"God, you're beautiful," he breathed against her skin. "All silky smooth and soft in just the right places."
Beautiful she wasn't. Julie knew that. But why disillusion the man by pointing out her many blemishes? Speaking of which....
She got a leg under her and rolled until she tipped Alex onto his back. Then it was her turn to nip and kiss and otherwise work her way down his long, muscled length. She found what she was looking for on the lower plane of his belly, just above his groin.
"I remembered this," she murmured, dropping a kiss on the small birthmark.
A thought occurred. She raised her head to find Alex regarding her through a screen of gold-tipped lashes.
"Just out of curiosity, does Blake have a matching birthmark?"
His mouth quirked. "Damned if I know."
"Your mother didn't put you both in the tub at the same time when you were kids? You never compared, er, endowments as boys?"
"Sure we did. We just didn't get all that up close and personal in our comparisons. Now if you're finished with your examination … "
He reached for one of the foil packets and tore it open. When he was sheathed, Julie rolled with him again, welcoming him eagerly him into her body.
And into her heart. She had time for that one, fleeting thought as her pulse accelerated. Alex filled her. Rocked with her. Took them both to the edge and back again. She locked her calves around his and rode the wild, surging waves, her mouth and her hand as urgent as his.
She thought she was ready for the climax. Fully expected it to leave her limp. What she didn't expect was that it would arch her back and rip a ragged groan from the back of her throat that seemed to go on forever. She was still riding the crest when Alex gave a low, strangled grunt and thrust into her a final time.
The pizza was cold, the cheese congealed when they finally got around to it several hours later. They'd worked up such an appetite by then, however, that Julie would have downed hers half cold and blobby. But Alex coaxed her out of bed and into her robe. Re-bundled, she sat at the kitchen counter while he put the pizza in the oven and poured them both cold beers.
"This is good," she muttered after downing a big bite of a reheated slice. "Very good."
"We aim to please," he said around his own bite.
Julie couldn't resist. Her eyes dancing, she fed his ego. "You did. Believe me, you did."
When he treated her to a smug grin, her heart tripped.
Uh-oh! She could love this man. Already did, a little. She had no clue what she would do about it, though. Nothing right now, except scarf down pizza and beer and almost mewl with pleasure when he finished his share and started to nibble on her instead.
The rest of the night proved as pleasurable as the first part.
Boneless with pleasure and totally depleted, Julie finally fell asleep in Alex's arms. She barely stirred when he eased out of bed just after dawn the next morning. She did manage to surface for a few groggy moments when he brushed aside her tangled hair to drop a kiss on her nape.
"Call Blake when you're ready to go over those contracts. I'll leave his number by the phone."
She buried her face in the pillow. "Unnngh."
"And don't forget, we're doing dinner tonight at my mother's."
"Double unnngh."
Just moments after she heard the front door close, she was out again.
She met with Blake in his office a little past 9 a.m. He had coffee waiting, thank God, and a draft of the contracts merging Agro-Air into Dalton International's vast conglomerate. If Alex had mentioned to his brother that he and Julie had picked up last night where they'd left off a year ago, Blake gave no sign of it.
"The terms are pretty much as Alex described to you and your partners."
He sat next to her on the hunter-green leather sofa grouped with matching armchairs in one L of his office and spread the contracts on a brass-and-glass coffee table. She caught a whiff of his aftershave, a more subtle scent than Alex's leathery lime. The rest of him was more conservative, too. Pleated charcoal slacks, gleaming black leather belt, button down shirt, Italian tie. The spiffy look went with the framed law degree she'd spotted on the wall behind his desk.
"We're prepared to purchase a used Lane AT-602 that should allow you to double your current business base. We'll also have our engineers look at ways to increase spread capacity."
"Alex has already done that. I met with them yesterday. I have to say I was impressed with what Lisa Wu and her partner have come up with in such a short time."
His mouth tipped in a smile so similar to his brother's that Julie did a double take. The personalities were definitely different but unless they were standing side by side, the physical similarities made it tough keeping them separate and distinct.
