by Leanne Banks
Brick took a quick sip of his own coffee and tossed the rest of it. His thoughts brought enough of a bitter taste to his mouth without adding black coffee.
Reining in his dark mood, he got in the car and headed toward the site. Lisa still hadn’t spoken several minutes later. “You’re quiet. Is something on your mind?”
“I’m not sure my mind is working yet.”
Brick relaxed slightly. “Everything okay with your family? You haven’t mentioned them much lately.”
“My youngest sister, Janine, is renovating an old house with her new husband. My other sisters told her that if her marriage can survive this, it’ll survive anything.” Lisa laughed. “I think she and her husband have already agreed not to wallpaper together.”
Brick stopped at a traffic light and looked at Lisa. “I didn’t know Janine had gotten married. When did that happen?”
Lisa looked away. “It was in May around my birthday. I think you might have been out of town for a few weeks then.”
“Seems as if I missed a number of things when I was out of town that time.” He frowned, adding the new information and wondering what to make of it. “So all three of your younger sisters are married now. Renee is married to the guy in the air force. Tina and—”
“Jeff,” she supplied. “He’s a plumber, and they live in Memphis a few blocks from my parents.”
All married except for her. Brick wondered if that was part of the reason she’d been so hell-bent on marriage. He would be crazy to ask her about it. Crazy was about right. He took the plunge. “Do your parents ever talk to you about getting married?”
Brick felt her stiffen beside him.
“Not a lot,” she said in a quiet voice. “My dad teased me a little at Janine’s wedding when I didn’t catch the wedding bouquet. My mother asked when I was going to let them meet you.”
Brick sensed a formidable resistance in her, but he’d gotten to the place where he wanted to understand everything about Lisa. “What was your answer?”
Lisa hesitated. “I told her you were busy with work. She said something about wishing you’d come to the wedding, and I dropped it.”
“Why?”
“In case you’ve forgotten, weddings are about commitment,” she said, exasperation leaking into her tone. “The whole situation would have driven you crazy.”
“Maybe,” he conceded. “Maybe not. I wish you had asked. I would have liked to meet your family.”
Brick felt her stare at him.
“Are you saying you would have gone?”
“I don’t know,” he said carefully. “I would have made the effort if I thought it was something you’d wanted. Weddings are about family too.”
Lisa shook her head and folded her arms. “I don’t believe you.”
Brick felt a jab of temper as they neared the construction site. “But you don’t know, do you? Because you never asked me.”
“You wanted everything nice and easy. No strings.”
“I did,” he confessed, and pulled the car to a stop. When he saw that she wasn’t going to look at him, he tucked his thumb under her chin and coerced her into meeting his gaze. “But tell me one time I wasn’t interested in you. As a friend, as a businesswoman, as a lover. Hell, as a woman who backs her car into something new on a weekly basis. Name one time.”
Her eyes were wide with trepidation. He wanted them wide with wonder. He wanted to kiss her, to match her mouth to his and cut this silliness between them.
Guided by an innate awareness of her sensuality, he did the next best thing to a kiss and rubbed his thumb across her lips. Back and forth, back and forth, until he gently pressed his finger into her mouth. She instinctively pursed her lips around it, and his loins tightened.
He slowly removed his thumb and lifted it to his lips. “You can’t name a time, because there’s never been one,” he whispered hoarsely. “In a minute, we’re getting out of this car, and I can’t think about you anymore. I can’t think about how much I want to hold you. I can’t think about how I’d like to kiss you for the next hour and not come up for air. I can’t think about how you feel underneath that T-shirt and those jeans, and how much I’ve missed touching you, or I could screw up this job.”
Staring into her turbulent aroused eyes, he took a deep breath and grabbed the hard hats on the dash. “Here’s your hat. I’ll introduce you to the super, and then I want you to watch it all. I want you to notice what the foundation looks like before and what it looks like after. And after it’s all over, we’ll talk.”
Wrapping his hand around hers, he tugged her out of the car and toward the site. Lisa automatically followed where he led, but her head was spinning. She didn’t know what to think or say. At the moment, she could only feel. Her lips still burned from his touch and her heart was beating so hard, it felt as if it were clanging in her chest. God help her, she didn’t think she’d ever recover from hearing Brick say those things.
For the first time, Lisa wondered if this meant that no matter what she’d said about breaking off their relationship, Brick wasn’t going anywhere. Her stomach twisted at the notion. She fought a wild elation at the same time she told herself that it didn’t matter. She and Brick were miles apart when it came to the future.
Somehow she responded to the superintendent’s greeting, but her mind was still on Brick. What he’d said wouldn’t go away. It was the kind of declaration she’d dreamed of. The only words missing had been “I love you,” and “Will you marry me?”
Lisa bit her lip as a cold, hard dose of reality hit, because she knew she wasn’t likely to ever hear those crucial missing words.
Two trucks pulled into the gravel parking lot, and the drivers immediately called for Brick. An instinct for emotional survival kicked in and made her deliberately stop thinking about what Brick had said. Instead she took stock of her surroundings. At this time in the morning, there wasn’t a great deal of traffic. The construction site was surrounded by a wire fence and in the darkness before dawn, to Lisa’s inexperienced eye, it looked like a lot of machinery, dirt and rock.
