Going Back (20 page)

Even if she didn’t find the
situation as funny as Brad did, she was unable to resist the
infectious rumble of his laughter. She shot a glance toward the
sink filled with soggy flowers, and then toward the garbage pail
harboring the shattered mayonnaise jar and the wine, and then
toward the stove with its lethal pot of sauce.

She started to laugh, too.

As soon as he heard her laughter,
Brad reached for her hands and pulled her toward him, steering her
between his outstretched legs. “Would it make you feel any better
if I told you I adored the music?” he asked once he’d regained
control of himself.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I
think it’s kind of stuffy.”

“I think you’re an
idiot.”

“I think you’re a boor.”

“I love it when you talk dirty,”
Brad murmured before grazing her lips lightly with his. He drew
back, allowing his gaze to meet hers. If anything, he looked even
sexier than he had earlier. Daphne’s laughter stuck in her throat
as she comprehended the message in the smoky radiance of his
eyes.

“I don’t usually talk dirty,” she
whispered.

“You don’t have to.”

“Do you want to skip
dinner?”

“I’d rather skip dinner than get
hives.”

She inhaled deeply, keenly aware of
what they would wind up doing if they didn’t eat.

When she’d contemplated the evening
ahead, she had expected that they would build up to the ultimate
event with a couple of hours of genial conversation, filling food
and sweetened coffee. She had anticipated having time to accustom
herself to the idea of Brad as a lover.

Perhaps it was better this way,
without the preliminaries, without the opportunity for them both to
reconsider what they were planning and come to their senses. As she
stood just inches from Brad, with his long-fingered hands resting
on either side of her waist and his unswerving gaze piercing her
defenses, all she could think of was how delectable his throat
looked to her, how much she wanted to kiss it.

She didn’t have the nerve, not
quite yet. “I was going to—I mean, I thought—in the interest of
romance and all...” She pressed her lips shut to keep herself from
babbling any more.

“You thought what?”

“I thought I should slip into
something more comfortable,” she said, then grinned crookedly at
the cliché.

“That would be very nice,” Brad
murmured.

Daphne slid from his embrace and
darted out of the kitchen. In her bedroom, she closed the door,
leaned against it and gulped in a few more frantic
breaths.

All right. They’d get this part
over with, and if it was awful they’d call it an early night and
get as far away from each other as they could. And if it wasn’t
awful, then none of the mishaps they’d suffered so far would
matter.

She undressed, forcing herself not
to dawdle, and hung her blouse into the closet. She noticed that
her slacks were damp around the ankles from the water that had
spilled when she’d dropped the jar, so she arranged them over the
back of a chair to dry. Then she pulled on an embroidered silk
caftan she’d bought on a whim when she’d vacationed in the Bahamas
last winter. She hardly ever wore it, but she thought it would
serve nicely tonight, draping over her modest curves in what she
hoped was an alluring way. As with her damp clothing and her
hive-inducing dinner menu, she’d spent a great deal of time last
night analyzing whether she ought to wear this caftan for Brad.
What had persuaded her to make use of it was her mental picture of
him easing down the zipper one inch at a time, gradually revealing
her body to his eyes and his touch. In her imagination, such a
disrobing had seemed incredibly romantic.

In reality, she wasn’t so sure it
would be.

Before leaving the bedroom, she
removed her eyeglasses and fluffed her hair out. Then, sucking in
one last, panic-stricken breath, she went to find Brad.

He was seated on the living room
couch, listening to Mozart. He’d removed his shoes and kicked his
legs up onto the table in front of the couch, but he immediately
swung his feet back to the floor and stood at her entrance. His
eyes widened as he surveyed her. “You look very nice,” he
said.

“You sound surprised,” she shot
back, then bit her lip. Now was not the time to remind Brad that on
a ten-point scale her looks would barely rate a four.

Brad accepted her words without
flinching. “Maybe I am, a little,” he admitted, crossing the room
to her.

