Forbidden Dreams (12 page)

He skimmed both hands over her, molding her, holding her, gazing in delight at the flush that rose up over her chest, at the proud, jutting nipples, the rapid rise and fall of her breasts. He wet one nipple with his tongue, watched it gleam in the flickering light, then sucked it deep into his mouth as he lifted her against him.

“I want you,” he repeated, his voice ragged as he struggled to tug his shirt from his waistband with one hand. “Now, Shell. Against me. Touching me. Now.” He set her down, tore his shirt open, reached for her again, and grasped … air.

“Stop!” The word was a soft plosive sound, like a sob. She had jerked away from him so suddenly and swiftly, he couldn’t stop her. Folding one arm protectively over her breasts, she stared at him. She shoved her tangled hair away from her face and staggered back from him, leaving him alone and cold.

Shell’s head spun, and she had to force herself to stand upright. The deep pulsing inside her had made it almost impossible to wrench herself away, but she’d had no choice. She knew that. Something had shrieked at her, Stop now!
Get out of this before it’s too late! To go on is insanity.

She stared at Jase from five feet away. His chest heaved, as did hers. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. Black hair glistened damply where his shirt hung open, arrowing down his flat belly to his belt. She tore her gaze away from the bulge in the front of his jeans, sweeping it over his face. His eyes looked half-crazed, and his mouth hung partly open on a word he couldn’t articulate. He snapped it shut and tried again.

“What?” he finally managed, but she took another step back as if he had threatened her. “What’s … what went … wrong?”

She struggled to control her panting. She was hyperventilating, growing dizzy. “ I … can’t.”

Can’t what?
she asked herself.
Can’t explain? Can’t go further with this?
Even she didn’t know what she meant at the moment. She knew only that it had been too much, too big, too frightening, whatever it was that had sprung up between them. And he was a stranger. A stranger from California.
Forbidden.

“Dammit, Shell—” Jase bit off the rest of what he’d been going to say and sank down onto the sofa. Leaning his elbows on his knees, he buried his face in his hands. He had never forced a woman in his life. And he had never felt more like doing so than he did at that moment. He breathed deeply, keeping a tight rein on his riotous emotions and the instincts that insisted he had only to touch her again, to hold her and kiss her and run his hands over her body, and she’d be his.

He groaned into his hands. Of course he couldn’t do that. The lady had said “stop.”

Shell felt his anger, his frustration, and part of her shared it. She knew what she’d done, and it was cruel. Men called women terrible names for less, but if she had known how it would be, how quickly her body would respond to him, how intense and almost inevitable the outcome of that kiss would be, she wouldn’t have accepted it. Would she? No! Never.

She bent and scooped up her sweater, then looked back at him. He had lifted his head and was staring at her, his eyes dark with questions for which she had no answers, questions he had every right to expect her to answer. What could she say? That she was sorry? He must know that. That she’d had to stop because if she hadn’t, in another two seconds she’d be inviting a man she didn’t know right into her bed?

He had to know that too. Just as he had to know that she couldn’t do it!

Suddenly, an almost frightening anger surged in from nowhere, sending her reeling onto another emotional plane. It was anger with herself. Anger with Jase for making her feel this way. Anger with Lil for needing her so much. Anger with circumstances she had never been able to control. She welcomed the anger, husbanded it, let it grow strong enough to overcome the aching sense of loss. It rescued her from her overwhelming guilt, and she threw it at Jase as he came to his feet. “No!” she said. “Stay away from me!”

Though he hadn’t been approaching her, Jase stood as if glued to the front of the couch. She snatched up the flashlight. “I’ll do what you want.” Her voice broke as she whirled around and started across the room, her hair streaming down her naked back.

“What I want …?” There was only one thing he wanted.

“I’ll take you to my father’s party.” At the far side of the room, she turned back, her sweater crushed against her breasts, hiding them, and he had never been so aroused by the sight of a woman. Her eyes blazed into his. “You didn’t have to try to seduce me, Jase. I’d have invited you anyway, if only to save my grandmother.”

“Shell! Dammit, I wasn’t—”

“Weren’t you? I find that awfully hard to believe.” She flicked an icy glance over him and turned away again.

