“I hope you enjoy it,” the saleslady said with a smile as she handed the hanger to Mack.
“Thank you,” Natalie said, uncertain if she was thanking the saleslady or her determined escort.
Mack led her out of the store and put her in the truck after he’d hung her new dress on the hook in the back seat.
“Do you need shoes to go with it?” he asked.
“I have some nice black patent leather ones, and a purse to match,” she said. “Mack, how could you pay for it? Everyone will think—”
His hand caught hers and curled into it hungrily. “Nobody will know you didn’t buy it yourself unless you tell them,” he said curtly. His head turned and he looked at her intently. “It really was made for you.”
“Well...”
His fingers curled intimately into hers. “You can wear it to Billings,” he said. “And when we go nightclubbing.”
Her heart raced madly, as much from the caressing touch of his strong fingers as from what he said. “Are we going nightclubbing?”
“We’re going lots of places,” he said casually. “You don’t start teaching until fall. That means, you’ll have plenty of spare time. We can go on day trips and picnics, too.”
Her body tingled from head to toe. She looked at the big, beautiful hand holding hers. “All four of us?” she asked, wondering if he wasn’t taking this chaperone thing a little too seriously.
“You and me, Nat.”
“Oh.”
He turned off the highway onto a dirt track that led under an enormous pecan tree. He stopped and cut off the engine. The dark eye that met hers was somber and intent on her face.
“Are you serious about Markham?” he asked at once.
“I told you before, he’s my friend.”
“What sort of friend?” he persisted. “Do you kiss him?”
She frowned worriedly. “Well, no...”
“Why not?”
She sighed angrily. “Because I don’t like kissing him. Mack...”
“You like kissing me,” he continued quietly.
“You’re making me nervous,” she blurted. “I don’t understand why you’re asking so many questions all of a sudden.”
He unfastened his seat belt and then hers before he pulled her across his body, her back to the steering wheel and her head resting on his left shoulder. He looked at her for a long moment before he spoke.
“I want to know if you have any long-range plans that involve your teaching colleague,” he said finally.
“Not the sort you mean,” she confessed.
His lean hand traced her shoulder and then slid down sensuously right onto her soft, firm breast. She gasped and caught his wrist, but he wouldn’t budge.
“You don’t have to pretend to be outraged,” he said gently. “I’ve touched you like this before.”
“You shouldn’t,” she whispered, flustered.
“Why not?” His hand spread in a slow, sensuous caress that made her nipples go immediately hard. “Your body likes it, even if your mind doesn’t.”
“My body is stupid,” she muttered.
“No, it isn’t. It has excellent taste in men,” he mused, tongue in cheek.
“Will you be reasonable? It’s broad daylight. What if someone drives down this way?” she asked, exasperated.
“We’ll tell them a bee got in your blouse and I stopped to take it out,” he murmured as his head lowered. “Now stop worrying about slim possibilities and kiss me.”
She tried to tell him that it wasn’t a good idea, but his mouth was already firmly on her soft lips before she could get a word out. He nibbled at her upper lip in a lazy, sensual rhythm that made it difficult for her to think. When his hand slid inside the blouse and under the strap of the flimsy lace bra, she stopped thinking altogether.
She heard the soft moan of the wind outside and the closer sound of her heartbeat in her ears. She curled a hand into Mack’s cotton shirt and lifted herself closer to him.
He bit her lower lip gently while his fingers felt for buttons and moved them out of buttonholes before he coaxed her soft hand inside his shirt and against warm, hard muscle and thick black hair.
It brought back memories of the rainy night he’d come to sit with her after Carl was killed. He’d held her close in his arms that night, too, and he’d pulled her hands inside his shirt, against his bare chest. She remembered his sudden, frightening loss of control....
Her hand stilled against him as she drew her mouth from under his and looked at him with traces of apprehension in her drowsy eyes.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She swallowed. “I don’t want to...to make things difficult for you,” she said finally.
“They’re already difficult.” He shifted her in his arms so that her head lay in the crook of his arm, and his hand went under her blouse and around her to unfasten the hooks on her bra.
“We shouldn’t,” she tried to protest.
He lifted his head and looked around for a few seconds before his gaze came back to her. “There isn’t a car in sight,” he said. “And I’m not planning to ravish you within sight of a major highway.”
“I knew that.”
“Tell me you don’t want this and I’ll let you go,” he said bluntly, hesitating.
She wanted to. She really did. He looked impossibly arrogant with his shirt half unbuttoned and his mouth swollen from the long, hard contact with her lips. His hair was mussed by her fingers, and he looked somber and dangerous. She should tell him to let her go. But his fingers were tracing under her arm, and her traitorous body was writhing in an attempt to get his hand where she really wanted it. She could barely breathe as she twisted helplessly against him.
“That’s what I thought,” he said quietly, and he shifted her again, just enough to give him room to pull the blouse and bra up, baring her breasts to his intent scrutiny.
Natalie couldn’t get enough breath to make a token protest. She loved letting him look at her. She loved the slow, gentle tracing of his fingertips on her delicate skin. She loved the way
