Explosive (15 page)

Once again, he couldn’t understand why he wanted to cherish her when he clearly must want to violate her just as much. He clenched his eyes shut tightly and moved his hands until they encircled her waist. Her breasts were a delicious pressure against his chest when he drew her against him, his pleasure at doing so overriding his regret at pressing her against his unshowered, overheated body.

He buried his face in her perspiration-damp neck, wondering at the fact that even her sweat smelled clean and delicious. He became absorbed in the sound and sensation of her ragged, rapid breath, mesmerized at the profound vibrancy of her being. A tenderness unfurled inside him, feeling like a living thing awakening inside his body, as he recognized her stark vulnerability at that moment. She felt so intensely alive, so
real
, in his arms.

To be alive is to be vulnerable.

He blinked, banishing the thought. A moment later, the low-grade anxiety that had plagued him for weeks seeped into his consciousness.

But he couldn’t completely forget those wondrous seconds as he held a trembling, gasping Sophie Gable in his arms. He couldn’t stop himself from wanting to experience it all over again.

CHAPTER
NINE

Sophie turned her head when Thomas nuzzled her jaw. She met his mouth and they shared a questing, delicious kiss. Strange, how he could be so demanding at times . . . volatile in his manner; and yet so tender and prizing at others.

She heard a soft, furtive sound in the woods behind them and opened her eyelids heavily. The combination of her post-climactic state, the contrast of the warm summer day and the cool, comfortable shade, and Thomas’s languorous, exploratory kiss had a similar effect on her as a good glass of wine or two. When she heard the scraping of brush and tree limbs again, she started slightly in Thomas’s hold. He sealed their kiss.

“Look,” she whispered.

She noticed the wariness that crept into his expression and tightened his muscles. His sudden tension eased when he turned and saw what crept up on them. The little red fox remained suspicious, however, as it stared at them from where it stood at the very edge of the woods with glassy, beady eyes.

“Be careful,” Thomas said when she made to leave his arms and head toward the fox.

“It’s okay. I leave food out for him sometimes. He knows me,” Sophie assured as she briskly pulled up her dress and retied the straps. She rubbed Thomas’s forearm in an “it’s okay” gesture, but he still seemed doubtful about releasing her from the circle of his arms.

“He’s just a little guy,” Sophie told him with a smile and upraised brows.

“Little guys have been known to have big teeth . . . and become rabid.”

She shook her head and stepped slowly toward the fox. Thomas watched her with a scowl on his face as he scooped up his swimming trunks from the grass.

“Guy isn’t rabid. His brothers and sisters and mother were all killed by some kind of predator last summer while I was here, probably a coyote,” Sophie murmured as she approached the fox, which appeared to be wavering between staying put and running. “I used to see the lot of them occasionally in the yard, or in the woods, while I was walking. Then suddenly there was just little Guy here, all alone. I got into the habit of setting food out for him here behind the boathouse. I call him Guy . . . hey, Guy,” she crooned as she neared him. She started to reach for him. The fox flinched before baring white, sharp teeth.

“Sophie, step back,” Thomas growled.

“It’s okay,” she soothed both males with whom she shared the clearing.

She crouched slowly, assuming a less threatening posture with the wary animal. From her new angle, she was able to see how the fox didn’t put any weight on its left front foot. “Aww, here’s the problem,” she sighed regretfully. “Your paw has been injured, huh, little Guy?”

She rose cautiously and began to back away.

“Sophie?” Thomas asked sharply when she started toward the house.

She spun around and faced him in a distracted fashion. He’d put the swim trunks back on and stood watching her with a bewildered expression on his handsome face.

“Oh . . . I’m sorry, Thomas. I need to go to get him some food and something to drink. See how skinny he is? He can’t hunt with his paw injured like that. I’ll feed him first, and then try to figure out a way to get him to let me take a look at his paw. Some jerk set a trap in the woods, I’m guessing. It’s illegal, but people
will
be idiots.”

“You make a habit of this sort of thing, I guess?”

She shrugged and gave him an apologetic grin when she noticed his expression of amazement had morphed into humor.

