as much as I did. And then at a dinner party, we found ourselves together-the token singles. It was funny, really. We started going to different functions just to save ourselves being set up.”
“And you found you clicked.”
“I don’t know about
“Easy to be with,” Garrett echoed and stood. Huge holes seemed missing in this picture. For one thing, he couldn’t fathom how a woman as warm and vibrant as Emma hadn’t been tempted by marriage long before this. And granted, he would have been prejudiced against her fiance if she’d claimed Kelly was a hero ten times over. But
Emma immediately stood, too, as if realizing how long they’d been talking. “I’ll help you take this all in if you’d like. But then I’d better be getting back to the gallery-”
He snagged her wrist. Just lightly. Just to see what touching her did-to her, to him. All he actually did was wrap his fingers around her wrist, his thumb on her pulse, for a few bare seconds. Yet that instantly her eyes shot to his like a light beam. The pulse caught in her throat where he could see it, beating, beating. Her lips suddenly parted.
“He sounds like a saint, Emma,” Garrett said.
“Not a saint. But a really good man-”
“Yeah. So you keep saying. And I believe you. But if you don’t love him, why are you marrying him?”
She didn’t answer him. Maybe she couldn’t answer him. That close, she looked at his mouth, at his eyes. She didn’t move away or try to evade his touch. A mourning dove called from somewhere in the yard.
The scent of peonies again drifted up on the hot, humid breeze, so teasing, so evocative.
It was all he could do not to kiss her-partly because that’s how she looked at him, as if it were all she could do not to kiss him.
Facts kept flashing in his mind: that she was engaged, that he wasn’t a poacher. But even when they were kids he’d never felt a tug this strong. At the vast age of thirty-five, it seemed crazy to discover there was a huge need inside him, a need from the heart, an unbearable hole of loneliness that he hadn’t even known he was suffering from, a hole that only she could feel or fill.
“Don’t, Garrett,” she whispered softly, a plea.
He heard the tremor in her voice. Immediately he released her wrist and stepped back. “I didn’t scare you, did I? I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, Emma-”
“I never thought you would.”
“But I won’t lie. I do want you.”
“Damn, you were always hopelessly honest. But didn’t anyone ever tell you that you don’t have to be quite this blunt?”
She obviously wanted him to smile, wanted to say something that would ease the tension between them. Just then, though, he couldn’t seem to conjure up a smile, even for her. Instead he touched her cheek with the back of his hand, just the mildest-nakedest-of caresses. “Maybe you don’t feel the same thing I’m feeling.”
She sucked in a breath. “I feel it.”
“Do you feel it with him, too, then? When you’re making love with him?” He really had tried to drill some of the blunt honesty from his character, and God knows he didn’t want to make Emma uncomfortable. But he had to ask. He just couldn’t imagine loving someone and feeling this for someone else. Sure, you could be attracted to more than one person. But this yank on his heart as if he’d die if he couldn’t have her, no. He couldn’t imagine another woman in his life if he could have what he was feeling right now for Emma.
She shifted her gaze away from his. “I don’t exactly know, Garrett. Reed and I haven’t…gotten that close.”
“Pardon?” He must have misheard her. She and Reed were engaged. How could they not have slept together?
She sighed heavily and noisily, glanced up at the sky as if begging for strength and then aimed straight for the stairs. As if they’d been discussing the weather, she said cheerfully, “If I find more goodies in the gallery I can spare, I’ll bring them over. And if anything I brought is in your way or you don’t like it, just give a shout and I’ll come get it.”
He leaned over the railing, watching her slim fanny swish as she climbed down the stairs. “Does that mean you’re not too annoyed with me for asking a few awkward questions?”
“Of course I’m annoyed. You’re being a royal pain. Unsettling and upsetting.” She glanced back at him one more time. “No different than you always were. But thank God I’m not seventeen anymore.”
“Damn straight. You’re a hell of a lot more beautiful. And more confounding.”
“And you always did like putting your hand in the fire. But we’re going to get along famously while you’re in town,” she informed him cheerfully. “Partly because we’re two doors down from each other. and because I care about your sister and want to help with Caroline if I can. And partly because you were my first love, which I really don’t want to forget-even though you’re being bad. Bad to the bone. Bad all the way down to the-”
“I get the picture.”
“So the point is that I’m not going to let a little awkwardness make it impossible to be together now and then.”
“Be together…how exactly do you mean that?”
She flipped him the finger. Emma. Emma Dearborn. Emma D-the silk-and-pearls debutante of Eastwick, the never-do-anything-wrong-in-public, never-offend-anyone Emma. Flipped him the finger.
He was downright charmed. And captivated.
“Damn, you’re fun,” he said.
“I am not.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, you are. And I may just have to make another pass at you, Em.”
“You try it and I’ll have to slap you silly,” she warned him…and then seemed to realize she was calling out that information to the entire neighborhood. He heard her sigh. Again. And then finally she disappeared from his sight.
He hung over the porch rail after that for a while, though. He could feel the silly grin on his face, when, hell, he didn’t do grins. Come to think of it, he hadn’t smiled in a long time.
He waited for the guilt to hit him again. And of course, it did. It wasn’t comfortable or right, this huge, building thing he felt for a woman who was taken, even though she sounded less taken than he’d originally believed.
Garrett told himself to back off. But when he pivoted around and headed into his apartment, he couldn’t swear that he was going to obey that inner conscience.
He couldn’t swear to anything. Not where Emma was concerned.
Except that he wished he hadn’t been crazy enough to lose her the first time.
Emma twisted and turned until she could see the middle of her back in the bathroom mirror at Color. There it was. The reason for the itch that had been driving her crazy on and off for days now.
A brand new hive.
Just one, but now she had a fresh excuse for being a nervous wreck. Sure, that last conversation with Garrett had preyed on her mind like a cat on a mouse. She’d been making love with Garrett in her dreams. She’d been driving in traffic and suddenly feeling herself flush when thoughts of him swam to the surface. She’d been dressing in the morning, picking out slips of satin and lace and suddenly thinking of taking them off. For Garrett. With Garrett.
But now at least she could claim a physical reason for feeling as if she’d lost control of her life. Impatiently she scratched the sucker-hive on her back, washed her hands and hiked down the hall. The country club June dance was coming up tomorrow. She’d been thinking of it as D-night. Reed had had his hands full all week. Tomorrow she simply had to find a way to corner him alone, to say the things she’d failed to the last time.
And right now what she needed was work. Mind-numbing plain old hard work.
In one of the first-floor display rooms, Emma was finishing up an exhibit. Through July, she was calling it the Red Room. She’d combined textures and textiles with only the color in common. A headdress from Cameroon was juxtaposed with a marble sculpture of a young woman covered in rose petals. A Schweitzer linen wall hanging contrasted with an Afghani rug. A perfectly ghastly lamp from the 1950s-with a woman’s leg in fishnet stockings for a base-echoed the shock and sensuality of a globe painted with the glossy red paint used by Jaguar.
The wall hanging wasn’t right, though, so she took it down and tried again. No matter how hard she
