Slow Fever (12 page)

Tell her,
his mind told him as his body held hers tight, his hands filling with her, hungry for her.

He dived into the summer lightning storm that was Kylie, his heart thundering with his needs, the final need to tear away her clothes, letting her skin burn his.

“Michael…” she sighed in the way that pushed away logic and served him dreams.

Tell her,
his conscience whispered even as his mouth found her breast, tasting it and the riveting waves poured from her.
Tell her.
Then as she arched to his touch, Michael could only feel, hear her heartbeat, want— Her hands moving over his chest and back did little to bring him to reality, to what he must do.

“This is heaven,” Kylie crooned, lying back on her mother’s couch, as Michael practiced reflexology on her feet. He shot her a warning glance when she wiggled her toes, just to see his reaction. Now, carefully following the colored chart of a foot, he looked little like the hungry man who had tugged her into the closet at the back of his shop, locking it. They had been alone, Leon showing off his new Porsche, and Kylie’s next appointment had canceled. Michael had eased off her sweatshirt and had taken her breasts in that hot, desperate way. Nothing sweet and tender about all that raw male power igniting within her arms, the jolt
had sizzled right down to her lower belly. “Mmm,” he’d rumbled against her throat, shaking badly as she held him.

“Take me now,” she’d whispered as he tore away his shirt to fold her close against him.

He’d stilled within her arms, breathing quietly against her cheek. His heavy slow heartbeat, like a leashed creature waiting to spring, rocked the closet’s shadows. “Not this way, not for you.”

“How then?” she’d whispered back and Michael’s dark, knowing chuckle mystified her as his kisses grew more tender and enticing. In the dim light, he cupped her breasts, caressing them as he studied her.

Because she’d had him close and locked in, blocking his escape, Kylie had stripped away her sweatpants and briefs. She’d wanted him then, wanted to take him before he withdrew into reserves she didn’t understand. “Well?” she’d demanded.

Michael hadn’t moved, his gaze flickering down her nude body. His hands had moved toward her breasts and then, rested lightly beneath her throat. “You can’t just come at a man like that,” he finally whispered in a raw uneven tone.

“Why not?” she’d been curious, watching his dark hot expression, her hands over his.

“For one thing, I’ve got plans,” he’d said hoarsely. And because he’d looked so wary and fierce and hot at the same time, Kylie had leaped upon him.

She studied the man massaging her toes now, in her mother’s living room. The technique wasn’t quite clinical, but more of a caress as if he wanted to study every molecule of her. Michael had to be treated gently, she decided, and he’d been unprepared for her feasting upon him. “I hope I didn’t frighten you today.”

His grunt said little, his eyebrows drawn in concentration
as he studied the chart. She wanted to discuss the intimacy running now between them. There had been little chance last night and this morning, when she’d walked into the kitchen to a dark brooding man who slapped a hearty breakfast on the table in front of her. “Eat,” he’d said, glowering at her, the night’s stubble covering his jaw as he sipped his coffee and considered her darkly.

She’d supposed he was a two-cup coffee in the morning man, one of those needing to be coaxed into the day, while she felt marvelous. Michael was delicate, she suspected, and needed reassurance. His slitted, hot looks at her could take her breath away, but she wanted action and quickly so. She wanted to rip away the rules and release whatever he held so close and tight. She couldn’t have secrets between them, and she’d waited forever for the event his hungry mouth and hands promised. “So how about a date?” she’d said over breakfast, feeling bold and untouched by his brooding silence as he considered her. “Tonight? Meet me at Willa’s after work?”

“Maybe” wasn’t exactly a cheerful answer as he held her hand, caressing the back with his thumb. The gesture was both erotic and friendly. At the door, seeing her off, his kiss was not friendly, but it tasted just right. “I’ll drop by the shop today. We need to talk,” he’d said roughly, caressing her sweatpants bottom. “This isn’t working out.”

At Willa’s earlier in the evening, Michael had growled deep in his throat when she took the check. “I asked you out, remember?”

He’d drawn into his shields again, closing her out with a cold expression. “This isn’t working out,” he murmured again in the cold November wind outside the Wagon Wheel. “It isn’t right. I have plans and you can’t afford to take me on like some orphan.”

“Stop growling,” she’d ordered lightly and slung her
arm around his waist because he looked dark and frustrated. “It’s a trade-off. You cooked a lovely dinner last night. I paid for dinner tonight.”

