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“Mmm,” she crooned.
She slipped her hands into his hair, pulling it sharply as the passion increased. He cradled her head in one hand and took the kiss deeper, harder.
Vaguely, he heard noises around him, but the words didn’t penetrate the hazy fog of delight.
Then the Venus with the midnight hair collapsed in his arms.
Startled, he took her full weight as her head tilted back and she went totally limp. He stared at her, then realization dawned. She’d fainted.
“Young fool,” someone snarled behind him. “What do you think you’re doing—manhandling her like that?”
Someone grabbed his shoulder. Jon shrugged off the hand. Bending slightly, he hoisted Anne Hyden in his arms, lifted her clear of the booth and turned.
He faced an angry mob, all glaring at him. He glared back.
“Where should I take her?” he asked a woman who pushed her way forward and bent over Anne. “Someplace quiet,” he added, with a narrow-eyed warning holding off the school chum who’d kissed Anne before him.
“Her house,” the woman said, releasing Anne’s wrist after counting her pulse. Her eyes sparkled at him as if she found the whole incident amusing. She pointed. “Over there.”
He saw a white frame house nestled among hibiscus bushes across the side street from the school. He headed for it, the older woman brushing the crowd aside to let him through. Finally, he was in the clear.
Behind him, the older woman—a nurse by her actions—ordered the line to form again and took Anne’s place in the kissing booth. He heard several groans of disappointment.
An arm crept around his neck. He glanced down at the woman he held. Her eyes were still closed. Her cheeks were flushed an attractive pink, her breath came quickly between parted lips and her heart pounded. Her head slumped forward, nestling against his shoulder as if she’d often snuggled in his arms.
In his dreams, he thought, and wished they were on their way to a romantic tryst at that moment. She felt like an angel, light and ethereal, yet warm and womanly, too.
The door was open when he reached the house with its neat shrubs and flower borders. He went inside and laid the luscious burden on a comfortable-looking sofa.
He removed her shoes and swung her legs up. After putting a cushion under her head, he knelt and observed her closely, an odd anxiety constricting his chest. Surely he hadn’t hurt her.…
Bending, he gave her a closer perusal. “Okay,” he said after a silent minute, “you can open your eyes now.”
The thick black lashes fluttered, then popped up, and he stared into eyes the color of wood violets.
Anne was reluctant to give up the lovely experience of being in his arms. She placed a hand against her chest where her heart still beat in an irregular pattern. When she’d felt his lips on hers, it had nearly pounded out of her chest. Strange, to react so strongly to a kiss.
She’d reacted to him before that, she admitted. There had been a stabbing pang in her chest when she’d noticed him that first time, when he’d stood under the oak tree and watched her before making up his mind about buying a kiss.
She pulled herself together and glanced around. “Good, we’re alone.” She managed a wry smile.
He frowned at her. “What the hell was the fainting act about?” he demanded.
“I didn’t want you to get beat up or arrested for mauling me,” she explained, her sense of humor coming to the fore as her heart slowed and its beat evened out. She didn’t want him to know his kiss had affected her to the point of fainting. It sounded so utterly Victorian.
She sat up and swung her legs to the side, knees bent. She saw his gaze roam their length as she tucked her skirt around them, and she felt another flutter within her chest.
“Who was going to do the honors?” he asked in a dry voice. “The jerk you went to school with?”
“Snooze?” She laughed, regaining her equilibrium at this safe topic. “No, not him.”
He smiled, too, not cynically, but seemingly relaxed now that he knew she was all right. “Why would I get arrested?” he asked. “You were the one selling kisses. I was merely trying to get my money’s worth.”
“Twenty dollars,” she murmured, curious about him. “Do you always throw money away like that?”
She licked her lips when he continued to stare at her mouth as if he were thinking of starting the kiss all over again. “I didn’t consider it a waste.”
“It was too intimate for a public kiss.” She frowned at him. “And you didn’t quit when I pulled your hair.”
