When You Wish (Contemporary Romance) (5 page)

“Do you have any idea what she’s talking about?” Dan asked.

“Unfortunately, ye
s. If you look too hard at something, you miss what’s all around you.”

“You’ve lost me.”

Don’t I wish,
Grace thought. “Look at it this way,” she said, “a cure is a theory that has been proven correct. A theory comes from nothing. Disease is caused by germs, cells, DNA. Things you can’t see.”

“Under a microscope I can see them just fine.”

“Truth can’t be found under a microscope.”

“Since when?”

Mrs. Cabilla’s chuckle made Grace realize she and the good doctor were nearly nose-to-nose. She stepped back and so did he.

“I think you two will have an interesting three weeks.”

“Three weeks?” Dan’s voice was incredulous.

“Yes, by then I’ll either be home, or I’ll call again, and I’ll expect you two to have worked this out.”

“I don’t understand how—” Grace began.

Mrs. Cabilla ran roughshod over Grace’s words. “If either one of you doesn’t wish to play by my rules, I’ll consider i
t a withdrawal of your grant application. Are we clear?”

Dan looked at Grace. Grace looked at Dan. They scowled at each other, then turned to address the disembodied voice of Mrs. Cabilla.

“Crystal, ma’am.”

Dan felt like he’d been turned inside out and back again. He was exhausted and at a complete loss. How had his world gotten so screwed up in the span of a single day?

Dan did not like change. Change made him nervous. Change was never good. He liked his life ordered. With order came security, and with security came peace. And only when Dan was at peace could he work with any sort of brilliance.

He and Grace stood in the living room long after Mrs. Cabilla wished them a cheery “
Adios!
”

“Well, Doctor, I
guess we should discuss this development.”

Dan turned fr
om the window and his contemplation of the North Star shining over Lake Illusion. He looked into Grace’s incredible face and wished he could despise her. Yet he couldn’t help but be drawn to her and he didn’t know why. Could it merely be her beauty and the mysterious, enticing scent that surrounded her, combined with the tiny problem of having had no sex for the last year? Was he really that shallow?

Could be. Probably was. Why else did he want to kiss her every time he saw her? He’d never felt that way before. Dan wa
s a reasonable man. With reasonable desires. He exhibited reasonable behavior.

Puling Grace down on the froufrou divan Mrs. Cabilla had brought from France and pressing his mouth to the thin, tanned line of her collarbone was not reasonable behavior. So why did he want to do it so damned much?

“Doc!”

“What?” Dan blinked, and the image of him and her on the divan went away. Poof, just like the dream bubble in a cartoon.

Before Grace could say anything more, the lights in the mansion clicked off.

“Hey!” Grace said, as if Dan had somehow turned them off to spite her.

The sound of a car’s engine made Dan turn back to the window just in time to see taillights disappear down the long lane toward the poor excuse for a highway that led to town. He pressed his nose to the glass and turned his head. Both his car and Grace’s were still parked in front of the house, which meant Perry had taken off and left them alone.
Weird.

Grace joined him at the window; her shoulder brushed his bicep. Very few women’s shoulders came to his elbow, and Dan found he liked having Grace’s head so close to his own. If he leaned down just so, turned his head this way—

“What happened?”

Poof, there went that image, too. Dan sighed. He was getting pathetic. “Perry must have gotten tired of waiting.”

“So he shut the electricity off before he left?”

Dan shrugged, and his arm slid along hers. The sexual shiver created by the contact of bare skin against bare skin, revealed by short-sleeved summer garments, made him hold his breath. Grace must have felt something too because she stepped away too quickly, too de
liberately, breaking the connection of flesh on flesh.

“Uh, I guess we’d better go then.”

He followed her through the darkened house toward the front door. They stepped onto the porch, the summer breeze pleasant after the heat of the day. The season had been dry, bad for farmers, great for tourists. No water meant no mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes could get so thick in the summer you couldn’t get from your car to your house without being attacked by a plague worse than locusts.

Grace headed for her car, and Dan stood on the porch for a long moment and watched her move. Out here in the middle of nowhere with Grace, Dan was having strange thoughts—thoughts he’d never entertained in his staid, productive little world.

Her dress shone silver in the light of the half moon. The stark red of the sash against the brilliance of the white should have looked harsh against the subdued hues of the lake, and the trees, and the sky, but instead they looked just right. For Grace.

Dan followed, unable to help himself. That skirt, with the slit all the way up the side, enticed him as nothing else ever had. He wondered how much of her leg would be revealed when she got into her car.

But instead of going to the car, Grace meandered nearer to the lake, staring at a ripple across the surface of the water. The breeze picked up a strand of her hair and unfurled it in his direction. The scent of Grace washed over him and his body responded, as usual.

“We seem to be in a bit of a jam,” she said.

She didn’t know the half of it. Just in case she turned to see what was keeping him, and saw something else, Dan moved behind her.

She tilted her head and looked at the sky. “Did you ever wish on a star?”

The woman changed subjects at the speed of light.

“Never?”

Star wishing had not been encouraged in his family. Wishing was for losers. Doers got the prize. “What would be the point?”

“When you wish, your dreams come true.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Don’t you believe in anything, Dan?”

“I believe in science.”

“That’s all?”

He thought a moment. “Pretty much.”

“Well, I’ll do whatever I have to, to make my dream come true.”

“Even wish on a hundred stars?”

“Whatever it takes.”

In that they were alike. He’d do whatever it took to make his dream come true. But Dan knew when you wished you only wasted time. From the way Grace was gazing up at the star-studded night, explaining his view to her would only waste more time. So he let the wishing argument go.

