Tangled Up in Love (8 page)

Dylan groaned again and clutched his midsection, making Ronnie laugh even harder. He listened to the sound, feeling it slide down his spine and warm him to the soles of his feet.

A second later, she noticed him studying her and sobered. “What?” she asked, that same wariness that he noticed much too often creeping into her gaze.

“That’s a nice sound, your laughter.”

She rolled her eyes and pulled her shoulders back a fraction. “Don’t get used to it,” she told him, the words lacking any signs of warmth.

“Don’t worry,” he said, fighting the urge to grin, “I won’t.”

Sitting up straighter, he produced the yarn and needles he’d brought along . . . hell, the yarn and needles he’d been carrying everywhere with him, hoping for some miracle to occur and his fingers to suddenly get the hang of the sticks and stitches.

With an exaggerated sigh, she reached for the jumble of yarn and slid closer to him. Intentionally. Voluntarily. Without baring claws and teeth.

Dylan felt like calling Ripley’s and reporting a truly astounding event. It should be documented, investigated . . . duplicated, if at all possible.

“All right,” she said, “the first thing I think we should do is pull this out and start over.”

She yanked the entire collection of loops he’d worked so hard on off its needle and started tugging at the yarn until the stitches began to unravel. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he might have whimpered.

“Watch carefully,” she told him, and proceeded to cast on several stitches. “See what I’m doing here?”

“Uh-huh.” He saw. He’d seen this part before. He’d even tried it a time or two himself. It looked simple, but he might as well have been a giant playing with the individual strands of a spider’s web.

She paused and held the needles out to him. “Now you try.”

It was embarrassing for a grown man to break out in a cold sweat at the prospect of dealing with a couple of tiny metal sticks and some blue yarn—
baby
blue, no less—but that’s exactly what he did.

Holding his breath, he took over and very slowly tried to mimic the movements she’d shown him. The
yarn got stuck around his big fingertips, and he kept fumbling the needles. He knew almost immediately that he was screwing it up again.

“Wait a minute,” Ronnie said, obviously noticing his awkwardness.

She sat for a minute, tapping the palm of her hand against the side of her leg. Then she bounced up and paced across the carpeted room.

“I think you’re having trouble because the needles are so small and the yarn is so thin.”

She came back with a bright turquoise faux leather tote in one hand and a woven basket in the other. The basket was filled with a multitude of yarns and needles, and she began sorting through them, searching for exactly what she wanted.

“Here you go,” she said, handing him a set of white plastic needles a couple of sizes larger than the ones he’d been using.

Then she dug into the bag and drew out a small, fat skein of soft black yarn. “Charlotte gave this to me tonight. She spun it herself from fiber sheared from the alpacas she raises. I really think you’ll like it. Feel how soft it is, even though the strands are nice and thick.”

He ran his fingers over the yarn, feeling the texture. He didn’t know jack shit about yarn, but it was definitely softer than what he’d bought at the craft store, even though the other stuff looked stronger.

“Okay, let’s try again.”

This time, when she plopped down beside him, their thighs touched from knee to hip, and the sensation shot straight to his groin.

Great. Just what he needed was to be sitting flush against the woman who’d made his life a misery this
past year, and whom he’d endeavored to make just as miserable, with a stiffy straining against his fly.

She arranged the larger needles in his hands, then showed him how to start the yarn. He followed her instructions to the letter, trying to do exactly what she was doing, exactly how she was doing it.

And he had to admit, the thicker needles and yarn did seem to make the task easier. He felt less clumsy, less like his fingers were fat sausages working to balance a couple of tiny toothpicks.

“Good,” Ronnie said after he’d managed to cast on a good number of stitches. “See, size really does matter. I knew the bigger needles and thicker yarn would work better for you. Now we can start to actually knit.”

“You mean we aren’t knitting yet?” he asked, jaw clenched in concentration.

She chuckled, rearranging herself on the sofa cushions. “Not yet. That was just the setup.”

