by Arlene James
Edward understood exactly what she was telling him. “Well, the marriage laws in Texas are narrow,” he said mildly.
Laurel looked at Tyler, who was clearly fuming. “Edward’s an attorney,” she explained sweetly.
“Oh?” Tyler said cattily. “Do I smell a nasty court battle? Wouldn’t Virdel love that!”
“What you smell,” Edward said, firmly banishing notions of any lawsuits connected with him, “is a prime rib headed my way. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to have my date to myself for some part of this evening.”
Laurel gasped but when Edward looked at her, she seemed perfectly composed. Deliberately, he covered her hand with his where it lay against the table linen and curled his fingers around it possessively. Tyler’s mouth turned down in a frown as he swept Laurel with an assessing gaze.
“I’ll tell Mother you asked after her.”
Laurel’s smile was dazzling. “Do that” Dismissively she turned her gaze back to Edward, and the warmth there rocked him back into his chair. Stunned, he was barely aware of Tyler May flouncing off. Benjamin exchanging his empty plate for one filled with sizzling beef made him turn away from that grateful gaze. Guilt stole his appetite. She thought he’d done that for her. She thought he’d pretended to be her date as an act of kindness toward her, when he’d only been protecting himself from being associated with a case he wasn’t yet certain he wanted to pursue. He gulped.
“Uh, I shouldn’t have said that”
“It’s all right,” she told him, concentrating on her roasted hen.
He didn’t say anything else, just forced himself to eat with a gusto he no longer possessed. When he finally chanced a look up, he found her staring longingly at the dance floor, where couples now swayed and glided to a gentle tune. He set his jaw, knowing that she wanted to dance and that it would be the greatest folly to do so. Determinedly he pushed aside his plate and fished a small notebook and an ink pen from a pocket
“I do have some questions.”
Her smile faded. “All right”
He tapped the pen on the notebook page. “You, um, spoke about attending college.”
“Yes.”
“Did you earn a degree?”
“I did.”
Here it was, another glaring inconsistency. He put down the pen and linked his fingers together over the pad. “How is it then,” he asked softly, “that you’re waiting tables in a diner? Fashion designing not your thing, after all?”
Something flashed in her bright eyes. Something dangerous. She smoothed her form-hugging skirt. “Do you like my dress?”
He blinked in surprise, his gaze falling involuntarily to her lap and traveling the length of her skirt down her slender legs—but not far down. He felt a curious flutter in his chest. “Very much,” he admitted hoarsely, “but it’s a little, ah…” He gulped, his gaze going again to her legs then zipping back up again to fasten on her eyes. The dismay he saw there shocked him.
“What?” she insisted, voice shaking. “My dress is what?”
“Well, it’s a little…” He searched for the right word and settled lamely for “Little.”
Abruptly she shot to her feet, hands smoothing fabric that already fit like second skin. “It’s a perfect fit!” she exclaimed. “Perfect!”
“Shh!” Edward hushed her, embarrassed by a very public display of a very fine—His breath quickened. “Sit down!” he hissed.
She seemed not to have heard him as she twisted about, showing him her backside. He closed his eyes, biting back a groan, then abruptly opened them again to sweep the room. If they had been the object of curiosity before, they were now the center of attention.
“Everyone’s staring!” he said through his teeth and made a grab for her wrist, intending to pull her back down into her chair. To his mortification, she spun away. An instant later, she was preening, literally, for the whole room. A man across the way— a man old enough to know better by Edward’s estimation, a rather dignified, middle-aged man, in fact, with sleek silver hair—inclined his head in silent acknowledgment of Laurel’s antics and, incredibly, lifted his hands to applaud. Suddenly the room rippled with applause. Laurel shot him a smug glance over one shoulder and sank into a half-bow, half-curtsy, her back to Edward. He watched the hem of her skirt rise up the backs of her thighs and nearly had a heart attack.
