LITMIR.BIZ

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hiked up around her knees, and much too late to rehearse this first private meeting with him since the night she’d slithered, uninvited, between the sheets of his bed and seduced him.

      For a while it appeared that neither of them was willing to break the silence unspooling between them. Instead, they simply stared at each other, he remotely, like the stranger he undoubtedly wished he were, and she—ye gods, her gaze clung to him shamelessly, devouring his every feature with the rapacity of a woman on the brink of starvation.

      In the more revealing light of the kitchen, she could see what had not been so apparent in the gloom of Belvoir’s garden. He had aged, but so graciously that he was even more beautiful than he’d been at twenty five. His hair lay as thick and unruly as ever, the only difference being that now it was lightly shot with silver.

      As for his mouth. . . ! Oh, despite the hardships he might have known, his mouth was as she’d always remembered it, so blatantly sexy that her lips parted in mute supplication to know its touch again.

      Just once more, her wayward heart cried. Just once and it’ll be enough. I’ll never ask again.

      Appalled, she said primly, “If I’d realized you were down here—”

      “You’d have remained upstairs.” He offered the merest suggestion of a shrug. “I could say the same thing but it would be pointless, wouldn’t it? You’re here, I’m here, and it seems that whether we like it or not we’re destined to acknowledge each other.”

      She wished he hadn’t moved his shoulders in that sinuous way that drew attention less to their width, which had always been impressive, than to the fact that his shirt was unbuttoned and hanging loose at the waist of his blue jeans. Her gaze dropped from his mouth to the expanse of flesh that his gesture had uncovered.

      The musculature of his chest was more defined than when she’d run her hands over its planes that other summer, the skin even more deeply tanned. His stomach, though, was the same: flat and hard, just as it had been then. Except for his mouth and his hands, he had been hard all over that night. . .

      “I was going to say I wouldn’t have disturbed you,” she said, corralling her thoughts before they got her into more trouble than she could possibly cope with. “We’ve put you to enough trouble already, getting you out of bed to rush to our rescue.”

      “I’m a night owl. I’m seldom asleep before one or two in the morning.”

      You were the night I came sneaking in, she thought. You were out cold, lying with nothing but a sheet covering you, and it took me no time at all to whisk it aside and confirm every last delicious fantasy I’d ever harbored about you.

      Her sharply drawn breath escaped before she could suppress it. Face flaming, she swung back to the Thermos of cocoa and hoped her hands wouldn’t betray her by shaking too visibly as she filled the lone cup.

      The worst was over, surely? They’d come face to face, exchanged the barest civilities and both survived the ordeal. Now all she had to do was beat a not too obvious retreat before her unruly memory betrayed her more than it already had.

      “How have you been, Emily?”

      Instead of being fielded from across the kitchen, his question flowed over her shoulder, and she realized that he’d moved to stand close behind her. Much too close. Agitated, she sought refuge around the other side of the table. “Very well, thank you.”

      “And your husband?”

      “Husband?”

      A smile settled fleetingly on his mouth, a glimmer of cool white amusement against the bronze of his skin. “The man you married.”

      “I—he’s well, too.” Even had this been the time and place to divulge that her marriage was a thing of the past, Lucas Flynn was not the one to burden with the disclosure. It wasn’t as if he gave a damn; he was merely going through the socially correct motions, as was she when she said, “I was sorry to hear about your wife.”

      He lifted his shoulders in another dismissive shrug. “These things happen,” he said, so dispassionately that Emily couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ousted Sydney from his life as easily as he’d evicted her.

      “You make it sound as if her death was more inconvenient than tragic,” she heard herself remark acidly.

      Annoyance thinned his lips, his amusement dispelled so thoroughly that, if memory hadn’t served her better, she’d have thought him incapable of smiling. “I hardly feel I have to justify to you how I choose to deal with personal tragedy, Emily Jane.”

      “You never felt you had to justify anything to me!” The last thing she’d wanted was to be the one to resurrect the past. Even less did she want to come across as the woman wronged, particularly since she’d been the aggressor in their encounter, but the words were out before she could stop them, full of accusation and reproach.

      He expelled a brief sigh. “I had hoped you’d forgotten,” he said. “I can’t imagine why you’d want to hang onto the memory.”

      Of course he couldn’t, because he hadn’t been the one to offer his heart and have it tossed back without a word of appreciation or thanks. He’d walked away untouched, whereas she’d been permanently scarred by her botched attempt to make him love her as she’d loved him.

      He had no idea, no idea at all, of the ultimate cost to her of the night she’d seduced him. Blissfully ignorant, he’d gone forward, married the woman of his choice, and left Emily to carry the burden of her guilt and sorrow alone. Knowing he hadn’t been to blame for that didn’t prevent her from resenting him for it.

      “I don’t,” she replied stonily. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t thought about you in years until today.”

      “Then you’ve been happy?”

      “What do you care?” Oh, Emily, shut up! she told herself angrily.

      His sigh this time was fraught with exasperation, as if he found having to explain such obvious and simple facts exceedingly tedious. “We were friends for a long time, Emily. Closer than friends, even. More like brother and sister. One night of ... indiscretion doesn’t negate all the good times. Of course I care.”

      About as much as he cared about the weather! But he wasn’t her brother, she didn’t want his diluted affection, and she couldn’t bear his bold references to a time she’d truly tried to bury in the past where it belonged. She wanted to escape and shut herself in her room, to be alone before she faced the fact that he still had the power to affect her more deeply than any other man she’d ever met.

      “Then, to answer your question, I am very happy, very successful, and very tired,” she said, stepping around him and heading for the door. “Thank you again for coming to our rescue tonight. Under the circumstances, it was very decent of you.”

      “Decent?” Although she couldn’t see it this time, she heard the amusement in his voice. “What else could I have done? Left you to burn?”

      “You might have, if you’d known I was visiting my grandmother.”

      “Hardly,” he scoffed. “I took a professional oath a long time ago to preserve and honor human life.”

      It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, Even mine? but she bit back the words and said instead, “Of course. Well, don’t worry that we’ll make a habit of calling on you to bail us out of trouble. We pride ourselves on being very self-sufficient.”

      

      

      Like every other assertion she’d made in the last little while, however, that last one of Emily’s turned out to be erroneous. By the following morning, Monique’s left knee was badly swollen. “I remember twisting it when I slipped,” she admitted to Lucas when, at Beatrice’s insistence, he came to take a look.

      “If you had gone to the hospital to be checked over as I suggested, this could have been taken care of last night,”

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