She would never know what impulse took hold of her then. Whatever it was, she leaned over before she could talk herself out of it and gave in to an urge she’d been trying to resist for the past ten minutes—oh, heck, for the past ten days.
She pressed her lips firmly against his.
Chapter Eight
Mitch was certainly quick. One minute she was standing behind the couch, leaning over to kiss him, the next she found herself tumbled into his lap, his arms around her, his lips moving avidly against hers. It was as if he’d just been biding his time until she made the first move and had been poised for an immediate response.
That fleeting brush of lips the night before had been merely a hint of what was to come, whetting her appetite and stirring her imagination. But this…this was so much more than she had even anticipated. There was no first-kiss awkwardness, no bumping of noses or fumbling of hands. He kissed her as though they had known each other—intimately—forever, his mouth fitting itself perfectly to hers, his tongue greeting hers as if he already knew exactly how she would taste and feel, his hands settling exactly in the right places to give her the maximum pleasure from his touch without making her uncomfortable by going too far.
“Do you know how long I’ve wanted to do that?” he asked when he finally gave them both a chance to breathe.
She rested her hand lightly against his face, feeling the slight roughness of his late-evening beard, the firm line of his jaw. “Since you fell over my suitcase and I tried to attack you with a candlestick?”
He chuckled. “No—though I won’t deny I wanted to kiss you then. The first time I met you I had stopped by Seth’s house to give something to Meagan, back when she and Seth were dating and Seth and Alice still lived across the street. You walked into the room carrying a big vase of fresh flowers to set on the table in the foyer, and I remember thinking you were even prettier than the roses in your hands.”
She blinked in surprise, clearly recalling the moment he referred to. Meagan had introduced them. “Jacqui, this is my brother, Mitch,” Meagan had said casually.
Jacqui’s first jolt of attraction toward the nice-looking man smiling at her had been firmly shoved aside when she’d remembered that Meagan’s brother was also a surgeon. She had nodded pleasantly, then asked him in her housekeeper voice if she could take his coat and get him anything to drink. When he’d politely declined the drink, she’d made an excuse about work to do and disappeared for the remainder of his visit with his sister. The awareness she had felt for him that first time had never completely gone away, try as she might to convince herself otherwise when she had seen him since.
She was startled that he, too, still remembered so clearly the first time they met.
“I’ve been wanting to get to know you better ever since,” he added, studying her face for her reaction.
“That was almost a year ago. You never gave any indication that you were…well, interested in me.”
He shrugged, settling her more comfortably against him. “It was awkward.”
She bit her lip for a moment before murmuring, “It’s still awkward.”
“It doesn’t have to be. We’re both single, unattached adults. There’s no reason at all we can’t spend time together when we want.”
She could already feel some of her earlier misgivings building inside her again. “And when it ends? I’ll still work for your sister, and because of that, our paths will continue to cross occasionally. Can we just go on the way we have been, pretending nothing changed?”
He gave a little laugh and brushed a strand of her tousled, short hair from her temple. “We’re just starting to talk about this and already you’re worrying about a theoretical ending at some possible point in the future?”
She grimaced. “I can’t help it. I like to know what to expect from my future. Where I’ll be, what I’ll be doing. As much as possible, I try to anticipate all the possible outcomes of any major decisions I make.”
His left arm propped on the couch behind her, he continued to toy with the ends of her hair with his right hand when he asked lightly, “Does that need to control the future come from your childhood?”
She still wasn’t really ready to discuss her past with him, but she answered candidly. “Probably. I never knew from one week to the next where I’d be living or going to school. All I ever wanted was to settle down in one place and make a home for myself there.”
His fleeting frown made her wonder if her admission worried him a little. He’d made no secret of his own restlessness—a result of a childhood that was too settled and predictable, in his view.
Maybe opposites attracted, but there had to be more than attraction to form a lasting bond. But then, Mitch wasn’t worried about forming lasting bonds, she reminded herself, studying his face through her lashes. Maybe he was concerned that she was looking for more from him than he had been prepared to offer. Her talk about permanence and settling down could have made him nervous.
She smiled slightly and shook her head. “Like you said, all we’ve done is share a few kisses. Satisfying our curiosity, I suppose. I’m not worrying about the future tonight.”
“That’s what you think we’re doing? Satisfying curiosity?”
“I suppose so. I have to confess I’ve wondered what it would be like to kiss you,” she said with a smile, trying to downplay her action in initiating that first kiss.
His mouth twitched. “Yeah? So how was it?”
Relieved that he seemed to be following her lead in keeping this light, she said after a moment of feigned deliberation, “It was nice.”
His eyebrows rose. “Nice? That’s the best you can say?”
She couldn’t help but laugh at his tone. “Okay, very nice.”