen, with this woman he'd known forever.

It didn't take her that long to finish it. He watched as she rinsed her hands in the sink, dried them on a paper towel and dabbed at her mouth with it.

He wondered if she'd gotten all the icing off, and he wished he could have done that for her.

"These things are so messy," she said.

He argued with himself about whether she knew what she was doing to him. He wondered what she had on under that shirt, wondered again what she'd looked like when she'd been asleep in it in the bed across the hall from him.

And he wondered if her lips would taste as sweet this morning as they had yesterday morning. He didn't see how he could get through the day without finding the answer to that question.

"Brian?" she said. "What's wrong?"

What was wrong? He could make her a list. It might distract him from the things he really wanted to do to her. Then again, it probably wouldn't.

He wondered about the inevitability of certain things in life. He'd often felt as if the fates had fought a relentless battle to keep him and Rebecca apart—as if they simply weren't meant to be together.

He didn't like to think that way. He'd preferred to believe he was in charge of his own life, that he could make it into anything he wanted, that he could get whatever and whomever he wanted if he tried hard enough.

But maybe he couldn't. Maybe it was fate. Maybe it was inevitable that he couldn't be with Rebecca because he was meant to be with someone else. Maybe the woman was standing right there in front of him at that very moment—maybe she was the one.

Maybe he could have stopped himself from touching her then. Maybe he could have stopped the sun from setting that night.

He doubted it, and he took a first step toward her.

"Brian?" She was worried now, and as he came forward she took a step backward. But she didn't make it very far. The island in the middle of his kitchen, with the grill-top stove and the pots and pans hanging above, kept her from getting too far away from him.

"Just give me a minute," he pleaded with her as he caught her face in his hands.

The fingers of his left hand fanned out across her cheekbones and settled into her hair. With his right hand, he traced the bones in her face, marveling at the smooth, soft skin.

He stroked her cheek, and she turned her face ever so slightly into his, welcoming his touch. She drew in a long, ragged breath, and her breasts rose in time with the air filling her lungs.

He couldn't help but watch, couldn't help but wonder what lay below the shadowy hollow beneath the open collar of that shirt.

She gasped for air again, bringing the tips of her breasts within a centimeter of brushing against his bare chest.

If he moved just a fraction, he would feel the weight of them against him. A button or two, a bit of cotton pulled down over her shoulders, and he would feel them pressed against his bare skin.

Shelly's lips parted on a sigh. He doubted she was even aware of the silent invitation, but he was. And it reminded him of why he'd started this in the first place.

Her lips, sticky sweet from that damned pastry—he wanted to taste them again.

Instead, because he needed to prove to himself that he still had an ounce of restraint left in his body, he traced her full lower lip with his thumb, then moved on to the upper one. They were soft and warm and open to him.

"Tell me to stop," he whispered, never taking his eyes off her lips. "And I will."

He'd find a way. It might well kill him, but he'd do it, if she asked him to.

He waited for what seemed like an eternity. She hesitated, just long enough that he felt he had her consent, that he could touch his lips to hers with a reasonably clear conscience.

And he did.

It was a battle to keep from hauling her into his arms, grinding his lower body into the soft, warm, welcoming heat he knew he'd find in hers, but he managed. He didn't see how, but he settled for bending his head and tasting her lips, stroking them with his tongue with a short, light touch, moving ever so slowly from one corner of her mouth to the other.

She trembled beneath his hands. Her breath caught in her throat, and her lashes fluttered downward. He kissed them, too.

He kissed her soft cheeks, and wished he'd been there to kiss away the tears he knew must have fallen that night in Tallahassee when he'd so callously taken what she'd offered him. He wished he could have kissed away the ache he'd known had taken root in her heart over the years when she must have wanted things from him he hadn't even imagined.

He wished he could kiss it all away, erase it all clean so they could start with no shared past and nothing between them, including his promises not to touch her again until he was sure he knew what he wanted from her.

But he couldn't do that. He kissed her soft, sweet lips one more time before he made himself pull away, only to take her by the shoulders and hold her there, his forehead bent down so it rested against hers, while they both struggled to breathe again. He was searching for something, for anything, he could tell her to explain what he was feeling. He just didn't know. The blatant desire was so strong it was blinding him to anything else.

And that was unlike him. He wasn't a man who got so caught up in wanting a woman that it pushed every other thought out of his head. He wanted to know a woman, to like her, to feel comfortable with her, before a relationship turned sexual. He'd learned a long time ago that a woman who could turn on his body wasn't necessarily one who could turn on his mind, as well. And one without the other fell far short of satisfying him.

He looked Shelly up and down again, looked over her flushed cheeks, her soft, sexy mouth, her downcast eyes.

He could hurt her so very easily. He knew that, and he'd already sworn to her and to himself he wouldn't do that again.

Brian looked around his huge, empty kitchen, the one he'd picked with another woman in mind—Rebecca—one who'd never been here and never would be. He couldn't help but compare the two women and what he felt for each of them.

He'd known it was over between him and Rebecca long before either of them had admitted it to the other. He tried now to reach back inside himself to what he'd felt for her and what he'd dreamed of finding with her, but he couldn't do it.