“I thought that was because you were excited, too.” He shook his head. “That never happened to me before.”
“What?”
“Getting lost in a kiss like that.”
Jon took in the delicate picture she presented. The heat, which hadn’t gone completely, surged anew. He wanted to strip her of the angelic outfit and find the devilish imp he detected deep in her gorgeous eyes.
“Black Irish,” he murmured, mesmerized all over again.
Her eyebrows lifted in question. They were as black as her hair and lashes, with a pronounced arch like a gull’s wing.
“That’s what my grandmother called my grandfather. He had Irish blue eyes, but hair as black as sin. She said it was the Spanish blood that got mixed in from sailors washing ashore after the defeat of the Armada.”
Anne smiled with delight at his story. She saw his silvery gaze flick to her lips once more. She remembered the taste of him when she’d tried to protest the kiss she could see coming but couldn’t get the word out in time.
With an effort, she resisted an urge to lick her lips again to see if she could still taste him there. That kiss had rocked her…right to her toes. A first for her, too.
His mouth was intriguing. The bottom lip was slightly fuller than the top. Both were well-defined, as if outlined by the artist who’d carved him from living marble.
“Keep looking at me like that and you might go into a real faint at my next kiss.”
Her heart did a tap dance against her chest. The pull was there between them. She backed off, using humor as a defense. “Yeah?” she challenged. “I’m waiting with a worm on my tongue.”
His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “A what?”
“Bated breath. Haven’t you been watching the reruns of ‘Mork and Mindy’?”
“No. I don’t have time for things like that.”
“Aha. An all-work, no-play, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy,” she mocked.
He ignored her light humor and gave her another perusal. “You have very tempting dimples.”
She lifted a hand to her mouth. “I’ve heard them described as cute, but tempting?”
Jon sat on the sofa beside her, crowding her so that his thigh pressed against her knees. “Yes, tempting.” He touched the tiny dimples that winked in and out at him as she talked or smiled. They were at the corners of her mouth. “They focus attention on your mouth. Make me think of other things I’d like to do to it…to you…with you.”
The dimples winked, disappeared. “I’d advise you to curb your, uh, impulses. This town is pretty straitlaced.”
He leaned closer and noticed that she didn’t flinch. Brave. He liked that in a woman. “Are you?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You kissed me back.”
Anne shook her head. “I did no such thing. That was an accident when I touched your lips. I was trying to tell you not to act on what I could see in your eyes.”
“Which was?”
“Lust, clear as the nose on your face.”
“I wasn’t the only one who felt it,” he insisted. “You moved your lips under mine. And your heart was beating like sixty against my chest.”
For a moment, she thought of all the possibilities—falling in love, kissing, teasing, laughing, sleeping together, waking in each other’s arms. Having a home, children…well, it was a lovely thought, but those things were never to be, not for her.
She had the family curse.
For a moment, the old resentment rose. Because of her heart, she hadn’t been in the school band. She hadn’t been a cheerleader. She hadn’t played basketball or soccer.
Fragile, delicate little Anne, who mustn’t become overexcited, overheated, overjoyed. Poor Anne, who’d fainted when the captain of the football team had given her a smothering kiss one time. She’d been fifteen. It had been her last date while in high school. All the guys had been afraid she’d have heart failure and her aunt would kill them because of it.
Her mother’s heart had given out during childbirth. Two cousins had died from weak hearts almost at birth. She had a heart murmur, which wasn’t terribly serious in itself, but it was an indication of the family trait.
She wouldn’t pass it on to her children. To force them into a restricted life when all the world was there to be discovered, to watch them die before they’d hardly lived, to see them fall in love, marry, then die before their children had a chance to know them the way her own mother had? No, she simply wouldn’t, couldn’t do it.
But sometimes she thought of the possibilities.…
She stifled the regret. She’d learned long ago to be stoic about life, to laugh at its foibles before it laughed at hers.
