Blushing Pink (24 page)

"But... what... why..."

"Here comes one." After he flagged it, the taxi swerved over and skidded to a stop in front of them. Reese hustled in first, followed by Brian, who said, "Where's your apartment?"

She had to think before she remembered her address, which probably should have told her that she was in deep.

"Do you want to go straight home, by the way?" Brian asked. "Have you eaten yet?"

"Yeah, I had something on my break earlier," she said.

"We could go for a drink or something," he offered. "But if you're too tired after working, I totally understand."

"Oh..."

"Where do you go?" the cabby demanded impatiently.

"Um..."

"We could get a drink," Reese said quickly before Brian rescinded the offer.

"Great," he said, smiling, and told the driver where to go.

Reese sat back against the cracked, duct-taped upholstery, trying to make sense of the last ten minutes. Just when she'd been dismally disappointed in men, she found herself giddy and excited and lustful all over again. She should really be writing some of this down.

Chapter 18

They'd been talking and nursing their drinks for the past forty minutes, and Reese was now in full flirt mode, which she'd never really considered one of her gears. She didn't even mean to do it, but it seemed to be happening under its own power. Right now, her life felt like hers, only better. Brighter. Bigger.

Brian had just asked her what she was going to do about her nonexistent dissertation, and in response, she felt her chin tilting down, her lashes fluttering up, and her mouth curving into a small smile. "I'd rather not talk about school, if that's okay," she said sweetly.

"Uh, yeah," he said, watching her intently, "that's fine."

She didn't know which undid her more—his eyes or his smile. Or was her vodka martini at all responsible for the dazed, heated, swirly kind of feeling she was getting in her stomach and head? She wasn't drunk, of course... she just felt good.

"To tell you the truth," she said suddenly, "I'm working on something else right now."

"Really, what?" he asked, leaning forward with interest. Brian's interest seemed far different from Kenneth's, which always smacked of social stalemate and inept prying.

Reese sat forward, too, bringing their faces only inches apart. "I'm writing a novel," she said a little bashfully, "or trying to, but I've only written one chapter so far."

"No kidding," Brian said, smiling, and sounding impressed. "Wow, how'd you get interested in doing that?"

She shrugged. "I don't know; it's something I've been wanting to try for a long time."
All talk, that's me.
"And I've always loved reading novels."
Especially after my last boyfriend dumped me.
"So recently, I decided to take the plunge."
If one unrevised chapter constitutes a "plunge."

"I can't even imagine doing something like that," he said. "You must be pretty creative. You're incredible; I know
that."
Blushing hotly, she looked to her martini for clarity. "You definitely have to let me read it sometime," Brian added in a low voice. "I mean, if you want."

"Okay," she said, biting her lower lip and braving a glance into his gorgeous eyes. As they burned through hers, she struggled to sound normal. "But enough about me. How's Project Blue going?"

"No way," he said, shaking his head. "If you don't have to talk about school, I don't have to talk about work."

"Oh... okay. What do you want to talk about?"

"You," he said huskily. She gulped. No hesitation, he'd just said it. Hot-blooded sensations that had been fluttering on the periphery of her body and mind now intensified. And thrummed and pulsed and roared. Did Brian have any idea how much she wanted to take an ice cube out of his scotch glass and rub it across the tips of her breasts? Or how much at this moment she wanted—
needed
—to contract the muscles between her legs?

She darted her eyes downward to break the powerful gaze between her and Brian, and that was when she noticed...

Oh, not again!

To her absolute horror, she spotted her nipples stabbing at the surface of her yellow angora sweater.
These damn things
(the sweaters, not the nipples).

Shooting forward, she tried to conceal herself with the table, but when she shot her eyes up to Brian's, she realized that if he hadn't noticed her aroused breasts before, he sure as hell did now.

He was dissolving her with his smoky stare, and she squeezed her thighs together, acting purely on animal instinct, as well as some distant memories of lust and heat and sex.

Finally she managed a weak, broken echo. "Me?"

"You," he said again.

"What about me?"

"Well, whatever happened to you?" he asked, leaning back, and cooling off some of the space between them. "I mean, two years ago I met you at a New Year's party, and then I never saw you again. I wanna know where you've been since then."

Not once in the time he'd been coming to the cafe had either of them spoken of that fateful night. Of course, until now, it hadn't seemed particularly fateful. Truthfully, Reese hadn't had the guts to ask Brian about that night. And if she did ask, she would feel the need to add in a million disclaimers about how she was "just curious" and "no big deal"—maybe even, "I swear I'm not stalking you!" But Brian had simply asked, openly and undefensively. He was admitting that he'd wondered about her, and that kind of confidence was a turn-on, even if it was also a come-on.

He took a drink of his scotch, but never let his eyes leave hers.

She took a drink herself, feeling that warm haze intensify and turn into a hot rush between her legs. "Well, I don't know. I enrolled at Crewlyn soon after... and that brings us around to talking about school, so I'll shut up now," she said, grinning.

A long, loaded moment passed before Brian grinned back....

* * *

He was transfixed by her eyes. They were like luminous green lights, smoldering green flames, even, and they had been flickering in their own sexy, flustered way for the past half hour. Her face was stained with a deep blush that could have been attributed to the heat of the bar, but he strongly hoped there was more to it.

"So..." Brian said absently, while his gaze tracked Reese's finger as it played with her bottom lip, which was slightly wet from her last sip of vodka. At last, he mentally shook himself back to the conversation at hand. "Remember that misunderstanding we had—when I thought you were slamming me, but you were actually slamming some other poor guy?"