“Good night,” she said, and her inflection was as poisonous as if she’d said “Drop dead.”

Several painful minutes later, Jase extinguished one lamp and, carrying the other, limped down the hall to his room. The oily stink of the lamp’s dying smoke eradicated the feminine perfume that lingered too long in his mind.

All right, he told himself. Fine. It was just as well she’d called a halt to something that had been almost entirely out of hand. He didn’t need involvement. He didn’t want it. And he damned well wouldn’t have it.

Not with Shirley Elizabeth Landry or anyone else!

“So there you are,” Shell said when she finally found Jase the next morning. He stood beside the creek where Ned had the front end of a badly crumpled green Jeep hooked up to his tractor, preparing to haul it out of the now tame and shallow water. “Uh … hi.”

Jase turned and looked at her, watching as she approached. For a long moment he said nothing; his eyes revealing no emotions. “Yup. Here I am,” he said.

She lifted the cup she was carrying as in a toast. “Thanks for making the coffee. What time did the power come back on?”

“I don’t know. When I got up, nearly every light in the house was blazing. I thought you were up.”
And had left without a word.
He didn’t say that, but she thought that was what he’d meant.

She managed a sketchy smile. “I should have checked switches, I guess, before I went to bed. I forgot how many had been turned on.”

His crooked smile told her it had been a poor choice of words. Their gazes met, held, and too many other, unspoken words crackled between them. Shell clutched her coffee mug like a lifeline and forced herself to continue meeting his gaze. “Jase … I’m sorry. About last night.”

He shrugged. “It’s okay My fault. I moved too fast. I’m sorry I scared you.”

She drew a deep breath and shook her head. She owed him the truth, if nothing else. “You didn’t scare me.
I
scared me.”

For the first time since she’d come outside, he smiled. It was a slow, tender smile full of gentle mockery, visible first as a lightening of his obsidian eyes, followed by an easing of the lines of tension in his face, then a curving of his lips. He took one long step that put him right in front of her, raised his arm, and rubbed his knuckles over her cheek. When he tucked her hair behind her left ear, she felt the touch right to the soles of her feet.

“
We
scared
us
,” he said. “But sometimes things that are scary in the night aren’t so threatening in the light of day.”

She wasn’t so sure of that. Simply being close to him made her insides all loose and hot and needful. “Aren’t they?”

He ran the broad pad of his thumb over her lips. “Do I make you feel threatened, Shell?”

Her awareness of herself, her body, her heart, her lungs, her skin, was total. “A bit,” she whispered. Staring into his eyes, she wished she knew him better, well enough to read him, wished he’d touch her hair again, or her lips. Her breasts or her aching nipples. What did a person do with this kind of wanting, except …? She drew a shuddering breath and held it. A smart person fought it until she knew where it was going.

This time, his rough-edged finger outlined her ear. “What is it about me that scares you, Shell?”

All the things you can make me want, simply by being here, by looking at me, touching me.
Before she could articulate the emotions swelling and surging and roiling within, he asked, “Want to know what it is about you that scares me?”

She swallowed hard. “Sure, if you want to tell me.”

“Your eyes, to start with. I’m afraid of drowning when I look into them.” He brushed the tips of her lashes and she closed her eyes. “And your mouth.” He traced it shape with a finger again. “It could capture me, hold me, make me crazy with wanting to kiss you.” His hands encircled her waist around the deep green cable-knit sweater she wore with her jeans, then slid down to curve over her hips. “Your mouth could keep a man busy exploring its mysteries so long he might forget there were other … places he wanted to explore.”

She opened her eyes to see the smile she’d heard in his voice. “I remember,” she said, “when we were children, you used to carve little boats and set them afloat with masts made of sticks and sails of leaves. You told me they were going to China, or India, or Argentina and that someday you’d go there, too. Did you?”
And did you meet a woman somewhere in your travels, a woman who became so important you still dream about her? A woman named Sharba?

He smiled widely. “You remember that?” She nodded. “I went to all those places,” he said. “And then some.”

“And did a lot of … exploring?”

His hands tightened on her hips and he drew her closer. “Yes.”

