Total Package. Cait London
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sometimes to hold a woman. Just hold her, and I don’t know why, but women get ideas and the next thing you know—”
She seemed to relax. “Human touch, right?”
Sidney stepped closer with the determined air of one who is sacrificing. “Hold me. Do it, now. You’ve got thirty seconds.”
Danya eased her against him, rested his chin over hers, and inhaled her fragrance and closed his eyes, focusing on the fit, the feel of her in his arms. Inside, where his heart had been cold and hurt, the warmth of pleasure and delight began—
“Time’s over,” Sidney said, pushing away.
He forced himself to release her. “Thanks. I feel better now.”
“Yeah, well.” She cleared her throat and backed away, her expression wary as she bent to collect her things. She turned and hurried into the bathroom.
Danya rubbed his stubble-covered jaw. At three o’clock in the morning, there was nothing he wanted to do more than cuddle Sidney Blakely. With a sigh, Danya turned off the lights, undressed and slid into his lonely bed.
Inside the bathroom, Sidney quickly undressed and slid on her comfortable boxer shorts and Danya’s overlarge T-shirt. She was shaking.
She’d wanted to nail him, to stake him out on that big bed and have him. Sexual impulses didn’t come to her often—maybe never. Sex with Ben, her only lover to date, had been too fast and had left her simmering.
The poor guy was thinking about suicide and mourning his wife, and Sidney was thinking about how good he felt up close and that just maybe she might get a good photo layout of him. She was scum to even think about nabbing him and curling up to that nice big hard warm body—She shook her head. There was no way she would take advantage of a sweet man like that, using him for her own satisfaction.
She was just tired and emotional, she decided as she left the bathroom and found the main room dark and cozy. A pillow and a sheet lay on her sleeping bag and it looked like heaven.
Danya’s broad back was turned to her and Sidney spread the sheet over the bag, slid onto it, and folded the rest of the sheet over her. She punched the pillow into shape and with the ease of someone who took what she could get on the spot, quickly dropped into sleep.
Danya listened to her deep easy breathing and turned to look at the slight, curved shadow on the floor. The sheet had slid from her bare leg and her hands were up by her face, almost like a child’s.
He eased from his bed and walked to crouch and study the woman who had no idea how much she fascinated him…. Her lips were generous and soft, slightly parted; her lashes swept shadows down that fine pale skin.
A compassionate woman, she’d endangered herself to rescue someone she thought might leap to his death. Unfamiliar with caresses or letting her body rest against a man’s, she’d still let him hold her; she’d touched him because she thought he needed the warmth of another human.
But on the rebound, Sidney wasn’t in the market for romance, and that was just what Danya had in mind.
It would take all his willpower to treat her as a friend, when he really wanted to make love with her. He scanned the curved line of her body beneath the sheet, his hand aching to skim that warmth.
Very little kept him from carrying her to his bed, where she belonged; very little kept him from holding her safe and warm, to cherish her.
To move into a relationship with this brusque, but caring woman, would be no easy task. She’d been wounded by a former lover and was wary of men, but Danya intended to be very patient and he intended to have her as his own….
Sidney awoke to the scent of coffee and the sight of Danya, holding a cup and staring off into the morning rain battering the cabin’s window. He wore only his jeans, his back broad and tanned in the dim light. The pose, the blend of shadow and light would have been wonderful for a photograph, that waving hair softening his hard profile, that jaw darkened by stubble. He looked thoughtful, grim and fierce.
“So how’s it going, buddy?” Sidney asked after yawning and stretching. “Feeling better?”
Apparently still deep in thought, he nodded. Sidney rose to her feet, shuffled to the kitchenette to pour herself a cup of coffee. She took a sweet roll from the plastic container, and walked to stand beside him. “Thanks for last night…letting me crash here, I mean.”
“Sure.”
Rain pounded the windows, the dim light outside casting shadows on Danya’s hard face; his mood seemed to match the elements outside. “Are you going to be okay today?”
“Yes. Alexi and I are remodeling, adding a family room onto a house. You can stay here, if you want, Sid. I mean, you can move in with me, if you want, to escape those models. It’s up to you. But there could be gossip. People might think that we were lovers.”
She studied the shadows beneath his eyes, the look of a man who had been through hell, who had been on some invisible edge, fighting the tethers that bound him. “I’ve bunked with men before.”
Danya inhaled suddenly, then released his breath slowly. He looked at her and his eyes were the color of blue ice. “This is different. I don’t want you to have problems.”
She’d heard that the Stepanov males were very gallant, but manners and female-male role playing weren’t for her; they just cluttered up life and took time she didn’t have. “The only problem I am going to have is that darned windup dance and social thingie at the end of this shoot. Marvelous Calendars insists on it. All the bigwigs are going to come down and I’ve got orders to look like a woman—put on a dress and makeup and everything. I’m supposed to bring a date.”
“That is rough.”
“Real rough. You’d think if I do a good job—and I do—that would be all that was required, but oh, no. I have to mix with the brass and schmooze with the models and be one of the girls. I am going to have to dance with the execs—in dress shoes, not boots.”
“Torture,” he agreed softly.
“You know it. If the weather clears, we’ve got about two, three days fast shooting and then I’m doomed.” Sidney yawned and stretched and settled into enjoy her momentary reprieve from the models. She ate the sweet roll and sipped her coffee, then she licked her fingers. Danya had been studying her intensely and his body was tense next to hers; his breathing seemed to be controlled, rather than natural. She’d been remiss not to offer him a bite; she was used to sharing whatever was at hand. “Want some?” she asked, holding up her sweet roll to him.
His hand wrapped around her wrist as he bent to take a bite, but his eyes never left hers. They were vividly blue and shadowed with heavy lashes. He straightened, still studying her, his thumb caressing her inner wrist. “About Ben. You loved him?”
Sidney was uncomfortable with that slow caress, but if the guy needed contact, she could give him that. “I still do, the rat. I’m going back to bed, if it’s okay with you.”
“My bed,” he said quietly, watching her. “I’ll be gone. You might as well use it. You’ve got sugar on your fingers—shame to waste it.”
Sidney watched, riveted as Danya’s dark head bent and his warm mouth closed over each fingertip, sucking it.
The quivery sensations shot up her arm and down her body to lodge low in her belly; her mouth dried and her throat tightened as she stared at him. When Danya’s head lifted, he smiled at her and her heart did some flip-flop thing. “No finger licking,” she said unevenly.
“But it would be a shame to waste, would it not?” His voice was deep and intimate, his phrasing formal.
“I guess it’s okay this time.”
Danya had kept her hand, holding it as they turned to watch the dim morning, rain slashing the windows.
Sidney held very still. She