Folding her legs beneath her, she leaned against him, hovering above him to observe his progress. Her arm rested on his back and shoulder, the side of her breast rubbing his bicep. The heat of her body burned through the material of his tan buttondown shirt, and they might as well have both been naked.

Now he was thinking about her naked. Crap.

He could picture her, too. All sleek, glowing ivory skin. Nice, firm breasts, full enough to fill a man’s hands and pert enough to make his mouth water. Her long, wavy brown hair falling down around her shoulders, a few stray curls framing those amazing breasts with their tight raspberry nipples, and drawing his gaze to her flat stomach, then lower . . .

He swallowed hard, his nostrils flaring and vision
going fuzzy at the edges. As if the snugness at his crotch wasn’t bad enough, now his diaphragm was growing tight, his palms turning damp, and his heart beginning to pulse beneath his rib cage.

He needed a drink, a cold shower, to put about a hundred miles between him and Ronnie’s hot, luscious body. Those pajamas, with their funny-looking dogs on them, might have been more-than-adequate covering when he’d first arrived, but now the only thing he could think about was ripping them off to see if the reality of her naked body was as good as his imagination painted it to be.

Oblivious to his inner turmoil or how close he was to spontaneously combusting, Ronnie remained pressed close to him, counting the number of stitches already lined up on one of the needles. She wiggled a bit more, ratcheting his temperature up another ten or twenty degrees, before covering his hands with her own.

She was practically in his lap . . . crap, crap, crap . . . ready to show him the next part of the knitting process. Only he couldn’t follow her instructions because every time he took a deep breath in an attempt to calm his raging libido, all he smelled was Ronnie.

She smelled fresh and clean from her shower, with a hint of sharp, sweet citrus, probably from whatever soap or shampoo she’d used.

His fingers clenched around the needles, so tight, he was surprised they didn’t snap. He wanted to inhale her. Wanted to turn his head just a few degrees and lick the column of her throat like a cat licking cream.

Admit it, Stone, you want to do a hell of a lot more than that.

Yeah, he did. Way more.

Slow things. Fast things. Hot, slurpy, sexy things.

“Are you watching?”

Blinking, Dylan raised his head to find Ronnie frowning at him. He shifted slightly, trying to find a more comfortable position for his trapped, straining boner, and hoping she didn’t notice his predicament.

“Yeah, I’m watching.” Watching, fantasizing, salivating.

“Oh, really?”

One of her dark, perfectly sculpted brows arched higher than the other, making him feel like a grade school student being singled out by the teacher.

“Then what did I just show you how to do?”

Damned if he knew. He was still trying to get the image of her long legs wrapped around his waist as he pounded his way to glory out of his brain.

“Um . . . I forget. Can you show me again?”

Counting to ten, she concentrated on her breathing and reminded herself that she didn’t
care
if he listened to her or not. Didn’t
care
if he learned to knit or not. In fact, for the sake of their competition, she preferred he didn’t. And either way, she was going to get her thousand dollars just for pretending to help him.

The thought of that amount of money sitting all safe and sound in her bank account washed the tension from her body and relaxed her from the crown of her head to her polished toenails.

She inhaled and exhaled once more, then leaned back in to wrap her fingers around his and guide his movements.

“Try to keep up, Stone. You don’t want me telling folks you’re a slow learner, do you?”

That seemed to snap him out of whatever haze he’d been in. He made a scoffing sound and replied, “I’m only a slow learner when it comes to certain subjects. With others, I catch on real quick.”

His voice was low and husky and carried a hint of suggestiveness. Slanting a glance in his direction, she noticed a heat in his gaze she’d never seen before.
Other men had looked at her that way, with lust and longing, but never Dylan.

She licked her lips and swallowed, quickly returning her gaze to the needles and yarn in front of them before he caught her watching him.

Having Dylan think of her in sexual terms wouldn’t have been so bad. He was a man, she was a woman, and that’s what men did around any woman who didn’t look like she’d just climbed out of the primordial ooze. They were horny bastards who could get turned on watching paint dry.

That was fine.
His
lust she could handle.