“Yet you still have exploring to do?”

“Lots more.” His mouth stroked over her face and settled briefly under her chin, then he lifted his head. Brushing her hair back, he curved his hand around her nape. “Like I said, there’s a lot of you I haven’t seen yet.”

Shell shuddered at the sensation his lips and fingers left behind, and burned with the need they engendered in her. She wouldn’t think about Sharba or any other woman he might have known. He was thirty-three years old. Of course he’d known plenty of women. And she’d known a man or two as well.

“Lord,” he breathed against her neck. “I could probably explore you and find things even you didn’t know existed.”

“That’s … what scares me about you.”

He lifted his head. “You don’t have to be afraid, Shell.”

“But if you are,” a man’s voice intruded, “you know you need only to holler. Right, Shell?” They both whirled, Jase more slowly than Shell, his hand trailing off her butt to rise to her shoulder. Ned was leaning against a tree trunk not three feet away, and Shell realized she had never seen him finish pulling the Jeep out of the creek bed, never heard him shut off the tractor, never been aware of his approach.

She glared at him. “Jase and I were having a private conversation, Ned.”

“Pretty damned public place for a private talk, if you ask me.”

“I don’t recall doing so.”

Ned shrugged. “Maybe not. Just remember, falling in love’s like getting drunk. The first thing to go’s the judgment.”

Shell stared at him, her coffee mug dangling from one hand, dripping. Her “I’m not—” and Jase’s “We aren’t—” were overridden by Ned’s snort, composed of equal parts derision and amusement. “How would you know? Like I said, judgment’s the first thing to go.”

“Now,” he added briskly, “if you want a ride to work, and your buddy here wants to get into town to find somebody to haul this hunk of junk off our property, I suggest you go get ready. I’ll be leaving in twenty minutes.”

He turned and mounted his tractor, then roared away down the road toward home.

Neither Jase nor Shell moved for several moments. After the sound of the unmuffled engine had dwindled, the sudden and raucous call of a Steller’s jay split the silence. Out over the ocean, gulls wheeled and mewed. Nearby, a squirrel executed a rapid spiral up a fir tree, barking a shrill warning as it ran.

Jase touched her cheek again. “You look as if you’re about to run into the woods and hide.” She tried to smile, wanting to deny it. Was she that transparent? She felt as if she were about to run into the woods and hide, as if she should. Ned’s words echoed in her mind: Falling in love … She wasn’t falling in love. She wasn’t! Of course she wasn’t.

“I think we’ll take it slow and easy from here on,” Jase said, then added, “That is, if there’s going to be a ‘from here on.’ ”

She searched his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Fair enough. Neither do I. But it would be nice to find out, wouldn’t it?”

Slowly, reluctantly, she nodded. Her heart was beating so fast she felt it might explode. She didn’t know if it was from excitement or fear. “It would be … nice.” Yet the idea was fraught with terror for her. Obstacles … So many obstacles stood in their way. Two totally different lives. Two totally different geographical locations. He wasn’t a country person. She knew that from things he’d said yesterday—and she was. She had to be. There was no choice. Lil needed her and had to come first. Shell wanted to weep. And yes, she wanted to run away and hide the way she had as a little girl when fans and reporters had screamed their incessant questions, popped their myriad flashes, reached with impatient, grasping hands, but …

She squared her shoulder. She was an adult now, and if there were difficulties ahead, she could face them as one. She would deal with them, meet each one as it occurred and beat it down.

“You look determined enough to dig your way to China,” Jase said a soft laugh. He slid his fingers into her hair but only for a moment before snatching them away and jamming them into the back pockets of his jeans. “I think that’s exactly the way you’d look if a firing squad took aim at your heart.”

“It is?” It wasn’t a firing squad she was worried about. It was that little fat pink guy with his bow and arrow, and she suspected he might be lurking in the branches of the trees, aiming right at her. It was time to get out of here, to get to work in her store and let reality take over her life again. Whatever this was, lust maybe, a crush at best, she couldn’t allow it to dominate her thoughts. She wasn’t going to fall in love with a man she didn’t know. Love took a long time to grow between two people who had known each other for months, even years.