After a moment, he swiped at his damp cheeks and rose from the bed, careful not to wake Sophie.
Sophie’s heart seemed to leap up into her throat when she awoke the next morning and discovered she was alone in the bed.
Dear God, she thought, as she flung back the sheets. Not again. She grabbed a yellow sundress out of her closet and hurried into it, tying the straps at her shoulders in a haphazard fashion and rushing out of the room.
“Thomas?” she called out anxiously. Something about the flatness of her query in the silent house warned her she was alone. She held her breath as she raced to the back door. Warm, cheerful sunlight bathed her face, chest, and arms as she stepped out onto the back stoop. The storm had passed. They’d been gifted with a dewy, golden day sent straight from heaven.
She exhaled the breath that had been burning in her lungs when she saw Thomas’s car directly behind hers in the drive.
She hurried around the house, hearing the buzz of bees and flies over the field of prairie grass and wildflowers next to the cut grass of her lawn. A decent-sized town had never sprung up around Haven Lake over the years, and Sophie was thankful for that. Without restaurants, movie theatres, and strip malls, the sleepy lakeside community had never really caught on as a vacation get-away. Haven Lake today was nearly as populated as it had been twenty-five years ago, when she came here as a child.
There were a number of houses rimming the lake, but she could only make out two secluded residences on the far shore through the dense oaks, maples, and locust trees. They were permanent residences; she was one of the few vacationers on Haven Lake.
The closest house was about a quarter of a mile down Lake Road. It belonged to the Dolans—a friendly couple who had retired relatively young. They occasionally stopped by to chat when Sophie was in residence, oversaw her lawn maintenance, and collected her mail for her when she wasn’t there. She couldn’t make out their home due to the thick foliage, but she could see their white dock running out into the still waters.
The lake and surrounding woods showed a different face to her every day, it seemed. Today the lake was a dark blue, reminding her of a sparkling sapphire set in a bowl of lush viridian.
The scenery usually captured her focus utterly, but today another natural wonder vied for her attention.
He wore a pair of blue swim trunks and nothing else. His torso gleamed with sweat as he pulled himself up until his chin was above a six-inch thick oak branch.
Sophie walked toward Thomas slowly.
His abdominal muscles must be working nearly as hard as his bulging arms and shoulders because they were tight as a ridged drum as he completed pull-up after pull-up. His gaze remained fixed on some distant point in the sky as his muscles flexed and then stretched with his falling weight, and flexed again. He grunted each time his body contracted before he uncoiled his lean, glorious length. Something about his hard, constricting muscles, the savage jerk of his sinews, and his soft grunts made her think of sex.
Then again, it was impossible to look at Thomas adorned only with trunks and golden brown skin that gleamed with sweat and think of anything but sex. She thought of last night—how he’d eaten her up with the single-minded intensity of a wolf at its supper. Her pussy tingled at the memory.
After another minute of heart-pumping activity—both for him and increasingly for Sophie—he dropped to the ground, limber and sinuous as a panther. She’d thought he hadn’t noticed her presence, as rigid and unwavering as his expression and gaze had been, but she realized he’d known she was there all along. He spoke without looking at her as he picked up a discarded T-shirt.
“I’ll bet you’re wondering where I got the clothes?” he asked as he wiped the sweat off his neck and then his brow with the shirt.
Sophie’s mouth fell open. She hadn’t been wondering about that at all. She’d been too busy salivating at the sight of all that flexing, pumping male muscle.
“Where did you get them?” she asked, suddenly curious now that he’d brought it to her attention.
“I was up early, so I drove into Effingham and found a store open,” he murmured. Now that he was looking at her, he seemed distracted by the sight. His gaze dragged over her face, neck, shoulders, and chest slowly. Sophie forced her attention back to the conversation even if her body was far more aware of the undercurrents sizzling between her and Thomas.
She smiled at what he’d said. The only store where he could have bought clothing at 6:00 A.M. was a Wal-Mart.
“What are you grinning at?” he asked softly. Sophie unglued her eyes from the mesmerizing vision of him running his hand slowly over his sweat-glistening abdomen.
“The thought of you shopping at Wal-Mart for clothing. I’m used to seeing you in expensive suits.”
“I’m used to seeing you all buttoned up as well.”
She glanced down at herself self-consciously. She couldn’t be any less put-together than she was at the moment. She hadn’t combed her hair and the straps of her dress were haphazardly tied. Once again, a sense of awkwardness seeped into her awareness, an acute consciousness of the unusualness of the situation with Thomas. He was practically a stranger to her, despite the fact that she knew so many secrets of his private life . . . despite the fact that she’d let him repeatedly consume her with his raw passion.
She cleared her throat and glanced at him uneasily. “Did you eat while you were in town? Would you like some coffee, or maybe some—”
She blinked in amazement when he dropped the crumpled T-shirt on the grass and stepped toward her. He cradled her head in his hands. His thumbs beneath her
jaw urged her to look up into his face.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a grown woman blush as much as you do, Sophie,” he murmured distractedly.
The heat in her cheeks amplified at his words. Damn it. She hated the telltale sign of what was happening in her inner world and had done battle with blushing since she was a child, although it’d been most acute in adolescence. It took something pretty major to get to her nowadays. Still, it happened more often than she’d prefer. She was an experienced, professional woman and it infuriated her, this proclivity to turn red when she least wanted to show her vulnerability.
She twisted her chin, breaking his intense study of her. If he’d laughed at her or insisted on talking about her sudden discomfort, she probably would have withdrawn even further. But instead—in what she was learning to be typical Thomas fashion—he acted as though her blush was not only beautiful, but a sign of much more than embarrassment.