Unthinkingly, he lurched to his feet, one hand clamping around her upper arm to spin her around to face him. Stunned, she yanked back. He instantly yanked her forward again. No match for his strength, she landed against his chest with a “Hut!” of expelled breath. He clamped his arms around her to prevent her from bouncing off again and falling to the floor. For one eternal moment, they stood there, locked together, trapped in one another’s eyes, bodies pressed together in tingling awareness. He forgot that they were standing in the middle of a crowded restaurant, forgot that this was business, that she was not the sort of woman who appealed to him. She moaned a low, husky “Oh-oh.”
His gaze shifted to her mouth, a wide, luscious, perfect, pink mouth with the promise of a hot little tongue inside. He bent his head. She lifted her chin. He felt the warm, humid caress of her breath. He could almost taste her, almost feel her. The tap on his shoulder came as a rude interruption. Eyes narrowed, he swiveled his head and impaled poor Benjamin, who swallowed visibly and in a quavering voice swept him back to reality.
“Will that be all, sir, or will you be wanting…” His troubled gaze flicked to Laurel, and he croaked, “Dessert?”
Embarrassment surged from deep in Edward’s chest, forcing its way up his throat and face to burst through the top of his head, anger following in its wake, hot, volatile, unruly. “That will be all,” he rumbled, holding Laurel with one hand and snatching up his notebook with the other.
“Perhaps you’d prefer to settle up later?” Benjamin whispered helpfully.
Edward growled assent and propelled Laurel toward the door, vaguely aware that she snatched her purse from the arm of her chair at the last possible instant and, at one point, dug in her heels. He literally shoved her through the door onto the covered walkway. The car waited at the curb, motor running, both front doors open. The valet hurried forward, and Edward slapped a bill into his palm, aware only by the young man’s gleeful expression that he’d overtipped outrageously. He didn’t care. All he wanted was out of there. It was not to be.
As he attempted to hand Laurel into the car, she suddenly hauled up short, threw out both arms and screamed at him. “Stop!”
He turned an incredulous glare on her. “Just get in the car!”
“No!” She had the effrontery to return his glare with fire of her own, one slender hip thrust out to provide a perch for her hand. “What is wrong with you?” she demanded.
He thought his eyes would pop out of his head. “Me?” He poked himself in the chest with a forefinger, then stabbed it at her. “You were the one making a spectacle of yourself in—”
“A spectacle!”
“Well, what would you call it?”
She gasped, and he thought he saw a flicker of hurt in her eyes, but then the fire came roaring back and she was shouting at him again. “You insulted my dress!”
The urge to shake her was so great that he spun away from her, clenching his hands and thrusting them to his sides as he turned back. “All I said was that it’s too tight and too short!" he argued, trying for—but not entirely achieving—a reasonable tone.
She stuck her chin out pugnaciously and leaned forward at the waist, both hands on her hips. “Well, no one else seemed to think so!”
“Oh, come on!” he shot back. “Every man in the place was drooling! Tongues were hanging out all over the room!”
She straightened and took a step forward, eyes narrowing. “Is that so?”
“You damned well know it!” he shouted, only belatedly realizing that she had lowered her own voice. Something strange swept through him. He grabbed instinctively for the remnants of his outrage. “That dres
s is so t-tight, you might as well be—" He didn’t say it, for he had a sudden vision of her standing there bare to the skin, and what his imagination showed him was the folly of the very thought. All at once he wanted desperately to put hands on her again, to haul her up against him and lock his arms around her. When she took another step forward, he shuddered with the effort to keep his hands at his sides.
She brought her face up next to his and fixed him with a hoteyed stare. “This dress,” she purred ferociously, “is a perfect fit. I know because I designed and made it!”
He capitulated utterly, much more concerned now with tearing his gaze from her mouth. “You’re absolutely right” he said quickly. “It’s a perfect fit. Please get in the car.”
