Linebacker’s Second Chance(78)
There’s a sinking feeling in my gut, like I’ve suddenly gotten in over my head.
But I think I already was, spiraling toward something that I can’t control.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Come on city girl!” I shout up the stairs. For a second, I marvel at how comfortable I feel with this woman. We shouldn’t be, not after so short a time—but it feels like we’ve known each other for a long time. Not only a handful of days. “Come on, woman! I’m the guy throwing this thing. We probably shouldn’t be late. Or am I wrong?” I pause for a moment and wait to hear Cadence’s voice, that lovely, rich sound, deeper than Joanna’s voice by far, and miles more sensual.
“It’s just not fashionable! Not even when you’re throwing the party.” I hear her from the second floor, still inside of the blue guest room, still getting ready after two hours of being locked in there. She’s assured me she’s a low-maintenance woman, but after painting all damn day, her hands and arms were caked with paint, purple and green specks of it in her hair. Cadence had rolled on into this house after driving the Range Rover for the very first time, frazzled and anxious, babbling about how she’d never get the paint off her skin and nails in time for the party. There was even a speck of pink paint right in the tiny, curved nook between her bottom lip and chin. I had the instinct to pull her into my arms and kiss her right there, graze my lip over the splatter of paint. But I didn’t. Instead I watched her as she ran up the stairs, arms glued to my sides. Now, I stand right at the bottom of the stairs, waiting. Waiting and wondering just what we mean to each other.
“It’s not exactly fashionable to be late when there’s only a hundred guests and you live in the middle of nowhere and you’re the man begging all these people to be a part of your—”
Well. Hot damn.
The woman that walks from out of the shadows of the hallway isn’t one I’ve seen before. Or, not quite. This woman is elegant and refined, nails painted a dark blue to match her dress, and her hair and skin bewitched with that magic that only women seem to know how to create. When she walks to the top of the stairs, she puts her hand to her chest just above the top of the blue dress, and her smile fades like she’s self-conscious or concerned.
I must be staring. Stop. Stop staring.
But I don’t stop, even though I know that’s the reason she must look the way she does, that expression of excitement and confusion all rolled up into one on her face. It strikes me then that she looks looser, freer, more real somehow than she did when she first arrived. That hint of sweet sadness is still there behind her eyes, but it’s overpowered by everything else. And that everything else is beautiful.
No, sexy. Perfection in the form of a human woman standing right in front of me. Warmth spreads through me, sparks of energy making their way to every cell and every fiber of my body. Half of me wants to take her into my arms and kiss her, smooth back the curl from her forehead and touch her warm skin. The rest of me—the man who sees those round breasts and that high, firm ass swaying under the blue dress as pretty as the picture in her room—wants to throw her over my shoulder like a caveman and skip the whole damn fundraiser altogether.
But it’s not exactly becoming for a man to do that to a woman. Or at least that’s what I hear. I’ve spied a few of the romance novels lying around on Cadence’s night stand, and those men are ripping some bodices and throwing caution to the wind. One of the covers even said it was a “bad boy alpha male romance,” whatever the hell that means.
I couldn’t help it. The thought of Cadence reading about that sort of thing has made my cock rise more than once in the darkness of my bedroom across the hall.
And even though the guest house is all fixed up and ready for a woman to take up residence, she says she prefers the blue room, that she likes getting up and finding Eliza at her door. She says it makes her feel less lonely, a little more like she’s back at home in her apartment building. She said that maybe she’ll go out there this week, but she thinks it might be too damn quiet to think.
So many excuses. And she’s skirting around the way she looks at me sometimes, the stare she gives me that makes me want to keep her right here and never let her drive over the mountains into Ruidoso.
That there is a country girl at heart. I swear it. She’s got that look to her, like she could be here forever, wake up happy to eat breakfast with her man and walk out toward the mountains at first light...