Blue Dahlia
imagined there was probably a nice pink light beaming quietly out of her fingers and toes.
His heart was thundering still. What woman wouldn’t feel smug and satisfied knowing she’d caused a big, strong man to lose his breath?
Cat-content, she stroked her hands over his back.
He grunted, and rolled off of her.
She felt immediately exposed and self-conscious. Reaching out, she started to give the spread a little tug, to cover herself at least partially. Then he did something that froze her in place, and had her heart teetering.
He took her hand and kissed her fingers.
He said nothing, nothing at all, and she stayed very still while she tried to swallow her heart back into place.
“Guess I’d better feed you now,” he said at length.
“Ah, I should call and make sure the boys are all right.”
“Go ahead.” He sat up, patting her naked thigh before he rolled out of bed and reached for his jeans. “I’ll go get things started in the kitchen.”
He didn’t bother with his shirt, but started out. Then he stopped, turned and looked at her.
“What?” She lifted an arm, casually, she hoped, over her breasts.
“I just like the way you look there. All mussed and flushed. Makes me want to muss and flush you some more, first chance I get.”
“Oh.” She tried to formulate a response, but he was already sauntering off. And whistling.
fifteen
THE MAN COULD COOK. WITH LITTLE HELP FROM Stella, Logan put together a meal of delicately grilled tuna, herbed-up brown rice, and chunks of sautéed peppers and mushrooms. He was the sort of cook who dashed and dumped ingredients in by eye, or impulse, and seemed to enjoy it.
The results were marvelous.
She was an adequate cook, a competent one. She measured everything and considered cooking just one of her daily chores.
It was probably a good analogy for who they were, she decided. And another reason why it made little sense for her to be eating in his kitchen or being naked in his bed.
The sex had been ... incredible. No point in being less than honest about it. And after good, healthy sex she should’ve been feeling relaxed and loose and comfortable. Instead she felt tense and tight and awkward.
It had been so intense, then he’d just rolled out of bed and started dinner. They might just as easily have finished a rousing match of tennis.
Except he’d kissed her fingers, and that sweet, affectionate gesture had arrowed straight to her heart.
Her problem, her problem, she reminded herself. Over-analyzing, over-compensating, over-something. But if she didn’t analyze something how did she know what it was?
“Dinner okay?”
She broke out of her internal debate to see him watching her steadily, with those strong jungle-cat eyes. “It’s terrific.”
“You’re not eating much.”
Deliberately she forked off more tuna. “I’ve never understood people who cook like you, like they do on some of the cooking shows. Tossing things together, shaking a little of this in, pinches of that. How do you know it’s right?”
If that was really what she’d been thinking about with her mouth in that sexy sulk, he’d go outside and eat a shovelful of mulch. “I don’t know. It usually is, or different enough to be right some other way.”
Maybe he couldn’t get inside her head, but he had to figure whatever was in there had to do with sex, or the ramifications of having it. But they’d play it her way for the moment. “If I’m going to cook, and since I don’t want to spend every night in a restaurant, I’m going to cook, I want to enjoy it. If I regimented it, it’d start to piss me off.”
“If I don’t regiment it to some extent, I get nervous. Is it going to be too bland, or overly spiced? Overcooked, underdone? I’d be a wreck by the time I had a meal on the table.” Worry flickered over her face. “I don’t belong here, do I?”
“Define here.”
“Here, here.” She gestured wide with both arms. “With you, eating this really lovely and inventive meal, in your beautifully designed kitchen in your strangely charming and neglected house after relieving some sort of sexual insanity upstairs in your I’m-a-man-and-I-know-it bedroom.”
He sat back and decided to clear the buzz from his head with a long drink of wine. He’d figured her right, he decided, but he just never seemed to figure her enough. “I’ve never heard that definition of here before. Must come from up north.”
“You know what I mean,” she fired back.
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