She peered in. “Wow.”
“They’re all individually labeled. Look at this one.” He held up a fragile delicacy for her to look at.
She leaned in closer and read the lovely miniature sign that had been planted in the dessert on a toothpick. “Buttermilk panna cotta with raspberry and rose.”
“There’s only one of each,” he said. He teased her by opening his mouth as if he was going to gobble up the whole thing.
She grabbed his wrist, and they pretended to struggle.
“One of the first things I teach in kindergarten is the value of sharing,” she said, and then she leaned in, and bit half the dessert right out of his hand. There was a spot of the glaze on the mound below his pointer finger. She blamed what happened next on the wine.
* * *
Jonas felt Krissy’s lips touch his hand. And then he felt just the faintest flick of her tongue. The intensity of it felt like a burn. Like a brand.
He snatched his hand away and managed to avoid looking at it to see if there was a mark. He popped the rest of the treat in his mouth. She had closed her eyes and was rolling the confection over her tongue. A little sigh of pure pleasure escaped her as she swallowed. Awareness of her burned in him, more scorching than the brand of her tongue.
She opened her eyes and gazed at him with sudden, unveiled hunger that could not be satiated with dessert.
The sensual tension leaping between them was at least as delightful and at least as delicious as the dessert selection. He took another confection from the box and held it out to her, hoping for a barrier, knowing it was an invitation.
Which she accepted. She nibbled. Her breath tickled his hand. She had icing sugar on her lip.
He had, truth be told, done quite a bit of dating in his day.
Bimbos, Krissy’s aunt had proclaimed scornfully.
But still bimbos who knew their way around the art of pleasing a man. And yet, there was something about this—sitting on a blanket on a warm evening with flower petals floating around them—that was infinitely more powerful than just about anything he had ever experienced.
His mouth was dry. His heart was pounding. She reached out with the tip of her tongue and flicked that speck of icing sugar away from her lip. It scorched him nearly as badly as when she had flicked her tongue to his hand.
Her lips were moist and plump. He wanted to taste her. He wanted to do exactly the same thing he had done when there had been chocolate on her lip the other afternoon.
She blinked at him. Her lips parted faintly. The desire that had sprung up over dessert was mutual. Really, this particular spring storm had been coming between them since the first time they had touched, and it had been building like thunderclouds on the horizon.
Jonas leaned in closer yet to Krissy. One part of his brain tried to remind him that this arrangement between them was going to be complicated enough.
But another part assured him that he couldn’t very well fake an engagement without any physical contact.
Better to do it now, his rational mind whispered, in somewhat controlled circumstances. It wouldn’t do to be taken totally by surprise by kissing her for the first time in front of Theresa or Mike.
It was like a practice run—that was all.
But when Jonas’s lips touched Krissy’s, there was nothing about it that was controlled, nothing about it that felt like a practice run, absolutely nothing about it that was for the benefit of convincing his sister of something at some faraway future date.
In fact, those things were wiped from his mind. Completely. Except the part about it being a total surprise.
Even though he had seen hints of passion sparking in her eyes, nothing could have prepared him for this part of her.
Krissy tasted of wine. And of the desserts they had just eaten. But she also tasted of mystery and the unknown, of all that was feminine and of the secret powers of the universe. She was Breakfast at Tiffany’s but she was also a fresh mountain morning with mist rising off a lake. She was a perfect bouquet of roses and she was a wildflower meadow. She was innocence, and she was seduction.
She was a model, an actress, a queen. She was an Olympian and a warrior. She was as complex and multifaceted as a diamond and as simple, as of the earth, as a fresh-turned shovel of soil. In her was that same ripe promise of being able to give life.
“Oh,” she said softly, breaking the contact of their lips, but staying close enough that she could taste him again in a heartbeat. Her eyes were wide and dazed on his face.
It occurred to him, that she might have consumed most of the wine. Which made this totally wrong, as if it wasn’t totally wrong, anyway.
Jonas was glad they were in a park in such a public setting. Because if this had happened the other night outside her door, there was no telling where it would have led.
He got to his feet and stretched mightily before she could lean into him again. Before he leaned into her again. He began to gather up the picnic things from around her. “It’s getting late. I’ll take you home.”
To that front door, where the options were going to be so much different.
He had an hour’s drive, he told himself sternly, to gird his loins for the coming battle, to pull himself together. It was not as if he was a callow boy incapable of saying no to temptation.
She got up off the blanket. Her hair was wild and curly, and her dress was rumpled, as if they had done quite a bit more than share a kiss. She was stiff from sitting for so long. She stretched, hands