It was like trying to grab a handful of the fog that rolled in across the beach in the mornings. He could see the cloudlike mist, but he couldn't hold it in his hand. He knew in his mind what it had been like to love Rebecca for all those years, but he couldn't feel it—not anymore.

Strange how far he'd come from it all in so short a time.

But what was he moving toward? What was he looking for with Shelly? What had he discovered between them?

He didn't know. He just knew that he wanted to know more about it. He wanted to explore this tangle of emotions between them, as much as he wanted to explore every inch of her beautiful body. And he had no right to do that now, when his head was so messed up, when she was so vulnerable to him.

He remembered how he'd felt, sitting on that plane beside her, coming back from Tallahassee. He remembered how much she'd been hurting and how little he'd been able to do to help her. He remembered thinking that he'd have wanted to kill any other man who hurt her like that.

He had to take care of her now, to try in some way to make up for what he had done. This time, he'd have to protect her from himself.

"Shelly, I wish there was—"

His phone rang, and he grabbed it off the counter thankfully. He had no idea what he was going to say to her or how he could possibly explain his behavior.

"Hello," he said into the phone.

The conversation was short and simple. It was the police. They'd just gotten a 911 call about a break-in at Charlie's house and thought Brian should know.

"Of course," Brian said. "I'll be there as soon as I can."

He ran a hand through his hair, then made a fist and wished he could slam it into one of the cabinets. When was this going to stop?

"What's wrong now?" Shelly said.

"We should have thought of that," he said, shaking his head. He knew exactly why he hadn't thought of it first. He'd been thinking of her instead.

"What?" She looked at him for the first time since he had let her go.

He felt like a heel. "Somebody broke into Charlie's house, either yesterday or this morning. One of the neighbors called the police around nine this morning. The damned front door was hanging open."

"Let me guess," Shelly said. "His financial records? His business papers? They're gone?"

"I'm sure they are, but we need to go by there and check, anyway. The man might have missed something there."

He downed his coffee in one big gulp. "Damn. We should have gone there yesterday, after we found that mess at the office, and cleared all his stuff out of there. It was just such a mess, so much work to try to put the office back together and see if anything had been left behind, I never even thought of the house."

"Wait," she said. "We still have the stuff we got out last night—all those papers I took to my apartment."

"I hope we still have them," he said. "I think we'd better go to your apartment first and get them. Give me five minutes to shower and get dressed. Then we'll go."

She nodded, her cheeks still flushed, her eyes reluctantly meeting his.

Yeah, he felt like a heel. And he remembered that just before the phone rang he'd been trying to think of something, anything, he could say to her to explain it all.

He still hadn't thought of a thing.

"Look," he said, struggling for all he was worth, knowing he had to say something, "about what just happened here—"

"Let me guess," Shelly said, who was getting better all the time at hiding her thoughts from him. "You still don't understand any of this."

"No." If he had nothing else to give her, it would be his honesty. "Do you?"

She shook her head, then turned aside, subtly shutting him out.

He hated the feeling of being closed off from her. Brian turned her to face him.

"But I promise you, there was no doubt in my mind about which woman I wanted or who I was holding in my arms."

Granted, it wasn't much to give a woman. But it was all he had right now. He didn't think she wanted to hear that he was half out of his mind from wanting her. And that was the only thing he was certain of right now.

* * *

Shelly punched in the security code, disabling the alarm so she could go outside. Just standing in the driveway, staring at his huge house, was enough to make her feel a little better. Anything to get out of that kitchen.

Brian had gone upstairs to get dressed. Please, she prayed, let the man get dressed. Not that it would help much. Now that she'd seen him otherwise, she wasn't going to forget anytime soon.

Brian in nothing but a thin pair of pajama bottoms, hanging low and loose across his hips, his chest bare, his hand raking its way through his thick, dark hair.

That was what he'd look like if they had spent the night together. If they'd made love, then wandered into the kitchen the next morning looking for coffee. He'd look sexy as sin, rumpled, his body still warm from the bed.

Oh, yes. She could see it now.

Shelly looked around the neighborhood of big stone houses painted in the washed-out pastels for which Naples was known. The homes sprawled across their oversize lots, topped by distinctive, reddish-colored tile roofs.

She wandered into the backyard, then to the canal that ran along the back. They were only a few blocks from the ocean, and she could smell it in the air.

He had picked an older neighborhood, one that for the most part had escaped the attention of the tourists, one that was filled with well-to-do people who actually lived and worked in Naples.

She could see him living here, but she couldn't see herself in a place like this. Not that he'd asked her to live here with him, nor ever would.

She couldn't let herself get carried away by a couple of kisses and one colossal mistake in judgment on her part.

It was just the way he'd watched her this morning, the way he'd touched her, gently, as always, but... differently.

He'd wanted to touch her, wanted that badly. He was fighting himself now. She recognized that in him so easily. For years, she'd been the one fighting herself and her own desperate need to touch him the way a woman touches a man.

And when he'd kissed her—she wasn't even sure she could call it that, though it had been more devastating than any real kiss she'd ever gotten. The way he'd run his lips across hers so carefully, so lightly, never daring to deepen the kiss. It was as if he were the one afraid of where that might lead.