As much as he wanted to go forward, Steve put the next move in her court.
“Do you want me to?” he asked.
Her heart was hammering so hard in her chest Erin was surprised that he didn’t hear it—or, at the very least, that it hadn’t just fallen out at his feet. Because he owned it, free and clear.
Her eyes still riveted to his, she gave him her answer. The only answer she could.
She uttered a breathless “Yes.”
Chapter Fourteen
As his fingers gently slid along her cheeks, then slipped into her hair, Erin went with the moment as he brought his mouth down to hers.
And braced herself.
Her pulse accelerated as Steve deepened the kiss layer by layer until she had gotten completely lost in him. Completely consumed by her need for him.
Her head spinning, Erin dug her fingertips into his shoulders, desperately trying to anchor herself to something solid so that she wasn’t embarrassed by her knees suddenly buckling beneath her. Her knees began to feel like mush and were swiftly losing the ability to support her at all.
She was utterly enveloped by this incredible sensation throbbing all through her. A sensation that was every bit as wondrous and wonderful as she’d once fantasized it would be.
Was this what it was all about? The excitement, the meeting of two souls that belonged together? She’d just resigned herself to making toys that brought out the best in children, that made children—children she was never going to have—happy. Joy on this level was something she had given up all hope of ever finding, of ever being allowed to experience.
Thank God she’d been wrong.
Standing up higher on her toes, feeling as if she were literally free-falling in space, she clung to Steve and the inflammatory kiss they were sharing for all she was worth. Her body was frantically heating, urging her not to stop, urging her to continue because this—whatever this actually was—might never come her way again.
He had to stop, Steve ordered himself, stop before he completely lost the ability to think, to exercise control over the desires that were, even now, wrapping him up in thin, steely bands and taking him prisoner.
With more effort than he’d ever had to employ in this sort of a situation before, he placed his hands on Erin’s shoulders and pulled his head back, away from her.
The look of confusion and desolation in her eyes almost drew him back in but he managed to keep a tight rein on the scrambling shreds of his emotions.
It took him several seconds to find his voice. “I’ll get my neighbor to stay with Jason and then I’ll take you home.”
She wanted the ground to open up beneath her feet and just swallow her whole. How could a human being go from bordering on ecstasy to feeling this hollow, this empty, in the space of a nanosecond?
Even though she felt like just disappearing and putting this behind her, she had to know, had to ask, otherwise this would haunt her for as long as she could form a coherent thought.
“Did I do something wrong?”
The question stunned him. Was that what she thought? How could she?
“Wrong?” he echoed incredulously, staring at her in utter awe. “Oh, God, no. If you had done it any more right, I wouldn’t have been able to dynamite myself away from you.”
That cleared up nothing. If anything, it just confused her more. “Then why are you taking me home?”
“Because this—” he waved his hand in a circle between their two bodies “—can’t happen between us.”
But why? her mind screamed. “You don’t want it to?”
For a man who made his living by speaking succinctly and getting to the heart of the matter, he was really doing a terrible job right now, where it counted the most, he reproached himself.
“What I don’t want is for you to look back and regret this.”
Was that it? Was he afraid he was seducing her? Stripping her of her own free will? He couldn’t have been more wrong.
“The only thing I’m going to regret,” she told him, enunciating every syllable carefully, “is if you send me home now.”
He wanted to believe that with his entire being, but he couldn’t let himself. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
She pulled herself together as best she could, cloaking herself in her dignity.
“I’m not drugged or drunk. I know exactly what I’m saying. After a certain point, when it didn’t happen to me, I thought that all those stories about walking on air, about a million emotions swirling all through you, making your head spin and your knees weak, weren’t really true. Or if they were, they weren’t true for me.
“One of the reasons that Wade became so furious with me was because I wouldn’t sleep with him. I rejected him because when he tried to kiss me, I didn’t want him to. I didn’t feel anything when I was near him.”
She looked at him meaningfully. “It was different with you. I did feel something. And then you kissed me and instead of being let down, I was lifted up. Up to a level I’d never even dreamed about before. So unless you’re regretting this, please don’t send me—”
She didn’t get a chance to finish, because just as before, he slipped his hands along her face, except that this time, the kiss didn’t begin slowly and then, inch by inch, blossom.
This time, the passion, the desire, they were all there right from the start, knocking down any barriers, any walls that might have been erected on some other plane.
And as he kissed Erin, as he allowed the passion that had been so hopelessly locked away and dormant within him for these past two years to explode, she leaned into him. And he just knew she was absorbing every vibration, every nuance, every tidal wave of desire and emotion that he was sharing with her.
Clinging to him, feeling the wild pounding of her heart, Erin was vaguely aware that the floor beneath her feet wasn’t there anymore. When the shock of that registered and then subsided, she realized that she hadn’t been catapulted into some other stratosphere. Instead Steve had lifted her into his arms and was now carrying her toward the stairs.
