“Are all these flowers for me?” she asked, pleased by her breezy tone.
“No, just half of them. The other half are for the Steve and Melanie Persky, up in Armonk. I figured if things got boring here, we could always take a drive up there to visit them.” Noticing the way she stiffened slightly at his joke, he laughed and rested the bulky bouquet within the cradle of her arm. “Don’t worry, Daff,” he whispered, brushing his lips against her forehead. “Things aren’t going to get boring here.”
His promise only increased her anxiety. She struggled to disguise her tension behind a hesitant smile. “Come in,” she said, realizing at once that she sounded more like a Marine sergeant barking orders than a seductress luring a willing victim into her boudoir.
Brad bent to lift a bottle-shaped paper bag from the step before following her inside. After commanding him so brusquely to enter her house, Daphne wasn’t about to make matters worse by reminding him that she didn’t drink wine.
“You’re nervous,” he observed, trailing her into the kitchen.
She busied herself laying the flowers on a counter near the sink and then pulling a porcelain vase from a cabinet. “Who, me?”
He chuckled. “I’m nervous, too, so don’t feel bad about it.”
She spun around, startled. “Why are you nervous?” she asked, thinking that, for someone who claimed to be nervous, he seemed remarkably relaxed.
He smiled again, and she responded to his dimples with a discernible tightening in the pit of her stomach. His gaze roamed her kitchen before coming to rest on the extravagant floral arrangement. “I’m nervous because those flowers aren’t going to fit in your vase,” he said.
She cracked a grin and turned to examine the vase. “You’re right. They’re not. I guess we’ll have to make a delivery in Armonk, after all.”
“I admit I got a little carried away,” he apologized, setting the paper bag containing the wine on the breakfast table and joining her at the sink. “I couldn’t make up my mind which flowers to buy, so I bought them all. Maybe we could just fill the sink with water and leave them there.”
Daphne dismissed his suggestion with a vague shrug. “I’m sure I’ve got something they’ll fit into,” she said, swinging open cabinet doors in search of a larger vessel. She found an empty mayonnaise jar. “How’s this?” she asked, filling it with water.
“Ugly.”
“The flowers are so pretty, they’ll make up for it,” she said as she tried to jam the stems through the neck of the jar.
“Don’t stuff them all in,” he cautioned her—too late. Her attempt to squeeze too many stems into too small an opening caused the jar to skid off the counter and land with a crash on the floor.
Daphne shrieked and jumped back, trying to elude the splattering water. Brad jumped back, too, then stared at the mess of broken glass, puddling water and ferns strewn across the floor between himself and Daphne. He laughed.
“It’s not funny!” she snapped before succumbing to a reluctant smile. There was something so crazy about the size of the bouquet, and something so utterly unromantic about a mayonnaise jar. There was, she had to concede, something perversely appealing about getting down on her hands and knees with Brad and swabbing up the mess.
By the time the last sliver of glass had been disposed of and the water mopped up, Brad’s jacket was off and Daphne’s sleeves were rolled up. “The florist warned me I was buying too many flowers,” Brad said, still grinning. “Can we divide them into two jars or something?”
“I don’t even know if I have two more empty jars,” Daphne informed him, selecting a couple of roses for the vase. “There’s a limit to how much mayonnaise I can eat in any given year.” She wrung out the sponge, accepted the remaining flowers from Brad and dumped them into the sink, which she filled with water from the tap. “I’ll figure out something to do with them later. Right now, I’ve got to get the dinner heated up.”
“Whatever you made, I hope it goes with red,” he said, pulling the bottle of wine from the bag. “I picked up a Bordeaux—”
“It goes with red, all right,” Daphne said, lighting the burner under a kettle of water for the linguini. “But you’ll have to drink the wine alone.”
He stared at her for a minute, then at the bottle. “Oh, shit.”
“You don’t have to drink the entire bottle,” she reassured him. “You can have as much as you like here, and then you can bring the rest home with you.”
