was Lou, flirting with the sixty-something-year-old customer.
“Lou!” Kylie refrained from wrapping her fingers around her grandma’s neck, and instead gestured her over. “Can I see you for a moment?”
“Sure.” Lou walked saucily toward them, making sure Jimbo watched her walk away.
He did, with his tongue practically on the ground.
“What are you doing?” Kylie growled when she got closer.
“What does it look like?” Lou patted her hairdo. “I’m trying to get a date. You remember what a date is, don’t you, Kylie?”
Wade laughed and Kylie groaned. “Don’t you have work to do?” she asked. “Accounting work?”
“All caught up.”
“How about the quarterlies?”
“Well, darling, I would, but I just did them last night.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m quite sure.”
“And then there’s the checking account situation-”
“Balanced,” Lou said proudly.
“Are you positive?”
“Of course, I’m positive. I’ve done this before, you know. Now shoo, scat, vamoose, you’re cramping my style.” Without looking back, she sashayed toward Jimbo.
Kylie was overcome with impending doom. She was failing, miserably.
“Hey,” Wade said. “It can’t be that bad.”
“As long as I’m wearing rose-colored glasses.”
He took her hand and pulled her away. They walked alongside the tarmac for about a hundred feet before they walked down the alley between hangars two and three toward maintenance.
She was just numb enough to actually let him lead her.
“Pretty day,” he said.
It was, but it’d be prettier if their hopefully new client called. She glanced at the cell phone. She’d given him this number in case there was a problem with the phones again.
No missed call.
Wade moved closer, and before she realized it, she had the cool hangar wall at her back and the big, bad, sexy pilot at her front. “Your mother is right,” he said, running his hands up her sides. “Tension is spilling right out of you.”
“That’s because you’re standing in my space,” she retorted, both the words and her breath backing up in her lungs when he spun her around and put her hands on the wall. “What-”
The word turned into a moan when he pressed close, pressed his fingers into her shoulders, massaging right where she felt most of the tension, at the base of her neck. “Wade-”
“Do us both a favor and be quiet a moment.”
Oh, man, did he know what he was doing. Those fingers were magic, pure, unadulterated magic, as they dug into the knots in her shoulders, her biceps, her neck. She wore a sleeveless faux-silk blouse, and he wasn’t shy about slipping his hands beneath the material to work more of that magic.
Within two minutes her legs were Jell-O. Her hands slipped from the wall, and he tsked, putting them back up. “Hold still.”
Hold still. If she so much as arched her back, her bottom found a snug home at the vee of his trousers. She knew this because she did it. Then his hands danced all over her and she couldn’t breathe. Hold still? She couldn’t!
“If you’d only admit you liked this,” he whispered into her ear, causing a set of delicious shudders to race down her spine. “I could do it for you whenever you tense up. Which is all the time.”
She spun around, not realizing until that moment just how close they were. Her chest brushed his, so did her hips. His eyes darkened, and his hands slid from her shoulders to cup her face. “Kylie?” His thumb slid over her lower lip, making it tremble open. “Do you like it?”
Definitely, a woman more in charge of her sexuality would do just that, admit it and then take more, take all of what was offered, whatever that might be. But Kylie wasn’t that woman. She knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was her life simplified. Wade wouldn’t do that, he’d complicate it.
Yes, in the deep dark of the night, she could admit the airport needed more help than she alone could give it. She needed a partner.
But in the light of day, she wasn’t willing to let go yet. And then there was Wade himself. She told herself she wasn’t interested. She needed more than a single smoldering look.
A single smoldering look, which at the moment, was consuming her, making her a little sweaty, a little tingly, a little dizzy even, so she put her hands on his arms for balance.
He stared down at them, then looked at her.
Oh my, he had hard muscle beneath his shirt. Her fingers squeezed, testing, her knees quivering again when nothing gave.
“Kylie…”
Fascinated, utterly unable to help herself, she squeezed him again. “Yeah?”
“You’re…touching me.”
She was. She couldn’t stop. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I like it,” he said in a voice that sounded a little ragged. He gripped her when she might have pulled away. “I like it a lot.”
Suddenly her entire body forgot its own pledge. It was humming, craving, yearning, and when she looked up into Wade’s face, his mouth slowly curved into a wry smile.
“Say the word,” he said huskily, with one more trace of the pad of his thumb over her mouth. “Just say the word and I’ll touch you back. I’ll be quite happy to touch you back, Kylie.”
She almost went for it. She certainly, suddenly, desperately, wanted to. But she just realized something else…Wade stood there, looking at her patiently.
And that, she decided, was the worst part of the morning. Not the reporters, or the pictures they’d almost gotten. Not her grandmother looking for a date amongst the clients.
But Wade knowing her so well.
CHAPTER FIVE
KYLIE WENT BACK into the lobby, with Wade not far behind. He had a flight-she knew because once again she’d peeked-and would be gone the rest of the day on a charter to Santa Barbara.
Good.
She needed the rest of the day to recover from the feel of his hands on her body. In less than two minutes he’d dissipated most of the stress tension in her neck, replacing it with a different sort of tension altogether.
One that wouldn’t be easily assuaged by working on an airplane engine.
When she stepped into the lobby, Kylie automatically braced herself for the worst. Her mother had probably single-handedly destroyed the phone system again, or somehow managed to break down dispatch.
“Honey!” Daisy called, waving her over. “I just reheated your stress-relieving tea, come and get it.” She held out the mug, then swept a stray strand of hair off her daughter’s face. “You seem a little pale,” she murmured. “What’s the matter?”
Nothing, except every hormone she had was on full alert. “I’m fine.”
“Okay, but drink your tea, you need some color in your cheeks.” She patted her hair. “I was thinking about going a shade lighter to celebrate. What do you think?”
“I’m going to my office.”
