Chapter 17 Emma #2
I looked into his eyes, expecting to see wry humor given his calm tone, but regret swam in that golden-green gaze. Regret and…embarrassment. “And so now…what, you’re banned from dating anyone related to the job?”
“It’s more of a suggestion than a ban. But since I haven’t dated anyone in a long time, it’s been a nonissue.”
An unspoken until now hovered in the air between us.
“Let’s just say I’m much more discreet now,” he said. “I keep my personal life and my business life separate.”
I nodded, then shook my head. “Which category am I in?”
He ran a hand up my back, and I stretched like a needy smitten kitten. “I’m no longer sure,” he murmured, doing it again.
Thinking was difficult, but I managed. “Is that going to be a problem for you?”
“TBD.” He flashed an ironic smile, said, “Rest,” and then kept rubbing my back in that slow, lazy way, and whatever I’d been going to say next left me as my eyes closed.
I came awake a bit later, in the deep of the night, alone in the bed. I sat straight up to find the outline of Caleb in a chair he’d dragged over. He was slouched, head back, muscular thighs splayed wide.
“Hey,” I said groggily. “What are you doing?”
He lifted his head. “Maybe I got scared of the dark.”
Yeah, right. I doubted he was scared of anything. “Or…?”
He rose and came toward me, before squatting; either he was hiding his grimace, or my earlier massage had helped his leg. With his forearm planted on the edge of the mattress, he looked at me. “Or I didn’t want you to have another bad dream and wake up alone.”
Feeling a little warm and squishy inside at that, I reached out to touch his hand. He was cold. “Come up here, you alpha dumbass.”
“Careful with the sweet nothings; I might fall in love with you.” He rose to his feet and swayed for a second.
“Caleb—”
“It’s the meds. Sometimes they make me a bit woozy for a day or two afterward.”
“Get up here before you fall down, you big oaf.”
“Thought I was an alpha dumbass.”
“You can be two things at the same time.”
With a chuckle, he perched on the edge of the bed and looked down at me. “Why are you scared of the wind?”
I let out a slow breath. “There are two reasons. One old and one newer. Which do you want?”
“Both.”
I never talked about this, so it took me a second to find the words.
“When I was a kid, my mom and I bounced around more than a basketball trying to get steady housing. We were couch surfing at a friend’s place on the coast, a little shack right on the beach, when a storm rolled in.
The sofa bed we slept on was against a window.
I was fast asleep when a tree branch crashed right through the glass in the middle of the night. ”
“Jesus.” He looked horrified. “Were you hurt?”
“Just cuts and bruises, nothing big.”
He studied me in the dark, then gently ran a finger over the faded scar just beneath my bottom lip. “That where you got this?”
I nodded.
“The other reason?”
“Before coming to Star Falls, I was still in Santa Rosa, working for a small architectural firm, subletting a room in an apartment downtown. The building was old, but the price was right—until a wild windstorm with sixty-plus-mile-per-hour winds whipped through, took some electrical lines down, and the sparks and subsequent fire lit up the field behind the building like the Fourth of July.”
He drew a sharp breath. “Were you in the building?”
“No, I was stuck in traffic, trying to get home from work. By the time I did, there was nothing left.”
“Holy shit,” he breathed, and…was he closer now? His thigh brushed against mine.
If I shifted a few inches, I could climb right into his lap. “Caleb?”
“Emma…”
My name on his tongue came out husky and a little raspy, tingling along my skin and giving me goose bumps. And hard nipples… “You stayed with me while I slept.”
There was a long, loaded pause. “I like to be near you,” he finally said.
He could have thrown me across the room and surprised me less. “Mr. This Is a Bad Idea likes to be near me?”
He winced at the nickname but nodded. “I do.”
I couldn’t fathom why. I’d done nothing but be a pain in his ass—not exactly something a guy checks off in the pro column. “Because?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“Why, Caleb?”
The glow from my flashlight highlighted the dark ink of the tats scrawled over his biceps as they flexed when he leaned closer.
“You…calm me,” he finally said.
I laughed roughly. “I thought I was a bad idea.”
“Not you. Us. We’re a bad idea. Or so I keep telling myself.”
“Flattering.”
“I tell myself that because…” He held my gaze prisoner. “Deep down I don’t believe it. But I have no fucking clue what to do about this. About you.”
I knew what I wanted him to do. Me. I wanted him to do me. Which meant my own instinct for self-preservation had left me in the dust.
I should’ve turned over and gone back to sleep.
