Jennifer Greene - Can’t Say No

The two candles flickered in the darkness. Beyond their corner of the porch, there was another world, ominously black, filled with leaf rustlings and shadows and the occasional shine of small eyes in the woods. On the porch, wrapped up in Hart’s arms with the sleeping bag for a mattress, bare as a baby and utterly safe, lay Bree, her cheek resting on his shoulder.

Hart wasn’t sleeping, but his eyes were closed. Bree kept stealing glances up at him. His chest hair was a wiry blond mat, circling his navel and stretching up over his heart. His shoulders were golden; strong ribs, flat stomach…his thighs were muscular, and when the composite was put together, the label was man. A very powerfully built man, and even an exceptionally handsome man, but still just…man.

There was nothing to explain why that specific body next to her had turned her into a wanton, wild creature of the senses, capable of intense, uninhibited pleasure. Or why she felt comfortable with him now, when she knew darn well she should be reading herself a riot act of guilt, reproaches, shame and disgust.

Thoughts whirling in her head, she spread a hand on his chest and watched the long blond strands of hair curl around her fingers. “Hart.”

“Hmm.”

“I don’t want an affair.”

His lips brushed her forehead. “Your voice is still coming out a little rusty, but it’s sexy as all hell. Or is it always that way?”

She cleared her throat deliberately. Hart chuckled. “I mean it,” she said firmly.

He shifted to his side, nuzzling his lips sleepily around the shell of her ear, letting one hand run lazily down the length of her. “You know, I was beginning to worry about you. On the nontalking business. I figured maybe when you ran out of plates to throw, you’d have to come through with a little verbal exchange, but you were so stubborn…”

“ Stubborn? I only came here because I was supposed to get heaps of rest and recuperation-”

“Who said?”

“After five million doctors said…don’t, Hart.”

“What do they know?” Paying no attention to her batting hand, he leaned over to run his tongue over the raspberry tip of her breast. He watched as the nipple responsively hardened and tightened before his dark eyes traveled back up to hers. “They know nothing that matters about you, honey. Nothing.”

She sucked in a little extra oxygen, her lungs seeming to need it. “You’re not listening,” she accused him.

“Sure I am.”

“I don’t just…race into relationships. And I certainly don’t-”

“Sleep around?” he supplied.

For two cents, she would have wiped the small smile off his lips with a scrub brush. Instead, she buried her head in his shoulder and closed her eyes. “It’s not as if you don’t have plenty of options besides me,” she said dryly, thinking of the harem she’d seen through her telescope. Not to mention whomever he’d worn the cream linen suit to dinner for.

“That sounds reminiscent of ‘pick on someone your own size,’” he said gravely. “Or else it’s a subtle inquiry as to how involved I am with other women at the moment. Honesty’s easier, Bree, but I’ll try to read your mind. I went to dinner with an old man named Reninger, a friend of my father from way back. He’s about four feet eleven, seventy-three if a day, and couldn’t conceivably turn me on in a bikini. I had a gift for him, some jade carvings. That should settle your doubts about this evening, but if you want a catalog of the women I’ve slept with over the years-”

“You know, I may kill you yet. Every time you open your mouth, I feel the general urge. That’s part of the problem. You don’t sleep with people you want to murder.”

“Is that a new American proverb? Maybe a potential slogan for a bumper sticker?”

“How do you want to go? Boiled in oil? Voodoo? A simple drowning?”

“Such talk. And I haven’t yet heard my thank-you for getting you to talk.”

“I beg your pardon. If you think you deserve an ounce of credit for that, when all you’ve done since I’ve met you is push and patronize and-”

“And it all worked. I want my thank-you.” He leaned over her. The pads of his thumbs caressed her cheeks; the weight of his chest crushed her breasts. He planted one heavy thigh between hers, pinning her beneath him. “I think,” he murmured, “I want you now, Bree. One of Manning’s oldest maxims-Never hesitate even a minute to go after what you want in life. And there is no question how much I want you. There hasn’t been from the moment I laid eyes on you.”

His mouth pounced…but slowly. Bree’s hands fluttered aimlessly for a minute or two, and then she gave in, her hands climbing up his arms to his shoulders, holding on. Hart was an unpredictable carnival ride. She had the terrible feeling it was useless to ask to get off halfway around.

Even worse, she knew she didn’t really want to get off. One more round of insanity, Bree…

“You’re going to have to open your eyes sooner or later, honey.”

By moving an inch and a half, Bree managed to bury the rest of her head under the pillow. Until the pillow was removed. And the comforter was slowly tugged down from her shoulders to the middle of her spine to her waist. She had to open her eyes then, to grab it.

Blinding morning sunlight made her blink as she snatched the comforter away from him and tucked it around her again, glanced at the clock on her bedside table and shook her head at Hart. “You have something against sleep, don’t you? I haven’t had one eight-hour night since I ran into you.”

“But for very good reason last night, Bree. You’re not having a hard time facing me this morning, are you?”

She opened her mouth, ready with a quick denial, then abruptly closed it. She wasn’t having a hard time facing him. She was having a terrible time facing him, which was why she’d been feigning sleep for the better part of an hour.

Through shuttered lashes, she cast a frantic glance at the wardrobe, several feet away. There was no way to get from point A to point B modestly, primarily because the sheet just wasn’t going to stretch that far and she wasn’t wearing a stitch.

Hart wasn’t either. He was standing stark naked, with one of those lazy smiles on his face…but it was the dark blue depths in his eyes that made her feel vulnerable. She couldn’t read his expression, and she was just coming to understand that Hart wasn’t at all the man he let on he was. The public Hart was a heartless, insensitive, macho-type nuisance. Now that she had her tongue back, she felt reasonably confident that she could handle that side of him. The private Hart, she was increasingly afraid, was dangerous.

He knew a lot about women, far too much about her in particular, and had a gift for making a woman feel loved-but Bree knew better.

He didn’t love her, and she couldn’t possibly love him. And if he’d been any kind of gentleman, he would have stolen away at dawn so she could now face alone the mountains of guilt and self-reproach for her abandoned behavior the night before. You don’t sleep with a man you barely know. You don’t start relationships with womanizers. You don’t play with a man you’re not even absolutely sure you like…but seem to have embarrassingly fallen in love with.

“One does get the feeling you’re not used to waking up with a lover in your bed,” he said mildly.

“Nonsense. I’ve done this hundreds of times.” Making up her mind to put a good face on the lie, Bree bounced airily out of bed, her eyes staring at the wardrobe so she wouldn’t have to look at him. How did other women face these mornings after the night before, anyway?

“Hundreds?”