First Time, Forever. Cara Colter
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up with this.” She was hunched over, her arms crossed in front of her, and he sat back on his heels, quickly stripping off his T-shirt. The thing was nothing more than a wet rag—an oversized wet rag that would hang down nearly to her knees—but it would hide what she wanted to hide.
Still averting his eyes, he tossed it in her direction.
“Thank you.” Her reply was barely audible. He waited until he figured she’d put it on, and then turned back to her—and once again his heart missed a beat.
He wasn’t going to tell her, but there was a reason why wet T-shirt contests were popular with a certain kind of crowd. She was demonstrating that reason right now, though she seemed unaware that the soaked cotton of his shirt was clinging lovingly to her every curve, and that her nipples were tautly outlined.
“I’m sorry.” Her words were still no more than a whisper. “I know you just saved my life.”
“Forget it. Now that you’re decent, let’s try to slip out of here without attracting too much attention.” He sounded brusquer than he’d intended, and he could also hear that he’d fallen into the broad brogue that he thought he’d grown out of years ago. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “There’s got to be a back exit somewhere around—”
He broke off, disconcerted by the expression on her face. Her lips were slightly parted, and the flush he’d seen lower down on her body had crept up to her cheeks. Her eyes were wide, and so dark that they looked almost a true navy blue. She was looking at him. She was looking at—
He was acutely conscious of the fact that he was naked from the waist up—not shirtless, not unclad, but buck-naked. There was something about the devouring way she was gazing at his chest that made that term the only appropriate one. But for God’s sake, there was nothing shocking about peeling his shirt off, even in front of a woman. This wasn’t the Victorian era.
She looked as if she was about to swoon.
“You’re very…very large,” she said faintly. “I hadn’t realized…” Slowly she brought her hand up. Lightly her fingertips ghosted across the surface of his skin. Between her parted lips Quinn realized that her breathing had shallowed and quickened.
She wasn’t the kind of woman he was used to. When he was on assignment, he found it easy to stay away from the sexual roulette of picking up a partner for the night. If the urge became absolutely unbearable, he resorted to fantasy, and despite what he’d been told as a boy, he hadn’t gone blind yet. But when he was back in Boston, he usually had some kind of short-term, casual relationship going. That was the kind of woman he looked for—someone who wasn’t looking for permanence, who took sex not irresponsibly, but lightly.
This emotionally fragile, sexually repressed woman wasn’t his type. But the hesitant, questing touch of her fingers on his chest was setting his blood on fire like no other female ever had. Worst of all, he doubted that she had any idea of what she was doing to him—but at any moment she’d be bound to. It wasn’t something a man could hide for long, especially in wet khakis that were plastered to his body.
Her glance travelled downward just as he’d feared, paused, and flew up again. Her face had been pink before. Now it blazed with color as her eyes met his.
Then her lashes came down, her head tipped back on her neck, and she moved infinitesimally toward him. Quinn found himself closing the tiny gap between them, found his hand cupping the back of that delicate, seal-wet head and found his own eyes closing like a boy moving into the mystery of his first kiss.
Her lips were cool, and beaded with water. He felt water running from the short ends of his hair, down his face like tears, to join up with the drops he could taste on her. He felt water dripping from her scalp to his hand behind her neck, felt water splashing from the pipe above them, felt it soaking through the fabric of his khakis as he kneeled there.
It wasn’t like kissing a woman. It was like kissing a mermaid.
And then her lips opened beneath his, and there was suddenly no doubt that he was kissing a woman—the essence of woman, distilled and condensed, so unadulterated that he knew that he’d never had anything this real before. He’d never come close to this. He tasted her, felt her taste him, and his grip tightened on the back of her neck, bringing her closer. His other hand came up to her face, and he was certain he felt her sigh softly against his mouth.
Then everything changed. He felt her stiffen, and opened his eyes just in time to see hers fly wide with shock. She pulled away from him, her hand going to her mouth as if to shield it from his.
“No!” She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. “No—I don’t do this. This—this isn’t me!”
She wasn’t playing coy. There was real denial in her eyes, and her face was chalky-white. Quinn suddenly saw himself as he realized she was seeing him—too big, too male, too much tanned, battered hide showing. He felt as if he was looming over her. He knew he only had a split second before the situation spiraled out of control.
“It’s not you,” he agreed, careful not to make any move that she might construe as threatening. His hands hung loosely at his sides. “It was the shock of what you’d just been through. That’s why it happened—it was just a reaction.”
“But you kissed me back!” She was hugging herself, as if she was afraid she would fly apart if she didn’t hold on tight, and his heart turned over.
He’d thought compassion had been burned out of him long ago. It seemed he was wrong. He had no idea what had turned this beautiful, warm woman against her own nature, what had made her shrink from a mere touch, let alone the passion she’d displayed only moments ago. But someone, sometime, had damaged her. It would have been a man. Quinn felt his hands tighten into fists, and it took an effort to relax them.
“I kissed you back,” he admitted. “It won’t happen again. Can you accept that?”
Her gaze searched his face. Slowly the arms she’d wrapped around herself became less rigid, and she nodded, her eyes never leaving his. “I can accept that. I think you’re a man of your word, McGuire.”
There were a few different answers he could have given to that, but Quinn didn’t get the chance. Even as he began to get to his feet, holding out his hand for her to take or not, as she chose, he heard a perfunctory knock and the door behind him burst open.
“Mother of God—what’s been happening in here?” The outburst came from a short man with thinning red hair and astonished blue eyes. The green vest he wore strained over a paunch that probably owed much of its existence to the beer on tap in the bar. Quinn had seen him once or twice during the evening, and had guessed he was the owner of the place.
“I come in here to check that the lights have come on all right, and what do I find but a complete disaster area!” the man sputtered. He looked with appalled confusion around the flooded room, frowning in bewilderment at the lipsticked message on the mirror. “I Know Who You Are? Okay, I’ll bite—who the hell are you?”
The man’s tirade stopped as Quinn rose to his full height. Jane, to his surprise, had taken his hand and had risen with him. She stood beside him, almost, but not quite, touching him, the enormous T-shirt she was wearing making her seem more insubstantial than she was. She was tougher than she looked, he thought abruptly—just like another woman he’d once known.
I surrender, Sister, he thought in wry defeat. It was a losing battle I was fighting from the first, wasn’t it? Very carefully, he put a protective arm around Jane’s sodden shoulders.
“What the hell does it look like?” he growled. “I’m the lady’s bodyguard, of course.”
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