“It isn’t that,” he swore, glaring at the bottle again. “It’s just...” He sighed. “I had it in my head that when you romance a woman, the traditional offerings are flowers and wine. I brought too many flowers, and I shouldn’t have brought any wine at all. I’m screwing the whole thing up.”
“Don’t apologize,” she consoled him. “I like the flowers—in fact, I like them a lot more than I liked that jar I broke. And seriously, you can have wine without me. Just because I’m a stick-in-the-mud—”
“You aren’t a stick-in-the-mud,” he said quietly as he carried the unopened wine bottle to the garbage pail. Without any fanfare, he tossed it in.
Daphne opened her mouth to object, then shut it. Throwing out the bottle of wine was quite possibly the most romantic thing Brad had done so far. “You’re going to be rewarded for your temperance,” she promised, hearing the bubbly sound of the water for the pasta beginning to boil. She lowered the heat and beamed at him.
His answering smile was unnervingly sexy. “That’s what I’m hoping.”
“I was referring to dinner,” she said, although she felt her innards thawing into a warm pool of yearning beneath his uninhibited gaze. The blatant message in his eyes ought to have made her even more nervous, but for some reason it didn’t. If she and Brad could laugh about broken jars and wasted wine, they could surely hang onto their sense of humor for everything else on the evening’s agenda.
“It does smell good,” Brad said, steering his hunger from Daphne to the pots on the stove. “As a matter of fact, it smells like spaghetti.”
“Linguini,” she told him. “Equally fattening.”
“I love it.” He lifted the lid on the kettle of boiling water, then the one on the smaller pot. “Home-made sauce? How domestic. I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“It’s only about half home-made,” she confessed, dumping a fistful of pasta into the boiling water and then giving the sauce an unnecessary stir. “The basic sauce came out of a can, but I added lots of spices. Of course, the clams came out of a can, too.”
“Clams,” Brad muttered, recoiling from the stove.
Daphne eyed him apprehensively. “You don’t like clams? Oh, Brad, I’m sorry. We can pick them out of the sauce if you’d like—”
He stared at the sauce with brooding suspicion. “It’s not that I don’t like clams—it’s that I’m deathly allergic to them. Even if I picked every last clam out of the sauce before eating it, I’d still break out in hives.”
“Oh.” Daphne focused on the carefully seasoned contents of the pot and grimaced. Just one more mistake to add to the mayonnaise jar and the wine. “I bet you hate that piano concerto, too,” she said, reaching the depressing conclusion that the entire evening was doomed to be as disastrous as the last evening she’d wound up with Brad. “I know I’m not wild about it.”
She heard what sounded like a low chuckle behind her. She couldn’t believe Brad found anything amusing in the fact that, on top of everything else, the dinner itself was a complete bomb. But when she turned around, she saw him practically doubled over with laughter. He was leaning against the table, his shoulders convulsing and his eyes closed, with tears of laughter leaking through his thick eyelashes and streaming down his cheeks. “Daff—” he gasped, “Daffy—you look so serious! Come on, honey, admit it—we’re really on a roll here!”
Even if she didn’t find the situation as funny as Brad did, she was unable to resist the infectious rumble of his laughter. She shot a glance toward the sink filled with soggy flo
wers, and then toward the garbage pail harboring the shattered mayonnaise jar and the wine, and then toward the stove with its lethal pot of sauce.
She started to laugh, too.
As soon as he heard her laughter, Brad reached for her hands and pulled her toward him, steering her between his outstretched legs. “Would it make you feel any better if I told you I adored the music?” he asked once he’d regained control of himself.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I think it’s kind of stuffy.”
“I think you’re an idiot.”
“I think you’re a boor.”
“I love it when you talk dirty,” Brad murmured before grazing her lips lightly with his. He drew back, allowing his gaze to meet hers. If anything, he looked even sexier than he had earlier. Daphne’s laughter stuck in her throat as she comprehended the message in the smoky radiance of his eyes.