His honesty moved her in a way
empty compliments never would have. If there had been any doubt
about her ability to trust him, it was gone now. She smiled shyly
as he cupped his hands over her shoulders and drew her to him. His
mouth covered hers, teased it, coaxed it open. He traced the edge
of her teeth with the tip of his tongue, then slid his lips from
hers. “Am I rushing things?” he asked.

“No,” she said in a rusty voice.
His tongue had felt wonderful inside her mouth. She wished he’d go
right ahead and rush things some more.

“I want you to tell me,” he
implored her. “This time, I want you to tell me what feels right,
what doesn’t...I want it to be as good as we can make
it.”

“Then kiss me again,” she
requested, lifting her hands to the back of his head and guiding
his mouth back to hers.

He wrapped his arms around her,
pulling her body against his, and angled his lips against hers to
afford him greater access to the inner recesses of her mouth. His
tongue lunged deep, searching for its partner and sliding
sensuously around it.

Daphne was astonished to feel the
instantaneous effect of her kiss on him, the sudden hardness in his
groin as he leaned into her hips. His hands skidded upward to her
hair, his fingers twining through the loose blond curls, and he
groaned. “Where the hell did you learn to kiss like that?” he
asked, his tone gravelly as he leaned back from her.

Daphne didn’t recall having learned
it anywhere. It was more a matter of inspiration, the inspiration
of Brad’s equally transporting kiss. It wasn’t anything like the
kisses she remembered him giving her the last time—kisses she’d
tried for the last eight years to forget. “I was going to ask you
the same thing,” she mumbled.

“I haven’t got an answer,” he said.
“Let’s try it some more. Maybe we’ll figure out what we’re doing
right.” He took her mouth with his again, and let his hands glide
forward to cup her cheeks. His thumbs stroked down along the angle
of her chin as his tongue danced with hers, and his hips surged
against hers again. “Maybe it’s the Mozart,” he whispered, his
breath tickling her lips.

“I doubt that,” Daphne countered
with a grin.

“You should have told me you didn’t
like Mozart.”

“I never said I didn’t like the
music. I just said it’s stuffy. But,” she added, emboldened by the
rapturous effect of Brad’s kisses, “it doesn’t matter. We probably
won’t be able to hear the record in my bedroom.”

Brad groaned again. As if he’d read
her mind—as if his sole desire in life was to fulfill her
fantasies—he located the zipper of her caftan and tugged it down an
inch. Bowing, he pressed his lips to the newly exposed skin at the
base of her throat. “I want you undressed,” he announced, stating
the obvious. “Is that all right?”

“It beats eating clams and getting
hives,” she joked.

Brad laughed briefly. He slid the
zipper down another couple of inches, then stopped. He wiggled the
tab, jerked it, tugged it and scowled. “It seems to be stuck,” he
said, straightening up.

Daphne lowered her gaze to the
zipper, which had opened to about the middle of her sternum. She
zipped it up a bit, then down again. It refused to budge past that
point. “It is stuck,” she wailed.

Brad was besieged by fresh
laughter. Daphne joined him. Even as she jiggled the tab futilely
and watched yet another romantic moment stumble into calamity, she
couldn’t keep the giggles from spilling out.

“What’s the verdict?” Brad asked as
his laughter waned. “Are you going to have to spend the rest of
your life in this thing, or do you want me to hack it off with a
chainsaw?”

“We might be able to pull it off
over my head,” Daphne suggested.

Brad bowed to gather up the hem of
the robe. He raised it, allowing his hands to run along the backs
of her legs. When he reached her hips, he sucked in a shaky breath.
“You’re not wearing anything underneath,” he noted.

“I thought...I mean, isn’t that
supposed to be the general idea?”

“Oh, God...” Shoving the bunched
fabric out of his way, he molded his hands to the soft, round flesh
of her bottom and pressed her to himself. “You are one hell of a
turn-on, Daphne,” he whispered.

