Can't Say No (12 page)

“Tell me,” he murmured gruffly. “Tell me, Bree.”

She buried her face in the column of his neck, pressing kiss after kiss in the open throat of his shirt as she unbuttoned it. Her fingers were awkward, trembling still from the intimate contact with his hard manhood, sheathed not very effectively in his suit pants. Rock would have been softer. And the thought of him inside her sent shivers of anticipation up her spine.

Maybe she was stark raving out of her mind. But if she was…it had to be with Hart. No one else. Not like this. Ever, ever, ever…

“Tell me,” he repeated.

She felt as if he were depriving her of life, when he shifted back from her and stood up. With a small smile, he tugged at her hands and drew her up in front of him. Not the wisest of moves. Her legs were Silly Putty. And her leaning up against him didn’t make removing her blouse any easier for him. Seconds later, the delicate fabric lay in a soft white puddle on the grass. Warm night air whispered over her bare skin. Hart dipped down to taste her moonlight-bathed shoulders. And neck. And throat. She tossed her head back restlessly.

“
Now,
Bree.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

“It isn’t rational,” she said desperately, her eyes raised to his. “You want me to pretend there haven’t been moments when I…” Her voice broke. “I’m not sure I like you, Hart.”

“Honey.” There was patience in his tone, but his voice was strained, and husky to the point of hoarseness. “You’ve got…
maybe
…ten seconds to tell me what you want.”

“I…”

“You want me to walk away, Bree?”

He would; she could hear it in his voice. And Bree knew exactly what he wanted to hear. She’d sent him all the yeses in body language; it wasn’t enough. Hart just wasn’t the type to settle for stainless when he could have sterling.

Really, he was despicable.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Can’t hear you.”

“Yes,”
she whispered more clearly.

“Can’t hear you.”

“Hart, I want you!” she yelled irritably. “Do I have to shout it from the rooftops?”

Hart leaned back and offered her a very quick, very wicked grin. “Yes,” he whispered.

An instant later, he swung her up into his strong arms; his lips stayed crushed on hers as he carried her across the yard to the porch. The citronella candles flickered; she remembered that later. She remembered the look of Hart as he shed his clothes, as he fetched the sleeping bag from the grass where she’d thrown it earlier. She remembered the terrible attack of trembling she had when he finally stole all of her clothes. It wasn’t…that simple. She’d never played around.

You’d think he knew.

He was flame to her fluttering moth. He tempted her with the light, with the warmth, with the fire, never pressing. It was her choice, to mold herself closer to him. Her choice to touch him, to open for him, to invite him intimately inside her, to risk the aching fear that he would take her high but no higher. It was Hart’s choice to make intimacy natural between them, to ensure that she didn’t come back from the skies until she was exhausted, and sated, and flushed, and damp all over, and…so exhilaratingly well loved that there were tears in her eyes.

The two candles flickered in the darkness. Beyond their corner of the porch, there was another world, ominously black, filled with leaf rustlings and shadows and the occasional shine of small eyes in the woods. On the porch, wrapped up in Hart’s arms with the sleeping bag for a mattress, bare as a baby and utterly safe, lay Bree, her cheek resting on his shoulder.

Hart wasn’t sleeping, but his eyes were closed. Bree kept stealing glances up at him. His chest hair was a wiry blond mat, circling his navel and stretching up over his heart. His shoulders were golden; strong ribs, flat stomach…his thighs were muscular, and when the composite was put together, the label was man. A very powerfully built man, and even an exceptionally handsome man, but still just…man.

There was nothing to explain why that specific body next to her had turned her into a wanton, wild creature of the senses, capable of intense, uninhibited pleasure. Or why she felt comfortable with him now, when she knew darn well she should be reading herself a riot act of guilt, reproaches, shame and disgust.

Thoughts whirling in her head, she spread a hand on his chest and watched the long blond strands of hair curl around her fingers. “Hart.”

“Hmm.”

“I don’t want an affair.”

His lips brushed her forehead. “Your voice is still coming out a little rusty, but it’s sexy as all hell. Or is it always that way?”

She cleared her throat deliberately. Hart chuckled. “I mean it,” she said firmly.