The problem was that she very much feared a similar desire would be visible in her own eyes if she let him meet her gaze. She was pressed up against him—how in God’s name had that happened? She didn’t even like him, didn’t think she’d ever touched him willingly before, but suddenly she was draped along his side like she was trying to share his skin. Gads!

And she was suddenly warm, warmer than she suspected the temperature in the apartment called for. She could feel the flush of her cheeks, the blood pulsing in her veins, the shakiness in her limbs.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. The worst was that in addition to being warm all over, she was wet. Down there, between her legs, where arousal couldn’t be denied no matter how vehemently she tried.

Oh, God. Oh, god, oh, god, oh, god. This couldn’t be happening. She
could not
be sexually attracted to Dylan Stone. She would rather eat glass . . . walk across hot coals . . . cover her body in paper cuts and jump naked into a vat of lemon juice . . .

Panic pressed in on her from all sides. She tried to
breathe, but her lungs refused to expand. Her head began to spin as she fought for oxygen, but the seconds ticked by with little success. She had to get out of there and away from him, before she freaked out.

“Water,” she croaked, jumping to her feet.

Dylan leaned back slightly, cocking his head to stare up at her. He looked as confused as she felt. “What?”

“Water. I need a drink of water.” She plucked her glass from the coffee table before he could notice it was still half full, sloshing water over her fingers in the process. “Do you want anything?” she asked, making a beeline for the kitchen.

She was already at the sink, splashing cold water on her face and, unfortunately, down the front of her shirt, when he answered from the living room.

“Only that beer, if you find one.”

She didn’t have beer, but she did have wine, and suddenly keeping it for a special occasion didn’t seem nearly as important as it had an hour ago.

Shutting off the spigot, she dug in the cupboard for the hidden bottle of Pinot Grigio in the back. It wasn’t an expensive brand, but it was tasty—one of the best she’d found within her price range—and would do the trick.

“How about a glass of wine instead?” she called back.

“If that’s the best you’ve got, I’ll take it.”

She already had the cork out and was pouring herself a glass, draining it in one long gulp. Feeling the smooth, slightly fruity, pale liquid rolling down her throat and into her belly fortified her and steadied her nerves.

“Mind if I use your computer to check my e-mail?”

Even from a distance, his voice rolled over her like a
warm ocean wave. Closing her eyes, she leaned against the edge of the counter and tried to slow her out-of-control heartbeat.

“No, go ahead,” she told him, mortified when the words came out weak and squeaky.

What was wrong with her? Where was her strong-as-nails, steel-heeled personality? Her fuck-you-and-the-horse-you-rode-in-on attitude?

Her world was tilting off its axis, and she didn’t like it one bit.

Pressing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, she concentrated on her breathing and struggled to regain her equilibrium.

A little misdirected sexual frustration, that’s all it was. Dylan was a man, she was a woman, and she supposed women could be as indiscriminate as the male of the species. That had never been her practice, but after a while, when a dry spell dragged on a bit too long and things below the equator started to thrum, apparently any guy in close proximity would do.

That wasn’t exactly a comforting thought, but she had no intention of letting her errant hormones overrule her more prudent sensibilities, no matter how loudly they sat up and begged.

Pouring a few more inches of wine, she took another hearty swallow, then topped off her glass before filling his and carrying both into the living room.

He was seated on the floor now, the same as she’d been before his arrival. His long, denim-covered legs were stretched out beneath the table, crossed at ankles that stuck out from the other side. He tapped a couple of keys on the laptop, then sat back and took the glass of wine she offered.

She moved to the far end of the sofa, putting as much distance between them as possible. Where she’d been feeling loose and comfortable before, she now held herself stiff and rigid. Even though a couple of feet of empty space separated them, she still leaned into the arm of the couch, away from him, and crossed her legs primly.

Dylan took a sip of his wine . . . a small sip that didn’t even remotely catch him up to her . . . and shifted to face her, resting his free arm on the cushion of the sofa.

“So,” he said casually, his tone light, “who’s Domiknitrix?”