She gave her companion a mocking smile. “My heart always beats fast when I’m being accosted.”
He stood, putting a couple of feet between them. His gaze licked over her like fire. “Accosted?” He gave a snort of laughter and his lashes dropped to dangerous levels over his eyes. “I’ve hardly begun. How about some lunch? The hot dogs at the bazaar looked pretty appetizing.”
She blinked at the change in topic. “Why should I want to spend my time with a known criminal?”
“I paid good money for that kiss. I didn’t steal it,” he reminded her, his mouth turning up attractively at the corners. He thrust his hands in his back pockets and rocked back on the heels of his scuffed boots as he watched her.
“I was speaking of your assault.” She stood and slipped her sandals back on. “Yes, lunch would be fine. My aunt and uncle must have heard about the kiss by now. It will reassure everyone to see me whole and well. Also, it might save you from getting beaten up by my more ardent protectors if we’re seen together.”
This time he blinked in confusion as she jumped from subject to subject with no pause. She grinned at him.
He lifted her left hand. “Those ardent pals of yours haven’t put a ring on your finger.”
“How observant of you,” she murmured, pulling away and running her fingers through her hair to smooth the heavy waves into place. She felt vibrantly alive, she realized. Strong and eager for life. She cast a wary eye on her companion, wondering what it was about him that affected her so.
“Let’s go.” He took her arm. “Don’t you lock up?” he asked when they went out on the porch.
“Not during the day. What would be the point? Everyone knows I hide the key over the door.”
He gave her a sardonic glance. “Is the whole town as trusting as you?”
“I’m not trusting,” she shot right back. “If thieves want anything I’ve got, they’ll get in anyway. If the door’s open, they can go right in without breaking anything. See? It’s simple logic.”
“I have a feeling nothing is going to be simple about our relationship.”
She cast him a startled glance from under her lashes. Again a vision of the future came to her—of her running across a field with this man, holding hands and laughing, a child and a dog running ahead of them…
Retreating to sober reality, she realized he not only disturbed her heart, he sent her dreams into a tailspin. She didn’t understand it.
“We don’t have a relationship,” she stated.
“We will,” he declared.
2
“Would it be rude to ask your name?” Anne asked. She placed the two cups of cola on the table. The cups, one red, the other green, heralded the season’s colors.
Her companion put the hot dogs and curly fries, seasoned with Tex-Mex spices, on the table beside the drinks. “Jonathan Sinclair—Jon to my friends.” He smiled as if at some secret thought while he pulled out a chair and held it for her.
“Sinclair? As in Sinclair Ranch?”
“Right.”
Instead of sitting, she held out her hand. “Anne Hyden, as in the Flower Garden.”
He shook her hand, then held it as he asked, “Should this mean something to me?”
“I’m one of your customers. In fact, I have a big order in for Christmas. That’s only a little over three weeks away,” she reminded him. “It is going to be ready, isn’t it?”
He had no idea. “Would I let one of my best customers down?” He sincerely hoped not. That might delay, although not impede, the relationship between them.
“It’s been known to happen,” she said wryly. She took her seat. He sat opposite her.
She bit into her hot dog. He did the same. She tried to keep her eyes off him, but it was difficult. He had no such qualms. He stared at her, an gleam of intrigue in his eyes, as they ate. A man to watch out for, she decided. A man who could be dangerous to a woman’s heart.
“So you own a flower shop,” he said when he finished.
“Yes. It was a dream come true to be able to buy it when the owner retired.” She’d had to fight her aunt every step of the way, right up to the final closing. She licked a smear of mustard off her lips.
“I’d like to do that for you,” he murmured, his gaze glued to her mouth.
She wiped her lips with a napkin. “You’re disconcerting.”
“Do I make you nervous?”
More than that. He conjured up old dreams of forbidden things as a magician conjured up a hatful of Texas-size rabbits. “Yes. You’re rather unpredictable.”
“I’m not dangerous…only fascinated.”
