It was okay, he wanted to tell her. He’d help her weather the gossip about her ex. But right then she seemed strung too tight to talk. As far as he could tell, she didn’t need more stress or seriousness right now. She just plain needed a break. So he kept it light.
“I haven’t been this scared in a long time,” he said wryly. “I thought they were going to riot over a few of those bottles. If you mentioned you had a big event going on tonight, it really slipped my mind.”
“I didn’t mention it because it wasn’t supposed to be a big event. There’s a hard-core perfume-bottle-collector crowd in Eastwick, so I just do this every few months. To be honest, I’d all but forgotten it was scheduled because normally it doesn’t take much to prepare for it.”
“Ah. They just wanted to drink your wine and get a look at you because of the broken engagement?”
“Don’t feel
“Did I hear you right? One of those old, used bottles actually went for 275K?”
When she nodded, he mimicked a man suffering from shock and gasping for air. Though she obviously was not in a laughing mood, her lips tipped and a helpless chuckle emerged. Finally that terrible stiffness eased in her shoulders.
“Oh, Garrett, darn it, I’ve needed to talk to you all day, but it’s been one thing after another. When I finally got a free minute this afternoon, this gallery event exploded on me. But I have something I absolutely need to tell you-”
“And I want to hear it. But not here, Emma.” He tried to steer her toward the door, but she balked.
“What’s wrong with here?”
“Nothing, normally. But right now your whole gallery smells like a perfume factory. In fact, I think the perfume’s destroyed all the oxygen in the entire county.”
She chuckled again but still wouldn’t budge. “It’s not that I don’t want to disappear with you-but I can’t leave this mess.”
Of course she couldn’t, he thought. She could hardly open the gallery in the morning with wineglasses and bottles all over the place.
Garrett realized, not too comfortably, that he was completely unused to thinking of other people, their needs, their life details.
But he wanted to change that. While she gathered and locked up all the fragile bottles, he headed for the kitchen. Tackling the dirty glasses and party debris was easy enough. He’d never liked KP-who did?-but he found himself whistling as he threaded the glasses in the dishwasher.
Helping her felt natural. Even more shocking was discovering that being himself with her felt natural. Who’d have believed it? That Emma seemed to just like being with him. That finger painting with her as if he were a little kid had actually been fun. And sex, of course, had been beyond great…but coming alive with her also never had the performance issues that sex and life always did. Somehow, he realized, he just felt
She showed up in the kitchen and grabbed a dish towel.
“Maybe it’s as simple as trust,” he mused.
“Huh?”
“It’s a meaner world than it used to be. Not easy to trust. Not easy to find other people with integrity. And I admit, it’s probably always been harder for me to take a chance.”
“Okay,” she said patiently, “you’ve obviously been sampling the wine while you handled the glasses-”
He kissed her on the nose, teased the dish towel out of her hand and this time seriously whisked her toward the door. The cleanup was ninety-nine percent done. Enough. “You, cookie, have had more than your share of nonstop running today. Let’s get you away from the gallery and phones and see if we can find some food to shovel into you, okay?”
“Cookie?”
“I know, I know. I can’t imagine why I called you
“You look gorgeous,” he said.
“Okay. No more wine for you. Maybe ever.”
It felt good. More than good. Getting her smiling, laughing, easing up. And she was way too whipped to give him much trouble by then. He easily bossed her around at his place, got her installed on the couch with a pillow behind her back. Within minutes, he’d handed her a fancy sandwich heaped with cheese and fresh tomatoes and cold cuts, all spilling out the sides and making her chuckle again. The glass, the pillow, the plate the sandwich was on were all hers-things she’d brought over to make this rental place livable.
But she was the one who made it livable. Curled up on that old couch, she brought life and emotion to the place. Still, every few minutes she kept remembering the refrain to her earlier song, and then her good humor would die again.
“Garrett…I really
“I know you do. You keep saying. And I want to hear. But first explain to me how or why anyone would pay so much for a bunch of used perfume bottles.” Before he settled down with her, he turned off the phone, the fax, all the electronics that he usually kept on 24-7.
“I’m not sure I can explain. Perfume bottle collecting is kind of a unique addiction, but if you’re not into it-”
“Trust me. I’m not. And likely won’t be.”
She chuckled again. “Poor baby. Those women really scared you, didn’t they? You never saw women in a shopping frenzy before?”
At the end of the couch, he pulled off one of her sandals. Then the other. “Not that close before.” He shuddered. “I wouldn’t want to get between one of those women and the bottles they wanted.”
“It’s a lost world now, but there was a time when perfumes had artists hand make bottles for their product. Once perfumers started using plastic-tipped stoppers, the bottles were never the same. But before that, the really great perfumes all had bottles that were hand designed, truly works of art-” She seemed to hear herself talking-or maybe she suddenly realized he was running his hands up and down the soles of her bare feet. Her throat suddenly flushed with awareness, arousal. Her eyes ducked from his, and she swiftly swung her legs over the side of the couch and stood up.
“I know what you’re thinking-” she began.
“What gave it away? I was trying my damnedest to make you believe I was fascinated about the bottles.”
But this time she didn’t smile. “Garrett…I really need to get something off my chest.”
The hell she did. She’d had enough stress and crap over the last twenty-four hours to last a lifetime. And all he had to do was gently tug her hands and she promptly folded into his arms. She wasn’t that small, but barefoot now, she had to tilt her head back to get kissed. At least to get kissed the right way-where he took her mouth and kept it. Possessed it. Seduced it. Until his head was reeling and she was breathless.
When he let her up for air, her luminous eyes met his and she started to speak…or tried to.
So he had to kiss her again, much more seriously.
He’d been without her all day. Too long. A thirty-five-year-old man should have had years of experience with women to learn self-control, but he didn’t. He had more self-control than any twenty men he’d ever met. But not the experience with women.
At least not with women he trusted down deep. Maybe he should have realized how much she mattered when they were teenagers…but for damn sure, he knew how much she meant to him now. His head spun as he kissed and kissed and kissed her yet again. He took a cherishing nip from her neck. Then her earlobe. Then indulged in a long, slow, tongue-stealing kiss, after which he tasted the exquisitely soft length of her throat.
Hell, if she hadn’t made a fierce groaning sound of surrender, he probably could have experimented with a thousand more kisses just on her face and neck alone.
Exploring Emma was the most fascinating job he’d ever come across…although Garrett discovered that undoing Emma was an even more consuming occupation.
The pearl clip in her hair had to be jettisoned first, because he needed to be able to freely run his hands through her thick, lustrous hair. The better to hold her. The better to kiss her thoroughly. The better to explore the