"Lisa's a great new hire," Blake agreed. "We snatched her right out from under the nose of Haliburton. Back to the contracts … As noted here, DI will take fifty percent of Agro-Air's profits until we've recouped the cost of the initial aircraft, after which we'll negotiate a profit-share percentage for the purchase of additional aircraft. As for the design and possible manufacture of a new application system, we'll bear the R&D costs. Agro-Air will provide technical input and flight testing. Is that what you and Alex agreed to?"
"Pretty much."
"Good. Why don't you take this copy of the contract with you? We can arrange a formal signing once your partners have had a chance to review and approve the clauses."
Before she made any move to take the papers, she took a final swig of coffee. Carefully, she replaced the cup in its saucer and eased into the issue that had been bugging her since she wrapped several strands of hair around Alex's shirt button.
"Did your brother tell you that I volunteered a DNA sample the first night I got here?"
"He did."
"Well?"
"I appreciate you being up front with us, Julie." His mouth quirked. "But I sure hate to strike you off our list. I was really hoping our search would end with you."
"I know. You're all anxious to ascertain Molly's heritage."
"We are, certainly. But you miss my meaning. I was hoping you specifically were the one."
"Me specifically? Why?"
"You're just what Alex needs. Someone smart, independent, more than able to give as good as she gets."
"Guilty as charged," she said, flattered by his assessment but secretly wishing he'd tacked on a few of the adjectives she would have used to describe the women she'd studied clinging to Alex's arm in the society photographs. Like glamorous. Sultry. Sophisticated.
Then again, Alex had called her beautiful last night. He'd been up to his eyeballs in lust at the time, she reminded herself ruefully. Still …
"Alex indicated I was the last possible on his list. What about you, Blake? Don't you have any viable candidates left on yours?"
"No."
A shadow darkened his eyes, come and gone so quickly she almost missed it.
"You do!" she exclaimed. "You've still got a possible on your list."
He smoothed his palms down his thighs. Slowly. Deliberately.
"C'mon, Blake. Give! Why haven't you gone after her?"
"She's dead, Julie. She died some months before Molly was born."
"Oh. I'm sorry."
"Yeah. Me, too."
He rolled his shoulders as if to dislodge an unwelcome burden and forced a smile. "So you understand why I'm no more eager than Alex to have Mother sharpening her claws again. Molly's distracted her."
"Still, I feel like a fraud for not telling her that I'm out of the baby stakes."
"Good Lord!" A look of acute dismay crossed Blake's face. "If you have an ounce of kindness in your heart, don't! Tell her, I mean. As long as she thinks you're a viable candidate, she'll lay off Alex and me."
"Oh. Right. In the meantime, she continues to consider me several rungs lower than a whore for jumping into bed with your brother and refusing to accept the consequences of my slutty behavior."
He had the grace to look chagrined. "I didn't say Alex and I were clean in all this. If you knew what Delilah's put us through the past few years, though, you wouldn't resent granting us this small period of relative peace."
"I hesitate to state the obvious. But you and Alex are fully grown males well past the age of consent."
"You're right." Laughing, he spread both hands and hunched his shoulders in a gesture of surrender. "I don't know how it was in your family, but I can tell you this. Alex and I learned early on you can only stand up to an F-5 tornado like Mom for so long without getting blown off the planet."
A point Julie kept front and center in her mind when she and Alex arrived at Delilah's place that evening. The ubiquitous Louis answered the door, bowed, and informed them madam was on the upper terrace.
"Upper terrace?" Julie murmured to Alex. "Didn't your mom bill this as a backyard cookout?"
"Well," he said as he escorted her down the hall and through a set of wide double doors, "we're cooking out and this is the backyard."
"Right," she muttered, sweeping her gaze over the landscaped terraces that stair-stepped down to a gorgeously tiled swimming pool adorned with marble statues. "We should all have backyards like this."