Hardly able to breathe, she still managed to draw her head back just for a fraction of a moment.
He thought for a second that she’d had a change of heart. But the next moment, the wide smile and starry look in her eyes told him otherwise.
“How did you know?” she asked in a low whisper, the words feathering with her warm breath along his neck, causing his excitement to heighten.
“Know what?”
“That my favorite passage in Gone with the Wind was when Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs. I read it over and over again a dozen times,” she admitted.
Not wanting to ruin the moment entirely by saying he’d had no idea she was enamored by the scene, he smiled into her eyes and said, “Lucky guess.”
He could, in the heat of the moment, be forgiven for telling the white lie instead of revealing that he had to climb the stairs because his bedroom was on the second floor.
As a bachelor, this wild feeling pounding in his veins would have had him taking her right there in the living room. But as a father, a certain protectiveness took precedence over desire, no matter how red-hot and demanding that desire might be or how overwhelming the rush of sensations was.
His lips were covering hers again before he reached the landing. She was making him crazy, he couldn’t help thinking. But crazy in a good way.
Once inside his room, Steve pushed the door closed with his back, then set her down, allowing her feet to touch the floor rather than laying her on his bed. Every single step of the way, he wanted to give her the option of changing her mind and calling a stop to what was happening, though he fervently prayed that she wouldn’t.
But when she clung to him like that, her lips feverishly responding to his, igniting him, they still wound up on
his bed less than two heartbeats later. He had no idea how they’d even gotten there, whether he was the one who’d led the way or if she was responsible for drawing him over there.
The dance was mutual.
He was far from inexperienced, but the lovemaking that followed still took his breath away.
Erin responded to every pass of his hand, to every kiss his lips pressed against her increasingly denuded body. Each time he touched her, each time he kissed her, he managed to ratchet up his own response to her until he was fairly certain that between the two of them, they could very easily wind up setting the bed on fire—and probably not realize it.
It was the closest thing to an out-of-body experience she had ever had.
Nothing, nothing she had ever felt could even come close to this. There were things happening inside of her, desires, wants, emotions, raw sensations, she couldn’t even begin to label or identify.
All she knew was that she wanted this wild madness to go on for as long as humanly possible. She didn’t care that this was much further than she had ever gone before—or that she had ever wanted to go before. At this single moment in time, she craved to know what it felt like to belong to someone, be one with someone, for however long that physical union lasted.
Up to this point, she’d never cared one way or the other that she belonged to a very small group of people who had never physically made love with anyone.
But now she wanted to leave all that behind, because she had found a man she wanted to belong to, for however short a time he wanted her. She knew making love wasn’t some silent, flowery pledge nailed to the word forever. This was about pleasure—and caring on her part, because if she hadn’t cared, cared deeply, none of this would have happened.
Her whole body was damp with sweat and throbbing wildly with anticipation when Steve finally slid her beneath him and loomed over her, balancing his weight on his hands. Lowering himself slowly, he sealed his mouth to hers first, and then he entered her.
The very next moment, as the shock registered, he stopped.
She saw his eyes fly open, saw the utter surprise within them. Knew in her heart that the next second, it would all stop. All be over.
She couldn’t bear that to happen, so she raised her hips to his insistently, moving so that whatever his good intentions might have been, they hadn’t a prayer of triumphing over the lure of her body.
The pain that shot through her when he pushed forward into her faded almost as quickly as it had materialized. The heat, the desire, the emotions all returned tenfold, seizing her and taking her to a place that she, however briefly, made her own—because he was there, as well.
His hips moved faster and faster and she kept pace with the rhythm, eager to reach the place he had been to so many times before—but never with her.
Until now.
When it finally exploded, enveloping her, the sensation she experienced was beyond anything she might have anticipated. Erin eagerly let the euphoria completely drench her as she clung to it.
Because she knew that the moment she returned back to earth, there would be questions to answer—and worse than that, his disappointment to face. With an almost superhuman effort, she attempted to seal herself off, even as she knew in her heart that it wasn’t possible.
She returned to earth soundlessly.
The silence that echoed in the room grew louder and louder until she couldn’t bear it anymore.
Turning toward Steve, she almost begged, “Say something.”
“I don’t know what to say.” Raising himself up on his elbow, he looked at her, remorse etched into every inch of his chiseled face. “I’m sorry.”
A moment ago she was wrapped in euphoria. Now she just felt horribly naked and exposed.
“I didn’t mean to disappoint you,” she said, turning away, fervently wishing that her clothes were close by instead of so far away on the floor.
Her words of apology ricocheted in his head. “Wait. What?”
