“Me too, me too. Christian can come with us to ’Merican Girl,” Emily shouted gleefully as she hopped up and down. “You can meet Sasha, Christian.”
The little girl ran out of the room, obviously intent on getting her precious doll.
“Wait, Emily. Christian doesn’t really want to—”
“What time are we going?” he asked.
After he left Megan had replayed every second spent with Christian. She kept thinking of the way he looked when he laughed, when he was watchful and observant, the heat in his eyes when he’d raised his head from their kiss.
But it was the sensations that he’d awakened in her that made it almost impossible to find rest that night. When she closed her eyes, she could almost feel the pressure of his kiss. She recalled all too perfectly how his mood had altered from being coaxing and gentle to demanding and a little wild.
Megan didn’t know which mood she liked most. She only knew that the memory of all of the facets of Christian’s character fueled a newly ignited fire within her. She chastised herself for it, she tried to ignore it, she even muttered a rare curse a time or two, but none of those punishments could stop her mind from fantasizing about more than just kissing Christian.
After a restless night she had herself convinced that her memory had misled her. There wasn’t a man alive who could be as handsome, as exciting as her brain and her body kept insisting that Christian was. And surely if there were such a man in existence, he wouldn’t be interested in her.
True to his word, Christian presented himself at her door at eleven thirty that morning, appearing entirely comfortable with the idea of spending a better part of the day shopping for clothes for Sasha and attending a doll tea party. When she opened the door to see him standing in the hallway, Megan knew immediately she hadn’t been overestimating his appeal.
He’d dressed up for a doll tea party.
The realization of that fact caused an unexpected surge of tears to sting her eyes. He looked entirely too handsome for his own good, wearing a pair of dark blue dress pants that fit his lean waist, hips, and the long length of his legs with too much precision to be anything but tailor made. His white cotton button-down shirt created a stark contrast with the dark pants, casual but perfectly fitted sport coat, and his sun darkened skin. Despite his tousled hair and well-trimmed goatee, he seemed as comfortable and natural in a sport coat and dress pants as he had yesterday in an untucked shirt, boots, and faded jeans.
“Christian.”
It was all she could get out by way of greeting. Before she could guess what he planned, his hand had snaked out and his fingers sunk into her unbound hair. The other hand went to her shoulder and levered her up against the length of him. His fingers cradled her head while his mouth came down possessively. It was a closed mouth kiss, very brief, nowhere near as sexual as yesterday’s had been. Yet Megan felt the impact of it in places in her body that she hadn’t known were connected so intimately to her lips.
He stepped away but his hand remained in her hair. His fingers flexed greedily into the waves. “I like your hair down,” was all he said.
“Christian kissed Aunt Meg!” Emily said in a singsong voice. Megan stared down dazedly at her niece. Christian handled the situation with his usual casual aplomb, picking up Emily and pecking her on her cheek.
“That’s right. All the pretty ladies get kisses this morning.”
“Sasha, too?” Emily asked hopefully as she held up her blonde doll, an attempted facsimile of Emily herself. She giggled i
rrepressibly when Christian bestowed a kiss to Sasha’s plastic cheek with an exaggerated smacking sound.
Megan’s anxiety still lingered an hour later despite Christian’s bountiful charm and ease.
“The dolls have a hair salon?” Christian muttered incredulously through the side of his mouth so that a starry-eyed Emily wouldn’t hear.
Megan gave him an amused glance but uncertainty mingled with her suppressed humor.
They stood in the doll hairdresser line at American Girl with dozens of little girls holding their dolls and their doting mothers and female relatives milling around them. Megan couldn’t help but feel the oddness of the entire situation.
Why had he wanted to come?
She wasn’t the only one who seemed aware of the novelty and intrigue of Christian’s presence. She had empathized with a few women when they looked at him with incredulity or humor in their eyes. She’d bristled at quite a few stares of downright lust. Megan tried to convince herself that she’d been wrong, but she would have sworn that two teenage girls who were accompanying little sisters had shrieked and grabbed each other in disbelief at the sight of Christian.
Not that she could fault them. Christian easily topped six foot three inches and his masculine features and muscular, taut body stood in stark contrast to the frilly, feminine atmosphere of the American Girl Store.
Yet he’d been nothing but solicitous and fun since they’d arrived. He seemed to share Emily’s enthusiasm, if not in the same way that another female might have, at least in the way of an adult who fully recalled the joy of childhood.
“I told you that you wouldn’t like it, Christian,” Megan whispered so that Emily couldn’t hear. For the hundredth time in the past hour, she asked herself why in the world he was doing this.
They were standing necessarily close, her shoulder pressing into his upper arm as they waited in line. Megan felt a little dizzy as she inhaled the increasingly familiar, spicy, yet elusive aroma of his cologne. His scent was just like the man who wore it: complex, intoxicating, wild and paradoxically subtle at the same time.
“Who said I didn’t like it?” Christian asked, his mouth lowering toward hers.
Because he couldn’t stop himself, and because he had always been much more of a sinner than a saint, Christian reached out and touched his fingertip to the gold cross that hung so daintily just above the upper swell of Megan’s right breast.