The Way You Look Tonight (23 page)

It wasn’t until he pulled away from her that she realized he must have taken out a condom before he’d dropped his jeans on the kitchen floor. She’d never been careless in bed with a man before, had never truly lost control before Rafe, had never trusted anyone as much as she trusted him.

Yet again, he’d taken care of them both, just as she’d always known he would.

He lifted her from the counter and carried her into the bathroom, holding her tightly in his arms as he climbed into the tub and let the water pour in to wash the chocolate from both of them.

She leaned her head back against his shoulder and closed her eyes. "You’re right. We don’t need any props to be wild." She turned her face to his with a smile on her lips, but he wasn’t smiling back. "You’re not feeling guilty for debauching me again, are you?"

Clearly, he was surprised she’d figured him out so well. "I could have hurt you up on that hard granite."

"You could never hurt me."

She felt him stiffen behind her. Come to think of it, hadn’t he looked a little twisted up about something when he walked into the kitchen? But she’d been so wrapped up in her own emotions that she hadn’t stopped to ask if he was okay.

"Rafe?" She immediately twisted around in the tub so that she was straddling his hips, her hands linked around his neck. "We’re not just lovers, we’re friends, too. You can say anything to me. You know that, don’t you?"

"I’ve never been friends with a lover before."

She caressed his cheek. "Me either, but I think we’re doing pretty good so far."

So good that she knew she couldn’t expect him to be honest with her about what was on his mind if she wasn’t honest with him, too. She could have avoided his earlier question again, the same way she had just minutes before. Especially when he was already hard again. Just the slightest shift of her hips and she could have both of them forgetting for a little while longer.

But for them to truly be more than lovers, even more than friends, meant talking not only about the cute things, the sexy things...but about the difficult things, too.

"You asked what happened when you walked into the kitchen." She sighed. "My parents called."

He slid a chocolate-covered strand of hair away from her forehead. "What did they say to upset you?"

"They still think I’m a little girl who needs their guidance, their protection, their wisdom. I’m not saying I don’t sometimes or that their learned wisdom isn’t valuable, but—" She sighed, the water in the tub shifting beneath the slight movement of her body over his. "All these years I’ve been so sure that one day they’ll open their eyes and see me. The real me, the woman I’ve become, not just a teenager who made a big mistake when she was sixteen. I can understand that they were terrified when I ended up in a car crash, but—"

"Wait a minute, what happened when you were sixteen?"

"I couldn’t stand feeling like a prisoner in my bedroom another second, so when my friend suggested we sneak out to go to a party a couple of streets over, instead of saying no like always, I said yes. But I had so little experience with regular teen stuff that when someone gave me a glass of punch, I drank all of it. And then another, until the next thing I knew, everything was a little fuzzy."

"There was Everclear in that punch, wasn’t there? A hundred and ninety-proof alcohol with no taste, no smell."

She nodded. "I think so. But I probably would have been okay and made it back to my bedroom without my parents ever finding out if I hadn’t gotten into a car with a boy I had a crush on." She winced. "He’d been drinking the punch, too, thus the crash into a tree in someone’s front yard. The air bags caught me and I was fine, but—" She shook her head, feeling foolish about it even all these years later. "Pretty stupid, huh?"

"Yes, it was stupid," he agreed, and her heart started to sink just as he added, "but every teenager is stupid. Stupid is what teenagers do."

"Why can’t my parents see that? Why can’t they see me for who I am now? For who I’ve become?"

"I wish I could promise you that they’d come around," Rafe said softly, "but since I can’t, all I can do is tell you what I see every time I look at you." His eyes were full of much more than desire as he caressed her cheek. "I see incredible beauty." He brushed the back of one hand down the curve of her body from breast to hip. "I see sensuality that shocks the hell out of me every single time we make love." He kept moving his hand down into the water until he’d picked up one of her hands. "I see the talent to make the best damned truffles in the world." He laid both of their hands between her breasts. "I see a heart that’s big enough to take in my family showing up unannounced on your doorstep." He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to it. "But most of all, I see a woman who is so damned smart that she’s done something few people will ever even realize they need to fight for: You’ve built your life exactly the way you want it, doing what you love, in the place you want to be. You don’t need to prove one damned thing to anyone, Brooke. You already have."

