Guilty Needs (13 page)

She sighed shakily. “Colby, you sure this is a good idea?”

With a soft laugh, he murmured, “Hell if I know. I just know it feels right. So what’s your answer?”

She licked her lips. He felt the brush of her tongue against his own mouth and growled, wanting to suck it in and bite down—just a little—until he felt her shudder against him. Instead, he lifted his head and stared down at her. “Well?”

Her nod was hesitant. Her voice soft. “Dinner.”

But her eyes were hotter than molten steel and Colby knew he could get lost in them—would get lost in them—if he wasn’t careful.

Slowly, he let her go. Catching her hand, he lifted it to his lips and brushed a kiss to the back of it. “Eight o’clock.”

“Eight.”

He took another step back and then made himself turn around before he grabbed her again. He managed to get exactly five feet away before he turned back, took two long strides and reached for her, cupping her face in his hands and kissing her until she moaned into his mouth. He sucked gently, drawing her tongue to him and as she slid it along his lower lip, then inside his mouth. Colby bit—gently. Softly.

Before he could do anything else, he let her go, turned on his heel and stalked away from her.

The next three hours were going to take entirely too long.

Chapter Seven

She looked beautiful in the candlelight, Colby decided.

Beautiful. Shy. Nervous. When she caught him looking at her, she’d bite her lip and look away as though she didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t something he was used to from her, but hell, he hadn’t exactly pictured the two of them in a date situation, or at least not for a good fifteen years. And a date situation for a fifteen-year-old boy was a hell of a lot different than a date situation for a thirty-year-old man.

“I never told you that I had a crush on you in high school, did I?” he asked, out of the blue. The second it left his mouth, he wondered why the hell he’d brought that up but he couldn’t exactly regret it, either. Not once he caught sight of the look on her face.

Her eyes went wide, her jaw dropped open and then she snapped it closed. “You did not.”

Leaning back, he shrugged and said, “Yeah, I did. But you were more interested in basketball practice and doing whatever you used to do with Alyssa. You never noticed me.”

Something odd moved through her eyes and she smiled sadly. “I noticed you. Alyssa just noticed you first.”

He wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but then the waiter appeared. They ordered, both of them going for the New York strip. Bree ordered a rum and coke, but he stuck with ice water. Forcing a smile, he said, “I did a little too much drinking after I took off. Figure it’s better just to not go there again.”

She glanced toward the waiter. “Maybe I…”

“Don’t worry about it. Doesn’t bother me or anything. And I’m not exactly an alcoholic looking to fall off the wagon. I just hit it harder than I should have, and when I realized it, I made myself stop.” Okay, truth doctored a little there. He hadn’t realized it. That was when Alyssa had first starting talking to him, her voice whispering to him in the night, and he’d been convinced it was because he was so damn drunk he was imagining it, or because he losing his grip on reality.

Neither appealed. If he was looking insanity straight the eye, he couldn’t do much about it but he could do something about the drinking. That was exactly what he had done—emptied out every last bit of alcohol he had stashed in the one-room efficiency apartment he rented by the week and he hadn’t had a drop since.

The fucked-up dreams about Bree had started a few weeks before that and because of them, he’d been drinking even more than normal. Part of him had hoped that, when he quit the drinking, the dreams and the whisper of Alyssa’s voice would stop. Didn’t happen.

“You look serious.”

He glanced up, pulled out of his retrospection and found Bree eyeing him with carefully guarded eyes. “Just thinking.”

He shrugged his brooding thoughts away, studying her from across the table. It was in that moment that he realized she almost always looked guarded—at least when he was around. If he happened upon her and caught her by surprise, it wasn’t there. But as soon as she saw him, the walls went up. He drummed his fingers on his thigh under the table and decided he didn’t like it. The few times he hadn’t seen it had been the day of the funeral, the other day when he’d kissed her and today on her porch.

Unable to stop it, a grin spread across his face, or it might have been more of a leer—hell if he knew. When she saw it, she flushed, her cheeks turning a dusky shade of pink as she squirmed in the seat. “What?” she asked defensively.

