Tanya Michaels - Mistletoe Hero

She was unprepared for Gabe to roll them over suddenly, pinning her beneath him. Should a man with a head injury be moving so qui-? Oh! She inhaled sharply as he kissed her through the lace. The pleasure was nearly unbearable-she couldn’t tell if she wanted him to keep going or if she needed a second to catch her breath.

Almost as if reading her mind, he gave her a moment’s respite, stopping just long enough to pull his shirt over his head. Wow . Even in the darkened room, she could appreciate how his well-muscled arms tapered to a movie-screen-worthy chest and a stomach indented with a straight line down the middle, ringed with the faint outline of abs. Next to that kind of physical perfection, Arianne should probably feel self-conscious about how rarely she exercised, but instead the only feeling she experienced was giddiness at the thought of being able to touch him.

She trailed her fingers over the flat dip of his navel, toward the waistband of his jeans. Her fingers shook as she undid the button and the zipper. Gabe held himself as still as a predatory cat right before it pounced.

When she rubbed him through the cotton of the boxer-briefs, his head fell back, his expression strained and indefinably erotic. “Arianne.”

He said her name like a pagan prayer. He made a pilgrimage of her body, worshipping with his hands and his lips. Her denim capris and then her bra vanished beneath his expert touch. By the time he slid a finger over the satiny material between her thighs, she was practically writhing with need. When he opened the nightstand drawer to get a condom, she almost sobbed with relief, long past ready to take him inside her.

She stroked him one last time, guided him to her center, her body bucking upward when he thrust into her. He braced himself above her, his muscles rigid with exertion as he watched her. She met his gaze as long as she could, until the intensity became too much, and she had to look away as the tremors built inside her. She closed her eyes, spasmed around him and let go, the ripples escalating into shock waves. Gabe finished with a wordless shout, then rolled flat onto his back, reaching for her hand among the tangled sheets and blanket. They lay there panting with their fingers entwined.

When Arianne noticed that he was pressing his temple with his free hand, she experienced a twinge of contrition. “Are you all right?”

“I could use some more of those pills,” he admitted. “Other than that, I’m perfect.”

Yes, you were . “I’ll be right back,” she said, shrugging into the shirt she’d worn earlier. She padded down the hall to the kitchen where she scooped the acetaminophen off the counter and poured a glass of water for Gabe. Standing in front of the refrigerator, she realized that she was famished.

“Thank you,” Gabe told her when she returned. He’d flipped on the nightstand lamp, the soft golden glow bathing his skin.

She dropped the pills in his palm. “It’s the least I can do.” What had she been thinking, attacking a concussed guy? This probably had not been what the doctor had in mind when he’d instructed her to wake Gabe every few hours and check for a response.

“I only hope I didn’t do you irreparable harm,” she said ruefully.

A smile flirted around the corners of his mouth. “If you did, I forgive you. It was worth it.”

She sat next to him, tucking her feet under her. “Any chance you’re hungry? We never did have lunch, and I’m pretty sure we missed dinner, too.”

He paused, as if taking stock. “Earlier I was nauseous, but now that you mention it, I’m starving.”

“I could make us dinner,” she volunteered, the offer making her incongruously bashful. The man had just seen her naked, but there was a different kind of intimacy in fixing him a meal in his home. It just felt so uncharacteristically domestic. “Although I should warn you, I’m not a very accomplished chef. My mother, bless her heart, tried to teach me, but I always wanted to be playing basketball out on the driveway or riding bikes with my brothers.”

“Arianne, right now, you could serve me a burned grilled cheese sandwich made with stale bread, and I’d still think you were a goddess. The problem is I doubt I have much in the way of groceries. I stock up on the weekend and had planned to go later today.”

She considered this, too hungry to get dressed and drive into town in search of sustenance. “Well, there’s ice cream.”

“Ice cream for dinner?” Gabe grinned at her. “Woman after my own heart.”

IT WAS A SIX COURSE MEAL, if one counted chocolate syrup, sliced bananas and ice-cream flavors as courses. Dress was informal, Arianne only in a shirt and Gabe in formfitting boxer-briefs. They each picked out two varieties from the assortment in his freezer-Arianne had been curious about one called Hawaiian Vacation that included coconut slivers and macadamia nuts-and made large, sloppy sundaes.

Gabe didn’t actually have a kitchen table, explaining that he mostly ate at the breakfast bar. But they opted not to perch on the high-backed stools and instead sat together on the navy plaid couch. Arianne, curious about everything from his choice of decorative touches to what movies he might have in his DVD collection, tried to take in her surroundings without seeming too nosy. It was a nice place, nothing fancy or fussy, but he used colors she thought worked well and he obviously wasn’t a slob. Frankly, if the tables had been turned and she’d ended up with him as unexpected company this afternoon, she wasn’t sure her place would have been as neat. It seemed like she was frequently on her way somewhere-to work, to her parents’, out with friends-and she had a tendency to dump stuff in the chair closest to the door as she passed.

A picture in a wooden frame, sitting on top of the shelves of the entertainment center, caught her eye. It looked like a personal shot rather than a professionally taken photo, and a pretty young woman on a railed front porch was smiling at the camera. Judging by her clothes and hairstyle, the picture was at least a couple of decades old.

“Your mom?” Arianne hazarded a guess.

Gabe paused with his spoon in midair. “Yeah.”

“Were you close?”

“No. She died before I was two weeks old. If it weren’t for pictures, I wouldn’t even know what she looked like.” He said the words blandly, with no emotion, and she wondered how he really felt. Did it bother him that he’d been denied the chance to bond with her, or had he made his peace with that years ago, not truly missing something he’d never known?

“What happened?” she asked, wanting to know more about this man and the upbringing that had shaped him.

“Postsurgery complications. I was a really large baby and they decided to do a C-section.” Again said eerily without inflection. Not sorrow or misplaced guilt that the C-section might have been his fault, simply a rote statement of fact. “She got an infection afterward, which is always dangerous, but she was diabetic, which made it harder to fight.”

Thinking of how important her mother, Susan, had been to her all her life, Arianne got a lump in her throat. But nothing in Gabe’s demeanor suggested he wanted to discuss his own feelings, so she found another outlet for her sympathy. “That must have been hard on your father.”

Gabe’s laugh was harsh. “And he never let me forget that. You should have seen his face when I, in the third grade, foolishly asked if there was a chance he might remarry, if I would ever have…” He trailed off, staring into space with such anger and pain that she couldn’t believe she’d thought him emotionless moments before.

Had she done it again, pushed too hard?

No , she told herself. Even if Gabe didn’t want to admit it to himself, this was probably something he needed to deal with. Was this strain why he and his father weren’t close? If Gabe was going to leave Mistletoe-her heart ached at the thought-then this might be his last chance to make peace with his dad. Although the past couldn’t be altered, perhaps they could at least gain closure.