“I’ll follow you, so we don’t have to come back here and risk getting pulled into the poker game,” he said, sparing her the need to figure out what to say.
She dared a look at him. “You don’t—”
“I do,” he said, his jaw set the way it had been in the kitchen. Strong. Determined. Two words that often defined Caleb.
Shay tugged her keys from her purse. “Stubborn,” she added out loud. Another word that often defined Caleb. “You’ve always been stubborn.”
“Determined,” he corrected, a slight lift to his mouth.
Shay turned away, afraid he’d notice she was looking at his lips. His full, sexy lips. Why did she keep looking at his lips? Because he kissed you, Shay, and you want him to kiss you again.
Shay paused at the side of her silver BMW and unlocked the door. The car had been a splurge the year before when her stockbroker fiancé had broken up with her. He’d said she wanted to love him but didn’t. After a few weeks of introspection, she’d known he was right. He’d been more buddy than lover. Comfortable. Safe. And not Caleb, though she barely allowed herself to think such a thing.
Nevertheless, the engagement had ended and Shay had bought herself a replacement for love and happiness—the car. Because she’d worked hard and she could survive—all by herself.
Deep in thought, Shay reached for the door handle when suddenly Caleb’s hand was there. She’d not heard him approach, or maybe he’d been by her side the whole time. Electricity shot up her arm, and Shay reacted, yanking her arm back.
If he noticed her rapid withdrawal, Caleb didn’t react. He opened the door and waved her forward. A gentleman. Nerves subsided ever so slightly as a memory of Caleb repeating his father’s words on many occasions skirted through her mind. “Soldiers are men of honor. They know good manners. Until you piss them off. Then they have none, so—”
“Don’t piss me off,” he finished for her with a grin. “That was my father. He didn’t say a lot, but when he did, he was a straight shooter every time.”
“Kind of like you,” she said appreciatively. “A nice change from Kent’s loud mouth. But I guess that’s why he does so well in sales. He’s always talking.”
They both smiled, and the charge in the air thickened into silence. Shay contemplated about ten things she could say to him, but as she raced through ways to turn them into sentences, nothing cohesive came to mind. Nothing overly coherent, for that matter. There was just her, Caleb and a kiss in the pantry.
“I know,” he said, as if one of the ten things had come out of her mouth when it had not. “We’ll talk. Let’s take care of your patient first.”
Silent understanding settled between them, and she nodded, but nerves fluttered in her chest again. Their game of tug-of-war had worked until now—one saying yes while the other said no. But Shay was really hungering for yes. If they were alone together, she feared she’d be weak, that she’d forget the potential fallout of an intimate connection between them. She’d most definitely kiss him again. And again. And, oh, yes, again.
Shay hurried into the car before she kissed him then.
6
CALEB FOLLOWED Shay to her office building, a white brick structure in the trendy Arboretum area of northwest Austin, surrounded by weeping willows and rows of perfectly manicured bushes. And as if all the privacy the greenery provided wasn’t enough of a safety concern, Shay had ignored the parking lot and headed into a garage beneath the building. Pulling his truck to a halt beside her car, Caleb took one look at the dark, vacant parking garage and shoved open his door with a mumbled curse. He stalked toward Shay as she exited her car.
“This is what you call safe?” he demanded. “What this is…is a perfect setup for someone to attack you. You could scream, and no one would hear you.”
“Good,” she said, slamming her door shut. “What were you thinking, kissing me like that in Mom and Dad’s pantry? What if someone would have seen us?” He was a few inches away, and she shoved at his chest. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”
He gently snatched her hand. “Kiss you or kiss you in the pantry?”
Bypassing a direct answer, she continued her rant—and damn, he’d missed her rants. “You can’t just decide to kiss me when you want to kiss me, after ten years of making me feel like crap for kissing you in the first place.”
“I’d like to think kissing me made you feel something other than ‘like crap.’ And for the record, I only did what you suggested. You said you kept thinking we should kiss again and get rid of temptation. And I decided that all the thinking and not doing was what always got us in trouble.” He tugged her closer, slid an arm around her waist. “And you didn’t kiss me ten years ago. We kissed each other.”
“I started it,” she said, swallowing against the raspy tone he noted in her voice.
“And I wanted it,” he promised her.
“But you never would have kissed me on your own.”
“Never is a long time for two people who want each other the way we want each other. We would have ended up here eventually, Shay, even without that first kiss.” His hand slid up her back, and he pressed her closer. He lowered his head, slowly bringing his mouth near hers. “There was enough electricity jumping off us today at that party to light up Texas. I spent every second after Kent interrupted us thinking about the forbidden kiss that would have happened had he not shown up. If we don’t do something about what’s between us, someone is going to notice—if they haven’t already.”
“We did do something about it,” she said, her breath warm on his lips. “We kissed and it solved nothing.”
“One kiss isn’t a lot of comfort after ten years of anticipation,” he said, his lips close to hers. He could almost taste her now. “Maybe we need to kiss again.”
She leaned into him and then suddenly pulled back. “Stop. No.” Abruptly, she pushed away from him. “We need to talk. You said we’d talk, and I’m holding you to it. And not when I have a client about to show up. I have to be focused on my patient…not on kissing you, Caleb.”
“All right then,” he said softly, his fingers curling into his palms as he resisted the urge to reach for her again. Now that he had touched her, he wanted to touch her again. Just as he wanted to kiss her again, to tear away the barriers and her clothes, so there was only the passion. It had to be. It would be. “But it’s time we deal with this, Shay.”
Her eyes went wide. “Deal with this? Gee, Caleb. You really know how to steal a girl’s heart.” She paled instantly. “Not that I mean—” She flung her hands in the air. “We need to go upstairs before my patient arrives. You’ll scare the crap out of him, too.” She turned on her heels and stomped away.
Caleb ran a hand over his jaw, the light shadow of a new beard rough against his hand. He considered himself a fairly sensitive guy, the front man for missions that had required diplomacy, but it seemed, with Shay, he had a knack for opening his mouth and inserting his foot. Ah, well. Hell, at least that gave him an excuse to keep his mouth occupied in other ways.