The rock was the problem. Construction for the addition couldn’t continue until the foundation was excavated. Watching more closely, she narrowed her eyes and saw that Brick was examining the holes drilled for the explosives.
By sunup, he was loading the holes with cartridged explosives. “Why cartridged explosives?” she asked the man beside her.
The young man pointed toward the office building. “If we overload and there’s flyrock, a lot of people could get hurt. Windows could get broken.”
She looked at the intricate design of holes, connectors and wires, and shook her head at the complexity of such a small project. “How does he know where to put everything and how much to use?”
He shrugged. “It takes years of experience. Brick’s the best. That’s why the operating manager of the company tried to keep him blasting as long as he could.”
It gave her an entirely new perspective on Brick. It seemed as if he checked the “shot” at least ten times. Back and forth, he looked for anything he could have missed. So utterly cautious, she thought, and wondered if the same cautiousness spilled over into his emotional commitment.
Was he the kind of man who would have to walk over the same ground time and time again before he took that final step?
The notion didn’t set her mind at ease, but it did give her something else to think about, something she knew would stay in the back of her mind for a long time.
Brick put wire mats over each hole, then brought the leads to the protected area where she stood.
“Go ahead and sound the warning signal,” he told the man beside her.
A loud horn blast jolted Lisa. Covering her ears, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
Brick seemed oblivious to the noise, but noticed her reaction. He grinned. “How would you like to wake up to that every morning instead of your clock radio?”
She laughed in disbelief. “About as much as you would.
”
“I’ll pass. Get ready.”
She watched him connect the wires and pick up something the size of a pencil. “What is that?” she asked the young man, not wanting to distract Brick.
He must have heard anyway. “We call it a popper. It’s a nonelectric detonator. It’s safer than the old kind.” He received clearance from the superintendent on a radio. Then Brick surveyed the site again and called out, “Fire in the hole!”
Within less than a second, the ground was rocked by the explosion and the noise was deafening. Lisa had to resist the urge to crouch down. It was silly, but she kept expecting someone to say, “Hit the deck!” The rock looked as if it had turned into a dust cloud. It was an incredible sight, watching all that hard rock instantly shattered. Even though she’d known what was going to happen, she hadn’t expected to be awed by the power of the explosion.
“You better close your mouth or you’ll be eating a lot of dust, Lisa,” Brick said dryly.
Lisa knew the voice of experience when she heard it. She closed her mouth.
A little over an hour later, after Brick had inspected the shot and filled out paperwork, they left the site. “How about we get a fast-food lunch and take it to my apartment. I need to grab a shower.”
Lisa agreed and barraged him with questions the whole way to his home. Brick patiently answered all of them and translated some of the technical jargon.
It wasn’t until he took his shower that she realized it was the first time she’d been inside his apartment. She remembered wishing for this. Senada had said she was silly, but Lisa had always wanted Brick to take her to his personal space.
Now that Lisa was there, she didn’t know where to look first. He probably watched his Braves games in the lounger that occupied the prize spot in front of the television, she guessed. Her gaze skipped over the large comfortable sofa that occupied one wall to the CD system housed on a small shelving unit. Country-western and rock CDs lay on one of the shelves. Nary a classical one contaminated the bunch, she noticed with a grin. On the bottom shelf were several photo albums.
Her fingers itched to open them and learn the secrets of Brick’s past. The temptation was great enough that she would have except she suspected he’d be out of the shower very soon.
With a reluctant sigh, she moved away from the albums and found a collection of photos on the wall. All family, she suspected. There were pictures of three different weddings. Carly and Russ’s, Erin and Garth’s, and Daniel and Sara’s. The rest were assorted pictures taken with his brothers, except for one older-looking photo.
“That’s my mom and dad,” Brick said from the hallway.
Lisa quickly turned and looked at him. His hair was still wet. He’d left his shirt unbuttoned, and she could see a smattering of droplets on his chest. For some reason, the sight made her thirsty. She swallowed. “I didn’t hear the shower cut off.”
He gave a slow grin. “Maybe your hearing was damaged by that blast horn.”
“Maybe,” she agreed, feeling his humor grab something inside her and pull. “I like your apartment.”
He shrugged. “It’s a place to eat and sleep, not as nice as yours.”
She tilted her head to one side, considering what he’d said. “Is that why you never brought me here, when we were—” She searched for a word. Dating didn’t seem to quite cover it. “When we were—”
“Together,” Brick finished for her. “I always liked being at your place better than mine. Yours felt more like a home.” He paused and studied her. “Did it bother you that I didn’t bring you here?”
“Oh, no,” Lisa said too quickly. “I assumed it was more convenient for you, or that maybe you needed your privacy.”
He lifted an eyebrow in disbelief. “Why do I think I missed the boat on this one too?”
