What was it she’d started to offer? “Coffee.”
His smile twisted wryly. “Coffee,” he repeated.
Neither of them moved.
“This,” she said after a moment, still feeling the weight of his fingers against her face, “is what some people might call an awkward moment.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” His thumb moved, tracing across her cheek to her lower lip. “We can go back to talking about fixtures.”
Her lip quivered beneath his touch. Talk? She wasn’t even sure she could speak coherently.
She could insist on keeping the evening strictly business, and Mac would go along with it. She could move to another chair, away from the feel and heat of him, and he wouldn’t try to hold her back. It would be the sensible, practical, Sharon thing to do.
Funny, she mused, studying the strong shape of his mouth. She hadn’t been quite herself since her car sank beneath the surface of Snake Creek. She hadn’t seen things in quite the same light—her job, this town, Jerry. Her life. Maybe because she’d come so close to losing it all. The accident had made her very aware of everything she had—and everything she’d only dreamed of.
She realized abruptly that it would have been a shame if she had died without ever meeting Mac Cordero. Without really knowing what it meant to melt at a touch.
His mouth was very close to hers now. If she reacted so strongly to the feel of his hand, what would it be like to kiss him? Did she really want to miss this chance to find out?
Taking her silence as permission, he covered her mouth with his.
Okay, she thought, somewhat relieved that no fireworks exploded around her, no cymbals crashed in her ears. It was just a kiss, like the kisses she had received before. Just a pleasant, gentle press of lips. Nice, but it certainly wouldn’t change her life.
Lulled into relaxing, she closed her eyes and tilted her head for him. Her lips softened, parting just a little. She raised a hand to his shoulder, letting it rest lightly there. Just a simple kiss between two unattached adults, she assured herself. If nothing else, it would satisfy their curiosity, and then they could get on with business.
The tip of his tongue touched her lower lip, eliciting a slight shiver of reaction. Okay, so it was a pretty good kiss. There was no reason to hurry through it. She slipped her other arm around his neck and parted her lips a bit more.
A moment later, her head was spinning, her pulse racing, her toes curling—and she would have sworn there were fireworks going off and cymbals crashing somewhere around her. Every cliché she’d ever heard had just become real for her—and this tricky, unprincipled male had deliberately waited until her guard was down before springing them on her.
Just a kiss? Right—like a tornado was just a stiff breeze.
Somehow his arms had gone around her, and his hands were sneaking into places they shouldn’t be, but she didn’t want him to move them. Which only proved how good he was at being bad.
His tongue
swept her mouth, taunting and teasing until she couldn’t resist responding with a few tentative thrusts of her own. Which only seemed to encourage him to take the kiss deeper.
This was why, she thought somewhere in the back of her mind, she had been so jumpy around Mac from the start. Somehow she had known almost from the first time she’d seen him that this would happen—and that it wasn’t going to be uncomplicated.
She’d known all along that Mac wasn’t like the forgettable men she had dated in the past.
She couldn’t think clearly with his arms around her, his mouth on hers, his tongue sparring with hers. It was wonderful. Heady. Exciting. She couldn’t seem to care that she had known him only a week. That she still knew very little about him.
All that mattered at the moment was that she’d felt a connection to him from that first dramatic meeting. That she’d been drawn to him every time she had seen him since. That his eyes, his touch, his voice affected her in a way she’d only fantasized about before.
His right hand slid slowly up from her hip, leaving a shivery path behind him. He pressed lightly against the small of her back, urging her closer. She tightened her arm around his neck, letting her fingers burrow into his thick ebony hair.
She didn’t know how this had happened, exactly—but she couldn’t be sorry it had. It really was a spectacular kiss.
His hand moved again, sliding around her waist to pause perilously close to her breast. Even as she ached to feel him there, she felt herself pulling back.
“Too much?” he murmured against her mouth, moving his hand to a more innocuous position.
“Too soon,” she amended candidly.
Very slowly, he drew back. He wasn’t smiling, she noted. He didn’t look particularly pleased with himself for slipping so neatly behind her defenses. In fact, he looked almost as startled as she felt—and almost as dismayed.
Because he was so very good at masking his emotions, his expression cleared almost immediately. He pulled his hands away from her. “Our coffee’s getting cold,” he said, his voice only marginally huskier than usual.