“It’s not the same thing. It isn’t natural for a woman to pay a man’s way. I have money,” he’d said, slipping his arm around her as they walked down the street. His nettled pride came from his childhood when he was supporting his dying father and yet would ask for nothing.

“Why isn’t this working out?” she asked now after a lovely meal at Willa’s Wagon Wheel Café as Michael was massaging her feet. He had baked a chocolate cake, using her mother’s cookbook, and she had leaped upon it hungrily after their return to the house. Now, with a plate of crumbs balanced on her stomach, and a beautiful man with strong warm hands massaging her feet, she wallowed in her good luck.

He studied her foot and corresponded the zones to the colored ones on his chart.

“I’m busy here,” he muttered. “This takes concentration. Let’s see, this outside area by your little toe is for your ears. This area is for heart and lungs.”

As if she needed stimulation for those areas with Michael near and scented of the chocolate cake. Experimentally, she dipped her finger in a dollop of remaining frosting on her plate; she sat up to ease it into his lovely mouth. The flick of his tongue and the heated suction launched an unsteady frustration. She wiggled her free foot up his side, only to have it captured by the press of his arm. “Stop that. You’re distracting me.”

“Are you always so intent?”

His gaze jerked to her lips, brushed her breasts and slowly ran down her legs to the toes he was massaging. “I’m thorough once I get started.”

“I liked you nabbing me in the closet,” she said, tossing
a tidbit into the beginning intimacy bin. “You don’t seem like the instinctive, impromptu type.”

“Sorry about that.” His tone lacked sincerity.

She studied the glow of the lamplight on his lashes, the way he experimentally moved his knuckles and fingertips across the areas of her feet. Those areas at the base of her toes were energy reservoirs and even without his testing them, they leaped into alert. He frowned when he touched her heel in a way that made her knee jerk, and sensitized her femininity. She rubbed her arch on his hard thigh and Michael scowled at it. “You’ve got very pretty feet, but they are in the wrong place,” he stated tightly.

She realized she was wiggling her toes too close to his jeans’ zipper and eased them away. Michael’s hands trembled as he gripped her feet in both hands, as if not knowing whether to replace them or push them away. He lifted her foot to place a kiss inside her arch, watching her. The electricity from his tongue staked every nerve and took her clawing at the couch. She found her breath and wished she could draw him over her, in her. “I know you resented me paying for dinner, but you’ve been working too hard. I heard you doing laundry last night. I can stop by your place and get you more clothes, if you wish.”

Michael looked up from studying her foot and higher places. He gripped her ankle, not tightly, but possessively. “Do not go there again.”

He frowned, studying her more closely as she looked away. “You did. You actually went there and cleaned for them again, didn’t you? You probably cooked some nutritious goodie for Sharon.”

“Who’s Rosa?” she asked, since Michael’s gentle relaxing mood was broken and whatever rode him was back and angry. His “Call Rosa for women” memo flashed in her mind on the list of things to discuss with Michael. She’d
found the note on his workbench in the back of her shop and it had nagged her all day.

Michael shook his head. “Some woman I know,” he explained curtly. “I asked you not to clean for them.”

“You didn’t ask. You ordered.” Kylie stood to her feet, angry with him. He would give her nothing, not even information about a name, a woman he knew.

Michael stood slowly, towering over her like a dark thunderstorm brewing a good lightning bolt. “I’m going out.”

“Fine. Run. Intimacy frightens you, so do relationships.” She wasn’t tired anymore, pleasured by Michael’s beginning reflexology techniques. “I can do my own toes.”

Michael ran his hand through his hair, leaving it in peaks. He had that desperate, trapped expression. “Kylie, I—”

“What?” She realized her tone gave him little opening for telling her what was on his mind, but with her body’s needs on override, she wasn’t happy to know she couldn’t keep the man she wanted desperately within arm’s reach.

“I’m going out for a beer.”

“At the Silver Dollar?” Where everyone could see that he was still lonely and haunted and that she couldn’t keep a man she’d asked on a date?

“On the back picnic table. It’s nice and cold and safe out there.”

Michael studied the bottles of colored nail polish he had arranged neatly over his workbench the next day. They represented the dreams he had of having Kylie’s full attention, of watching her little feet play and intertwine with his as they lay on her daffodil splattered sheets. Making love to Kylie in a closet or in the front seat of her pickup wasn’t what she deserved. Little had kept Michael from surging into her, placing himself deep in her, but he’d wanted an old-fashioned bed and a marriage ring on her finger.
What
was he doing? What made him think he was suitable marriage material for Kylie?