With just a handful of the most beautiful sentences she’d ever heard, he’d answered every question she had left about falling in love with her next-door neighbor and friend, and had erased every last doubt.

All Brooke had ever wanted was for someone to actually see her—and to love her—for who she really was. Finally, she’d found him. The first boy she’d ever loved would also be the last.

"Remember how I said that if you ever gave up being a P.I., you should consider short-order cooking?"

He cocked his head at her strange response to his incredibly sweet words. "You’ve got a hankering for eggs all of a sudden?"

"No, but I want you to know I’ve changed my mind. Plenty of people can make great scrambled eggs, but so few can be a poet."

"I’m no poet, Brooke."

"To me," she said as she laid her head against his shoulder, "you are."

Chapter Twenty-one

Rafe wanted to do anything he could to strip away the lingering pain in Brooke’s eyes from her phone call with her parents. But since more lovemaking would only put her more behind on her truffle-making schedule, he offered his two hands in whatever way she could use them to finish getting the rest of her orders made. She took him up on it with a big, happy smile that had him wasting a few more minutes of her tight deadline in his arms despite his best intentions to keep his hands off her until her work was done.

Earlier in the day, he’d been worried about being in her way, but as she quickly showed him what she needed him to do, he realized he should have given her enough credit to know exactly how to put him to work in such a way that he’d be a help rather than a hindrance.

He hated the thought of anyone harming her in any way. When he’d walked in after she’d gotten off the phone with her parents and she’d told him she’d needed him, he’d been desperate to heal the hurt in her eyes by replacing it with pleasure. Their lovemaking on the kitchen counter had been wild and hot, but more than that, it had been full of the sweetness that was at Brooke’s core.

Everything she did held that same beautiful contradiction. The combination of heat and coolness in her chocolates. The simple sundresses over naughty lace and silk...or nothing at all. Wicked and oh so good. A man would be a fool not to look deeper than the surface with Brooke.

Did that mean he’d also have to be an even bigger fool about the background check he’d ordered?

And yet, even though Rafe had meant every word he’d said to her in the bathtub, though he’d seen with his own eyes her beauty, her brains, and how big her heart was, what about all those years he hadn’t been with her? Could there be something he needed to know that was bigger than sneaking out at sixteen and getting drunk, something she would never admit even to him? Something that would tear them apart down the road?

"Rafe?" He didn’t realize he’d given voice to his frustration at the battle raging inside of him until she said his name. "You’ve already done so much to help. I’ll come to bed after I’ve made my deliveries."

He moved from the boxes he was putting together to wrap his arms around her from behind. He rested his chin on the top of her head and loved the way she immediately relaxed back into his arms and chest. "I’m not going anywhere."

She turned her face to his, and he caught her lips in a soft kiss. Before she could spin around in his arms and convince him to ruin their hard work by lifting her up onto the counter to take her again in another rush of unquenchable desire, he moved his hands to her shoulders and began to give her a massage.

"
Oh God.
Please don’t stop doing that."

He grinned as he dug his fingers just a little harder into her muscles. "I’m glad it feels good."

"So, so good." Her eyes had closed and her head fell forward as she let herself enjoy every second of the impromptu massage. "A short-order cook, a poet, and now a masseur. You’re so good at everything you do."

He pressed a kiss to her head. "You must inspire greatness in me."

She rubbed her hips against his groin. "I wonder what else I can inspire?"

"As soon as we get the rest of these chocolates made and out the door, we can find out," he promised her, before reluctantly lifting his hands and stepping away from her gorgeous, extremely inspiring curves to get back to work on filling truffle boxes.