“Just thinking—different sort of thoughts this time.” His gaze dropped, following the rosy blush down to her neckline where the deep vee of her blouse blocked his view. Her nipples were hard.

Her blush deepened as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Would you stop?” she asked, exasperated.

“I’m not doing anything,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t exactly true. He made her nervous.

Bree. Of all the women he knew, she was the last one he would have expected to be nervous around him. Was it a new thing? Or just something she’d hidden?

The waiter appeared once again, quiet and fast, placed a rum and coke in front of Bree, then disappeared as quietly as he’d arrived. She grabbed it, took one large gulp, then another. From under her lashes, she watched him.

“What about you?”

She frowned at him. “What do you mean, what about me?”

He shrugged restlessly. “Who did you have some secret crush on in high school? Basketball player? Somebody on the football team?”

She took another sip from her drink and then set it on the table before answering. “High school was fifteen years ago. I barely remember half the kids in my homeroom class.”

“You telling me you don’t remember your biggest crush in high school?”

Rolling her eyes, she said, “What does it matter? It was high school.”

“Just making conversation. I don’t really remember ever seeing you hang out with a particular guy.” And he would have noticed, at least if it happened during their freshman year or even halfway through their sophomore year. Probably even beyond, because even though he stopped thinking about her like that, she had been his girl’s best friend. Most teens did double dates from time to time, but Bree hadn’t. Hell, come to think about it, he really couldn’t think of a single guy throughout high school that she’d really spoken to.

In college, she’d dated some. He could remember those guys. One had been a jackass and she’d dumped him after two dates. One had lasted a few months. During their senior year, the guy she had dated had actually lasted throughout the year. That one had seemed serious but then the guy had died.

“You don’t date much.”

It wasn’t a question and she didn’t treat it as one. A wry smile curled her lips and she lifted one shoulder carelessly. “I’m picky.”

“Picky about what?”

“The guys I date.”

“What are you so picky about?” Bracing his elbows on the table, he leaned forward. What made a woman so picky that she went on less than two or three dates a year? He knew she got asked out a lot—or at least it seemed a regular occurrence, from what he’d seen. No surprise. She was flat-out sexy, she was funny in a quiet, understated way and she was one of the kindest people he’d ever known.

“Maybe I just haven’t found what I’m looking for yet.”

“What are you looking for?”

She rolled her eyes. “Geez, Colby, what is this? Twenty questions? If a guy asks me out and I’m interested, I’ll go out with him. I’m usually just not interested.”

“You’re here with me.”

Her dark-gray eyes narrowed and she said acerbically, “So apparently, I’m not picky enough. I hadn’t realized I was going to get the Spanish Inquisition.”

He slid his hand across the table and took hers. Lacing their fingers together, he whispered, “If we’re doing an inquisition, does that mean I can get you on the rack later?”

Her eyes widened. A startled laugh escaped her and she clapped her free hand over her mouth, muffling the sound. “I don’t do racks on the first date.”

He was flirting with her. Okay, Bree wasn’t an idiot, but it took her a little while to actually realize the truth. Colby was actually flirting with her.
Why the hell is that such a shock?
He had his hand in your panties and his tongue halfway down your throat a couple of hours ago. He more or less said he wanted to sleep with you. Why shouldn’t he flirt?

Still—it was weird. Seriously weird.

And unsettling as hell. Not just because it felt like some bizarre fantasy come to life either.
You and I both know we’ve gone past being just friends
. Actually, she hadn’t let herself think along those lines, even after he’d kissed her outside the winery. She just wasn’t ready to let herself think about that, because Bree was a linear type of thinker. If she knew one thing was coming, she started to plan for what happened after.

Here, the “after” that seemed most likely was that Colby wasn’t seriously interested in her and once he got whatever this was out of his system, she’d go back to being a friend—probably not even that.

Definitely not something she was equipped for.

