Once Upon a Rose(31)

She liked it.

Of course, she liked the scowl, too. It made her want to poke him and pet him and see how easy it would be to make that scowl disappear.

Men with hot bodies had it so easy where women were concerned, she thought with a sigh of despair at herself. They could get away with just about anything as long as they flexed their muscles from time to time. She’d burned herself on a couple of hook-ups like that before, post performance at a festival, when everyone who had been on stage was feeling kind of high with the glory of it, all wide open from having poured their hearts out to the crowd. But then you woke up in the morning wondering what the hell you had done, and why you had been so careless with your own heart. The music circuit was a small world, and you ran into those guys again, and saw them hooking up with some other high-on-performance woman, and…yeah, it felt crappy.

In other words, if starting something with him was her subconscious way of avoiding working on that album, it was a really bad idea. Oddly, though, she didn’t feel as if she was avoiding the album. She actually kind of wanted to sit down and play with bass notes all evening. Drift some silken sweet sounds over them like a fall of petals. Let the breeze from the pines blow through. See what happened to them when night fell…

Matt glanced down at her as he headed out of the kitchen with his toolkit, his step slowing as if he might just stop and not leave. But he kept going. Outside the house, he set the toolkit down and turned to face her in the doorway.

“You still have the key,” she said.

He braced his hands on the doorjamb, on either side of her above her head. That moved him into her space—caging her in with his size, and all his body wide open to her. But of course, she could always take one step back and shut the door. “It’s in my back pocket,” he said. That little smile as he held her eyes, and that deep, deep voice. God, a smile was a gorgeous look on him. She wanted to play with it, run her fingers over it, nurture it. “And I think my hands are dirty.”

His jeans looked as if they’d been through a lot more than dirty hands. And, anyway, he’d just wiped his hands off so carefully she’d been sure he was about to touch her with them. But now they gripped the doorjamb above her, not touching her at all.

Meaning she would have to touch him, if she wanted any touching to occur.

His back pocket. Her palm itched to slide over the curve of that taut butt. “If I—if I got it out, what would you do?”

The biceps to either side of her face grew more pronounced. He gazed down at her, eyes not grumpy at all, oddly quiet. Intent. “What would you want me to do?” His voice didn’t boom. It slid over her, textured, strong and rich, entirely reassuring.

“N—nothing,” she admitted. Well, that was kind of what she wanted. With, like, the only two neurons that seemed to be functioning in her brain right now, that was what she wanted. The other two hundred billion seemed to want something entirely different.

Evidently a big, hot body that smelled of roses short-circuited all synapses.

His low, deep voice rubbed over her. “Well, I guess I’m going to do nothing, then.”

Oh, really? Would you really do that for me? Hold all that big, aggressive need to do still for me?

He tightened his hands on the doorjamb. “I told you, it’s not that easy to do.”

But he waited, quite still except for the flexing of his arm muscles.

She slid her hand into his back pocket slow, slow, slow, afraid of what she was doing but tantalized by it, too, by that firm curve, by the warmth and snugness of the pocket, by the arms framing her that hardened and didn’t move. By his eyes watching her. Intent and pushing his will on her, as if he knew exactly what he wanted to do to her, but with maybe this hint of caution, too, as if he wasn’t quite sure what she might do to him.

She came out with the key, iron and warm, but she didn’t step back into the house with it and shut the door. She stared up at him, liking her little space inside the cage of his body so much she could have stayed there for an hour, with that warmth so carefully not touching her.

He took a deep breath and sighed it out. “I promised to do nothing, didn’t I?”

She nodded mutely.

Another huff of a breath, and he shoved himself away from the doorjamb and her. “Well, that was a lot harder than I expected.”

He picked up his toolkit and studied her another long moment, as if she was really hard to figure out. “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced yet,” he said slowly and held out his hand. “I’m Matthieu Rosier.”

Her hand disappeared into his, slim and strong but engulfed by his strength and size. “Layla Dubois.”