“I don’t usually talk dirty,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to.”
“Do you want to skip dinner?”
“I’d rather skip dinner than get hives.”
She inhaled deeply, keenly aware of what they would wind up doing if they didn’t eat.
When she’d contemplated the evening ahead, she had expected that they would build up to the ultimate event with a couple of hours of genial conversation, filling food and sweetened coffee. She had anticipated having time to accustom herself to the idea of Brad as a lover.
Perhaps it was better this way, without the preliminaries, without the opportunity for them both to reconsider what they were planning and come to their senses. As she stood just inches from Brad, with his long-fingered hands resting on either side of her waist and his unswerving gaze piercing her defenses, all she could think of was how delectable his throat looked to her, how much she wanted to kiss it.
She didn’t have the nerve, not quite yet. “I was going to—I mean, I thought—in the interest of romance and all...” She pressed her lips shut to keep herself from babbling any more.
“You thought what?”
“I thought I should slip into something more comfortable,” she said, then grinned crookedly at the cliché.
“That would be very nice,” Brad murmured.
Daphne slid from his embrace and darted out of the kitchen. In her bedroom, she closed the door, leaned against it and gulped in a few more frantic breaths.
All right. They’d get this part over with, and if it was awful they’d call it an early night and get as far away from each other as they could. And if it wasn’t awful, then none of the mishaps they’d suffered so far would matter.
She undressed, forcing herself not to dawdle, and hung her blouse into the closet. She noticed that her slacks were damp around the ankles from the water that had spilled when she’d dropped the jar, so she arranged them over the back of a chair to dry. Then she pulled on an embroidered silk caftan she’d bought on a whim when she’d vacationed in the Bahamas last winter. She hardly ever wore it, but she thought it would serve nicely tonight, draping over her modest curves in what she hoped was an alluring way. As with her damp clothing and her hive-inducing dinner menu, she’d spent a great deal of time last night analyzing whether she ought to wear this caftan for Brad. What had persuaded her to make use of it was her mental picture of him easing down the zipper one inch at a time, gradually revealing her body to his eyes and his touch. In her imagination, such a disrobing had seemed incredibly romantic.
In reality, she wasn’t so sure it would be.
Before leaving the bedroom, she removed her eyeglasses and fluffed her hair out. Then, sucking in one last, panic-stricken breath, she went to find Brad.
He was seated on the living room couch, listening to Mozart. He’d removed his shoes and kicked his legs up onto the table in front of the couch, but he immediately swung his feet back to the floor and stood at her entrance. His eyes widened as he surveyed her. “You look very nice,” he said.
“You sound surprised,” she shot back, then bit her lip. Now was not the time to remind Brad that on a ten-point scale her looks would barely rate a four.
Brad accepted her words without flinching. “Maybe I am, a little,” he admitted, crossing the room to her.
His honesty moved her in a way empty compliments never would have. If there had been any doubt about her ability to trust him, it was gone now. She smiled shyly as he cupped his hands over her shoulders and drew her to him. His mouth covered hers, teased it, coaxed it open. He traced the edge of her teeth with the tip of his tongue, then slid his lips from hers. “Am I rushing things?” he asked.
“No,” she said in a rusty voice. His tongue had felt wonderful inside her mouth. She wished he’d go right ahead and rush things some more.
“I want you to tell me,” he implored her. “This time, I want you to tell me what feels right, what doesn’t...I want it to be as good as we can make it.”
“Then kiss me again,” she requested, lifting her hands to the back of his head and guiding his mouth back to hers.
He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her body against his, and angled his lips against hers to afford him greater access to the inner recesses of her mouth. His tongue lunged deep, searching for its partner and sliding sensuously around it.
Daphne was astonished to feel the instantaneous effect of her kiss on him, the sudden hardness in his groin as he leaned into her hips. His hands skidded upward to her hair, his fingers twining through the loose blond curls, and he groaned. “Where the hell did you learn to kiss like that?” he asked, his tone gravelly as he leaned back from her.