She stepped back, squared her shoulders with a nod and whirled away to slide herself neatly onto the seat. The valet rushed forward to shut her door, and Edward let him, stalking around the front of the car to put himself behind the steering wheel. He forced himself to pull away from the curb circumspectly, to ease into the stream of traffic moving along the downtown street. The rain had stopped, but he failed to notice, just as he failed to notice the irony of the silence that filled the car. Now that they had no audience, they found nothing to say to one another, nothing to shout about. Troubled by his own poor behavior, Edward soon left off trying to puzzle out hers. What had possessed him to yell at her? What was he thinking? He flashed on that kiss in his office, and suddenly he knew too well what he had been thinking. He had been thinking that every male in the place was looking at Laurel Miller with the same lust as he had—was. Dear God. A thrumming began in his belly and climbed up into his throat, concentrating in the hollow above his sternum.
At one point she folded her arms and muttered to her window something about him sticking to what he knew and letting her do likewise. He ignored her, too shaken to chance a clarification. The car wheeled into a space in the parking lot. He hadn’t even set the gear before she had her belt off and her door open.
“Thank you so much for dinner,” she snipped. “Good night!”
He clamped a hand on her shoulder. “Wait!”
For an instant she remained tense, but then she melted back against the upholstery and swiveled her head around to look at him. “What?”
Heaven help him, she wasn’t going to make it easy. He meant to take his hand away; instead, he slid it around to the nape of her neck. “I’m sorry,” he told her softly. “I don’t know what happened. I—I just…” He pushed his free hand through his hair in frustration.
Clucking her tongue, she eased around and reached up a hand. “You’ve messed it up,” she said softly.
He mumbled another apology, not giving a fig whether his hair was mussed or not. “We didn’t get anything done,” he muttered.
She folded her arms and said quietly, “You asked why I’m waiting tables. Well, I’ll tell you. It isn’t because I can’t design. It’s the cold hand of my grandmother reaching out from the grave.”
“Your grandmother.” He choked out the words.
“My grandmother,” she said, “and Bryce.”
He put a hand to his forehead, feeling a vague ache starting between his eyes. “How? Why?”
“Why? Because fashion designing is frivolous. Anything that makes you look better and feel better about yourself is frivolous, according to my grandmother’s edict. The only thing in which we can take pride is our heritage, our standing on the social ladder.”
The ache moved to the vicinity of his heart. “Why did you let her discourage you?” he asked gently.
She shook her head sadly. “I didn’t. Even after she effectively had me barred from all the better schools. But then she just used her influence to bar me from every decent design house on the continent.” She made a disgusted sound in the back of her throat and added, “I couldn’t get a job as a salesclerk by the time she finished with me.”
“And Bryce naturally followed her lead,” he concluded.
“The hand that controls the Heffington millions,” Laurel said bitterly, “as few as they are now, controls the Heffington heir.”
Edward sighed and twisted around to face her, one arm draped over the steering wheel, the other laying across her shoulder. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She had the grace to add her own apology to his. “Me, too.”
His hand found the nape of her neck again. He could feel the blood throbbing in his veins, thick and hot. “You, um, seem to know your stuff,” he said, more for something to say than anything else. “Maybe, uh, you could give me some pointers. The haircut seems to have worked, after all.”
She smiled and laid her head back against his arm. “Let’s see now. I don’t think you need so much help, really.”
He smiled at that. “No?”
She shook her head. “All you need is the attention of a good tailor.”
“Mmm-hmm.” God, she had glorious eyes, bright as emeralds and tilted exotically at the outer edges, her long lashes curling back.
She sat up straight and began tugging at his jacket, taking up big handfuls of it. He sucked in his gut, fire jolting through him. “Look,” she was saying, “you don’t need all this room. You have broad shoulders and a big chest, but your middle’s flat and your waist is relatively small.” She brushed and patted her hands over him in demonstration.
