He said, “Where are you going?”
“Not far.” She thought up an excuse quick. “The diaphragm. I have to take it out now.”
“Jenny?”
Drawn to the questioning tone of his voice, she paused in the doorway to the bathroom and glanced over her shoulder. Logan sat up, the sheet sliding down to expose the crunch of the ripples of his abdomen.
He ran a splayed hand over the indentation of her body in the bed. “Come back after.”
She wanted to say yes but couldn’t. She should say no, but didn’t. Right now, she felt soft and open and vulnerable, as readable as a child’s picture book. She didn’t want Logan to read her mind. After that kiss and the cozy embrace that followed, chaos was swirling in her mind, churning up fantasies. About how lovely it would be to bring Logan to the department cocktail party for the opening of the semester, how she should fly with him to New York to introduce him to her mom and prove to her dad that she was capable of meeting a good man. She wondered if Logan would drop his toothbrush into the cup that held hers at home, keep a shaving kit in her apartment bathroom, and leave a crisply-ironed shirt in her closet. Her future was running miles further than her better sense and she just couldn’t keep up.
“I think,” she said, bracing against the doorway, “that I’d better catch up with my work in the lab today.”
“Don’t.” Logan swung his feet off the bed.
Her head spun as he stood up in front of her, in all his naked glory. “Don’t…what?”
“Don’t hide from me.”
I’m not hiding. How could she hide? He was standing right in front or her, revealing every cut muscle, and she was wearing nothing but a thin layer of silk. She tried to act casual, pushing away from the doorjamb. “We can’t have hot sex all the time, tiger.”
“I’m not asking for sex.” His gaze dropped over her body. “I know you’re sore.”
She squeezed her thighs together, felt a faint bruising, and remembered how gently he’d made love to her last night, after he’d felt her flinch. But that was about shared passion, not love, which was now growing at the center of her mind’s storm. Her heart had made that leap with lightning speed. Her better sense struggled to swat it down.
“I also know you well enough,” Logan said, stepping closer, “to know when you’re making an excuse.”
She stared beyond him at the art-festival print over the bed blurring in her sight. “I do have work,” she insisted. “I haven’t even found the third species John mentions in his paper.”
“Then we’ll find it together.” He lifted his hand as if to touch her, and then dropped it in reconsideration. “We’ll go back to the park today, bring lunch.”
The idea was tempting, stirring up images of the two of them alone in the woods, a delicious combination of business and pleasure. She tugged on the ends of the bathroom tie, willing her weakness away. Of course she wanted to spend another day with Logan, but that would mean getting to know him better, and giving him plenty of opportunities to read her runaway mind, if she couldn’t convince herself this was foolishness.
Logan leaned in and pressed his forehead against hers. “You promised me a week, Jenny.”
His nearness was like a shot of grain alcohol. “Promised?”
“The week has only begun.”
“Logan.” She felt as thin as a sheet of glass, and just as likely to shatter. “I just…need a moment.”
“That’s not what your eyes are telling me.” He pulled away, touched her chin, and lifted her face to meet his. “When I first saw these eyes, I pinned them as the color of ice tea, icy-cool. Later, when I teased you into a fighting mood, I thought—single-malt scotch, smoky and secretive and packing a hell of a burn. When I first made love to you, I saw the color of a Long Isand Ice Tea, shots of liquor chilled—fire and ice, potent enough to knock me out. But right now, your eyes are as impenetrable and bracing as hot black coffee.”
Her voice felt shaky in her throat. “You must be thirsty.”
A corner of his lips twitched. “Only for you.”
Only for you.
“Don’t hide in the basement lab.” He settled his hands on the either side of the bathroom door, trapping her in an embrace without even touching her. “Don’t hide from me, as I nearly did from you until last night.”
She trailed the tie of her silk bathrobe through her fingers as her heart sprinted in place. Is this what Logan had felt like last night, when she’d poked and prodded at him, asking so many personal questions?
“Jenny.” A muscle in his check flexed. “I’m knocked to my knees, too.”
She glanced up into steady green eyes, ringed at the pupil in gold. Her ribs tightened. A weakness shuddered through her. Control was an illusion, but even that was slipping out of her hands.
“We’ve got a week.” He pulled away and cupped her face. “How about we take it one day at a time?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Witchity-witchity-witchity-witchity-wit. Which-is-it-which-is-it-which-is-it.
Yellowthroat, Logan thought, clanking the mouth of his beer against his teeth and lifting the bottle to suck down the dregs. He leaned back in the dappled shade of a tree and listened again
Pit-r-ick. Pit-r-ick
Tanager, he noted, searching for the bird in the tree Jenny identified as a big leaf maple. No sooner had he found the brilliant red head amid the greenery than his gaze drifted down again, down, across the blanket he’d
