So he was startled when he turned to find her poking among the pile of DVDs of movies and sitcoms that went back ten years and more. “What are you doing?” he asked, hoping like hell it hadn’t come out like a squawk.
She glanced up at him. “I found this bunch at a yard sale and brought them back for potential guests. I saw you have a laptop. We could watch one on your computer. It would give me a chance to bone up on pop culture.”
“Outdated pop culture.” Hadn’t he seen the first season of Heaven Come Early there? If they watched, maybe she wouldn’t recognize his just-turned-teen self as one of the stars of the popular dramedy, its title based on the George Bernard Shaw quote “A happy family is but an earlier heaven.” Still, there was no reason to chance it. If she discovered who he was, word might get out and then his privacy would go poof! He saw her fingers brush over a DVD of Main Line, the last movie he’d made before he’d retired from on-camera work. “I thought you said you liked to read.”
Her quizzical look signaled he must sound a little desperate. Ryan tempered his voice. “The only good light is in here and I want to get back to my George R.R. Martin.”
“So then I’ll take the laptop to the bedroom—”
“I thought you had an aversion to the bedroom.”
Yes, desperate. But she didn’t push any more, instead crossing to her purse to pull out a paperback. Without another word, she settled at one end of the sofa. Realizing he’d boxed himself into a corner, Ryan retrieved his own book and took the opposite place.
Even the dramatic events of the seven kingdoms couldn’t keep his eyes off that basket of DVDs. He should have buried them somewhere when he’d first spotted them. Not that he regretted that part of his life. He’d been a child of Hollywood—well, Malibu, really—with his father a well-known and well-respected stunt director, his mother a successful makeup artist. He and Linus and their pals had started making movies at an early age and during a dinner party his folks threw, a casting agent had seen their latest and wondered aloud if Ryan wanted to try for the part in an upcoming show.
It had seemed like a great way to get out of school, which was damn boring in seventh grade.
A teen star had been born.
He’d gotten a kick out of it, to tell the truth. He’d enjoyed pretending he was someone else and it had taken a while for fame to catch up with him...years before it smacked him hard in the face. But by the time he was twenty-one, twenty-two, he didn’t like the long hours wearing heavy makeup, the bullshit from the suits, the celebrity press that wrote ridiculous stories probably planted by studio publicists. The women who came for his face and stayed for his fame.
And he’d garnered enough money to stop making films in order to actually make films. And cable series and TV movies.
Maybe people would have forgotten him and he could have gone on to live a nonnotorious life. But then came that March. Fucking March.
“You could scare small children with that expression you’re wearing,” Poppy suddenly said.
He never wanted to be around small children again. So he grunted, and turned a page he hadn’t read.
But her comment returned Poppy smack-dab to the center of his consciousness. He cast a sidelong look at her, watching the firelight play over her innocent angel face, noting her curly lashes and the tail of hair she idly played with as she pretended to enjoy her book.
Because she wasn’t turning any pages.
Time passed.
More time passed.
The hail changed to a torrential rain that was a dull roar against the roof. The walls seemed to close in, creating an intimacy that was unwelcome. Risky. Still, Ryan adjusted his position on the cushions, pushing his back deeper into the sofa’s angle so he could pretend to read and watch her at the same time. She continued to stare straight ahead, thinking...what?
Then she turned her head quickly, too quickly for him to redirect his gaze. She’d caught him. Their eyes caught, too.
The walls drew closer.
He tightened his hold on his book, though he wanted to throw it aside, then grab her to him and escape March and all its terrible cruelties in her fragrant female body. He knew what lust was, knew its power, and it was gathering in his loins, in his chest, and he wanted to give in to it. The landlady wasn’t afraid of him or immune to him, he could see that by the flush on her face, the quick flutter of the pulse in her neck.
Why the hell couldn’t they indulge?
Because after the deed was done he would still be himself, he knew. It would still be this particular month, and if he wasn’t able to get away from her in the morning—unlikely, as it appeared she’d remain stuck in his cabin—then he chanced dragging her down into hell with him.
Nothing good ever came of March.
Her gaze still not leaving his, she wet her lips with her tongue.
Ryan’s body tightened all over. He was more than half-hard, and he forced himself to look away so that he wouldn’t go full-ready. But shit, that mouth— Don’t think about her mouth.
Clearing his throat, Ryan shot up from his seat. “You want a drink? Coffee? Beer? Wine?”
“Caffeine keeps me up,” she said.
Since he was already uncomfortably up himself, he took that as a sign to go for beer or wine. God knew he needed something to take off the edge. In the kitchen, he found the opener and a bottle of red. Since she had stocked the cabinets, he didn’t suppose she’d object to drinking out of the large glass tumblers.
He placed one in her hand, careful not to touch her, not to look at her. Careful not to think about her mouth. Kissing her mouth.
Knowing he couldn’t go back to pretend-reading, and because thoughts of bed just made him jumpy, he looked about for an activity to occupy them. A box of jigsaw puzzle pieces sat on a nearby shelf. He grabbed it up.
“You like to do this sort of thing?” he asked, dumping the pieces onto the coffee table in front of the sofa.
