He had been checking out her chest when she registered his existence in the world. No big deal, really. She’d blossomed from soda-straw skinniness to a C cup the summer before she entered seventh grade, and she’d been getting ogled ever since.
Although she didn’t particularly relish the attention her bosom attracted, Lucy had come to terms with it. She’d also discovered that the apparently genetically ingrained male tendency to assume that a woman’s IQ was inversely proportional to her bra size could be turned to her advantage. She didn’t play dumb. She had too much self-respect to resort to that kind of ploy. But there were situations in which she consciously refrained from flaunting her brains up front.
The few genuinely offensive members of the opposite sex she encountered-specifically, the jerks who grabbed without asking permission and who couldn’t seem to grasp the concept that no meant no, not maybe or take me—she left to the not-so-tender mercies of her widowed father, three unmarried brothers, four uncles and ten male cousins. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe herself capable of fending off lechers. Quite the contrary. But as the only female Falco of her generation, she believed it behooved her to offer the men in her family the opportunity to defend her honor—and vent what she considered potentially dangerous buildups of excess testosterone—every now and then.
It was for her own peace of mind, really. As long as her macho macho relatives were preoccupied with protecting her, they weren’t going to have the time or energy to embroil themselves in any really serious trouble.
The tawny-haired stranger had lifted his gray-green eyes to her coffee-bean-brown ones a second or two after she glanced in his direction and became aware of his unabashed appraisal of her T-shirted breasts. She’d intended to blow him off like lint, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that she was sweating like a pig—thanks to her brothers’ spectacularly inept efforts at air-conditioning repair—and didn’t feel like being gawked at by some preppie-style prince who obviously didn’t belong in Falco’s Pizzeria. But as their gazes collided and locked, she’d felt a surge of attraction so powerful that she gasped aloud and grabbed for the side of the cash register she’d been tending for nigh on eight hours.
She’d tried to turn away, but found herself unable to do so. Her pulse had kicked like a chorus line. Her stomach had fluttered wildly. Nothing she’d experienced with any of the long line of neighborhood guys she’d dated during the five years since she’d celebrated her sweet sixteenth had prepared her for such a primal response.
Her ogler had flushed, obviously embarrassed. Obviously affected, too.
And then, astonishingly, he’d smiled at her.
It hadn’t been one of those hey-baby-I’m-so-sexy grins she was accustomed to fielding from the local lotharios. Rather, it had been a quirking of flexible male lips, punctuated by a glint of even white teeth.
There’d been a trace of surprise in the expression. As though the smile represented a surrender to impulse by someone not usually given to succumbing to hormonally generated whim.
Lucy had reciprocated. Briefly. Breathlessly. If Chris had blinked, he probably would have missed it.
Despite the fact that she’d been accused—not completely without justification, she was willing to concede—of being a tease by several of the neighborhood Romeos, she hadn’t been trying to be coy. Her control over her facial muscles had simply been too iffy for her to attempt a full-scale smile.
Lucia Annette Falco had not been hunting for a husband the day twenty-four-year-old Christopher Dodson Banks walked into her family’s restaurant. She’d hoped to make a happy marriage eventually, of course. But not until she’d proven herself. By herself. To herself. For herself. And not until she’d firmly established her emotional and economic independence from her family.
She’d never imagined herself tying the knot while she was still two semesters away from earning her bachelor’s degree in business administration. And even if she had, she certainly never would have envisioned a scenario in which the cause of her decision to reroute—some might suggest derail—her professional ambitions would be an Ivy League-educated lawyer who was the scion of one of Chicago’s most prominent families!
Lucy’s breath hitched in her throat as she suddenly recalled the disapproving expression she’d glimpsed on her new mother-in-law’s perfectly made-up face as she and Chris departed for their honeymoon. She quickly shoved the memory aside. She’d find a way to deal with Elizabeth Banks, she assured herself. But not on this, the first night of her married life.
“I can’t believe we actually did it,” she whispered, scarcely realizing that she’d spoken aloud. The enormity of the commitment she’d made washed over her like a wave. For a moment, she felt as though she might drown.
“Well, we did, sweetheart.” Chris hugged Lucy close, pressing his lips against the crown of her head. He inhaled sharply. The scent of a fresh floral perfume—and of warm feminine flesh—hazed his nostrils. Desire swirled through him like a zephyr. “You and me. Together. In front of a huge horde of witnesses.”
“I told you I had a lot of relatives.” There was an apology implicit in her soft voice. And an edge of defensiveness, too. The potentially troubling implications of both were lost in the rush of sensation unleashed by the stroking search of her hands.
“True,” Chris acknowledged thickly, plucking the pins from her hair and scattering them on the floor. Lucy’s family—boisterously affectionate, abundantly extended, the antithesis of his own limited network of blood kin—was something he envied her. Still, there had been more than a couple of instances during this evening’s nuptial festivities when he found himself growing irritated by the number of guests who seemed to believe themselves entitled to lay claim to his bride’s undivided attention. “But having to face all of them in the same place at the same time was a little overwhelming.”
“Overwhelming,” Lucy repeated in an odd tone, then shivered ardently as he finessed the nerve-rich skin of her nape. “I know... what you mean.”
Perhaps she did. Perhaps she didn’t. Chris decided that it wasn’t particularly important at this particular time. What mattered right now was that, after too many hours of being forced to share her, he finally had the woman he’d promised to love and honor as long as they both should live all to himself.
Was it selfish to want her so exclusively? he asked himself, unzipping Lucy’s dress and sliding it off her smooth-skinned shoulders. She accommodated his efforts with a provocative little shimmy, then began undoing the buttons on the front of his shirt. Was it wrong to resent her seemingly endless interest in other people’s problems?
Maybe, he conceded, sucking in his breath as he felt the delicate rake of fingernails against his hair-whorled chest. But it also struck him as being profoundly human.
They kissed again. Chris feathered his mouth back and forth, deepening the intimacy of the caress by carefully calibrated increments. Lucy’s lips grew pliant, then parted. He eased his tongue between them, absorbing his bride’s languid sigh of pleasure with a throaty invocation of her name.
She was so...different... from the kind of woman he—to say nothing of his parents, friends and professional colleagues—had expected he’d one day woo and wed. Not just in appearance. But in upbringing and outlook, as well.
This had unsettled Chris at the start of their relationship, and he’d tried to go slowly because of it. He hadn’t doubted Lucy. He’d doubted himself.
He was self-aware enough to recognize that he wasn‘t—and probably never would be—entirely comfortable with the unearned privileges and unavoidable responsibilities that went with being the sole heir to the Banks family fortune. He’d needed to be certain that his desire to get involved with Lucia Annette Falco wasn’t the manifestation of some long-deferred impulse toward rebelling against his birthright.
It had taken a fair amount of soul-searching, but he’d finally satisfied himself that his feelings were not the product of