She led him through the front door. Somehow, the cavernous two-story foyer seemed smaller with him standing at the foot of the staircase.
“You mind if I freshen up?” She was already five steps up and climbing.
He made notations on his clipboard, not sparing her a glance. “I don’t require a babysitter, Ms. Hancock.”
No way was she letting him loose unsupervised in her house for long. As she entered her room, she ripped the ponytail holder out of her hair and ran a brush through the thick dark mass. Looking longingly at the sober, serious suit hanging on the door of her closet, she brushed her teeth and sprayed on some citrusy body spray. Color flushed her cheeks, and her eyes were slightly pink and glazed. She sharpened her focus, narrowing her gaze, but then ruined the effect with a spontaneous giggle. Geez, she was screwed.
As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she slowed to regulate her breathing. Beeps came from the living room. She tiptoed to the door and peeked in, not sure what she expected to catch Alec doing. Deliberately cutting wires while twirling a fake mustache and laughing maniacally?
He was bent over a desk testing an outlet. His pants pulled snugly over the curve of his butt. Good Lord, it was outstanding. Buzzes and beeps from his equipment filled the silence. She moved closer. He straightened to make notations on the clipboard, and his glute flexed. Her heart responded in kind.
He glanced up, his gaze meeting hers before trailing down her body and back to his notes. He was probably cataloguing all her deficiencies—her shortness, her sparkly purple toenails, and her decade-old oversized No Doubt–concert T-shirt. It didn’t matter. Her body continued to thrum with an inconvenient awareness.
Now—years later after their first encounter—she wondered what he would be like in bed. Quick and a little bit rough but hotter than a wildfire? Or had he learned to take things slow and sexy?
Curiosity drew her another step closer to him. Counting on his preoccupation with his notes, she explored the nuances of his body. A body that had aged like a fine whiskey since college. He was the quintessential quarterback—tall and lean, but with broad shoulders and muscular legs.
He’d shed the party-boy image he’d cultivated at Bama. But, there was something else. Something around his eyes that made him look even older than his thirty-one years. Whatever it was incited a strange urge to hug him.
Before her marijuana-addled brain could act on the compulsion, she asked in a singsong voice, “So, how’s it going?”
“Fine.” He was making notations in little boxes.
She wanted to touch him and feel the answering warmth in his body. What if she pushed him back against the desk, pressed her softness against his hardness, and mussed his hair with her fingers? Would he shove her away or would he kiss her? She clasped her hands behind her back before she could humiliate herself by finding out.
What was wrong with her?
For one thing, she was still high as a fluffy white cloud, all fuzzy and floating. But the biggest problem was time and (lack of) opportunity. In short, she hadn’t gotten any action—even a kiss on a cheek—in a long, long time. Alec was an undeniably virile man with working appendages. Simply having a man who wasn’t blood-related in her house had kicked her libido into overdrive.
All she had to do was get through this inspection without doing or saying anything inappropriately sexual. Her mind cast around for a safe, non-sexual topic. Football, of course. “The team is doing well. Hunter Galloway is kicking butt and taking names.”
“Yep.”
“Think you’ll make the state playoffs this year?”
“Got to take things game by game. Any given Friday night . . .” He was feeding her the standard lines. The Falcon football program was the heart and soul of the town, and the coaches were the conduits for encouragement and unwanted advice. Besides Robbie Dalton, the head coach, Alec probably received the most flak, since he coached the quarterbacks.
He tucked the pen behind his ear and pulled the strap of his tool bag over his shoulder. The muscle in his hairy forearm flexed. When had she started to find men’s forearms so damn sexy? He smoothed his hair, putting his forearm level with her hungry gaze. Her pelvic muscles tightened. Apparently since about twenty minutes ago.
“I’m ready to move on. Foyer and then kitchen?”
She looked from the jumping muscle of his arm up to his eyes. Too far up. Instead of intimidating her, his height made her want to toss her hair and send him come-hither looks over her shoulder. In New York, she had mostly dated skinny, goth artsy types, but Alec’s preppy, athletic frame was definitely getting her hot and bothered.