Poppy set her book aside. “What’s it a picture of? It’s something else I found at a garage sale, but I didn’t look at it too closely.”
He sat beside her and sifted through the cardboard snippets, turning some faceup. They all seemed pinkish in color. “This isn’t the original box. Maybe it’s one of those really difficult ones that are just the puzzle, no helpful photo.”
“Those take a lot of time,” she said, starting to move pieces around, as she sipped at her wine.
“And concentration,” he added. We won’t be able to think of anything perilous.
“Look for the corners first,” Poppy advised, apparently getting into the spirit of the thing. With a triumphant sound, she held one up.
“Good for you.” Ryan found a couple of pieces already joined and set them in the center.
They both continued to work, each of them seeming to find a part of the whole that they claimed as their own. The fire crackled. The very generous pour of wine in each glass was consumed. After some minutes went by, Poppy murmured, “Oh, there is a picture. I think it’s a woman. I have some of her face.”
He glanced over, noting she’d constructed a nose, and part of one eye. “I’m still getting nothing but pink,” he said, trying to work a little faster. As diversions went, the activity was a success, and he congratulated himself on his brilliant idea.
Until...
It stopped being brilliant.
He stared down at the section of the puzzle he’d completed. “Uh...”
“Hmm?” His companion-in-puzzles fit one piece to another, tossed back the last swallow in her glass, then set it aside.
“Maybe we should quit,” Ryan suggested.
“What? No.” With a frown, she turned her head, then jerked it back when she saw what he’d wrought.
Naked tits. Overinflated, pearly pink and topped with tight, upstanding nip
ples.
A squeak of horror escaped Poppy’s lips, followed by a moment of stunned silence. Then she started to laugh. As she laughed harder, she put one palm over her belly, and the other over her mouth.
Need—rash, blazing and no longer deniable—overtook Ryan. That mouth, he thought again. He was going to have that mouth. It was imperative he taste the laughter bubbling from it, inhale the sound into his shrunken soul. He had to kiss her.
* * *
POPPY’S GUARD WAS down, thanks to an outrageous pair of puzzle breasts. Maybe because of the wine she’d drunk or maybe because she’d been walking a tightrope of tension all evening, hyperaware of Ryan’s very-male presence in a room that had kept getting smaller by the second, but for whatever reason the sight of those naked boobs had tickled her sense of the ridiculous. Aware she might sound the tiniest bit hysterical, she pressed her hand harder to her lips, still giggling like mad when Ryan reached over and drew it away.
The gesture didn’t immediately alert her to a threat. She still couldn’t believe that she’d been so anxious to smother the sexual vibrations humming in the room that she’d gladly dived into working a puzzle...of an X-rated image. Even with the knowledge that her car and her cabin were half-ruined lurking at the back of her mind—or because that knowledge was lurking at the back of her mind—it struck her as hilariously funny. Even now another laugh rose in her throat.
“Poppy,” Ryan said, his voice soft.
Her gaze shifted to his face, and the glow in his blue eyes sent her to serious in a hurry.
But it didn’t send her body anywhere safe. Instead, she sat frozen on the couch, her hand cradled in his much larger one. The contrast made her feel feminine and breathless and...oh, boy, curious. Because she knew what that tone in his voice signaled. She knew what was coming.
And she hadn’t been kissed in over five years.
So sue her, she had a curiosity about kissing. Strike that. She had a curiosity about how Ryan would kiss.
And then...and then he was showing her. His mouth brushed over hers, the touch as light as a snowflake, though the brief caress sent heat racing like a flash fire over her skin. When his lips came back a second time, she parted her mouth, hoping to entice him to make it firmer. Hoping he’d brush his tongue with hers.
It had been aeons since she’d been French-kissed.
On the third gentle pass, she speared her hand in Ryan’s hair to keep their lips locked. He made a sound, low in his throat. Gratified? Smug? She didn’t care. Her muscles tensed, her body quivering as she anticipated his next move.
His tongue, all right, but now it brushed like damp butterfly wings against her bottom lip. Her thighs clenched and he rubbed his thumb over the knuckles of the hand he held. Soothing, every stroke of his soothing, as if he knew she was all of a sudden so keyed up that a stronger touch might shatter her. Who would blame her for that?
Five-plus years without a proper kiss.
Ryan’s free arm came around her shoulders to draw her closer. She breathed in his scent as tears stung the corners of her eyes, and she squeezed them tight, mortified that she might have to explain—again—a crying jag. It had just been so long since she’d snuggled up to something this big, this warm, this human.
“You smell better than Grimm,” she said against Ryan’s mouth.
He drew back a little. “What?”
She discovered her tears had dried up and she was on the verge of more giggles. How much wine did she have floating around in her system? “You smell good,” she said, nuzzling beneath his chin.
“You’re suddenly friendly,” he murmured as she pressed tiny kisses along the edge of his elegant jaw.
“I’m curious,” she corrected, drawing her lips over his chin.
“Me, too,” he whispered, then tilted his head to take another kiss.
Oh. Oh, God.
His tongue plunged into the cavern of her mouth. It was no longer a subtle exploration, but a sexual onslaught, masculine, deliberate, hot.