How many ways did he want her to say it? “I know that if you’d known that I hadn’t...done this before—” each word felt as if it weighed a ton as it left her lips “—you wouldn’t have made love with me.”
“No, I wouldn’t have,” he agreed, “at least, not like this.”
It was Erin’s turn to be confused again. “Like this?” she echoed. Then he would have made love to her, just under different circumstances? Was that what he was saying? She felt as if her brain was addled.
He searched for a better way to say it. He owed her at least that much for taking away so cavalierly something so precious.
“A first time is supposed to be memorable,” he told her, “not just a spur-of-the-moment thing or—”
She put her fingers to his lips to stop his rambling apology. He didn’t understand, did he?
“A first time is supposed to be with someone I wanted it to be with,” she corrected.
He stared at her for a long moment, trying to absorb what she was saying to him. “You mean to tell me that I’m the first one—the first one that you’ve ever wanted to be with?”
“Yes, I thought you understood what I was saying before.” The reason for his discomfort dawned on her. He was afraid she was going try to tie him down. “But you don’t have to worry,” she told him. “I’m not going to be turning up at your doorstep with wedding rings or invitations or—”
She didn’t get to finish because, for the second time that evening, his lips took her words away from her as he covered her mouth with his own.
For one wild, heady moment, Erin allowed herself to get lost in his kiss. Then, drawing her head back, she asked, “Does this mean you forgive me?”
He smiled into her eyes. “What do you think?”
She could feel her own smile blossoming inside of her. “I think I have a lot to learn.”
“Not nearly as much as you think. You have a great deal of natural talent to tap into.” And then he grew serious as he looked at her. “But you really should have told me, you know.”
She lifted one bare shoulder in a half shrug. “Not exactly the kind of topic a woman who does dinosaur voices can raise at the dining-room table.”
“True enough,” he told her, lightly skimming his fingertips along her face, moving her hair back out of her eyes. The next moment, moved by a fresh wave of desire, he lowered his lips to hers again.
The moment he did, the fire returned, igniting within his chest, his loins, his desire for her coming back with a vengeance as if it hadn’t just been sated a scarce few minutes ago.
Steve had no idea what exactly it was about this woman that created such a fever in his blood, but he knew at this moment that the search he had suspended, the one that he’d hoped would yield not just a partner for him but, just as importantly, a mother for Jason, was not going to need to be revisited and resurrected anytime in the near—or distant—future.
He’d found the woman he had been looking for. All he’d had to do, he realized with a touch of irony, was stop looking.
Now, of course, it got a little more complicated. Now he had to find a way for her to want to be his and remain his.
One step at a time, he cautioned himself as he went on to make love with her. One slow, deliberate step at a time.
Chapter Fifteen
“He’s kind of a boring guy,” A.J. informed Steve. After two weeks of surveillance, the private investigator had worked up Wade Baker’s schedule and now placed it on Steve’s desk. “One day is pretty much like another. For the most part, it almost looks like his part-time job interferes with his real vocation in life—drinking.”
Steve turned the schedule around so he could examine it more carefully. There was little variation from one day to the next except for the weekends, when the man appeared to open the bar as well as close it down.
Why had Erin even hired Baker in the first place? She must have seen something in the man but for the life of him, he certainly didn’t see it.
“This is just a hunch, but since you had me draw up this guy’s itinerary, I get the feeling that you don’t want to waste precious time and resources fighting his suit in the court. You want to have some sense talked into the guy in person.”
“Valid hunch,” Steve granted.
A.J. nodded his head. “If you want, I could go to his place of work or that bar, have a talk with Baker, tell him that it might be in his best interest to back off before you make certain things public.”
Steve seriously considered A.J.’s offer for exactly five seconds. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have even thought twice about the matter. Confrontations outside the courtroom or boardroom were something that he felt were A.J.’s purview.
“Thanks and no offense, but this one I want to handle personally,” he told the detective.
“None taken,” A.J. assured him. “But what if this guy wants to take a swing at that pretty face of yours? People get nervous if their lawyer shows up to represent their interest sporting a black eye.”
He supposed if someone looked at the two of them, A.J. was the one who appeared as if he could handle himself in a situation. However, he wasn’t exactly a novice in this department. He’d gotten in an altercation or two—and won—despite the expensive suits he wore.
“I didn’t spend my years in college with my head constantly buried in a book. I can take care of myself if need be,” he assured the investigator. “But thanks for the concern.”
A.J. inclined his head. “Well, you know how to reach me if you need backup or change your mind.”
In response, Steve patted the pocket where he kept his cell phone. “Yeah, I do.”
* * *
Rather than go to Wade Baker’s apartment or his place of work, Steve decided to do a little surveillance himself. So he went to the bar A.J. had said he frequented.
Dating for Two (Matchmaking Mamas) Page 16