She laughed at that. "Yeah, mmm-hmm."

"Well, now I'm wondering..." His voice trailed off as he tapped his knuckles on his near-empty glass of scotch. "Forget it," he said suddenly, waving his hand. "Never mind."

"What?" she pressed.

"No, it's silly. Never mind."

"What? Come on; tell me." She was curious now, just like he'd hoped she would be.

"Well, I'm just wondering, if you
had
been talking about me to your mother, how would you have described me?"

A tiny wrinkle formed on Reese's forehead, and her blush got a little pinker.

"And not based on that night at the diner," Brian qualified. "Based on the
other
night."

"Um... well... I don't know, exactly...." A beat of silence passed, before abstraction gave way to warmth, and she smiled up at him. His chest constricted. Instantly he realized that he'd been wrong: Her eyes weren't flickering lights, but wide pools of scalding green liquid.

Then her smile turned coy, as she rested her chin in her hand and said sweetly, "I really couldn't say. The whole night's sort of a blur."

"The kiss, too?"

She paused, then licked her bottom lip and said softly, "The kiss, I definitely remember."

He swallowed. "Well, how do you remember it?" he asked in a low, smooth voice. Then he waited patiently for her answer....

* * *

Reese knew that Brian was being deliberately provocative, and that spurred a thrilling sort of curiosity as to what
exactly
he hoped to provoke. The possibilities alone fired her up. Brian naked, aroused, on top of her... sweating, grunting... with her ankles on his shoulders—

"Reese?"

"Oh..." She snapped back into focus, and tried a turn-the-tables stalling tactic. "What do
you
remember?" She hoped to buy time to formulate a good answer herself, and to figure out what she was going to do about all this suffocating desire.

"I remember that it was pretty damn terrific."

"Yeah... those were the days," she joked stupidly.

Brian grinned. "Yeah."

So much for formulating a good answer—she'd winged it with a stupid one-liner. But Brian didn't seem dissuaded in the least, and what really mattered was that he remembered the kiss, and seemed to be hinting strongly for another one. That was what she wanted, too. And more.

In fact, her body was fully on fire—some of the sensations were familiar, and some felt new in their intensity. She had a pit in her stomach a tightness in her chest, and a quivering in her inner thighs.

Involuntarily, she shivered.

"Are you cold?" he asked, concerned.

"Oh... yeah," she fibbed, and hoped she wouldn't have to sit there with her coat on to support the lie.

"Here," he said, pulling his sweater over his head, rumpling his hair in the process, and revealing his faded Ithaca T-shirt underneath. He handed it across the table, and Reese felt compelled to take it. She would have also loved to smell it and rub her face all over it, but she refrained.

"Thanks," she said with a soft smile, and slipped it over her own sweater.

Just then the cocktail waitress appeared and asked them if there would be anything else. Brian deferred the question to Reese. She shook her head, still feeling dazed. She was a little tipsy, burning up inside, and not wanting the night to end. Vaguely, she heard him say "Just the check," and when he signed the charge slip, she found herself staring longingly at the subtle curve of biceps under his T-shirt.

Soon they were outside on the busy sidewalk, and Brian was gently resting his hand on the small of Reese's back. "We can probably walk from here, if you want."

"Okay. Wait, don't you want your sweater?" Reese asked, starting to pull it off.

He stilled her with his hand. "No, I don't need it; you wear it."

On the walk to her apartment, neither said much. But it wasn't the awkward, empty silence that she shared with Kenneth. It was different. It was a charged, loaded kind of silence... it crackled with an undercurrent of sexual tension, and it sizzled with the kind of raging heat that made her gasp and sweat. Well, if she weren't in the middle of a busy street.

She wanted him so much, she spent the entire walk wondering if he would make a move on her when they got to her apartment. And if he didn't, would she'd have the guts to do it herself?

* * *

They got to her door, and some of the fog in her brain had cleared. Brian hadn't done anything like grope her or make suggestive comments during the walk, which was, of course, to his credit. The only downside was that Reese was once again totally unsure how to read him. Really, did Brian
like
torturing her?

"You didn't have to walk me all the way up. I'm sure that creepy customer is nowhere near me right now," she said, smiling over her shoulder as she turned the fifth lock and opened her apartment door.

"No, don't be silly," he said. "That guy's not the only weirdo in this city—in case you haven't noticed."

She grinned at him again, and led the way inside. Brian followed, shutting the door behind him and keeping a slight distance. "Well, thanks for coming out for a drink," he said. "I really had a lot of fun with you."

The fun doesn't have to end,
Reese almost said. Instead, she went with, "No, thank you—for coming to the store tonight. I know you were busy earlier and everything."

"Oh... right," he said.

There they were standing in her front hall, looking around, grinning like idiots, and neither one making a move.

Brian said, "So... this is your place, huh?"

"Yeah... yeah," Reese said, nodding, and looking around as if she didn't remember what it looked like. "It's not much, but that's graduate housing." The apartment was dimly lit by the street lamps outside, but the front hall where they stood was almost pitch dark. Reese didn't want to turn on the overhead light, though, because she was afraid it might make her lose her nerve.

"Actually, two of my roommates graduated this past semester," she threw in for no reason.

"Ah," he said, nodding now, too.

"Yeah, so... this is where I live."

"Nice."

"It's all right."

"Hmm."

They both casually surveyed the place for the tenth time.

Then Reese broke.
To hell with this,
she thought boldly. She would never forgive herself if she let this night end without at least
trying.