She forced her voice into a serious, flat monotone. “Of course, right this way, Mr. Grayson.”
The clomp of his work boots echoed behind her in the grand foyer. On his way to the huge chandelier’s light switch, he shot her a look. “Is everything okay?”
She wanted to shout, Everything is bad, very, very bad. I’m a little bit high and a whole lot horny. Instead, she plastered her practiced fake, southern-politesse smile on. “Everything is fine. Awesome. Wonderful. Couldn’t be better. Really, really, great.” She drew the last word out like Tony the Tiger.
His eyebrows rose and the corners of his lips quirked into an honest-to-God smile, but his frown snapped back so fast she got whiplash. “Miss Hancock, there’s no reason to be nervous. This is simply a preliminary inspection of your electrical system. Although, structurally I did notice some dry rot around your porch that will need to be fixed.”
“Yes, sir.” For some reason she found herself saluting, which garnered her another slightly bemused flash of amusement.
He finished in the foyer, and she trailed him into the kitchen. He reached high to check the security of a light fixture, not needing a boost from anything. She had to pull chairs over to reach the top shelf in her cabinets.
He squatted down to check an outlet, leaving his butt in all its glory again. Their one encounter had involved drunken sex in a dark room. She’d never actually seen him naked, but she remembered how he’d felt. Sometimes she still dreamed about it.
If she were honest with herself—and pot tended to heighten her candor to skyscraper-like levels—eighty percent of the reason she occasionally wandered by the Falcon football practices was to see his butt in action. The other twenty percent involved other aspects of his body. She wasn’t proud, but that didn’t change the fact the man was panty-melting hot.
He seemed to have received a personality transplant since college, which both confused and intrigued her. Gone was the party boy who strutted around the campus like he deserved the adulation. Now he was overly stoic and serious, and accordingly to the churning rumor mill, he never went out or even dated.
The shifting muscles of his back and glutes drew an appreciative smile to her face. Leaning on the kitchen island, she propped her chin on a fist. “How tall are you? Six-two, Six-three?”
He glanced over his shoulder, and her eyes shot back up to his, and she wiped the leer from her face.
“Six-four,” he said.
“A foot taller than me exactly.” A flash of him kissing her had her staring at his mouth. Kissing him would give her a neck-crick. A terrible, horrible kiss. The worst of her life.
Yet, even as drunk as he’d been that night at Bama, his kisses had curled her toes and made her frantic. Sadly, she couldn’t blame her poor judgment on the alcohol. The two beers she’d nursed at the frat party had given her a buzz but hadn’t turned her brain to mush.
She closed her eyes and shot back to that night. The pulse of music in the other room, the hum of conversation, the occasional burst of laughter. Even though she’d been a virgin, the uncomfortable feeling of being invaded had morphed into a consuming blaze. He’d been dominating and big—everywhere.
Although her experience since certainly wasn’t vast, nothing had come close to matching the intensity of their one time together, which made her hate him a tiny bit more. He had ruined her for any other man.
What would he feel like now? No longer an innocent, the thought sent blood rushing through her body. How insane was she to even be thinking about sex with him? Her one dose of humiliation was enough to last a lifetime.
It was crazy.
“What’s crazy?” he asked.
God help her, she’d actually spoken. She popped her eyes back open and stared at him while her mind searched. “Uh. . . adding under-cabinet lighting?”
The reasonably intelligent recovery smoothed her frazzled nerves, and she listened with less than half an ear to him explain the need for another breaker if she installed the extra lighting.
The narrow former mudroom and current office was his next stop. She stayed on his heels. He pushed at the mass of cords with his pen. “I would advise you install a surge protector.”
“Is that for code purposes?”
“No, but it would keep your computer working if lightning hits or a squirrel gets fried on the power lines. I’d hate to see you lose your hard drive. You can pick one up for ten bucks or less at Walmart.”
“Okay. I’ll do that.”