He shifted to his side, nuzzling his lips sleepily around the shell of her ear, letting one hand run lazily down the length of her. “You know, I was beginning to worry about you. On the nontalking business. I figured maybe when you ran out of plates to throw, you’d have to come through with a little verbal exchange, but you were so stubborn…”

“
Stubborn?
I only
came
here because I was supposed to get heaps of rest and recuperation—”

“Who said?”

“After five million doctors said…don’t, Hart.”

“What do they know?” Paying no attention to her batting hand, he leaned over to run his tongue over the raspberry tip of her breast. He watched as the nipple responsively hardened and tightened before his dark eyes traveled back up to hers. “They know nothing that matters about you, honey. Nothing.”

She sucked in a little extra oxygen, her lungs seeming to need it. “You’re not listening,” she accused him.

“Sure I am.”

“I don’t just…race into relationships. And I certainly don’t—”

“Sleep around?” he supplied.

For two cents, she would have wiped the small smile off his lips with a scrub brush. Instead, she buried her head in his shoulder and closed her eyes. “It’s not as if you don’t have plenty of options besides me,” she said dryly, thinking of the harem she’d seen through her telescope. Not to mention whomever he’d worn the cream linen suit to dinner for.

“That sounds reminiscent of ‘pick on someone your own size,’” he said gravely. “Or else it’s a subtle inquiry as to how involved I am with other women at the moment. Honesty’s easier, Bree, but I’ll try to read your mind. I went to dinner with an old man named Reninger, a friend of my father from way back. He’s about four feet eleven, seventy-three if a day, and couldn’t conceivably turn me on in a bikini. I had a gift for him, some jade carvings. That should settle your doubts about this evening, but if you want a catalog of the women I’ve slept with over the years—”

“You know, I may kill you yet. Every time you open your mouth, I feel the general urge. That’s part of the problem. You don’t sleep with people you want to murder.”

“Is that a new American proverb? Maybe a potential slogan for a bumper sticker?”

“How do you want to go? Boiled in oil? Voodoo? A simple drowning?”

“Such talk. And I haven’t yet heard my thank-you for getting you to talk.”

“I beg your pardon. If you think you deserve an ounce of credit for that, when all you’ve done since I’ve met you is
push
and
patronize
and—”

“And it all worked. I want my thank-you.” He leaned over her. The pads of his thumbs caressed her cheeks; the weight of his chest crushed her breasts. He planted one heavy thigh between hers, pinning her beneath him. “I think,” he murmured, “I want you now, Bree. One of Manning’s oldest maxims—Never hesitate even a minute to go after what you want in life. And there is no question how much I want you. There hasn’t been from the moment I laid eyes on you.”

His mouth pounced…but slowly. Bree’s hands fluttered aimlessly for a minute or two, and then she gave in, her hands climbing up his arms to his shoulders, holding on. Hart was an unpredictable carnival ride. She had the terrible feeling it was useless to ask to get off halfway around.

Even worse, she knew she didn’t really want to get off. One more round of insanity, Bree…

“You’re going to have to open your eyes sooner or later, honey.”

By moving an inch and a half, Bree managed to bury the rest of her head under the pillow. Until the pillow was removed. And the comforter was slowly tugged down from her shoulders to the middle of her spine to her waist. She had to open her eyes then, to grab it.

Blinding morning sunlight made her blink as she snatched the comforter away from him and tucked it around her again, glanced at the clock on her bedside table and shook her head at Hart. “You have something against sleep, don’t you? I haven’t had
one
eight-hour night since I ran into you.”

“But for very good reason last night, Bree. You’re not having a hard time facing me this morning, are you?”

She opened her mouth, ready with a quick denial, then abruptly closed it. She wasn’t having a hard time facing him. She was having a
terrible
time facing him, which was why she’d been feigning sleep for the better part of an hour.

Through shuttered lashes, she cast a frantic glance at the wardrobe, several feet away. There was no way to get from point A to point B modestly, primarily because the sheet just wasn’t going to stretch that far and she wasn’t wearing a stitch.

