“Is Mama home?” he muses toward the cat, who is ignoring him completely and waiting patiently just a few feet from the doorway, tail swishing back and forth in an almost canine fashion.
A few seconds later, Bianca’s standing in the doorway, quickly pulling the screen door shut behind her as the cat lunges forward to rub up against her ankles. She’s wearing some kindof one-piece thing (in a soft green color the same as the shirt he picked for her this morning), shorts with an attached top that’s tied up around her neck to hold it in place because he’s pretty sure the thing doesn’t have a back. She’s got on a pair of heels that look like they might be able to slit a man’s throat. Her hair is down in long silky waves, her natural curls starting to poke through despite her efforts to tame them into submission. The shiny mahogany curtain swings down in front of her as she bends to run a hand over Amelia’s coat and Xavier stifles a groan, trying not to be too jealous of a cat.
From his angle – because yep, it doesn’t have a back – it almost looks like she’sonlywearing the heels and absolutely nothing else.
“Hello sweet girl,” Bianca coos. “Did you miss me, Amelia Peabody Emerson? Did you?”
“Amelia Peabody Emerson?” he asks, trying to place the name, momentarily distracting his traitorous mind.
“From the books?”
He shrugs, completely unfamiliar.
“The Amelia Peabody novels, by Elizabeth Peters. My favorite books. They’re like Agatha Christie meetsThe Mummy, except the protagonist is a Victorian British woman and they were written by an Egyptologist, so the history is spot on. Actually, I think you’d find them fascinating, especially the later books. You kind of remind me of one of the characters.”
“Later books?”
“There are twenty of them.”
He absolutely cannot remember the last time he read anything for enjoyment. “Just a bit of light reading? Maybe when my eyes stop crossing from looking at my own words.”
“That’s fair,” she says and then lifts an assessing eyebrow. “Have you moved since I left?”
Shrugging helplessly, he stands, moving across the living room toward the kitchen; leaning back on the counter across from her, he says, “I went to get some of my stuff and then after, I . . . paced around a little bit while trying to figure out how to rewrite my introduction so I don’t sound like a pretentious twat.” Her eyes light up at the opening he just gave her, but he shakes his head, cutting her off. “Don’t say it.”
Her shoulders sag in mock disappointment and she closes her mouth, pulling it into a sweet-looking pout.
And now all he wants to do is kiss it away.
Fuck.
It’s always like this – he’s walking around minding his own business and she wrecks him with just a shift of expression.
No one should have that kind of power over anyone, but at least she has no idea she possesses it.
He’s pretty sure she doesn’t, anyway.
If she does, she hasn’t taken advantage of it.
He’d actually kind of like it if she did.
“How were drinks?” he asks, desperate for a change of subject.
“Fine, they were fine,” she says with a tight smile, shrugging one shoulder with indifference. She’s lying and he wants to press her on it, but her eyes seem like they’re pleading with him to leave it alone, so he does.
“And my texts?”
Those desperate eyes light up, those gold flecks flickering merrily at him, and her smile becomes a real one. “A major hit. Five stars. Ten out of ten.”
She leans over, grabbing a water bottle out of the fridge, and he fights down the urge to walk up behind her, run his fingers down the long line of her bare back then find her hips with his hands and tug her against him.
Yeah, that’s definitely over the line that has yet to be defined.
They probably should talk about that again, but still, he vaguely knows where it is, enough to know better than to give in to his current fantasy.
“I should leave you alone to get your work done,” she says, turning around and hopping up onto the kitchen counter.
It’d be easy enough to just take a step forward and then another, nudge her knees apart, run his hands up over her thighs, under the hem of whatever the hell this outfit is called and see where things lead from there.
