Too Close for Comfort

Excerpt

Keep this all business.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she said, tilting her head toward the vine-laden tree. “Looks like I need your help. Those blossoms are too high for me to reach, and I would like to make sure that I have enough to examine so that I can do a thorough preliminary report for my uncle.”

“Ah,” he said as he lowered the camera. “So, you do need me.”

She let the comment pass as she seized a sample bag from her pack and led him toward the tree. They stood, heads tilted back, watching a wasp meander from one blossom to another. Trevor raised an arm and stretched upward, but the blossoms hung just above his reach.

“You’ll have to climb on my shoulders,” he said, discarding the camera atop the pack at his feet. Then he dropped to his knees, with his back to her.

She blinked at the top of his bowed head. He obviously expected her to just climb right on.

“Uh, Trevor,” she said, crushing an empty plastic bag in her hand. I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“What? Are you afraid of heights?”

“No.” She didn’t feel like spreading her thighs and resting her bottom behind his head. “I’ll be too heavy for you.”

“What do you—never mind. I’ve stuck my foot in my mouth enough as it is.” He twisted around, sized her up with a lazy, roaming eye. “I can hold you, Kass. Climb on.”

He turned back around and bowed his head again. She took a deep breath. If she was ever going to get those flowers, she supposed she didn’t have a choice. While this was just a hobby for her, these flowers could prove to be beneficial for her uncle and his research. So short of heading back home and hiking back here with a step stool or ladder this was her only choice. Not only would she kill time doing so, the action would make her look very foolish.

Her decision made, she swung one leg over his shoulders. He slapped his palm around her calf. She braced her fingers on his shoulder between his neck and her thigh, then swung her other leg over. Her shorts slid up; his hair tickled the inside of her thighs. Then he tightened his grip on her leg and made a lumbering lurch upward. Her feet left the ground. He leaned forward. She slid forward until her crotch bumped against the back of his head. Then he rose high, hiking her up with him, lifting her up into the boughs of the tree and their twines of fragrant blossoms.

For a moment she just braced herself in the shadow of the tree branches, drunk with the scent of the blossoms, dizzy with the height and feel of his firm hands on the bare skin of her legs, dizzy with the crush of his head against her stomach and the heat of his breath along the inside of her thighs, shaking with the sensation of being off-balance, out of control of her own body in this high, fragrant place.

His voice sounded strained. “Can you reach it now?”

“Yes, I can,” she said.

Back to the task at hand, Kassady.

She lifted one hand off his head and un-crumpled the bag. Peeling her other hand off his head, she tightened her thighs and started picking. “Stay still for a few minutes,” she said hoarsely, “and I’ll be done here as soon as I can.”

“Relax, Kass.” He stroked her legs, massaged her tight thighs. “You’re choking me.”

“Sorry.”

She tried to loosen up. But her skin still tingled where his hands had touched her. And if she eased the tension in her thighs too much, her buttocks sank down deep into his shoulders. She felt, too keenly, the shape of his head between her legs, the surprising silkiness of his hair.

“So,” he said, flexing his grip, “how did you get so interested in flowers? You don’t strike me as the country sort of gardening girl.”

“I’m not.” She pulled the nearest blossoms off and stuffed them in the bag. “I grew up in Santa Monica.”

“Santa Monica, California?”

“Move up a little,” she said. “There are more closer to the trunk.”

“Very interesting,” he said as he stepped forward. “I never imagined you to be a Cali girl.”

“I’m not sure if that is a compliment or an insult.”

She stuffed more blossoms into the bag, ducking her head to dodge an angry wasp. “I’m finished,” she announced, sealing the bag with a quick swipe of her fingers. She looked through the plastic at the stuffed bruised blossoms and frowned. It would have to do. It would be a preliminary analysis, nothing more. She could bring a ladder or a step stool next time. But she had to get off this man’s shoulders, now. “You can let me down.”

“That was quick.”

“I don’t need much.” She sank along with him, watching the ground as it rose to meet her, felt it hard and stable beneath her hiking boots. She braced her feet on the solid ground. He unlocked his head from the vee of her thighs, lowered his chin and swept his head out behind her, rasping the tender skin of her inner thighs, scraping the full sweep of her crotch. As she stumbled at the loss of his steadying influence, he rose up behind her and grasped her arms.

