LITMIR.BIZ

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to walk away and head for the stairs.

      He sighed, shaking his head. “I always thought that under standing women would get easier the older I got.”

      Isabelle stopped and turned around. She was not about to put herself out on a limb and assume something. When he said nothing further to follow up on his statement, she prodded, “And?”

      “And, I was incredibly wrong,” Brandon confessed. “It doesn’t get any easier. Matter of fact, it gets harder.”

      Men were always saying that, she thought. But that was because they liked having their mystery plots complicated and their women simple. It didn’t work like that. Smiling, she said, “We’re not so hard to understand.”

      Brandon’s eyes narrowed slightly, as if he was trying to fathom the meaning being her words, and then, when he realized she was serious, he laughed.

      “Ha!”

      Isabelle continued as if he hadn’t interjected anything. “We respond to kindness and honesty—and a sense of humor never hurt the situation.”

      There he begged to differ. “Unless I laugh at a dress you wear.”

      Isabelle inclined her head. He was right there. She stood corrected. “Unless you laugh at a dress I wear,” she agreed. The moment she echoed his phrase, she remembered. “Speaking of which—”

      If she didn’t get started soon, she wouldn’t be ready by the time he’d indicated that he wanted to leave.

      “Laughing or dress?” Brandon asked her, a smile curving the corners of his mouth.

      “Dress. I have to,” she reminded him, ready to race up the stairs.

      In place of the easy smile, a seductive, sexy one slipped over his lips as Brandon thought of the way she’d been last night. He couldn’t remember if he’d told her how beautiful she was wearing only a sigh. He knew he’d meant to.

      “Only if you want to,” he told her.

      “I want to,” she answered with a laugh. Deep down inside, she was flattered by the look in his eyes. Flattered and aroused. “I have no intention of being arrested for nudity and public indecency.”

      “There was nothing indecent about your nudity,” he assured her, sounding so serious when he said it that, just like that, her heart was in serious jeopardy of brimming over.

      “Still,” she told him as she headed toward the stairs a little more slowly, “I don’t think you need that kind of a news-grabbing headline attached to you. It’s not exactly the kind of attention the father of a preteen likes to have drawn to him.”

      She could feel his eyes peeling away the layers of her clothing as he regarded her.

      “Oh, I don’t know. I might be willing to risk it, given the right woman,” he told her with such a straight face, she didn’t know if he was being serious or not.

      But, whether or not he was serious, she had always been the sensible one in any gathering numbering two or more. That being the case again, Isabelle patted his handsome face and declared, “Well, I’m not willing,” just before hurrying up the stairs.

      She was only halfway up when he called to her, and she stopped again.

      “Yes?”

      “Thanks.”

      She could have gotten completely lost in his smile. He had to have the most soul-affecting one she’d ever encountered. It took her a moment to locate her brain. “For?”

      He was honest with her, something he discovered he could be. Something that hadn’t been possible for him with anyone else outside of the two women already in his life. With Isabelle, he could be himself and not worry that she could use it against him, or criticize him. Or laugh when he didn’t want her to.

      “For pulling me out of a dark place just now,” he told her.

      “Don’t mention it,” she told him cheerfully. “It’s all included in your mother’s bill. It’s listed right under ‘cheerfulness on demand.’ By the way, the first fifty times are free,” she added with a wink he found tantalizingly sexy.

      His daughter’s parting words to him echoed in his head.

      “Maybe you were on to something after all, Victoria,” he murmured under his breath.

      Reaching the top, Isabelle turned around one last time. She thought she heard him say something, but she wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t her imagination. “You say something?” she asked.

      He looked up at her innocently. “Nope.”

      Taking the stairs two steps at a time with his long gait, he would have caught up to her—if she hadn’t started running.

      Isabelle made it to the guest bedroom before he could make a grab for her.

      Her laughter as she eluded him wrapped itself around him, teasing him. Making him yearn at the same time that it made him happy just to be alive.

       Chapter Fourteen

      “This wasn’t a good idea.”

      Brandon sounded so solemn when he said it, Isabelle braced herself for what didn’t want to hear.

      She desperately scrambled to sound upbeat, fervently hoping to hold off whatever it was he was going to say to her for a little while longer.

      “What wasn’t?” she asked brightly, then supplied a benign answer before Brandon could respond. “Dinner out?”

      The restaurant had seemed pleasant enough, but nothing about either the decor or the menu set the place apart. It would either require some sort of a makeover with an interesting motif, or a whole host of friends frequenting the premises nightly in order to keep the new restaurant out of the red until it found its identity.

      He looked at Isabelle for a second, absorbing her answer. “What? No, that was okay. I’m talking about ‘this.’” To underscore his point, he waved one hand about. Then, in case his point still didn’t come across, he put a fine point on it. “Dancing.”

      After they’d had their meal and Brandon had gone to exchange a few words with his friend and wish the man luck with his new venture, she’d impulsively suggested that they go dancing. The restaurant, as it so happened, was only several blocks away from a club where they actually played music that couples could hear and dance to rather than the mind-numbing throbbing which supposedly passed for music in a great many of the more popular clubs.

      As she recalled, Brandon had agreed readily enough. There’d been no arm-twisting required on her part, or even anything beyond a suggestion.

      Obviously, between that time and now, Brandon had changed his mind.

      Why?

      She hadn’t stepped on his toes. Thanks to her obsessive mother who had sent both Zoe and her for extensive dancing lessons when they were girls, insisting that they needed to “move gracefully, not like wild animals about to attack,” Isabelle was fairly certain that she danced well.

      So what was it he objected to? Being with her in the first place?

      She might as well find out the truth now, she thought, instead of stalling. “I thought you liked dancing.”

      He looked down into her eyes as he whirled her about the floor to the rhythm of a very seductive blues number. “I do.”

      Okay, she was officially confused. “Then why don’t you think that ‘this’ was a good idea?”

      A half smile curved Brandon’s mouth. He would have thought that was self-evident. “Because holding you in my arms like this and not kissing you is damn harder than I thought it would be.”

      Oh.

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