I should’ve ignored the chemistry between us, this surprising, undeniable sexual chemistry.
But I couldn’t, not when he’d been slowly showing me sides of himself I hadn’t known existed.
Compassion. Empathy. Inner strength to match that impressive outer strength…
And I didn’t want to ignore a thing. “You’re trying to tell me something. ”
“Yes, but I’m better at showing than telling.” He pulled me into his lap, wrapped me up tight, and pressed his face into the crook of my neck, inhaling me like I was the last drop of oxygen on Earth.
“God, you always smell so fucking good,” he murmured against my skin. “And the way you look at me like I’m full of shit…” I felt him smile against me. “Drives me out of my mind. And then there’s your mouth, your smart-ass mouth… I need to taste you again, Emma.”
I forgot how to breathe, but not bothered by my impending suffocation, he dragged his teeth along my throat.
I moaned.
“Tell me no, Em.”
I opened my mouth to say just that, but my traitorous lips whispered, “Yes.”
“Is that yes, back off or yes, kiss me?”
“It’s yes, if you don’t kiss me, I’m going to combust.”
He lifted his head and met my gaze, his hazel eyes hot and hungry and searching. He must have found what he wanted because he tightened his grip so that our bodies were flush, and I could feel the heat of him radiating into my skin in the chill room, making me sigh with pleasure.
When our mouths collided, I moaned again. He kissed like the world was ending: devouring, demanding, worshipping, giving me such pleasure that it left me utterly defenseless.
Far too quickly, he pulled back and met my gaze, one arm wrapped around my waist, solid as steel, pinning my hips against his.
The other hand was in my hair, fingers tangled, using the grip to hold me to him as I struggled with the urge to tear away the clothes between us.
“Why did you stop?” I asked breathlessly.
“I felt the need to remind you that you don’t like me.”
I wanted to both laugh and jump him. “Most people can keep sex and feelings separate. In fact, we should label it a rule.”
When he winced, I knew I’d given myself away, that I wasn’t most people, but I wanted to be. I wanted to be just like everyone else who could take what they wanted and walk away without looking back. “You’re not going to ruin this, are you?”
He drew in some air. “Let’s just breathe for a sec.”
Okay, fine. I let my head fall back, and his lips ghosted across my throat, my jaw. I heard the words he spoke against my ear as much as I felt them inside my body. “Be sure, Em.”
I was so sure, it was shocking. “Did you want me not to be?”
“No, I want you to be very sure.”
“I’m not asking for a future, if that’s what you think. I know I’m not…” Easy to fall for. Nor did I fall easily, at least until recently. After all, I was the girl who’d managed to hold on to a silly grudge simply to ensure I didn’t accidentally fall for him.
“Not what, Em?” he asked, something in his voice that I couldn’t name but made me wary.
“Do you always talk this much?” I threw as much attitude as I could into the question.
He stared at me for a full ten seconds. Which I knew because I’d counted.
“Any other rules?” he finally asked in his low, gravelly voice, the one he never used on the jobsite, only with me, and it made my heart thump wildly in my chest like it was fighting its cage.
It would be so easy to let myself be taken apart by that voice, those hands, the big, hard body I couldn’t stop dreaming about.
That wasn’t the problem. My feelings were the problem.
I kept them in that cage alongside my heart, and I was having trouble keeping it locked.
“No other rules,” I managed to say softly.
Those mesmerizing eyes of his trained on my mouth, his hands angling my face, drawing me to him as he breathed a single word against my lips. “Okay.”
“Okay,” I whispered back. My heart raced. The bones in my legs were suddenly…unboned. My heart thundered more than the storm around us as we stared at each other, teetering on a precipice.
Then he smiled, all sexy as hell. “I like you like this,” he said. “All flushed and discombobulated.”
I liked him like this too: bedroom eyes, knowing hands, sexy body…
He was beautiful, and I felt like I’d hopped on a Tilt-A-Whirl at the fair.
If I could just keep spinning, I could avoid my real fear: falling.
Falling into another hopeless relationship.
Because when he walked away—and it would happen, as it always did—my heart would be broken beyond repair.
“Kiss me,” I said breathlessly, dooming myself.
And then his mouth was on mine again, his fist tightening in my hair, using the grip to angle my face the way he wanted it, and any lingering doubts died in my throat.
This kiss wasn’t gentle or soft. It was hungry, and wild, and all-consuming. His arms tightened around me as a rough groan reverberated from his chest and into mine. And every scrap of pent-up desire I’d buried barreled through me like a freight train until I had only one word in my head.
“More.”