The sky was dark, the moon only a sliver now. As they worked, its reflection on the surface of the water outside moved across the lake until it was replaced by the rising sun.

"No doubt about it," she said as they put together the last handful of boxes, "I’m officially too old for all-nighters. Thank you for helping. I couldn’t have even come close to pulling this off without you."

"You wouldn’t have been this far behind without me, either."

"We’re having another one of our silly arguments again," she said with a little smile. "Come on and let’s get these delivered so that we can get back to being inspired, instead."

People were going to wonder—and assume—when they saw him with Brooke this morning. It was a small, tight-knit town. He hadn’t been a part of it for the past eighteen years, but he hadn’t forgotten how it worked. Word had likely spread like wildfire that he’d bought the lake house his family used to own, and he doubted his dinner or motorcycle ride with Brooke had gone unnoticed, either.

The locals would wonder how on earth he’d gotten to be the luckiest bastard on the planet. But more than that, they’d want to know if he was even close to good enough for one of their own.

They were the exact two things Rafe kept wondering himself.

* * *

Four hours later, Brooke was asleep in the passenger seat as he drove her car back up the long gravel driveway between the Douglas firs that led to both their houses. They’d driven to the main shopping areas of the three towns closest to the lake and delivered chocolates to every gift store, grocery, sweet shop, and ice cream stand. He’d been momentarily surprised when Brooke stopped in at the police and fire stations with free boxes of chocolate. It was a brilliant marketing idea, and he’d seen the incredible goodwill everyone in town had for her, but that wasn’t why she did it. She simply wanted to show her appreciation for the difficult and important work the cops and firefighters did.

He’d run into guys at the stations he hadn’t seen in years, and while they’d clearly been glad to see him again, he’d also felt the weight of their silent warning:
Screw around with Brooke and you’re screwing around with all of us.
On top of that, more than one of them had clearly been upset that he’d stolen the prettiest girl in town out from under their noses. Knowing just how many guys would have been more than willing to be "wild" with her had Rafe feeling even more possessive and protective of her.

His sister had been right: Summer flings never worked out the way they were supposed to. Maybe, he found himself thinking as he unbuckled Brooke’s seatbelt, then lifted her out of the car, that was because sometimes they worked out even better.

She nuzzled her face into his neck as he carried her inside. Laying her down on her bed, he intended to gently strip her clothes off without waking her up, but she wouldn’t let go of him.

"It’s time to be inspired."

Her whispered words in his ear had him growing even harder than he’d already been just from holding her in his arms. She inspired not only deep desire, but also emotions he would have been on guard against with anyone but her.

Brooke had slipped in beneath his defenses, not just with sweet kisses and incredibly hot lovemaking, but with her constant smiles and laughter that jumped like a cannonball into the dark spots inside of him and splashed them with light.

"I’m always inspired when I’m with you."

Her eyes fluttered up, arousal quickly edging out the sleepiness. "Show me."

Her mouth was so damned soft, her tongue so sweet, that all he could manage to show her was the fact that he couldn’t resist her.

Every time they’d made love had been special. Perfect. Wild. This was their first time for sleepy and slow, her body like melting butter beneath his.

How many other ways would there be to love her?

It was a question he knew he’d enjoy trying to answer every day for the rest of his life.

Her skin smelled like chocolate, and he breathed her in all over as he slowly stripped her clothes away and ran kisses from her temple down to the brightly painted tips of her toes. She stretched like a contented, sleepy kitten beneath his increasingly heated caresses, purring like one, too, every time he found a particularly sensitive spot with his tongue.

He could have spent the rest of the day tasting behind her knee, nipping at her hipbone, rubbing his cheek against the undersides of her breasts, but there were so many other spots he needed to taste, too.

The soft skin on her neck when she arched beneath him.

The small of her back when he rolled her onto her stomach so that he could fully appreciate the gorgeous curve of her hips while massaging away the aches that came with doing such hard work at the kitchen counter all night long.