He turned toward her, and the room shrank around them. The checks of his shirt blurred into muted shades of blues, and she thought his breathing quickened, but maybe it was just hers. If she didn’t get control of herself, he might wonder if she was having an asthma attack. Yet she didn’t move. Couldn’t move. She trailed her gaze up the corded muscles of his neck to his face, his lips a mere twelve inches away.
She hadn’t been this close to him since college. That night his eyes had been glassy from arousal and alcohol. Now the green and blue shards glowed sharply against the background of brown.
His tongue darted over his lower lip. A shaving nick where a small dimple creased his chin made her want to reach up and kiss it better.
“We’d better”—a frog sounded from his throat, and he tried to clear it, but his voice still rumbled, low and sexy, tumbling through her stomach like a rockslide—“better get on to the second floor.”
“You didn’t check the outlets,” she said barely moving her lips.
His gaze flicked over her face, and he took a deep breath. “I’ll cover them during the final inspection. Next floor, please.”
He wrapped a big, warm hand around her upper arm. Her body went slack, ready for him to pull her to him. Instead, he shifted her aside and brushed past, his biceps grazing her breasts.
Oh. My. God. Like that night in college, she had zero self-control around him. She rubbed the tingly place on her arm as if she could erase the arousal his touch inspired. Alec was the last man in Falcon she should be messing around with, yet when was the last time her blood thrummed like she’d plugged into an electrical current?
She stayed at his side up the grand staircase to avoid staring at his butt in action, rambling on about the how her ancestors had made the long oak banister. She pointed out a saber gash from the Civil War.
“We were occupied for a time. Yankee officers commandeered the house. Anna Hancock fell in love with one of them and ran off with him after the war. Quite the scandal.” Unlike her aunt Esmerelda, who whispered the fact like poor Anna was a criminal, Lilliana announced the defection with pride.
At the top of the landing, they turned to face each other. His mouth was tipped in what probably passed for a smile in his eyes. “You sound like you admire her?”
“She forged her own path in a time when it was difficult to break free of family expectations. Especially for a woman.”
“You went off to art school in New York, didn’t you? I can’t imagine any other Hancock doing that.” Was that a hint of appreciation in his voice? Her intuition was unreliable even though the effects of the pot were beginning to fade.
“I did, but you see where I ended up. Back here trying to live up to my family’s expectations.” The weight of responsibility pressed on her chest and her voice tightened. “I wish I were as strong as Anna. I would let someone else worry about the old place falling down, let them lose sleep over loans, let their fingers blister from hours of sanding drywall.”
She held out her hand between them, palm up to showcase the calluses she’d grown from the constant, mindless work that took away from her real passion. He skimmed his fingers under the back of her hand, tentatively at first, but his grip firmed as he brought her hand higher for a closer inspection, his thumb massaging the blisters and calluses along her palm.
“Family expectations can be tough. It could be that staying is the brave thing to do, not the weak one.” His touch was unexpectedly tender, his voice understanding.
She kept her gaze on their hands, afraid to look him in the eyes. She could handle him being brusque and all business. She could even handle him being hot-as-sin. What she couldn’t handle was him being so . . . nice.
She pulled her hand away, their fingers tangling for an instant, and led him into her bedroom. He stopped in the doorway, his gaze sweeping the spacious room. His face gave no indication of what he was thinking or feeling. He closed the door behind him and moved toward the first outlet.
Instead of crouching down, though, he stared at the small portrait hung where only she could see it when she closed the door. She curled her hand into a fist, waiting to hear his opinion. She flashed back five years to the panic-inducing anxiety of having a professor rip her creative vision to shreds.
“You did this?” He pointed like a toddler as he glanced over at her.
“Yes.” She shrugged, the word sounding more like a question than a statement.
A long pause made her squirm on the edge of the bed.
“It’s absolutely incredible.” He turned back to study her pencil portrait of an old woman in Central Park. The unexpected praise did funny things to her insides that had nothing to do with her earlier lust.
