She glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. “It’s eight o’clock at night.”
“We had burgers for breakfast and didn’t eat lunch. We might as well have pancakes for dinner.” He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “I know a great pancake house, it’s a bit of a ride, but it’s open all night. Twenty-four hour breakfasts. Scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, thick waffles—“
“Waffles?” she said, imagining the fragrant squares dripping with maple syrup. “As in, Belgian waffles with dollops of cream?”
“You got it, Red.”
“Oh…my.”
“Hey,” he said, coming around the bed to put his face right up to hers, “that expression is reserved for me.”
A bubble of a laugh floated its way to her throat. “We’ll see, after the waffles.”
An hour later, Jenny lifted a fork full of waffle dripping with syrup. The waffle melted in her mouth, and the taste of fresh maple syrup and rich cream exploded on her tongue. As she chewed, she gazed at Logan over her fork and concluded without question that sex with Logan Macallister was a hundred thousand times better than waffles.
He knew, too, for his mouth twitched in a way that made her think of being braced up against a hard wooden door. She glanced around the nearly empty pancake house, as if they could see her thoughts, and then enjoyed another bite of dripping waffle.
“Jenny.” Logan’s green eyes sharpened. “Stop that.”
“What?” she asked around her fork.
“Eating like that.” His gaze slipped to her mouth. “You did the same thing last night with pizza. Pulled everything off the fork with your lips. It drove me to distraction.”
Jenny speared her fork into another piece, swirling it slow, around and around, in the maple syrup. “Are you objecting to the way I eat?”
“The way you eat should be banned.”
She hefted a dripping forkful, waving it like a tease.
“You pull your mouth back so deliberately.”
She suppressed a giggle as she did as he described with extreme slowness, tugging a small piece of waffle off the tines.
“And all the while,” he continued, lowering his voice, “you look up at me with those smoky-brandy eyes, making promises.”
“Are you suggesting,” she said, as she swallowed anew, “that I’m not eating properly, Dr. Macallister?”
“It’s obscene. It should be banned.”
She closed her thighs against a new, sore surge of wanting. “I am doing everything right, I believe.”
“Yes.” He leaned his crossed forearms on the table, having shoved his empty plate to one side of the cluttered table. “You’ve been doing everything perfectly.”
His words were more of a balm than he knew. One end of the open wound on her heart knitted tight, but she lowered her eyes so he wouldn’t see how good that made her feel, or how vulnerable she felt, or how little she trusted the strength of those stitches.
“That’s good to hear,” she said, licking a drip of maple off her thumb. “My etiquette teacher will be pleased I learned my lessons well. She wouldn’t approve of public lewdness.”
Jenny laid her fork on the side of her plate and pulled the straw out of her milk shake. Defying all propriety, she licked the dripping shake off the length of the straw, then sucked the rest through until it slurped.
Their gazes met across the table and her heart lifted. She felt saucy and wicked and sated and happy. She had every intention of doing to parts of Logan’s anatomy what she was no doing with this straw, and he saw the promise in her eyes, and it was moving him to arousal. To think she hadn’t thought about her research or experiments in twenty-four hours. She traced Logan’s shin under the table and basked in his unflinching gaze. His attention, his interest, his laugh, his touch, all made her feel like the sexiest, most desirable woman in the world. It didn’t matter that it was temporary. They had another whole week together.
“So,” he said, clearing his throat and leaning back against the neoprene banquette. “You took etiquette classes as a girl.”
“I was taught how to greet dignitaries, how to set a formal dining room table, how to be a conscientious hostess. A throwback to an earlier time, though several of my friends did marry politicians.”
“Sounds more like finishing school for aristocrats,” he murmured, “brings images of pearls and white gloves.”
“We were required to wear pearls and gloves at tea-time. Very British. Of course, there were times when me and the girls would wear our pearls and our white gloves and not a stitch of underwear.”
Logan made a quiet choking sound, shifting his seat as if his shorts had just gone too tight. The story was a bald-faced lie, for she wouldn’t have dared do something so bold that might have got her expelled, if they’d ever been found out. But sitting with Logan, she would say anything to keep him on the pulsing edge of desire.
“You’ll do that for me?” he asked, setting his water glass aside. “Wear pearls and gloves and nothing else?”
“You bet.”
Logan shot up, dishes rattling, glassware clinking, as he leaned over the table to capture her mouth in a kiss that broke every rule of social. She rumbled a laugh under the kiss as Logan pulled away and called for the bill.
On the way home, somewhere along the side of the dark country road, Logan pulled over onto the gravel and drew her close, kissing her until she could barely breathe.
She could get used to this, she thought, as he urged her back in the truck’s cabin to stare up at his handsome face.
If only she could feel like this forever.
CHAPTER TEN
A breeze flooded the cab of the truck as Logan eased the vehicle onto the country road. The cool night air swept out of the cab the scent of sex and heavy breathing. It tousled his hair and battered the edges of his half-unbuttoned shirt, left open in his rush to arrange his clothing
