“Tell me about them,” he said.
“Well, these women have been my closest friends since we all met in the dorm in college. Zoe and Joss and I were in a triple room, and Lacey was our resident adviser. We got close and stayed that way through the years.”
He nodded, absorbing that. “What about your real family? Parents and siblings?”
“Not much to tell.” Not that she wanted to share, anyway. Not yet. “I’m an only child, and my mother is…” Oh, no. Not the time for this. “Not really in my life,” she said quickly. “My ‘friend’ family is the one that matters. And who’s who will be self-explanatory, and you’ll get to know them all when you work at Casa Blanca.”
“Can you give me a refresher before we get there?”
“Sure. Lacey and Clay Walker own the resort and have a new baby, Elijah, plus Lacey’s teenage daughter, Ashley. Zoe has a hot-air-balloon excursion business, which she has someone else piloting right now because she’s pregnant. She’s engaged to Dr. Oliver Bradbury, an oncologist, and they’re planning to get married after the house they’re building is finished and the baby’s born.”
“After?”
“She wants the baby at the wedding. She lives to be unconventional.”
“So there are a lot of babies in the air,” he noted, keeping his arm tightly around her.
“A few. None for Jocelyn, yet. She recently married Will Palmer, a local carpenter. She runs the spa at Casa Blanca.”
“How did you all end up at the resort?”
“Lacey launched the project and, one by one, we came to join her.” At the truck, she unclipped her key ring from her bag, handing it to him. “Don’t think it escaped my notice that you barely drank one glass of wine and let me dip into a second. You drive.”
He took the keys, maneuvering himself so her back was against the passenger door. “Be happy to.”
She sighed as he got closer, tilting her head up to look at the full moon, but her gaze caught his instead, and stayed there, letting the power of those blue eyes nearly flatten her. For a long moment, he said nothing, just looked into her eyes.
Since he’d taken over the conversation at dinner, the warning bells had stopped ringing. He’d made her comfortable and content. He had convinced her they’d had two rocky starts—the bar and the interview—but this was all new. He had made her stop doubting, at least for now.
“What are you thinking?” she asked him.
“You don’t want to know.”
The answer surprised her. “Then I wouldn’t have asked.”
“I’m thinking about a lot of things.”
“Name one.”
“How perfect you are,” he whispered.
“Oh, with the lines.”
“That’s not a line,” he insisted. “You are perfect.” He backed her against the passenger door with one step, stroking her cheek with a shockingly light knuckle, the feathery touch making her close her eyes. “I’m not sure how I feel about that, but you’re perfect.” The hint of sadness in his voice made one of those dormant warning bells ring again. Something wasn’t right with that answer, or the regretful tone in his voice.
“Perfect for what?”
He frowned and shook his head, not answering.
She put both hands on his chest, not to push him away but to get a good feel of the muscles under his shirt. “What exactly are you looking for in a woman, John?”
“I don’t know,” he said gruffly, added some pressure so they were chest to chest, legs to legs. “But I think I found it.”
Oh, God. Was it possible he was for real? Was she about to kiss a guy who could possibly…
No. Not this soon. Not this man. It wasn’t—
He lowered his head, angling it one way, then the other, as if he couldn’t decide the perfect way to go in for the kill. “Damn it, you’re beautiful.”
His mouth covered hers, warm and wet, soft and sweet, his lips lingering like she was as delicious as the tiramisu they’d just shared.
Lifting her hands, she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him into her and standing a little higher on her toes to get every bit of this moment. Her head buzzed and her heart hammered and every nerve in her body quickened to life. She couldn’t separate the taste of mocha and mint and man, and didn’t try. She merely reveled in them all.
He opened his mouth, swirling his tongue around hers. An invitation, not an invasion, and Tessa licked him in even deeper. A soft, low groan escaped from his chest, the sound of sex and desire, a sound that made her dig her fingers into his silky long hair and press harder against his granite-like torso.
“Now I’m sorry,” she whispered into the kiss.
“Sorry?” He broke the contact, frowning at her. “For kissing me?”
“For inviting you to meet my friends.”
He almost smiled. “Because you want to go straight home and fall into bed?”
She kind of nodded, fighting a laugh.
“I know how you feel, but…” He kissed her again, taking her face in his hands this time, tilting her so their mouths fit perfectly, breathing life and hope and a dizzying, stunning jolt of desire all the way through her. “I really want to meet your friends, too.”
Seriously? “I can’t believe this,” she murmured into the kiss.
“Believe it.” He inched back, his eyes squeezed closed. In the moonlight, it almost looked like his lashes were damp and he worked hard to swallow.
Was he
He squeezed her into him, fending off the question with a hard kiss, unforgiving, and completely different from the ones before. This was far more fury and desperation than seduction and sex. And
He kept his eyes closed and took a ragged breath. “I told you,” he murmured. “You affect me.”
Tessa stood perfectly still, looking up at a god in the moonlight, no question that the sides of this tough guy’s eyes were moist.
She touched the tear-dampened line and brushed his long lashes. “In more ways than one, I’d say.”
“Yes, in many more ways.”
Corralling his composure, he put his hands on her shoulders as if to steady her, despite the fact that he was clearly the one in need of steadying.
Once Ian Browning committed to a course of action, he rarely veered in any other direction. That was why he had excelled in university. That was why he’d sailed up the ranks at Barclays. That was why once he decided he’d get Tessa Galloway to marry him, he pulled out all the stops and turned up the heat.
At least that was what he kept telling himself, even after he made the monumental mistake of letting himself feel something for her—enough that his emotions were all over his face.
He was no stranger to tears; he’d shed a thousand since Kate died. But these? These stunned him. Surely they weren’t because he felt something for Tessa Galloway already.
“Let’s go,” he said, not wanting to get into the conversation here and now. “I want to meet your friends.”
She gave him a wary smile. “Really?”
“No, that’s a lie,” he admitted. “I’d rather have a root canal and hug a cactus tree than go to a party, but”— he opened the passenger door and gestured for her to get in—“let’s go.”
She hesitated. “Why, if you hate parties?”
“Because you want to go.”