“Oh.” He was strangling. His lungs locked. His body stirring and hardening.
“What you need to start with is a well-tailored double-breasted suit,” she was saying. “Black, of course, and brown would look good with your coloring.” She ran her eyes over him. It was like a physical caress. “Tan would be good,” she went on, “and olive.”
“O-olive.”
“Oh, and cream. Yes, definitely cream.”
He wasn’t certain but he thought he repeated that, too. He couldn’t be sure, what with wondering how his arm came to bearound her waist when he had draped it, pointedly, across the steering wheel
“T-try a monochrome color scheme,” she said, sounding breathless, “and a-accent with another. F-for instance, c-cream shirt and jacket and slacks—the pleated kind—and wear them long.”
“Wear them long,” he mumbled, compelled to bend his head so that his breath warmed her ear. A lovely little ear, neat and trim and…He had never before seen a perfectly delicious ear.
“S-so they break at the top of your foot.” She sighed.
“The top of my foot,” he whispered, feeling his breath flow back to him from the perfect shell of her ear. She shivered, so he pulled her closer for warmth.
“A different color tie,” she rambled, “or a vest—brown tweed, maybe. They make shirts without collars, you know, so you don’t necessarily need—” She seemed to lose the next word and closed her eyes.
Her jaw beckoned, and he allowed his mouth to glide around it to her chin. She let her head fall back again, leaving him to contemplate the smooth column of her throat or the short trip to her mouth.
The trip was so short that he didn’t even know he’d taken it until he felt her lips meld with his. She was hot and liquid and sweet, curling into him, melting against him, her arm coming up to hook around his neck. She moaned, and he breathed in the sound with something very like triumph swelling within him. His hands moved over her, registering her shape and the firm, supple softness that comprised it. That damned dress didn’t give an inch, and he wanted skin. Oh, how he wanted skin.
He leaned back into the corner, wedging himself against the steering wheel and the door, pulling her on top of him. She wrapped both arms around his neck and ground her mouth against his. He went up in flames, his hands skimming down to the hem of her dress and up again over that luscious rump and tiny waist to…Skin. Bare, cool, silky skin. Her breasts against his chest were both fuller and heavier than he’d judged. Her hips lay perfectly in the cradle of his, pressing her soft belly against his hard…He ravaged her mouth and began trying to figure out how to do this. She was so slender, that
he’d have to lift her legs up and drape them over his hips to fit himself between them. And these clothes had to give. Briefly he considered the mechanics involved in ripping apart her tights, then his mind whirled on to making room by yanking the steering column out of the dashboard and kicking open the door at the end of this too-short seat His hands fortunately found something with which he could easily deal, the clasp in the band of her bra.
It parted with a flick of his fingers, and immediately he felt through their clothes the added warmth of her unbound breasts. His body leapt, and he moved his hands to her hips to press down the need to put himself inside her. It occurred to him dimly, desperately, that never before had he felt such intense need. He felt close to tears, very close to losing all control. He thrust against her and in the same moment stuck his tongue deeply into her mouth. And then she changed everything.
She reared up, one hand planted squarely in the middle of his chest, and slapped him. Hard.
Chapter Six
As shocked by what she’d done as he was, Laurel scrambled for the door, ignoring where her knees and elbows landed as she moved across his big body.
“Ow! Oof!”
She yanked open the door and lurched out onto the parking lot, sinking her precious shoes in a puddle of rainwater.
“Laurel, wait!”
But why should she wait? The damage was already done. Why should she stay and let him rub her nose in it? What was wrong with her anyway? Letting him kiss her like that again, getting so carried away that he thought it perfectly permissible to start undressing her in a parked car! Oh, God, if only she hadn’t proposed marriage to him! Blushing to the roots of her hair, she ran across the parking lot, no longer caring that her feet were soaked.
“Laurel!”
She gasped, whirling to see that he’d come after her. “Go away, Edward!”
