“I know, I know. That’s exactly what’s driving me crazy.” She scraped a hand through her hair, making the curls spring up in tufts. She faced him, her eyes so fierce. Soft-fierce. “I can’t stand worrying that she’d be put in a bad place for her. All I really want is to be able to take care of her until we know for sure what’s what in her life. I
“Win, I don’t really give a damn if it’s nuts or not. If I understood what you told me earlier, they’d consider you for temporary guardian, if you were married. Is that true or not true?”
“True. Actually, it’s true that they would consider me anyway-but I’d almost certainly get turned down right now. I don’t know of any circumstances where a single woman’s been allowed to foster. Not here. It’s always a two-parent family-”
“So let’s get married.”
She tried to answer and ended up sputtering on another bubble of laughter. She laughed harder. Then quit. Then hiccuped.
He’d never seen Winona undone before. Had no idea she could be-at least by him.
When he lifted a hand, he knew he intended to kiss her. When his fingers touched her cheek, pushed back, so gently, into her hair, cupping her head toward him…he knew what he was doing then, too. Sort of. He sure as hell knew how to kiss a woman.
But he’d never kissed Winona before. Any kind of kiss. Any way. Possibly because he’d known that even one small kiss was never going to be simple. Not with her. Not for him.
She wasn’t expecting the kiss, because her forehead puckered in a frown and her eyes widened in surprise and confusion when he kept coming closer. But when his fingers laced in her hair, she didn’t move. When his mouth honed in on hers, she didn’t pull away. She went as still as a statue.
But nothing about Win resembled a cold statue. She tasted fragile. Soft. Warm. Alluring.
She made a small sound when his mouth touched hers, tasted, came back for more. Win rarely wore perfumes, yet he suddenly felt surrounded by her scents. Her tongue still carried the echo of the vanilla cappuccino he’d made her. Her hair was a tumble of springy, unruly curls, threaded with that hint of strawberry shampoo she used. And she was always slathering cream on her face and hands because her skin was so dry, and that was the other scent. Almonds. Vanilla. Strawberry. All edible stuff.
Like her.
She made another sound, and her fingers suddenly clutched his arm, as if to push him away. Only she didn’t push him away, and beneath his mouth, her lips were suddenly moving, trembling like a whisper, her eyelashes swooshing down as if the light in the room were suddenly too bright. The TV flashed on a news interruption, which technically they’d both been rabidly interested in earlier. Now, he didn’t look up, and neither did she.
Those first exploring kisses turned deeper, silkier, sexier. The fingers clutching his arm suddenly wound, tight and hard, around his neck. Tongues tangled, tangoed. He kissed and kept on kissing, but now he could feel her skin heating, feel her body yielding, bowing to his on an angry groan of a sigh. He heard the anger in that groan, and a thousand years from now-when he had time-he’d want to smile. Win had had no idea she’d feel desire with him.
Neither had he. He’d been pretty sure, for years now, that his panting after her had all been one-sided. Yeah, there was a kind of love. The way you could love a brother at the same time you smacked him upside the head. The way you loved an old friend who knew your childhood secrets. It was good love. All love was good love. But it wasn’t man-woman love.
It wasn’t heat like a volcano, and a hurricane rush, and wanting that could claw you from the inside out, if you let it.
He wanted to let it. He wanted to peel that big sweatshirt off her and bow her back into the couch cushions, into the shadows, and dunk her in sensuality so deep, so hot, that neither of them could get up until it was over. He wanted to see her naked. To touch her naked. To have her naked.
But there was a sleeping baby only three feet away. And these few potent kisses were suddenly raising questions that Justin never thought he’d get the chance to ask. Fire or no fire, need or no need, he was afraid of losing the answers he wanted if he moved too fast.
So he eased up on that last kiss. Tried to remember how to breathe normally. Smoothed his hand back up above her neck. Pressed his forehead to her forehead, eyes closed, loving how she was huffing like a freight train, too.
And that helped him relax. And smile. “Hey, Win…I’m richer than Croesus. You did know that, didn’t you?”
Her eyes were still more liquid than a lake, but she gave him a short frown, expressing confusion. “Am I supposed to care about that?”
“Yeah. Because it matters. It matters because I can put a marriage together faster than most people. And get those temporary guardian papers going through the legal system. You want this baby? We can make it happen.”
“Justin…” She swallowed, hard, when he lurched to his feet.
He’d already heard the baby stir. He pushed into shoes, glanced around for his jacket, but then he met her eyes again. Those soft, liquid-as-a-lake-blue eyes. Liquid for him. For the first time in all these years, liquid for him. “I don’t know about you and me. But we’ve known each other forever, Winona. And again, I’ve got the money, the resources to put this together fast. The resources to make it easy for both of us-to get in, to get out, to do whatever we both want to do. There’s no woman in my wings. Is there a man in yours?”
She blinked. “No.”
“Come on. I need you to be frank with me. There has to be some guy-”
“No.”
Well, hell. He couldn’t hold back a grin. He ruffled her curls, grabbed his jacket and let himself out. And yeah, he’d left the proposal hanging between them. But there was no way Winona Raye would ever-in this life-give him a yes on the spur of the wild moment like that.
By his leaving right then, he’d given her no chance to say no.
That wasn’t just progress. As far as Justin was concerned, it was damn close to manna from heaven.
Snuggling the baby more securely on her shoulder, Winona paced the house from window to window. Justin’s satin-black Porsche had disappeared from her driveway an hour ago, but she kept looking out anyway. Maybe his visit had been a mirage. Or maybe he’d put a drug in her coffee-because something had dropped her off in Oz for a few hours, for darn sure.
Angel let out a sleepy burp, making Winona smile. Still, she kept on pacing and patting, pacing and patting. Really, her brief sojourn into Oz was downright funny. She’d actually imagined Justin seriously asking her to marry him. Not joking this time. But low-down serious.
Boy, was that funny.
So funny that even after the baby fell asleep big time-for the night, she hoped-Winona still couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t sleep. She was as tired as a worn-out hound, yet still pacing the floors in the dark.
He’d asked if there was a man in her life. And simply couldn’t seem to credit her avowal that there wasn’t.
At midnight, she prowled to the refrigerator for some milk-poured out a half a cup, all she had in the house-and carted it back to her bedroom. She climbed in between the cobalt-blue sheets and mounded the pillows behind her head, sipping, staring out the windows at a lover’s moon and a sky full of stars.
There’d been men. But not in a while. Once she’d realized that she’d been the one screwing up the relationships, she’d backed off from trying. She wasn’t any good at getting close-not in the sack or out of it. Sex wasn’t the only problem, but it was a nuisance of a big one. She had no objections to intimacy, getting naked, big inhibitions, nothing like that.
She’d just figured, a long time back, that her sweat with intimacy was about abandonment. Being abandoned once in a lifetime was enough. If you had your soul ripped out once, most sane people didn’t volunteer for a repeat experience. But when that translated into a relationship…well. She could lie there beneath a guy. Smile. Make the right movements. Make the right groans.
In fact, she had.