“I thought that was supposed to be
the general idea, too,” Daphne murmured, secretly thrilled that her
attempt at playing a seductress hadn’t been a total failure, after
all.

For a long moment he held her,
sketching circles over her skin with his fingertips, urging her
higher against him so her body would accomodate the increasing
hardness of his. “Something tells me this evening is going to turn
out to be one of the best ideas I’ve ever come up with,” he said,
his tone rasping as he lifted Daphne into his arms.

“Don’t carry me,” she cautioned
him, gripping his shoulders as he staggered beneath her weight.
“You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“Not if we move fast. Where’s your
bedroom?”

“Down the hall and to the left.
Brad—”

“It’s a good thing we didn’t eat
first,” he teased, stalking down the hall with her. “If you’d
gained your three spaghetti pounds, I wouldn’t be able to do this.”
He raced across the bedroom to the bed, where he dropped Daphne and
collapsed onto the mattress beside her, panting. “There,” he
gloated, once he’d caught his breath. He flexed his arm muscles
proudly. “You’re dealing with a pretty strong guy.”

“If you’re so strong, you ought to
be able to open an itty-bitty little zipper,” she challenged
him.

“I’m so strong, I’ll open it with
my teeth, Daff.” He didn’t quite follow through on that boast,
although his teeth weren’t far from the zipper as he attempted to
wrestle it down again. When the zipper refused to give, he ignored
it and kissed her breast through the silk of the caftan.

Daphne moaned. She felt as if she
were teetering on the edge of too many emotions—amusement,
affection, ravenous passion and something else, something she
wouldn’t dare to call love. It was confusing, dizzying, and very,
very dangerous. And she didn’t want it to end.

Just because Brad hadn’t yet
succeeded in undressing her didn’t mean she couldn’t start to
undress him. She groped for the buttons of his shirt and opened
them. Brad assisted her by shrugging his shoulders free of the
shirt, then sweeping it down his arms and flinging it across the
room. For someone who had always struck Daphne as fastidious, who
would never consider tackling the dirty work of renovating a
handyman’s special, who even in college had kept his fraternity
house bedroom tidy, the careless manner in which he’d disposed of
his shirt took Daphne by surprise.

She was also surprised by the firm,
gloriously virile lines of the chest he’d bared. His streamlined
muscles stirred beneath bronze skin which was enhanced by a sparse
mat of dark hair. His shoulders were solid, rounding into taut
biceps in a gracefully masculine way. The stretch of skin above his
belt was flat and well-toned, and his neck was even more inviting
than she’d realized. Daphne hadn’t remembered him having such a
gorgeous physique—but then, she’d remembered nothing positive about
the one time she’d seen his body.

Tonight, she suspected that she’d
remember nothing negative. The mishap with the mayonnaise jar, the
threat to Brad’s health posed by the dinner, none of it—with the
possible exception of her jammed zipper—could alter the pleasure
she believed she and Brad were destined to share. “Pull it over my
head,” she said.

Brad understood
what
it
referred
to. He gathered the caftan by the hem again, lifted Daphne toward
him, and tugged the robe upward. She raised her arms and sparred
with the cloth. He yanked it around her head. She opened her mouth
to complain about her inability to see and wound up with a clump of
fabric trapped in her lips. But somehow, thanks to Brad’s patience
and a bit of well-timed wriggling on Daphne’s part, she was
liberated from the damned caftan.

Brad tossed it aside and turned his
attention back to her. He ran his gaze over her long pale body,
taking in her small breasts, her nipples already taut and flushed,
and then the slender span of her waist, the spread of her hips, the
triangle of blond hair between her thighs. His breath was even but
shallow, as if he were exerting himself mightily to maintain his
self-control.

He seemed on the verge of speaking,
but instead he lowered his hand to her, combing his fingers through
the golden thatch of curls and discovering the moistness of her
flesh beneath it. Both he and Daphne flinched. He issued a strange,
broken sound, then whispered, “You feel so good,
Daphne.”