“I was about to take you up to bed, you know.”

“Oh . . . you were?” She fumbled, caught off guard by his forthrightness, not to mention the appeal of his proposition. “This won’t take me long, I promise,” she said as she started to turn. “Oh, and Thomas?”

“Yeah?” He was now exchanging suspicious glances with Guy.

“You probably should give Guy some space. Male territory and all that. This patch of grass is where he always fed last summer.”

Thomas’s eyebrows shot up. He gave a sharp bark of male laughter that made Guy inch back toward the woods.

“
Thomas
—” she hissed

“All right, all right. I’ll go and take a swim,” he assured her, laughter still shaping his mouth. He took several backward steps toward the lake and the fox came to a halt in its departure. “First time I’ve ever been beat out for a woman by a guy with four legs, though.”

“Three and a half, actually,” Sophie muttered, giving him a reproachful glance even though she was glad to see his smile.

CHAPTER
TEN

She saw him swimming when she came out the side door a minute later with a dish of hamburger and a bowl of milk. He was past the Dolan’s dock, still moving in a direction away from her at a brisk pace. He stayed in a straight line forty or so feet from the shoreline, safely within the buoys where boats were required to proceed with caution due to swimmers.

“I was right about him being a swimmer, wasn’t I, Guy?” she murmured to the small fox once she’d placed the dish and bowl several feet away from where he still hovered anxiously at the edge of the woods. When she backed away, granting him ample room, he limped toward the food.
Poor thing
, Sophie thought when he left the cover of the woods and she saw how thin he really was. He finished the hamburger and milk in seconds, and then glanced up at her a little reproachfully, as if to say,
Is that all?
She laughed.

“That’s it for now. You come back in a few hours for more. You’ll get sick if you eat too much so quickly, starved as you were.”

She started coffee and showered quickly when she returned to the house, then put on her standard lake clothing—a bikini and shorts. Thomas had just risen out of the water when she walked out onto the dock carrying a towel and a tray ten minutes later.

“Thanks,” he murmured when she handed him the towel. He idly dried off his wet hair and face as he watched her set down the tray and sit cross-legged on the dock. Her skin prickled with awareness when his gaze trailed down over her bikini-clad torso. She was having difficulty not eating up the sight of him, as well, as he sat there with his long, well-formed legs hanging over the dock, his taut abdomen moving in and out slightly from the exertion of his exercise.

“Coffee?” she asked breathlessly, pulling her gaze off the vision of his succulent shoulder and upper arm muscles beaded with water. He nodded and she poured him a cup from the small carafe.

“Time for you to feed me now, huh?” he teased warmly as he accepted the coffee.

She arched an eyebrow. “I would imagine you’ve worked up a good appetite.”

His smile widened rakishly before he helped himself to a slice of buttered toast. “Tastes good,” he said appreciatively a moment later before he grabbed another slice.

“You sound surprised.”

“I haven’t had much of an appetite lately.”

“And haven’t been sleeping well, either, I’m willing to bet,” Sophie added evenly before she took a sip of coffee. She immediately regretted her words when a shadow fell across his features. She’d been facing his profile, so when he turned and glanced out at the calm lake, munching his toast more slowly now, she couldn’t observe his expression.

“Thomas—”

“I don’t want to talk about my brother right now,” he said quietly, but she heard the warning in his tone. He turned and gave her a brooding glance.

Maybe he’d read her mind. She
had
been planning to subtly encourage him to put his grief into words. The trauma of Rick’s and Abel’s deaths was festering inside of him, making him suffer. And Sophie suspected that was only part of what he grieved. If only he’d release some of the poison, the chances were his memories from that dark period of time would slowly start to come back to him. Trauma amnesias—both physical and psychological—were much more common than people realized, and they usually resolved given a supportive environment where the mind had a chance to heal.

But Sophie also knew he had to process his grief at his own pace. If she pushed him too hard, she’d pay for the error. He’d flee . . . or do something rash, given his volatile state.

“All right,” she said evenly.

He looked a little sheepish and relieved at once at her agreement. He leaned back on one arm and lifted his coffee, his large hand encircling the entire cup versus utilizing the handle.