Hart wasn’t either. He was standing stark naked, with one of those lazy smiles on his face…but it was the dark blue depths in his eyes that made her feel vulnerable. She couldn’t read his expression, and she was just coming to understand that Hart wasn’t at all the man he let on he was. The public Hart was a heartless, insensitive, macho-type nuisance. Now that she had her tongue back, she felt reasonably confident that she could handle that side of him. The private Hart, she was increasingly afraid, was dangerous.

He knew a lot about women, far too much about her in particular, and had a gift for making a woman feel loved—but Bree knew better.

He didn’t love her, and she couldn’t possibly love him. And if he’d been any kind of gentleman, he would have stolen away at dawn so she could now face alone the mountains of guilt and self-reproach for her abandoned behavior the night before.
You don’t sleep with a man you barely know. You don’t start relationships with womanizers. You don’t play with a man you’re not even absolutely sure you like…but seem to have embarrassingly fallen in love with.

“One does get the feeling you’re not used to waking up with a lover in your bed,” he said mildly.

“Nonsense. I’ve done this hundreds of times.” Making up her mind to put a good face on the lie, Bree bounced airily out of bed, her eyes staring at the wardrobe so she wouldn’t have to look at him. How did other women face these mornings after the night before, anyway?

“Hundreds?”

A flush crawled up her cheeks. “Maybe thousands. As I’m sure you have.” Faster than the speed of light, she dragged a thin cotton robe around her and belted it. Courageously, she faced him then, and like a coward she whipped her eyes away. To be fair, he wasn’t standing there like a seductive Viking by choice; all his clothes were outside. On the lawn. Strewn. “I’m going to have to find something for you to put on,” she said flatly.

He snuck up behind her while she was leaning into the wardrobe, trying to find something—
anything
—he could wear. She felt his palm on her spine like the stroke of a feather, soothing and quiet. “Bree.”

“What?” she said distractedly.

“Stop being so nervous. I won’t bite. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. And nothing’s going to happen that you don’t want. Ever. Not with me.”

In spite of herself, she felt the flush on her cheeks recede. Her heartbeat even pounded out a more normal rhythm. “I’ll get you some breakfast,” she said swiftly, and bolted for the loft steps, deciding to let him worry about what he could find to wear.

By the time he came downstairs, she’d brushed her hair and teeth, had placed two bowls at the kitchen table, and had stopped yawning every third second from a severe attack of nervousness. Hart strode right by her and went outside, returning seconds later wearing his suit pants and nothing else.

There was something terribly decadent about a man wearing five-hundred-dollar pants and no shoes. Except
decadent
wasn’t the word.
Sexy
was. When he dropped to the kitchen chair and glanced up at Bree with a lazy grin, she could feel her heart plump down to her stomach, and some hot-blooded memories that she was trying to forget flooded through her. So he’d been an outstanding lover. So no one else had ever made her feel that way. So?

She plunked a spoon down in front of him.

“Are you going to let me help make breakfast?” he asked calmly.

“No help is required. You don’t think you’re getting anything more than Corn Flakes, do you?” She took a breath. “Which reminds me. I hate Corn Flakes. You can cart
all
of the purchases you made up to your place, and those that I’ve used up I’ll pay you for.”

“What’s wrong, Bree?”

His baritone had that…implacable tone, misleadingly gentle and coaxing. She slipped into the chair opposite him. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“The lady sounds as prickly as a hedgehog, but her fingers are trembling and her eyes have the look of a wounded fawn again.” Quietly he added, “Did I hurt you?”

She reached for the pitcher of milk. A drop or two spilled as she tried to pour it into her bowl of Corn Flakes; Hart had a napkin, waiting for her. She set down the pitcher. “Look. I just feel…” She hesitated. For an instant, she felt lost, staring into a pair of dark blue eyes that rested on hers as though they loved the fragile quality in her face. “I don’t want you to think I’m making too much of this,” she said uncomfortably. “I mean, people do this kind of thing all the time without—”

“Without what?”

“Without…” She motioned helplessly with her hands, having completely forgotten what she meant to say. “Anyway, last night is hardly likely to repeat itself. I really don’t know what got into me—”

“I do.”

She flushed to the roots of her hair. “Hart—”