Jennifer Greene - Tender Loving Care

Everywhere, she could hear the sea. Everywhere, she was conscious of isolation and privacy, of the romance implicit in the situation for two people who’d craved being alone for weeks, of Rafe watching her explore, waiting for her in total silence.

He still said nothing when she finally knelt beside him on the carpet by the hearth, but his gaze settled on her like an intimate touch. She suddenly registered the hammer-beating of her heart, her not-quite-dry palms, the texture of fragile feminine nerves. Her pulse throbbed with inordinate sensitivity; she wasn’t sure what to say, what to do. She’d always been natural with Rafe-she’d never had any choice but to be natural with Rafe-but these circumstances were different. Before, she’d always known that two children could interrupt them at any minute. Her heightened awareness of Rafe was a measure of her knowledge that no one would interrupt them now, any more than anyone could save her from a man who suddenly seemed part stranger, vibrantly sexual, and inescapably male.

She didn’t want to be saved. She just wished she could find something reasonably intelligent to say.

His jacket was gone, and so were his shoes. Clamped between his knees was a long green bottle, so recently uncorked that vapor still rose in wisps from its neck. He poured the sparkling wine into two stemmed glasses that gleamed like crystal in the firelight. The man’s eyes had a far more purposeful gleam when he handed her a glass. “I figured it was about time I found out if you could handle your wine, Zoe.”

“Yes?”

He nodded, his voice hushed and throaty. “Do you realize how much there is about you that I don’t know? Simple things, like whether you get silly on champagne. What you look like all dressed up. What you’ll look like when I wake you first thing in the morning. Or what colors you like-or what you’re like, naked, when there isn’t a soul around for ten miles and you know exactly what I want to do to you-Careful, sweet. You nearly spilled the wine.”

She was so shaken she could barely manage the first sip. “Rafe,” she said slowly, “I think you’re deliberately trying to unnerve me.”

He gave her a lazy smile. “A little.”

The champagne sizzled over her tongue, as heady as dancing blue eyes that spelled trouble as they peered over the rim of his glass. “It seems to me that a gentleman would make a little effort to make a lady feel at ease in a circumstance like this,” she scolded him.

“But then, I’m not always a gentleman, and I hope to hell you’re in no mood to be a lady. Have you had enough of that yet?”

“I just had one sip! And you just opened the bottle-” She snatched the glass away when he tried to take it from her. “Wait a minute, just wait a minute.” She took a breath. “It’s going to take me a second or two to put on a sophisticated face and pretend I know how to handle all this…attention.”

He managed to remove the glass from her hand, pin her flat on the carpet and still not make the first seductive move toward her. Balanced on his elbow so his weight wouldn’t crush her, he gave her his gravest frown. “Sophisticated faces never cut much ice with me, and it’s not attention you should be worried about handling. It’s lust.”

“Are you tactfully trying to warn me I’ve been kidnapped by a savage?” She reached her hand up to push aside the disobedient lock of hair that habitually strayed to his forehead.

“More or less.”

“I’m shaking.”

“No, you’re not. You’re relaxing. I’ll even give you your wine back if you’ll promise not to clutch the glass as though you’re worried I’ve turned into a stranger.”

“I don’t need the wine, but, Rafe?”

“Hmm?”

She motioned generally to the room beyond him. “You planned. A lot,” she accused quietly. “The plane, your mother, this place, the car. This is a lot more than a whim you thought up on the spur of the moment.”

“Yes.”

“I think…” She hesitated. “I think you should have asked me.”

He nodded and set his glass on the hearth. “I know I should have asked you, but I wasn’t willing to risk your saying no.” She was wearing a coral blouse with a neckline that annoyingly blocked his view of her throat and that for some inconceivable reason buttoned at the shoulder. He opened those buttons one at a time. “You have extraordinary green eyes, love.”

“You never told me you had two brothers. That you could fly. Where you rented the plane. How you found this place-”

“Suddenly, you’re chattering like a magpie. Am I making you nervous again?”

“I want to hear more about your mother,” she said stubbornly. “And what your father’s like. I didn’t even realize you came from South Dakota, did you know that?”

“You are nervous.” His breath fanned her lips just before his mouth touched down. “Good,” he murmured with satisfaction.

The Oregon sun filtered in the windows. The cabin was cool by morning, and invaded by the smells of sea and woodsmoke. Rafe watched her sleep, aware of the faint, lingering scent of her perfume. Her skin had the blush of dreams, and her hair was tousled on the pillow. Zoe inevitably slept sprawled on her tummy, except for those times he’d tucked her close to him in the night.

He’d kept her tucked close until dawn, and he had in mind keeping her close for a lifetime, but Zoe…he was so unsure of Zoe.

Especially these past two weeks, he’d carefully led her to believe that kids were a low priority for him, but it was like traveling on quicksand-he didn’t know how to be careful enough. The kids had nothing to do with what he felt for Zoe, but getting her to believe that had him tied up in knots. That Steven character had wanted her on a package-with-children basis; there was no way he wanted her to think this was the same thing.

He’d deliberately told her he couldn’t handle the responsibility of children alone. He’d deliberately tried to show her that he felt just as inadequate as a father as she could possibly feel as a mother-when Parker was ill, for instance. If she could just see that the little imps needed both of them, he knew they could work through any lingering fears or negative emotions she’d built up about children. She adored the twins, whether she knew it or not. And so did he, but it was a thousand times more important to make Zoe see that there was nothing they couldn’t tackle as a twosome.

He didn’t plan to spend the long stretch of lonely years without her, but two days wasn’t long enough to make absolutely sure Zoe felt loved for Zoe. He had in mind binding ties and complicating her emotions and wearing down her resistance and stealing the alternatives away from her. He had in mind sneaking in some love whenever he could. He had in mind assaulting the lady where she was most vulnerable.

Sleeping, she was most vulnerable. Gently, silently, he slid the comforter off her, then the sheet. Her bare skin had the satin glow of sleep, and the long expanse from the nape of her neck to her toes confronted him with far too many options for the ruthless assault he had in mind. Her slim thighs were his personal preference, but he could also build a ladder of kisses up her spine. Her neck enticed him, but so did the curves of her calves.

It was going to be a long war if the choice of first battle was going to be this difficult. Finally, he chose her fanny, primarily because he was sure no one had ever begun a seduction with Zoe on that particular portion of her anatomy. He attacked with assorted kisses, some butterfly soft, some lingering. The firm skin sloped with delicate feminine perfection, which he always knew. His tongue scouted the hollow at the base of her spine, and then dawdled down to the tops of her thighs.