What she really needed was a moment to figure out how badly she’d humiliated herself this time. Experimentally, she stuck her backside out. Sure enough, the front of her red pleather skirt tented dead center, stuck fast to the lowermost pearl button on Max’s shirt—the button that was just above his belt buckle, which was right above his—
Sara slammed her hips back against his belly, an automatic reaction intended to halt the dangerous direction of her thoughts and hide the proof of her latest misadventure. It was like throwing fuel on the fire her imagination had started.
Max’s breath whooshed out, hot and moist against the inner slopes of her breasts. She didn’t waste time wondering how she could feel his breath right through her heavy angora sweater. It made perfect sense, considering that his face was buried between her breasts, his mouth right at the bottom of her breastbone.
Too bad the sweater wasn’t a V-neck, Sara caught herself thinking, a low, cleavage-baring V-neck. Her front-clasp bra would have posed no problem to a talented man like Max Devlin, and his mouth was there anyway. Blood rushed into her face, then drained away to throb deep and low, just about where his belt buckle was digging into her—
“Sara!”
She snapped back to reality, noting the exasperation in his voice, even muffled as it was by the regrettably turtle-necked sweater. Reluctantly, she arched away from him. The man had to breathe, after all.
“There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this,” she said in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. In fact, that tone amazed her, considering that she was pressed against a man she’d been secretly in love with for the better part of six years.
“There always is, Sara,” Max said, exasperation giving way to amusement. “There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for how Mrs. Tilford’s cat wound up on top of the church bell tower.”
Sara grimaced.
“There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Jenny Hastings went into the Crimp ’N Cut a blonde and came out a redhead. Barn-red.”
Sara cringed.
“And there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the new stained-glass window in the town hall looking more like an advertisement for a brothel than a reenactment of Erskine’s founding father rescuing the Indian maidens.”
She huffed out a breath, indignant. “I only broke the one pane.”
“Yeah, the pane between the grateful, kneeling maidens and the very happy Jim ‘Mountain Man’ Erskine.”
“The talk would die down if the mayor let me get the pane fixed instead of just shoving the rest of them together so it looked like the Indian maidens were, well, really grateful.”
“People are coming from miles around to see it,” Max reminded her. “He’d lose the vote of every businessman in town if he ruined the best moneymaker they’ve ever had.”
Sara huffed out another breath. It was a little hypocritical for the people of Erskine, Montana, to pick on her for something they were capitalizing on, especially when she did have a perfectly good reason for why it had happened, why bad luck seemed to follow her around like a black cloud. Except she couldn’t tell anyone what that reason was, especially not Max. Because he was the reason.
One look at him and all she could think about was how it would feel to have his mouth on hers, his hands on her body, the long, solid length of him pressing her down into a soft mattress or a haystack or against a wall…Sara glanced away from the white-painted cement block just inches from her face, but she couldn’t hide from the truth.
She loved a man who’d closed off his heart, a man who tossed up a barrier whenever a woman got too close to him. Except for her, Sara thought. He seemed perfectly content with her friendship, and she was too afraid of losing it to ask him for anything more, so she did her best to hide her feelings and, while she was concentrating on that, something embarrassing always happened.
But that wasn’t really the point, Sara reminded herself. The point was that she was superglued to Max Devlin.
“I’m sorry, Max.”
She didn’t have to elaborate. He looked down to where her skirt and his button were getting up close and personal, then at her face again. His expression, raised eyebrows and half smile, said it all.
“At least the superglue isn’t dripping anymore.”
“Sara, Sara, Sara,” he said with a chuckle that resonated through her ribs and did serious damage to her heart. “What am I going to do with you?”
She could have told him, if her breath hadn’t backed up in her lungs, if the thought of what she wanted him to do to her didn’t have all the blood draining out of her brain so she couldn’t even put words to the images that haunted her nights and dazzled her days. She would have told him, if she’d had the courage.
“Unstick me,” she said, then found herself almost wishing she was talking about more than her skirt.
Six years was a long time to love a man who only considered her a friend, a long time to love that man’s son as if he were her own. A long time to dream…Without Max there would be a huge hole in her life, but Sara wanted more than a friend. She wanted a man to sit down to dinner with each night, a man to share her joys and sorrows, a man to give her children of her own. The longer she held out for the impossible, the longer she would be ignoring the possible.
She stared down into Max’s laughing eyes and accepted that she was just too stubborn to believe anything was impossible.
“Is the banner all right?” Max asked.
Sarah took one last rewardingly deep breath and glanced up. Somehow she’d managed to repair the off-center tear so well, even she could barely see the seam from less than a foot away. “Move your hands,” she said.
Max dropped his arms, rolling his shoulders and whistling out a breath.
Sara eased her hands off the banner, first one, then the other, keeping them within easy slapping distance, just in case. The paper sagged a bit in the middle, then settled. She let out her pent-up breath. “It’s holding.”
“I’m sure glad to hear that.”
She let her arms drop, forgetting that she was standing on a child’s classroom chair. Max caught her around the hips just as she lost her footing on the slippery wooden seat.
Sara froze. Not just her body—her heart stopped, she quit breathing and time, as she knew it, ground to a halt. Her eyelids fluttered down, her gaze accidentally colliding with Max’s, eyes as blue as the flame of a Bunsen burner. He flexed his fingers, and every nerve in her body shrieked back to life. Her heart lurched into an unsteady rhythm, the blood pounding where his fingers bracketed her hips. Purely out of self-defense, she braced her hands on his shoulders and tried to climb down from the chair. Away from him.
The wash of cool air on her thighs stopped her. Of course, she thought, closing her eyes and heaving out a shaky breath, she was still joined to Max by the bonds of holy superglue. She longed to get naked with him, but not in her classroom, mere moments before twenty-five third-graders and their parents were due to arrive for Open House. She had to get out of this embarrassing situation before someone saw her. If that meant giving Max a close-up of her shockingly unteacherlike black satin panties, so be it.
Max wasn’t as anxious to put her modesty on the line as she was. “Uh, I think you should stay where you are,” he said, his hands tightening on her hips, his wary eyes on the way her hemline rose when she tried again to step down from the chair.
“Half the town is going to walk in that door in a few minutes.” Or a few seconds, Sara corrected, as the sound of voices and footsteps drifted in from the hallway, reminding her that her clock was at least five minutes slow.
Peep show and Max’s hands