Grace lowered h
er head and gave a sigh that wavered in the middle. Before he could think about what he was doing Dan put his hands on her shoulders. Instead of stiffening, or pulling away, she went very still.

“That’s my lab across the lake.” His voice sounded normal.
Amazing, when his body was anything but.

“The old scout
camp.” Her voice sounded strangled, as if she couldn’t quite force the words past whatever blocked her throat. Dan’s thumbs rubbed along the bend in her neck and she caught her breath.

He shouldn’t to
uch her. Touching her was an incredible mistake. Feeling the shift of her bones beneath the dress, beneath her skin, was a bigger mistake. Being aroused even more by the heat of her in his hands, the scent of her in his nose, the need for her taste in his mouth, was insanity.

But with the
moon half full, and himself completely aroused, Dan ignored his voice of reason and listened to the voice of lunacy instead.

When she turned in his arms and tilted her chin to look into his eyes, that perfect brow scrunched up and her mouth irresistibly puckered, he closed the small gap of space between them and took what he’d been wanting to take since he’d seen her only hours before.

She tasted like lemon drops and sunshine. Silly thoughts, but his mind was full of them. Of how she suddenly smelled like summer rain and winter pine. How her hands were soft on his face, then hard at the back of his neck, pulling him closer, deeper into her.

Her mouth opened, or maybe his did, but they joined with a groan that floated away on the silent night. Lips and tongues meeting, melding,
magically, as if they’d been searching for each other for a very long time.

Chapter
Four

Grace had always enjoyed being kissed by a man who knew what he was doing, but they were so few and far between. Amazingly, Dr. Dan was quite skilled. She’d never have known it by talking to him. Stiffs usually went—well, quite stiff, when sex was involved. Grace shifted in his arms. Her hip bumped his groin.

Hmm, stiff in more ways than one.

Dan started and would have pulled away, but Grace was not done yet. She pressed herself farther into his arms, mouth to mouth, chest to ribs, hips to thighs. Rarely did she meet a man who fit her as well as this one did. And as an extra, added plus, when his mouth was occupied upon hers he wasn’t talking. When Dan talked he annoyed her, but when he kissed  . . .

“Mmm,” she murmured against his lips, then ran her tongue along his teeth. Her palm cupped the back of his head, holding his mouth to hers, unwilling to let him go—yet.

Being a massage therapist attuned Grace to the sensual order of life. In order to heal, you had to feel with your hands the mysteries of the body. If you were any good,
you became sensitive in the extreme. To touch, to taste, to smell.

She ran her tongue, hard, down the center of his. He shuddered and gathered her closer, tighter. She tasted mint; she smelled lake water and
faded sunshine; she opened her fingers and ran them through his hair.

He had the most incredibly soft hair she’d ever touched and it was much longer than the average doctor’s. Heck, much longer than the average man’s, especially if you counted Olaf of the biweekly buzz cut. The only men who wore their hair longer were related to her, and since Grace just couldn’t see the good doctor wearing a ponytail, or a braid, she figured this was as long as his hair got. Too bad, because she really liked that hair.

How long had it been since she’d been kissed? Far too long because she didn’t want to stop. She was losing herself in him. She wanted more, and more would be a very bad idea. Sleeping with Dr. Chadwick would screw up more than her head.

Grace pulled back
from the intense embrace, kissing him gently one last time because she couldn’t help herself. Those lips made magic. Grace had always sensed things about people; still, she never would have figured Dan for a kissing wonder.

Em always told her nerds did it better because they tried harder. Em’s third husband—or had it been the fourth?—had been an inventor with an IQ that made Grace’s
look puny. When he wasn’t blowing up the basement, he’d been fashioning Em into a sexual savant. Her aunt hadn’t been the same since.

Grace’s eyes opened slowly, as if the lids were stuck together, and she stared at Dan in the pale moonlight. His eyes stayed closed, his lips looked ravished—wet, and swollen, and red. Had she done that?

Her fingers still tangled in his hair; his palms still rested along the curve of her spine. The thin, cotton dress did little to stop the heat of his hands from molding her skin against his. They might as well have been naked, since she could feel everything, and no doubt, so could he.

Their bodies pressed together, his arousal hit her just above the pelvis. S
he resisted the nearly irresistible urge to press against him and ignite the embrace to another level. Just because she hadn’t had sex in—oh, say, half a decade—didn’t mean she was going to encourage a near stranger to make it with her on the shore of Lake Illusion—even if he wasn’t a complete stranger. She had, after all, seen him naked.

The image burst to life in her brain, arousing her further. He had an incredible body, and she wanted him to hold it against hers. That was always her problem. She wanted what she could not, should not, have. That wanting had gotten her into trouble more often than not. For an instant, sh
e remembered another lake, another man, another heartbreak.

She must have stiffened in his arms, because Dan’s eyes popped open, and he stared at her as if trying to see into her brain. Grace stared back. Hey,
he’d
kissed
her
. Even if she’d kissed him back, a lot, he’d just better not—

“ . . . apologize.”

—do that. She hated when they did that. Right now Dan looked shocked, as if he’d been caught boffing the maid.

Grace’s lips pressed together, and she tasted Dan upon them. Her eyes narrowed, and she stepped back, breaking
his hold upon her. Her hands unclasped, tangled again in the hair that reached to his nape, and the softness of the strands enticed her to wrap her fingers in them once more. She wanted to hold him close and kiss him more deeply, nearly as much as she wanted to slug him. She resisted both behaviors—barely.