Priceless(21)
“What?” she asked, her voice surprisingly shaky.
“That your weak spot is chocolate.”
“That’s one of them,” Beth agreed, since there seemed little point in denying the obvious, not when she’d just caved and renounced several of her scruples to get a soufflé for dessert.
Mack lifted his glass of water. “To discovering the rest,” he said, his tone soft and his gaze serious.
Beth returned his gaze and tried not to notice that her heart and her stomach were turning cartwheels. Sweet heaven, was there any female on the face of the earth who could remain immune to this man once he set out to be charming? She certainly prayed she’d turn out to be one of the rare ones, but right at this moment she didn’t give herself a chance in hell.
Chapter Five
Mack had absolutely no idea how his evening had taken such an unexpected shift the night before. One minute he’d been looking forward to his date with a woman who undoubtedly would never speak to him again now. The next minute he’d been irresistibly drawn to Beth’s office just for the simple pleasure of stealing a kiss. It didn’t make a lick of sense.
Something about her revelation that she’d hardly dated as a teenager had stirred some kind of purely male reaction in him. If he hadn’t known himself better, he might have thought it was some sort of weird attraction to the virginal nature of the admission, which was ridiculous. Not only had Beth not said anything at all about still being innocent, he definitely preferred women who knew the score.
But that hadn’t stopped him from hightailing it after her like some sort of overheated jerk intent on making a conquest. He was damn lucky she hadn’t guessed all of the undercurrents behind that kiss and leveled him with some sort of sedative, the way a vet took care of an unruly animal.
Okay, he thought as he unintentionally snapped a pencil in two, that explained the kiss. The assessment wasn’t pretty, nor did it speak well of him, but it was honest. It did not, however, give him a clue about what had happened during and after the kiss.
The woman had made his supposedly rehabilitated knees weak. When in hell was the last time that had happened? Maybe never. He never lost control of a situation the way he had last night. From the minute his lips had touched Beth’s, he’d been transported to some other dimension, a place where he wanted to take risks and give pleasure, not in some casual, meaningless way, but something real and lasting.
Which was absurd. Totally and utterly absurd, he decided as another pencil broke in two in his grip. He stared at the little pile of wood and lead and concluded he needed to get out of his office and away from all this unfamiliar introspection before it led him down a dangerous path or at least before he destroyed most of his office supplies. Wasn’t he the one who was always going on and on around here about wasting everything from bandages to paper clips?
Outside and in his car, a recently developed habit made him turn in the direction of the hospital, but he overrode the instinct and headed instead to Virginia. He hadn’t been out to Ben’s farm in a while. Being around his artistic brother was usually soothing. Ben was an accepting guy. He took people as they came. He didn’t ask a lot of probing questions, especially since his own life was such a mess. Nor was he the least bit inclined to meddle. Yep, visiting Ben was definitely a good choice. Mack would be able to chill out for a couple of hours and forget all about that disconcerting encounter with Beth.
As Mack approached the farm, the rolling Virginia countryside slowly began to work its magic. Mack found himself unwinding and understanding for the first time what had drawn Ben out here after the tragedy that had shaken him to his core. It was hard to feel anything here except for an appreciation of nature’s beauty in the distant purple haze of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the soft green of the grass, the canopy of towering oaks and the majestic stature of the horses grazing behind pristine white fences.
Because Ben was always hungry, rarely paused to eat and never stocked his refrigerator with any decent junk food, Mack stopped at a coffee shop in town and picked up sandwiches, sodas and chips to take along as a peace offering for interrupting his brother’s work. He grabbed a few freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies while he was at it. Those would go a long way in diverting Ben’s attention away from the reason for Mack’s unexpected visit.
By the time he finally reached the gate to his brother’s place, Mack had pushed aside all thoughts of his own tumultuous emotions, if not the image of Beth herself.
Mack parked in the shade of an oak tree and headed directly to Ben’s studio in the converted old red barn. No one responded to his knock, but that was fairly common. Ben wouldn’t hear a herd of Black Angus cattle approaching if he was absorbed in one of his paintings.