Jennifer Greene - Wild in the Moonlight

Instead, he’d been giving her nightmares.

As soon as the women were cleaned up and herded out, Violet piled dishes into the sink, added sudsy water and then turned on the dishwasher. A moment later she realized she’d turned the dishwasher on without any dishes in it, and thought she’d either had too much to drink…

Or too little Cameron.

She looked frantically around for the dish towel, but it seemed to have disappeared.

Two weeks ago he’d claimed he wanted to sleep with her. Intended to sleep with her. Imminently soon.

Only, they hadn’t.

He’d been kissing her regularly. Over breakfast. Before lunch. In the middle of the day, if he found her in the Herb Haven with her hands filled with a dried-herb arrangement, he’d take a bite out of the back of her neck, cup her fanny. He’d walked with her in the moonlight. They’d hip-danced doing the dishes after dinner, barged in on each other coming out of the bathroom, fallen asleep watching horror movies on the same couch.

But the damn man hadn’t done one thing about seriously seducing her. She was free! She was cheap! She was available. She had boobs. She wasn’t asking him for a single thing! So what was the matter with the man?

Upstairs, she heard the pipes rattle. He was taking a shower. She opened the refrigerator for some God-unknown reason and found her dish towel. She held the cool towel to her pounding head. The man was turning her into a train wreck. She had to get her life back. She couldn’t remember where her shoes were, her keys, her dishrags. She was starting to become ditsy for real.

Enough was enough. If Mohammed wasn’t willing to come to the mountain, she was darn well going to have to try seducing the mountain herself.

Cameron walked into the kitchen and stopped dead. They’d been sharing KP duty over the past couple weeks, but after seeing the war zone caused by the women’s group earlier, he’d put on clean khakis and a decent shirt, figuring that Violet would want to go out to dinner.

Instead, the women were gone and the kitchen cleaned to within an inch of its life-give or take the cats and cat hair. The old oak table had white quilted place mats, roses floating in a bowl, some kind of wild salad-smelled like lemon-pepper shrimp-puffed-up fresh rolls…

Violet whirled around. “We’re having something I call come-to-Bahama wings. They’re chicken wings without the bones. Kind of hot. A little lime juice, some rum, some honey, some hot peppers… I guess I should have asked you first, but you can handle hot, can’t you, Lachlan?”

“Sure,” he said, but the adrenaline was instantly pumping. Something was wrong. Worrisome wrong. The way she smiled at him raised the temperature in the kitchen twenty degrees. He saw the hot wings and the roses and heard the come-to-mama invitation in her voice.

Everywhere he looked, there were more land mines. And the more he looked, the more he recognized that she’d gone to a ton of trouble, laying all kinds of intricate, tricky traps.

She was barefoot, wearing a skirt that looked like a long, floaty handkerchief. Her midriff was bare, her long hair all scooped up and twisted and sedated with long clips off her neck. Said neck had been doused with some lethal scent-not her usual citrus soap, for damn sure, but something that reached his nostrils from the doorway. The perfume was a drug. That was all he was sure of.

Her lips had been coated with something shiny, and she was wearing a top that looked like another handkerchief. Only the top was actually about the size of a handkerchief this time, such a light fabric that he could clearly make out the plump swell of her breasts and the shape of her nipples.

“Whew, it’s really hot tonight, isn’t it?” she said with a grin.

His bloodstream shot his heart another dose of adrenaline. Yeah, he’d suspected that patience-and celibacy-would pay off eventually. But Violet was usually so warm and nurturing that he’d never figured she’d be the kind of woman to play mean.

This setup wasn’t just mean; it was down and dirty.

“I figured you had such a swamped afternoon that you’d want to go out, pick up dinner. Hell, I’d have helped if I’d known you were going to all this trouble.”

“No trouble,” she said sweetly. “You’ve been working crazy long hours yourself. I decided that we both needed some real food and a relaxing evening for a change.”

“Relaxing,” he echoed, thinking that nothing about this setup was remotely relaxing. On the other hand, even in ninety-degree heat after putting out a ten-hour work day, his entire body was hard as stone. Hard, willing and high on anticipation.

However, he hadn’t sucked it up and slept alone the past two weeks just to let her get off this easy. Yeah, he was willing to kiss her feet-and all the way up from there. But he hadn’t deprived himself, or her, without reason. He smiled at her as if his blood wasn’t pounding, ambled up behind her and dropped a soft, slow kiss on the drift of her nape. “What can I do to help?”

He felt her responsive shiver-but she recovered too darn fast. “Nothing but enjoy the feast. Or…how about if you pour the wine? It’s red. I know you’re supposed to have white wine with fish and chicken, but I didn’t have any around…and red is so much more potent, don’t you think?”

Another glossy, sultry smile, another tip of the lashes. He thought, I’ll be lucky to make it through dinner without throwing her on the table and going for it. “Yeah, I like red better than white, too. Hey…”

“Yes?”

Somehow he had to buy some time. He was more than willing to let her have her way. But first he wanted to understand what had motivated all these sudden wicked tactics of hers-not that he wasn’t enjoying them. Just that he figured a few minutes of distracting conversation was a good idea. “I was thinking how crazy it was that we’ve been together every day, yet I never asked you what you did. I mean, I know you moved here after a divorce and set up your herb business. But what kind of work did you do before that?”

“Work?” The question obviously startled her, because momentarily she forgot the sultry-smile, big-eye thing.

“Yeah. I mean, for a living. Were you into some kind of different career before this?”

There went the last of the provocative smile and the hip sashaying. It wasn’t as if she didn’t still look sexy as hell, and then some, but as if she stopped planning it.

She handed him dishes, one after the other, and he carted them to the table. Within minutes they were eating. A half hour later they were on the last bites and their second glass of wine.

“I was a physical therapist,” she told him. “I didn’t have any kind of formal specialty or anything fancy like that. But I mostly worked with kids. Kids who’d been in accidents, lost a limb or use of a limb. Tough road, to get a little one physically and emotionally prepared for life again, after going through a trauma to that extent.”

Cameron shook his head, no longer stalling or playing games. He was fascinated by everything she’d been telling him. “Wow. I can’t believe you never mentioned this before.”

“There was no reason to. I’m not doing it now.”

He hesitated. He could see in her face there was more here. He sensed Violet kept the “more” to herself for reasons he couldn’t fathom. So he pressed. “You quit because you burned out on it?”

“No. Not exactly. Kids tend to hate physical therapy. Actually, adults do, too. It’s not fun. It hurts and it’s hard work. And especially for children who’ve been through a life-changing event, they feel confused and angry about what’s happened to them. Anger, fear, frustration. I can’t explain this, but that’s exactly why I loved the work-at the time. Have some more wings, Cam.”