Delicious.
Poppy clutched at the hand that held hers and pressed close to his hard chest as her head fell back and he took what he wanted from her. This wasn’t a French kiss, this wasn’t anything cosmopolitan or civilized in the least. This was a Neanderthal kind of kiss, one that might involve caves and the pulling of hair and the ripping of fur robes—if only she had the guts to beg for such things.
Just as she ran out of air, he lifted his head and they both sucked in ragged breaths, staring at each other. Poppy’s head swam a little, from lack of oxygen or perhaps from a surplus of libido. She wondered about trying to work up some regret or concern about the kisses, but her heart was pounding too hard for clear thinking. A little muddy logic was good, she decided. It kept her mind off unpleasant things, such as why she was at Ryan’s cabin in the first place.
For that alone, she owed him. “Definitely better than Grimm,” she said.
Still holding her close, Ryan’s expression turned bemused. Then he glanced toward the snoozing dog. “I’m starting to worry, Poppy. Do you mean to tell me you let your dog kiss you? Am I going to catch something with you being the conduit between me and getting a sloppy from your pooch?”
Such a silly conversation, she thought. She didn’t get kisses from Grimm. But the silliness made it perfect for the giddy, dizzy mood Ryan’s thorough kisses had left her in. “Absolutely not,” she said, stroking the placket of his flannel shirt with her fingers. Poppy Walker, touching beautiful Ryan Harris’s flannel!
“You’re not going to make me believe a dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human’s,” he said. “That’s an urban myth.”
“But you’re in the mountains now,” she pointed out, smiling a little as she teased him.
He shook his head. “God, you’re cute,” he said, then pressed a kiss to her nose. “But let’s be real. Out in the woods I’ve seen your dog sniffing some extremely suspicious substances.”
Thank goodness he appeared to want to avoid serious or second thoughts as much as she. Poppy wiggled on the cushions and found a comfortable place against Ryan’s side. His hand stroked idly over her hair, and the atmosphere turned almost companionable, though the smoke from those powerful kisses lingered like a haze in the air. She stretched her legs, displacing some puzzle pieces as she propped her heels on the coffee table. “The bacteria in a dog’s mouth is species-specific,” she informed him. “Which means you’re much less likely to catch something serious from a dog than another human.”
He glanced down at her, the amused light in his eyes making her heart jerk, once. “Where did you come across this bit of knowledge?”
It was the kind of thing the mother of a young son knew, especially the mother of a young son who adored his furry pet. But she didn’t want to tell Ryan about Mason. Her little boy and her status as a mother were secured in another compartment for the moment. Mason’s mommy didn’t cozy up to handsome men by crackling fires. Mason’s mommy didn’t want to share some more of those potent kisses.
But Poppy did.
Because she was tipsy, or tipsy on Ryan’s taste or maybe because she needed further diversion from recalling the damage the storm had wrought on her life. Her mind began to flash on the crack of sound as that heavy limb—
No.
She twisted toward Ryan, grabbed the front of his shirt in a fist and yanked his mouth down to hers. He lurched toward her, catching himself with one hand on the back of the couch before they bashed noses. Their lips met instead and she reveled in this next kiss: the sure thrust of his tongue, the heat of his body, the flame that set fire to her blood. Her fingers curled into his shirt just as she thought about taking off hers, because she was hot, so hot, and—
An icy trail of moisture hit the back of her head, ran down her neck.
Startled, Poppy jolted, then jerked her head upwar
d, only to receive an eyeful of freezing water. “Wha—?”
More trickled into her mouth and both she and Ryan came off the couch in a rush. He shoved the furniture away from the narrow stream that now seeped steadily from the seam between an exposed beam and the ceiling plaster. She ran to the kitchen for a pot to catch the leak.
Another sprang before she returned.
Poppy’s mood plummeted as she watched Ryan bend to slide one of the glasses they’d been drinking from beneath the new drip. He looked disheveled and aggravated and absolutely gorgeous.
And completely the wrong man with whom to be satisfying her curiosity after five-plus years of celibacy.
“What is wrong with me?” she said aloud. Her dwelling was damaged, her vehicle was damaged and she’d been playing kissy face with some rich, great-looking stranger who from the beginning had put up her back. Yet she’d almost been on her back! “How did this happen?” she demanded.
Ryan spared her a glance and she could see he was as displeased by the situation as she. “It’s March,” he said with a grimace. “Fucking March.”
CHAPTER FIVE
FROM YOU SEND ME, a screenplay by Linus Hamilton:
FADE IN:
EXT. STREET—DAY
A luxury convertible pulls into a parking space in front of the log cabin-style post office in a tiny, isolated Southern California mountain town. Twenty-nine-year-old LINUS HAMILTON’s head turns from side to side, taking in the flanking businesses: a minuscule grocery and an even smaller real estate office. A summer breeze plays with LINUS’s wealth of dirty-blond hair.
A woman in shorts and hiking boots exits the post office, catching his attention. She shades her eyes with her hand, as LINUS, in slacks and T-shirt, steps from the vehicle.
WOMAN
Take My Breath Away Page 6