“So . . . what do you like to do while you’re here, Dr. Gable?” he asked gruffly.

Sophie swallowed some toast. “Oh . . . a lot of this,” she glanced between them and out toward the lake.

“So you haven’t been working frenziedly on your research articles?”

“No, I told you I’d procrastinate. Once I get used to swimming any time of the day I want, taking long walks, reading until the wee hours of the morning, and creating awful paintings, I’ll get around to the articles.”

He smiled. “How long have you painted?”

“I just started a couple years ago. I was getting really stressed with my job, and I have a friend—a psychologist—who insisted I start doing something to unwind. I signed up for a couple classes at a community college—tai chi, sailing, painting, ceramics. Only the painting took. It relaxes me.”

“The psychologist who’s your friend—is he the one who works in your office?”

She examined him closely as she nodded her head, but she couldn’t decipher his expression.

“Andy Lancaster. We met during undergrad at the University of Chicago. We’d both volunteered to take part in a psych experiment for extra credit. It was about conformity and obedience, and we were supposed to shock a puppy when it did anything but sit still. Both Andy and I refused point blank, but Andy was so stressed out by the whole thing, he practically had a break down, even when they told him the puppy really wasn’t being harmed, that the subjects just needed to think it was for the purpose of the experiment. Andy doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, though, and it really shook him up. I took him for a beer afterwards to unwind and we’ve been friends ever since.”

Thomas’s smile dawned slowly, snagging her gaze. She realized she was grinning back at him. “Picking up strays even as a girl,” he murmured. “It’s easy to see why you became a doctor. You practice internal medicine, right?”

Sophie nodded.

“I’ve watched you with your patients a couple times while I was in the waiting room. They trust you. I can tell. They really believe you care.”

He said it with such genuine warmth that Sophie blushed in mixed embarrassment and pleasure. “Thanks. What about you?” she asked, longing to turn the topic away from herself. “Does it make sense that you became an investment advisor?”

“No sense whatsoever,” he replied before he tossed the last of his toast in his mouth and washed it down with some coffee.

“Why’d you do it then?”

He shook his head while he chewed, a grin still shaping his mouth. “I had to do something once I left Mama’s arms.”

“Mama?”

“The military,” he chuckled, seeing her stunned expression.

“Hardly a maternal figure.”

He tilted his head as though considering the matter thoughtfully. “The Navy took care of me for sixteen years of my life. Orphans can’t be too picky about who takes them in.”

Her smile faded.

“Still . . . why did you choose the financial sector when you became a civilian?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I’m good with numbers. I remember my mom—my real mom—used to say my dad was, too, even though he only finished the seventh grade. When I was in the second grade, I asked my real dad who the founding fathers were, and he said, “I’m not sure about the other guys, but Lincoln headed ’em up.” He met her gaze and smiled. “But numbers—that was different. He could just glance at a page-long column of three- or four-digit numbers and tell you if the bottom line was incorrect. I’m not quite as impressive as my dad, but I got the freak gene.”

“He was a savant,” Sophie murmured.

Thomas nodded.

“Thomas?” He met her stare. “Is that why you’re so convinced that the FBI was wrong about their allegations about your client? Mannero?”

“I don’t make mistakes when it comes to the books, Sophie. If the IRS gave the FBI a tip that Mannero was using crooked accounting, they were looking at different books than I saw.”

Sophie nodded thoughtfully.

“Now I have a question for you,” he said as he picked up another piece of toast.

She raised her eyebrows and took a sip of coffee.

“Your psychologist friend? Lancaster? Is that all he is to you? A friend?”

The abrupt change in his tone and topic made her blink. “Yes. He’s happily married. I’m friends with his wife, Sheila, as well.”

Thomas nodded. His earlier broad smile and light manner might have been a figment of her imagination. “And is he a good doctor? In your opinion?”

Sophie opened her mouth to say she knew why he was asking; she knew his brother had been Andy’s patient. But she recalled what he’d said about not wanting to talk about Rick at the moment and swallowed her words.