Daphne didn’t recall having learned it anywhere. It was more a matter of inspiration, the inspiration of Brad’s equally transporting kiss. It wasn’t anything like the kisses she remembered him giving her the last time—kisses she’d tried for the last eight years to forget. “I was going to ask you the same thing,” she mumbled.
“I haven’t got an answer,” he said. “Let’s try it some more. Maybe we’ll figure out what we’re doing right.” He took her mouth with his again, and let his hands glide forward to cup her cheeks. His thumbs stroked down along the angle of her chin as his tongue danced with hers, and his hips surged against hers again. “Maybe it’s the Mozart,” he whispered, his breath tickling her lips.
“I doubt that,” Daphne countered with a grin.
“You should have told me you didn’t like Mozart.”
“I never said I didn’t like the music. I just said it’s stuffy. But,” she added, emboldened by the rapturous effect of Brad’s kisses, “it doesn’t matter. We probably won’t be able to hear the record in my bedroom.”
Brad groaned again. As if he’d read her mind—as if his sole desire in life was to fulfill her fantasies—he located the zipper of her caftan and tugged it down an inch. Bowing, he pressed his lips to the newly exposed skin at the base of her throat. “I want you undressed,” he announced, stating the obvious. “Is that all right?”
“It beats eating clams and getting hives,” she joked.
Brad laughed briefly. He slid the zipper down another couple of inches, then stopped. He wiggled the tab, jerked it, tugged it and scowled. “It seems to be stuck,” he said, straightening up.
Daphne lowered her gaze to the zipper, which had opened to about the middle of her sternum. She zipped it up a bit, then down again. It refused to budge past that point. “It is stuck,” she wailed.
Brad was besieged by fresh laughter. Daphne joined him. Even as she jiggled the tab futilely and watched yet another romantic moment stumble into calamity, she couldn’t keep the giggles from spilling out.
“What’s the verdict?” Brad asked as his laughter waned. “Are you going to have to spend the rest of your life in this thing, or do you want me to hack it off with a chainsaw?”
“We might be able to pull it off over my head,” Daphne suggested.
Brad bowed to gather up the hem of the robe. He raised it, allowing his hands to run along the backs of her legs. When he reached her
hips, he sucked in a shaky breath. “You’re not wearing anything underneath,” he noted.
“I thought...I mean, isn’t that supposed to be the general idea?”
“Oh, God...” Shoving the bunched fabric out of his way, he molded his hands to the soft, round flesh of her bottom and pressed her to himself. “You are one hell of a turn-on, Daphne,” he whispered.
“I thought that was supposed to be the general idea, too,” Daphne murmured, secretly thrilled that her attempt at playing a seductress hadn’t been a total failure, after all.
For a long moment he held her, sketching circles over her skin with his fingertips, urging her higher against him so her body would accomodate the increasing hardness of his. “Something tells me this evening is going to turn out to be one of the best ideas I’ve ever come up with,” he said, his tone rasping as he lifted Daphne into his arms.
“Don’t carry me,” she cautioned him, gripping his shoulders as he staggered beneath her weight. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
“Not if we move fast. Where’s your bedroom?”
“Down the hall and to the left. Brad—”
“It’s a good thing we didn’t eat first,” he teased, stalking down the hall with her. “If you’d gained your three spaghetti pounds, I wouldn’t be able to do this.” He raced across the bedroom to the bed, where he dropped Daphne and collapsed onto the mattress beside her, panting. “There,” he gloated, once he’d caught his breath. He flexed his arm muscles proudly. “You’re dealing with a pretty strong guy.”
“If you’re so strong, you ought to be able to open an itty-bitty little zipper,” she challenged him.
“I’m so strong, I’ll open it with my teeth, Daff.” He didn’t quite follow through on that boast, although his teeth weren’t far from the zipper as he attempted to wrestle it down again. When the zipper refused to give, he ignored it and kissed her breast through the silk of the caftan.
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