At his touch, tingles flashed through her, and she knew she was hopelessly lost unless she got her wits together and her defenses up. She drew herself up. “Hi, Aaron. I thought you were in Spain.”
“Well, I was,” he drawled in that mellow voice that was like a stroke of his fingers. Darn, if he would just quit looking at her like she was a bit of steak and he was a starving man. “But I came home because I wanted to see you.”
“You came home to see me?” she whispered, shocked and unable to believe she had heard correctly. Did he know? She rejected that notion instantly.
He looked around while a gust of cold wind buffeted them and spun leaves into the air. “Could we maybe talk inside?”
“Oh! Of course. Come in,” she said, feeling ridiculous and knowing the women in his life knew how to handle moments like this smoothly and casually, while she was acting like a twelve-year-old with her first crush. She moved ahead of him, reached out to unlock the door and dropped her keys. He scooped them up, reached his long arm around her and unlocked the door, pushing it open and waiting for her to enter. Too aware of how close he was behind her, she stepped inside. He made her fluttery and overly conscious of him and of herself and her condition.
She glanced around her tiny kitchen and thought of his palatial family home in Pine Valley. Her whole apartment would fit into his kitchen.
She opened her purse to drop her keys inside and the smell of the hamburger wafted into the air. His brows arched and he reached down to pull the wrapped burger from her purse. She could hear the laughter in his voice. “You carry hamburgers and fries in your purse?”
“Not usually,” she said, snatching her lunch from him and carrying it to the counter to set it down. “I wasn’t hungry. Do you want anything to drink?”
“No thanks, but help yourself.”
She shook her head. “Let’s sit in the living room.”
He looked all around as they entered her tiny living room with its white wicker furniture, red, blue and yellow throw pillows, colorful prints on the walls—an attractive room to her, but a far cry from his lifestyle.
“Nice place.”
“Thank you.”
He prowled around with both the grace and curiosity of a cat and stepped into the bedroom that opened off the living room. “This is your bedroom,” he said, and she wondered how she had left her room that morning when she had dressed for the doctor’s appointment. She ran her hand across her forehead, watching him as he returned to the living room and moved across the room to the sofa. He tilted his head again.
“Are you going to sit down?”
“Yes,” she replied, knowing she was acting ridiculously, but he had jolted her with his sudden appearance when she’d thought he was in Spain.
When she perched on the edge of the sofa, he sank down near her, looking relaxed and as if he owned the place. He leaned closer, and she realized she should have sat across the room from him. He ran his finger along her cheek. “Big blue eyes just like I remembered,” he said softly, and she wondered if he could hear her heart thudding.
“Why are you here?”
Again, he looked as if amusement danced in his eyes. “Glad to see me?”
“Yes,” she said cautiously. This time there was no mistaking the laughter in his eyes.
“Uh-huh,” he drawled. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” she said, bracing up and wondering what was coming.
“Why did you disappear the next morning?” His voice was quiet, his words innocuous, but his eyes nailed her and a flush heated her cheeks.
With an effort she looked away from those damnable green eyes that made her feel as if he could see every thought in her head. “I was supposed to leave town and I needed to get home.”
“Oh, yeah,” he drawled in a voice that indicated he didn’t believe that answer for a second.
She knotted her fingers in her lap. “I don’t usually sleep with a guy the first night I meet him,” she whispered stiffly, feeling her cheeks burn, but there it was, the flat-out bald truth.
“I know you don’t,” he said in such a tender voice that she wanted to fling herself into his arms. His fingers lifted her chin and turned her to face him, and when she looked into his eyes, she felt she was melting and all her resistance was slipping away.
“Go to dinner with me tonight.”
“I can’t be—”
“That’s why I came home,” he interrupted.
Shocked by his statement, she stared at him. “It isn’t either! You didn’t come home to take me to dinner.”
“Did so,” he argued quietly. “To my way of thinking, we have some unfinished business between us,” he said, and beneath his soft voice, she could hear a steely determination.
She thought about her condition and shook her head. “I think it is finished,” she said. “You move in one world and I live in another. I’m just a country girl, Aaron, so let’s be realistic. You couldn’t have come home to take me to dinner!”
“Yes, ma’am, I surely did,” slipping into a West Texas drawl that she knew he didn’t usually have. “And what’s all this about a country girl? Where do you think I grew up?”
“Right here, but don’t give me that ol’ country-boy routine. You were educated in the east and you live abroad and you move in circles that I know nothing about and the women in your life—”
“Bore me witless,” he said, scooting a little closer. “I wouldn’t pursue this if I didn’t feel like there was something between us.”
His words devastated her, and she clutched her fingers even more tightly together. Resist the sweet talk, resist…
She scooted away from him a few inches, keeping the space they’d had, but now she was pressed against the end of the sofa.
“We had sex between us, but—”
“That was lovemaking, Pamela,” he interrupted with such solemnity that her heart did another lurch. “It was good and fine and important.” He studied her. “Maybe we need to take some time now to get to know each other.”
“No, we don’t!”
“Why the hell not?”
Her mind raced on how to answer him. Why did he have to sit so close? It was difficult to think. “I told you, I’m country and you’re not and don’t say you are. Our worlds are really different, and there is no way you can convince me that you’re here because I’m so fascinating.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No. How’d did you get off work in the middle of the week?”
“I asked for time off to come home to see you.”
Her jaw did drop. While she stared at him, he gazed back steadily with no amusement in his features now.
“This is important,” he announced solemnly.
Her heart stopped. Missed beats and then picked up. No. Not now, was all she could think. Not now. Don’t do this. He mustn’t know. Her head swam. This can’t happen now. It’s too late. Much too late for us.
She shook her head. “You need to pack and go back to Spain. This is ridiculous. We’re in different worlds, Aaron. That night was special, but it was just a night. Now I need to—”
He moved closer. “Pamela, I want a chance to show you that our worlds