Jennifer Greene - Nobody's Princess

In short order they’d finished the chores and aimed for the back porch again, this time settling in the rickety porch swing. All five cats climbed on laps. True darkness had fallen by then, bringing a cool breeze that sifted strands of her hair and ruffled her collar. Lights popped on in the neighborhood. Katydids called. She poured him another glass from the pitcher of mint juleps.

“Have you heard from your Gwen?”

“No.”

“Do you think you will?”

The first time he’d met Regan, he thought her outspoken prying damn near close to rude. Now, it just seemed part of her, not about rudeness at all but more a gutsy honesty that was intrinsically part of her nature. And he admired it—even if she had the slight, nasty tendency to put him on the spot. “Yeah. Eventually. Gwen always lived here, and so does her family. So sooner or later, regardless of what happens with the guy she took off with, she’s bound to show back up if only to see her family.”

Regan reached up to unclip the hairpin, and shook her hair loose to let the breeze play with it. “That’s one of the reasons I took the job here—to be able to escape having to see a guy. He taught in the same building.”

Hell. If she could put him on the spot with those dicey questions, so could he. “You were in love with him?”

“Oh, yeah. Head over heels.” Her eyes looked smoky by moonlight, her face soft-brushed in the silvery shadows. “His name was Ty. I could have sworn I was picking a prince. He was blond, blue-eyed, claimed to be madly in love with me right back. Until I was late one month. At which time he turned into a frog faster than a witch could wave a wand.”

Late. The last time a woman had mentioned her period around him was precisely never. But she was trying to find a way to tell him, he suspected, that she’d had a “male Gwen” in her life. “He left you in the lurch?”

“I wasn’t in the lurch. It turned out I wasn’t pregnant. And to be honest, I admit to being careless...it just didn’t seem that way at the time. We were so in love that I was positive we were headed for rings and orange blossoms and that whole shebang. I never meant to skip a pill, but when it happened I just wasn’t that worried about it. Our starting a family seemed in the cards.”

“It still hurts?” he asked quietly.

“Yes and no. It doesn’t hurt that he’s gone from my life. Once he picked up with a young female student, the handwriting on his character wall was damn obvious. But it hurts that I was so damned naive and stupid to be taken in. It’s not like I was seventeen. I was too damned old to still be believing in the ‘magic’ of love.”

He’d been keeping the swing swaying with a foot. Now he stopped. “You’re serious? You really don’t believe in love?”

“I believe that if two people work like dogs, they may—may—make a successful marriage. But I’m not sure that has anything to do with love. I think couples with stars in their eyes, looking for magic and romance, are selling themselves lies that can seriously hurt them.” She cocked her head. “You were just burned by someone yourself, Alex.”

“Yeah. But not because either of us lied. It just didn’t work out. I wasn’t the right man for her.”

She shook her head vehemently. “There is no right man. There are no heroes. Not for a man—or a woman.”

Alex didn’t shout at her. By the cut-and-dried code he lived by, a man never vented temper on a woman. His voice did sneak up another notch in volume, though, but that was necessary. Her whole cynical view...as if love weren’t the most powerful force in the universe, as if there were something inherently dishonest in the concept of romance...well, he simply had to tactfully address the errors in her thinking.

They were still fighting like cats and dogs when she startled them both with a yawn. A quick glance at his watch shocked him. The illuminated dial claimed it was 2:00 a.m. He shook the watch, just in case the battery had stopped, but no.

“For Pete’s sake, I’m really sorry. I know you have classes in the morning, and so do I. I just didn’t realize how late it was getting.”

He immediately stood up from the porch swing. So did Regan, with a chuckle. “I didn’t, either. In fact, it’s been a blue moon since I got so involved in a debate that I totally forgot the time. ... I’m glad you came for dinner, Alex.”

“Yeah, me, too. Thanks for the invitation.” It seemed natural to scoop up two of the kittens when she did and cart them back to their nesting box in the kitchen. Somehow she’d made him feel at home. Alex really didn’t understand iL He’d never had a problem finding a comfort level with a woman, but this was her. Regan. Who had his hormones in such an unfamiliar zinging uproar that he never imagined ever feeling relaxed around her.

Her house was tripping dark. Since neither of them had been inside all evening, no lights had been turned on. Just as he reached the front door, her hand reached out in the darkness to flip on the light switch in the hall. “I’ll put the outside porch light on, too,” she said with a chuckle. “I just still can’t believe how—”

Whatever she’d been planning to say faded into cyberspace. When her hand reached out, it connected with his chest. Alex had no doubt whatsoever that the contact was accidental. His body just happened to be between her and the light switch. She was just seeing him out. Nothing had happened through the whole evening to make him think anything else was conceivably on her mind. Or his.

But there was a sudden silence in the dark hall. And her soft, warm palm froze. As if it were glued in place against his heartbeat.

Three

He couldn’t be kissing her. Not Alex. Regan wasn’t prone to hallucinations, but she fully respected that everyone had a bonkers moment now and then. This simply had to be one of hers. All she’d done was walk him to the door. Reach out in the pitch-black hall to flip on a light switch. And, yeah, her hand had accidentally collided with his chest. But there had been a spare second when she felt his heart beating, beating against the nest of her palm.

It wasn’t as if a bomb had exploded. Or Congress had balanced the budget. Absolutely nothing monumental had happened to explain this sudden, strange break from reality she was suffering from.

So fast, so mystifyingly fast, his arms had swept around her. Regan could have handled an unwanted pass blindfolded in her sleep. But this was nothing like a pass. The accidental physical contact acted like tinder for a spark in a dry, dry forest.

His fingers sieved and then clenched in her hair. And suddenly his mouth was just there. Covering hers. Warm. Mobile. Evocatively and distinctly male.

She swayed against him because she would have lost her balance if she hadn’t. He wasn’t rough. She couldn’t even imagine Alex being rough. The texture of his mouth was as gentle as the disarming, winsome caress of a spring breeze...or it started out that way.

That first soft kiss deepened and darkened, scooping up momentum like the electric charge in a lightning storm. His lips sealed against hers with a pressure that made moonbeams dance under her closed eyes and the blood sluice through her veins in a giddy rush.

She wasn’t going to call it magic. She knew perfectly well that physical longing and a bunch of ragtag, amoral hormones could hoodwink a woman into believing silly, irresponsible things.

But this nonmagic thing he was doing was alluring and startling and terribly unsettling. One kiss whispered into another, chained into another and another. Alex was supposed to be a gentleman. Not an inspired kisser. She’d been so positive he was on the shy side, if not downright inhibited around women, but that illusion bit the dust, too. His tongue bribed hers into trying a taste. He tasted like mint juleps and need...a raw, urgent, honest need to touch and be touched, hold and be held. He treasured her mouth, exploring, tasting, sipping her responsiveness as if he’d never sampled this gold before, as if nothing were more important in the whole paltry universe but finding her.