She ran a light finger over the fresh cut along his cheek made from the tree branch just a few hours ago. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘Stings a little. Not bad, though. It’s nothing.’
‘You all right?’ She returned the question.
‘I woke up with Texas Fire running through my mind.’ He settled a kiss on her ear and pulled her close. ‘Believe it or not, I’ve been inspired lately. I think it’s going to be a pretty good read after all. Who’d have ever thought that Kendra Davis would be my muse?’
‘Glad I could help.’ She ran a hand over his chest and shifted on his lap, feeling the beginnings of a hard-on in his boxers. ‘Garrett, what happens when you become Tess Delaney? What changes inside you, what shifts over enough so that you can access the Tess side of you?’
He stroked her arm and she could see color climb up his throat. He was beautiful when he was wrong-footed, when he was embarrassed by how amazing he was. She wished it didn’t embarrass him, though. She wished he could own the beauty and the talent of who he was, because it was in that talent, in that beauty that he was more himself than she suspected he even knew he could be.
He nodded to the laptop humming quietly on the desk. ‘It’s not anything so simple as a shift; I mean, there’s no split personality or anything like that. Tess Delaney started out as a pen name, just a way to get my romance into print and get the nice check that it promised. But still, the person who writes Tess Delaney novels is different than the person who wrote Brad Dennis novels.’ His face was suddenly sad. ‘The person who writes Tess Delaney novels knows more, has more life experience. The person who writes Tess Delaney novels broke his brother’s heart by stealing his fiancée and then had his own heart broken when he realized that his wife still loved his brother, and then he’d lost his wife, his best friend, and his brother.’ He brushed his fingers over the keys. ‘Who knows, maybe Tess was my penance, maybe Tess was my healing.’ He smiled up at her and the blush returned. ‘Then again, maybe it was just the inspiration of a really good steady income.’
‘So.’ She shifted in his lap and tightened her arms around his neck. ‘If there is no shift, then it’s as much Garrett Thorne at the keyboard as it is Tess Delaney, more so, really.’
‘It doesn’t feel that way, at least not any more. It feels like when I’m writing a Tess Delaney novel that I’m in a place that’s somehow a little more grounded and a little more real.’
She leaned in and kissed his ear. ‘Do you ever fantasize about her?’
‘No!’ he said. ‘It’s never like that. It never has been. It’s more like she’s my muse. It’s more like she watches and guides me. I don’t even know what she looks like. I’ve never had the inclination to visualize her face or her body. That seems like cheating somehow.’
‘Did she have red hair?’
He smiled up at her and shook his head. ‘If you’re asking if she looks like you, no. And no, you’ve never been Tess Delaney to me. You’ve always been Kendra Davis, the one who slapped the hell out of me in Wade’s office and the one who tried to drown me in Harris’s lake.’
She giggled. ‘Both of which you deserved.’
He slid the shirt off her shoulders and cupped her breasts in turn, raking his thumb over her nipples, and she arched into his touch. ‘I’d endure it all again to have you here on my lap like this, to constantly be thinking about the next time I see your face.’ He placed a kiss on one nipple, then the other. ‘About the next time I can hear you laugh, the next time I feel your touch.’ He slid his hand down the slope of her belly to stroke and fondle her pubic curls, and her whole body tensed with anticipation, as it always did when Garrett touched her, as it always did when she knew he wanted her the way she wanted him.
With the other hand, he shoved his laptop to one side, then hoisted her, in a wave of giggles, onto the desk, opening her legs so that he sat in the office chair, between them.
For a moment, he just looked at her, his gaze moving down her body from her face, over her breasts, and down between her legs. His studying of her made her feel more than just sexy. The way he sat between her legs, the way she opened to him, made her feel worshipped, adored. She’d never felt that way before.
At last he moved to run the tips of his fingers over and around each nipple, to knead and caress the weight of her excited breasts in the cup of his palm. With the other hand, he lifted her feet onto the arms of his chair. It was a position into which she had to move forward, shifting and rearranging her bottom until the tilt of her hips, the position of her open thighs, the flat press of her feet gave him a perfect view of the splayed swell of her, and he didn’t deny himself the pleasure of that view. He started with the cup of his hand against her perineum, then he shivered his fingers upward to open her, pausing to slide first one, then two inside her, where she was slick and anxious and tetchy.