Jennifer Greene: Wild in the Moonlight

“You want me to drive into town? Is that why you’re upset, because you feel stuck with me under your roof?” he asked. “There’s just no reason to get your liver in an uproar. If I’m a problem for you, I’ll just take off, go find a hotel or motel-”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” she said crossly. “You’re not taking off cross-country in the middle of the night in a thunderstorm. I never heard of anything so stupid.”

Well, hell. Somehow he had to find some way to communicate with her a hell of a lot better than they were doing so far. They hadn’t even started to do serious business, yet he seemed to invoke some kind of strange response from her. She was running on froth and emotional fumes. He needed her straight and coherent.

So he snagged her arm when she tried to go flying by-God knew where she was sprinting off to this time, but apparently her goal was to find more candles, even though the living room already looked like a witch’s lair. She went stark still the instant his hand closed on her wrist.

“What are you doing?” she asked. She didn’t shout it. Or whisper. Only…asked.

He felt her pulse gallop. Felt the warmth of her skin. Felt her gaze shoot to his face as if compelled by their sudden closeness. “I’m confused what’s going on here. Are you afraid of storms?”

“No. Heavens. I grew up here. We get blizzards in winter, thunderstorms in summer. Vermonters are sturdy people. Actually, I love the rain.”

Typical for her, she offered a lot of talk but very little information. “So it’s just me, then? I’m doing something to make you nervous?”

“I’m not nervous. I’m always goofy,” she assured him. “Ask anyone.”

He struggled not to laugh. If he’d laughed, of course, she would have diverted him from the problem. Which made him wonder if that was why she came across so scatterbrained-because it was such an effective defense for her. “I don’t want to ask ‘anyone.’ You’re right here, I’m asking you. If you want me out of here, I’ll leave. Just say the word.”

She still hadn’t seemed to breathe, although his hand had immediately dropped from her wrist. “You’re staying. As long as you don’t mind staying with a batty woman.”

“You’re not batty.”

“You don’t know me. I know me. And if I say I’m batty, I should know.”

God. It was like trying to reason with a cotton puff. Only she wasn’t a cotton puff. In all that flickering candlelight her hair was drying, looking like silky silver. The pulse in her throat was beating hard. Her skin, her mouth, defined softness. And her eyes…she was still meeting his eyes. There was nothing goofy there, just the awareness between a man and a woman that carried enough heat to melt the Arctic.

He had no intention of kissing her. Maybe she was just figuring out the chemistry, but he’d known it since he first laid eyes on her. There was no explaining what drew a man and woman together-particularly when the two people were as contrarily opposite as they seemed to be-but Cameron didn’t sweat problems he couldn’t solve. When there was heat, there was heat. You didn’t lie about it. You didn’t pretend. You just faced the truth, whatever it was.

And the truth was, he didn’t care if there was a combustible furnace of chemistry between them, he wasn’t going to kiss her.

Yet suddenly he was.

He wanted to blame it on the moonlight…only there was none. In the dark candlelit room, with the growl of thunder and hiss of rain just outside, there seemed nothing alive but her and him. Nothing he could smell but her soft skin, the flower scents drifting from her hair, her throat. Nothing he could hear but the pounding of his own heart, in anticipation.

He didn’t exactly remember how he reached for her, how his hands happened to curve on the swell of her shoulders, slide down, slide around her back to pull her into him. Yet he knew the exact moment, the exact sensation, when her hands reached up to lock behind his neck.

He could have sworn she’d been sending him keep-off, no-trespassing messages-yet if she didn’t want to be kissed, she sure acted as if she did. Her arms swooped around his neck and she came up on tiptoe.

There was one more brief millisecond when he remembered all the reasons why this was a bad idea, but once she was that close, all rational bets were off. In a blink his mind turned to mush. Electric, excited mush.

He hadn’t kissed anyone in a while. He hadn’t kissed a woman this way in years. Hadn’t wanted to. He thought it was long gone from his life, from his heart-that pull, that wonder, that wildness. He didn’t know why it had to be her, didn’t care.

She tasted like magic. Sweet, soft, alluring. Unforgettable. That pale-blond hair sifted through his fingers. Her head tilted back, accepting his kiss, inviting more than the graze of his mouth. Her lips asked to be taken. He answered.

One tentative kiss melted into another stronger one, another richer one, and then another that lost all track of time and space. His tongue found hers. Her heartbeat was suddenly racing, chasing, against his. Her arms nested tighter around his neck, and his hands molded down her spine, down to her fanny, pulling her closer to him.

Silver rain shivered down. Candles flickered. Shadows whispered of loneliness and old hurts and need. She’d been hurt. She’d been lonely. She needed. And maybe those were secrets she never meant to reveal to a stranger, but she didn’t tell him anything. She just kissed him back, wildly, freely, intimately.

Cameron thought he was a man who took gutsy risks…but she was the brave one, the honest one, revealing so much. Something in her called him. Something in him answered her with a huge, nameless well of feeling that he’d never known he had.

He raised his head suddenly, feeling shocked and disoriented and unsettled. Her eyes were still closed, lashes lying like kitten whiskers on her cheeks, but when she finally looked at him, her eyes were luminous and her mouth wet and trembly.

“I never meant…” he started to say.

She gulped in a breath. “It’s all right. I didn’t think you did.”

“It was the storm.”

“I know.”

“It was the moonlight.”

“I know.”

“I need you to know you can trust me. The last thing in hell I wanted was to make you worried I’d-”

“I’m not worried. I’m thirty-four, Cameron. Too old to trust someone I barely know. But also way too old to make more of a kiss than what it was.”

“You said it exactly. That was just a kiss.” He added, “Right?”

“Right,” she said firmly. “We’ll just mark this down as a moment’s madness and forget all about it.”

Violet’s bedside telephone rang just after five in the morning. She jolted awake like a kicked colt. Mental images of her mom and dad or her sisters in an accident flashed through her mind in a panic as she fumbled for the phone. No one called this early unless there was a dire emergency-or unless someone had the sensitivity of an ox.

She clapped the receiver to her ear and recognized Simpson’s voice.

Her pulse climbed back down from the worry stratosphere. Her ex-husband-like PMS and rain-could always be counted on to show up at the most inconvenient time. “Insensitive” should have been his middle name.

“Were you asleep?” he asked, his tone warmly ebullient.

“Me? Heavens, no.” Why tell the truth? He wasn’t worth it.

“Good. Because I didn’t want to wake you. I just couldn’t seem to resist calling. Vi, Livie had the baby.”

As if someone slapped her, Violet instinctively braced against the headboard. “Congratulations.”

“A son this time. We’re going to name him John Edward, but Livie wants to call him Ed, after me.”