Lilliana and the old woman had been regulars during the afternoon lull between grown-up lunchtime and kids getting out of school. Lilliana had done her best to impart the beauty and tragedy of the woman’s life in detailed pencil lines on stark two-dimensional paper. Pencil was her favorite medium, though the one she was the least confident about. There was no color or brushstrokes to hide behind.
“I see joy but sadness too. Is that what you intended?” He looked over his shoulder again, his eyes serious, before turning back to the picture.
She controlled the urge to hug him once more. This time for seeing what she had taken pains to reveal yet feared she’d failed at doing. “Everyone’s life is a mixture of joy and sadness, don’t you think?”
In silence, he stared for another long moment at the portrait. Finally, as if coming out of a dream, he crouched at the first outlet and went to work. She sat on the edge of her bed and watched him work with an efficiency of movement that reflected his athletic background.
“Everything in here checks out electrically, but your balcony is a hazard. Get it fixed, and for God’s sake don’t take one step onto it until you do. Next, I want to see the bathroom that caused so much fuss last year.” His voice was back to its cool briskness.
The moment she’d been dreading. Without offering an excuse, she led him to the Pepto-Bismol bathroom. She propped a shoulder against the doorjamb instead of following him into the tight space.
The handheld machine he used let out a series of beeps as he checked the outlet. He grunted and dropped to his knees to check under the cabinet. Even from the doorway, Lilliana could see the tangle of wires that Carl hadn’t known what to do with.
Pulling out a flashlight and crunching his shoulders into the tight space, he muttered, “Good Lord.”
Having your inspector utter calls to the Almighty didn’t bode well. After a couple of minutes of grunting, he clicked off the flashlight and reversed his shimmy. Would she need to tear the wall out? Rewire the entire upstairs? She waited for the crushing blow to her plans.
“Ouch!” He jerked as he ducked his head out from under the cabinet. Crouching on the nauseating pink tiles, he fingered a tear in his shir
t along his side. Blood oozed, but she couldn’t tell how badly he was injured. Could he sue over an injury sustained in her fire hazard of a bathroom?
“How bad is it?” Falling to her knees, she tugged his shirt out of his pants, lifting it to reveal his wound. She traced smooth, firm skin alongside a long, shallow scratch. Her voice creaked a little from a combination of relief and the fact she’d gotten her hands on him. “Let me dab on some ointment, and I can stitch the tear in your shirt. It’ll only take a minute.”
Was her subconscious to blame for orchestrating this? She didn’t argue with her logic and went to work on his shirt buttons from the bottom, her breathing pacing faster to match the beat of her heart.
“Stop. I’m fine. I have other shirts.” His words sounded rushed, panicked.
He grabbed at both her wrists, but the movement only flipped his shirt apart, exposing the bottom half of his chest. Something dark edged from the checked cotton. He froze, his hands loosening. She finished working his buttons open and spread the shirt to expose his entire chest.
“Oh. My. God.” Her words compressed out of lungs that held no air.
She wasn’t in shock from the defined muscles of his chest. That she’d expected. It wasn’t even the sexy dusting of hair trailing into the waistband of his pants. What hypnotized and held her rapt was the enormous tattoo that covered one side of his torso.
The vibe was difficult to nail down. Tribal with some Picasso cubism thrown in. Script played peekaboo along his side, obscured by the shirt hanging on the curve of his shoulders. What words would a man like him pick to inscribe on his body?
One thing was certain—his tattoo was a work of art. Now she was less interested in his warm, man-scented skin than what was drawn on it. Impatiently, she pushed his shirt off his shoulders to hang at his elbows.
The tattoo extended to his shoulder and over his upper arm, stopping at mid-biceps like a permanent sleeve. In all the football practices she’d attended, he’d never revealed his ink. Unlike the boys or other coaches, he wore long-sleeved workout gear and used a towel tucked into his shorts to wipe away sweat, but she’d chalked his habits up to being a quarterback and needing a protected throwing arm and dry hands.
Melting into You Page 2