By the time the waiter brought the check, she felt as though she was going to splinter into a thousand pieces from the pressure. Trying to keep it light, trying not to let him see how he affected her, trying not to read too much into his casual, sexy flirtation.

The ride home was a little easier—not having to sit across from him, staring at the perfect face with his sexy mouth and those amber eyes, having to sit still while he looked at her with such heat that she could almost feel it stroking over her skin. He pulled into her driveway and she bent to get her purse from the floor. He was already halfway around the car and when she opened her door, he was there with his hand outstretched.

Tucking her hand into his arm, he guided her around the side of the house, instead of in. Bree lived in the house where she’d grown up, under the care of her aunt. When her aunt moved to Florida a few years after Bree graduated from college, she had bought the house and spent the past eight years working on it.

The backyard looked like something straight out of
Extreme Home Makeover
—an outdoor kitchen complete with a stone fire pit, a small swimming pool, water gardens, every last inch of ground perfectly landscaped. It was her pride and joy and normally, she loved being out here.

But for some reason, tonight, here in the darkness with Colby, it was unsettling, to say the least.

The neighborhood where she lived was an older one and the lots were huge. Tall privacy fences separated the yards and the vining plants that she had growing along the perimeter inside her yard only added to the sense of seclusion. He unlatched the gate and guided her inside with his hand resting low on her back.

“I think, if you want to tell me to go home, now’s going to be a good time.”

She glanced up at him. It was a full moon and the silvery light shown down on him, highlighting the planes and hollows of his face, revealing the heat in his eyes—a heat he’d made little attempt to disguise during the night. Her head was spinning. She could barely keep up with the changes in him, going from quiet, brooding widower to sexy, flirtatious charmer. None of it made sense and if she was smart, she’d tell him it was best to call it a night.

But Bree couldn’t say it.

Fifteen years of fantasy stood next to her and even if she ended up getting her heart broken, at least she’d have something, right?

“You know, you’re confusing the hell out of me,” she said, keeping her tone light. Slipping her arm away from his, she reached down and unbuckled her shoes. Stepping out of them, she carried them over to the porch and laid them down, along with her purse. Then she turned to face him, her arms hanging loose at her sides, her heart pounding with anticipation and nerves.

“How?”

Bree shook her head. “You just are. Five weeks ago, I had no idea where you were, if you were ever going to come home. Then you’re here, but you’re not…not quite you. Grief is a bitch, I know. It does weird things to people…”

Her voice trailed off and she licked her lips. She lifted a hand futilely, as though she could pull the words from the air. But words were his thing. Not hers. “Then all of a sudden, you’re flirting with me, teasing me. You kiss me, tell me you want to sleep with me.”

She eyed him nervously. He stood mostly in shadow now, the moon at his back, throwing his features into darkness. She could make out the hungry glitter of his eyes but not much more than that. “So what is this? You trying yourself out on training wheels or something before you rejoin the land of the living?”

He snorted. “Shit, you don’t think much of me, do you, Bree?”

“Actually, I think the world of you.”
You have absolutely no idea just how much I think of you. If you knew just how much I think of you, you’d probably take off running
. “I just…” her voice trailed off and she sighed. “I don’t know what you want.”

He didn’t say anything right away, but she could all but hear him laying out his thoughts. Sometimes, it seemed this man spent way too much time thinking, and when he spent a lot of time thinking, she had to wonder what that meant for her. He paced toward her, not speaking until he was close, so close she could feel the heat of his body. “I want you.”

“But for what? For a night? For a few nights? You just need to take the edge off? What? I like knowing what I’m getting into and I can’t tell with you.”

He cupped a hand over the back of her neck, drawing her close until he could press his brow to hers. “I’ve been dreaming of you nearly every damn night for the past six months. I wake up half sick with guilt and feeling like the lowest life form in existence because of those dreams. Alyssa’s only been gone a year but I’ve spent half of that year obsessed with her best friend. Whatever is going on inside me isn’t something that’s going to go away after one night, two nights—probably not even if we spent the next six months in bed.” He brushed his lips over hers.