“No, really,” she said in a tone rife with undercurrents of embarrassment. “I didn’t think—”
Ignoring her protest, Brick hooked his fingers around her wrist and tugged. “Let me give you the nickel tour.” As he led her down the hallway, the reason he’d tried to keep his relationship with her so isolated from the rest of his life hit him in the face. His time with her had been so special, he hadn’t wanted to share it. Being with Lisa always made him feel as if he’d come home. Sighing, he wished he could find a way to tell her that now. He watched her carefully, wondering if it would make a difference to her.
“A seascape,” Lisa said, pointing to the picture above his king-size bed in his bedroom.
“Yeah, it’s the one drawback to living in Tennessee. No ocean.”
“I know what you mean. I keep wishing I could get to the beach.” Her eyes widened as if she’d just remembered something. “As a matter of fact, I’ll be going on a weekend cruise next month.”
Brick’s grin froze on his face. “With Mr. Perfect?” he tried to say in a normal voice.
Lisa shook her head. “No. That dating service I told you about is sponsoring a cruise, so I signed up.” Her hands fluttered until she clasped them together. “You never know,” she said with a shrug as her gaze slid from his. “Moonlight, music and island breezes might stir something up.”
She sounded as if she were hoping to be stirred, and Brick wanted to be the one doing the stirring. He laced his fingers together and caught himself before he cracked his knuckles.
“Let’s eat,” he said, then started whistling. He used the opportunity to put his hand around her elbow and stopped at the doorway. “So what did you think of the shot?”
She turned, and her face was suddenly close to his. The area was small and the hallway was dark. He smelled the soft scent of her perfume and felt more intimate with her than he had in a long time. He looked deep into her eyes and felt the air crackle around him. She had to feel it, he thought. She had to feel this pull that never went away. “It just seems to get stronger,” he murmured to himself, wanting to touch a stray strand of her hair. Instead he let his hand slide from her arm to the inside of her wrist and rubbed the place where her pulse beat swiftly.
Lisa glanced at his hand, but didn’t remove hers. “It what?” she asked in a hushed voice.
He shook his head. “Nothing. I asked what you thought of the shot.”
He watched her throat move in a deep swallow. “It was incredible. So powerful. It was amazing to me that those explosives and little wires had the power to turn that rock to dust.” She shook her head. “Amazing.”
He lifted her hand to his bare chest, where his own heart pounded like thunder. “Maybe you’ll understand me a little better now.”
“What do you mean?” she whispered as if whispering were the best she could manage.
Brick felt a lick of arousal wind its way to his belly. “You saw what dynamite did to that foundation.” He lowered his head and gave in to the temptation to unfasten the clip in her hair. “Lisa, you do the same thing to me.”
Chapter Seven
Lisa’s heart soared into her throat. With his hands in her hair and his pulse drumming against her palm, she felt weak. She stifled a plea for help or maybe it was a plea for him. Confused, she dropped her hand away.
His broken groan caused a knot in her chest. “For God’s sake, Lisa, touch me. Anywhere or everywhere, but touch me.”
It was too much. She tried to look away, but his violet gaze kept her trapped more surely than an armed guard. The need in his eyes compelled her to surrender to her own bottled-up desires. Her whole body seemed to cry out to be close to him.
Tentatively, she lifted her hands to his face.
When her palms met his skin, he closed his eyes as if her touch were almost too pleasurable to bear. “Brick,” she whispered hesitantly, “I don’t—”
He turned his mouth into her hand and kissed it. “Just don’t stop.” He shuddered when she slid her hands through his still-damp hair. He coiled his own fingers through her hair. “I don’t want to open my eyes. I’m afraid you’ll disappear. Maybe you’re another dream. Maybe you’re not real.�
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A lump rose in her throat. Lisa swallowed hard. “I’m real, Brick. I’ve always been real.” Driven by the overriding desire to prove it, she stepped closer so that her body pressed against his, her sensitive breasts to his hard chest, her belly to his swollen ridge. Her thighs parted for his leg to fit between them. Stretching on tiptoe, she gave in to another desire and matched her lips to his.
Her lips were wet, warm satin, and her sweet taste made Brick ravenous with hunger. He felt like a man who’d been without water for days and was getting his first sip. In some corner of his mind, he knew he should slow down, shouldn’t let her see how much he needed her, but it wasn’t a matter of choice. It was a thriving, grasping instinct in his gut that reminded him of how desperate he was for her.
He slipped his tongue past her lips to familiarize himself with the secrets of her mouth all over again. Her breath caught and her hands fell to his shoulders as if she were holding on for strength.
He felt the clench of her slender fingers on his flesh, the tight tips of her breasts burrowing into his rib cage, and felt a sheen of perspiration on his brow. Every minuscule move from her body impacted him like an electric charge.
His mind shorted out, and for one glorious moment it was just Lisa, panting softly and taking all he could give. All sensation. Rocking against her, he lowered one hand to the small of her back and skimmed the other to her breast. Her nipple jutted against his palm, and suddenly it wasn’t enough. “I want to feel your skin,” he muttered into her neck.
Pulling her T-shirt loose, he ran his hands up over her waist and pushed past her bra to cup her full breast. At the first touch of his palm on her skin, his groan mingled with hers. He rolled the impudent nipple between his thumb and forefinger. With each caress, Lisa twisted against him, her shirt rising a little more with each movement.