She knew about his young life, and he couldn’t bear her sympathy. He’d made money his goal for years, skipping the intricacies of relationships and Kylie was a woman who deserved conversation and intimacy. “Don’t you run away from me again,” she’d called out to him as he sat brooding on the picnic table.

She’d hurried out into the wind and hurled a warm shawl around his head and shoulders. She tucked it around him tightly and pushed back the fringes from his eyes. “You’re here, and it’s my fault and I’m not having people say I can’t take care of you. Oh, don’t glower at me. You don’t frighten me.”

It had been odd, yet right, sitting on the old picnic table, nursing his beer and wrapped in a woman’s large woolen shawl.

Leon, currently preening in the mirror, presented a problem. With Fredricka, who had stopped by to visit Michael, watching him, Leon was putting on quite a show of flexing muscles in the simple task.

“He is vain and a troublemaker,” Fredricka murmured quietly before sauntering over to Leon and smiling at him. “I would like a massage. Do you take walk-ins?”

Leon eyed Fredricka’s tall, statuesque body, her wide blue eyes and her long blond hair. “I think I have an opening now.”

Fredricka turned to look at Michael. “I have always liked you and Kylie,” she murmured. “It is good between you?”

“Pretty good.”
If she weren’t killing herself worrying about Leon and Sharon, and if Michael had told her of his intentions, already known to everyone else.

“Kylie loves her work. She’s not much on playing,”
Leon interrupted, not wanting to be excluded from the quiet conversation. “Except sports. She’s always been a tomboy. Not very feminine. Too open. No mystery.”

“Has she?” Michael asked darkly, nettled by Leon’s lack of knowledge of Kylie.

“I’d hardly call her a vamp or a tigress in bed. You never see her in a dress, do you?”

On his feet now, Michael took a step toward Leon. Kylie’s soft heart and her femininity weren’t up for discussion. “Listen, you—”

Fredricka’s hand stayed Michael. “You say you have an opening now, Leon? I’ve been waiting for a massage from a man with big, strong hands,” she purred.

After Fredricka’s tall curved body sauntered into the front part of the shop, Michael noted Leon’s drool and his haste to move after her. “Freddie” was usually cool and concerned with her tulip farm and her physical shape. She usually had little time for self-indulgence, running the miles into town for her mail. Men stood by the roadside to watch her pass, a beautiful tall flow of curves and long hair who ignored them all.

Michael turned his mind from the Fredricka-mystery and concentrated on his nonexistent and painful lack of love life. Two days of hit-and-miss cuddling Kylie-sessions weren’t helping his temperament, Michael decided. Honor prevented him making love to Kylie in her mother’s house without a wedding band on her finger. The moment had come and gone several times in which he could tell her that he’d spoken for her at the Women’s Council. It was only a matter of time before someone told her. Kylie seemed hot and ripe, and sensual tensions sprang between both of them at one look. Leon and Sharon were in the way at every turn and Kylie felt responsible for bringing them to Freedom Valley. She was too drained by running after them and
Michael could ruin whatever advances he’d made with her by just one badly needed punch— Michael opened his notebook computer, studied the various shades of polish he intended to apply with regular attention to Kylie’s toes and began punching keys.

“Fredricka is awfully friendly with Leon,” Kylie worried quietly at Michael’s side. “You never heard me walk up to you and you’re usually so perceptive. What are you doing?”

When she peered at his computer, Michael quickly exited the programs. Within hours, he intended to pry Leon and Sharon from Kylie. The responses he’d gotten from associates all over the world had been good, and Michael expected immediate confirmation of Leon’s appointment at a resort far, far away.

Kylie’s hand smoothed his chest and Michael almost purred aloud, pushing away the hunter’s instincts that ruled him on a project. He was losing his guard, the one that had kept him alive in danger. She leaned her head on his shoulder and Michael fell into those dark blue, mysterious eyes, wondering at what ran between them, how Kylie could now be so close and warm.

Kylie had softened him, this precious little bit of curves and a cheeky grin and an open, trusting heart. She’d stolen a piece of him, but the mix of sultry, hungry woman and fairy still dazzled him. She’d fascinate him long past what brewed and sizzled between them now. He knew that she wanted him, but while he might permit a taste, he had beautiful, wild plans for the claiming of Kylie. He could give her relief and himself the pleasure of watching her go into herself, capturing those riveting sensations within her. “You asked what I’m doing? Waiting for you. Maybe I always have,” he said, and watched her eyes darken as his head lowered.