“Steady, Kass.”

He drew her back against his chest. Forcing her spine straight, forcing her head into the nook between his shoulder and his jaw. She breathed heavily, felt her chest heave with each exhale, felt the heaviness of her breasts in the silk cups of her bra. Her button-down shirt gaped; she sensed his gaze sweeping downward, burning a trail through the thing material to the pucker of her nipple.

“So, Cali girl,” he said against her hair, “if you like the city life so much, what are you doing here in the woods of Colorado?”

“What’s with all the questions, Trevor?”

“Just making conversation.”

Frustration and guilt rushed through her, adding to the massive web of tangled emotions. She was doing it again—being cold and prickly to someone who’d taken the time to help her out, who was trying to make up for past mistakes. She had to get a handle on this, to get a handle on him. She shook herself free, turned and faced him—and immediately wished she hadn’t. It was hard enough to concentrate without all six feet or so of him so close to her, a big lumbering hunk of breathing, sweaty man in the warmth of a hot summer morning.

He deserved an answer, he was waiting for one, and standing here, she couldn’t think of a legitimate reason not to tell him the truth.

“I suppose,” she began somewhat reluctantly, “that it started with my grandfather.”

“Ah.”

“He had this great big plot of land in Texas, half of it cultivated, half left to grow wild,” she explained. “He was an amateur herbalist and knew the name of every plant on his property.”

“As brainy as his granddaughter,” Trevor murmured. “You spent a lot of time there, then?”

“Not at all,” she responded. “My mother would have never allowed that. I had school. I had…lessons.”

Dance lesson. Etiquette lessons. Piano lessons.

“I spent many of my summer’s there, that’s all.”

The best summers of her life, she remembered. Not a scheduled activity for almost three months. Not a single textbook that had to be read, not a single concerto that had to be memorized. Long days bright and full of discovery by her grandfather and uncle’s side as she plucked samples for the house. Sage, thyme, rosemary, Saint-John’s wort and so many others, fragrant, mysterious and full of magic. She, her Grandpa and her uncle—when he could join them—would spend hours meandering over the property, watching a seed go from sprig to flower to fruit. Quiet, slow hours that seemed to stretch on forever.

That perhaps, was the greatest gift Grandpa and her uncle had given her; the memory of all those sweet, shared uncluttered hours. The feeling that she—tall curvaceous, big brained Kassady—had been important enough in someone’s life to merit the deep-focused expenditures of a commodity as precious as time.

“What are you thinking about?”

She glanced up at him and took a sharp, painful breath. He’d spoken in a low voice, deep and resonant, and he stood just by her side. Big. Big and breathing, warm and all male.

“Tell me,” he urged, “what you were just thinking of.”

“Why?”

“Your entire facial expression changed.” He traced his finger down her cheek. “You went soft, Kass. Like you were thinking of a lover.”

She sucked in a deep breath of surprise. His hand was gritty against her cheek. Then laid his hand against her jaw, a warm pressure. The world beyond him spun on a kaleidoscope of color and light.

A lover.

She knew nothing of lovers, nothing of passion, nothing of the crazed mindlessness that overcame a sane woman when she was in love. Though she’d seen it happen to her friends over the years. Such a strange phenomenon, she’d thought each time she witnessed that distinct intensity. Such a waste of energy and time, lolling about gazing into a lover’s eyes. What did they see? She’d never seen it in Lance’s eyes, dear, sweet, kind Lance, who had left her with such biting words.

Trevor’s eyes were deep, intensely gray, a shade she couldn’t recall seeing before now. Deep and full of shifting currents, strange messages, strange emotions, strange meaning—curiosity and concern and something far darker, far more needy, far more intense.

The pressure of his hand on her jaw intensified, and she felt another pressure, deep inside her, a coiling, heated sensation in the hollow of her abdomen. A fierce and sudden hungry taste in her mouth for things she’d not known in years—the touch of hot flesh, the taste of a man’s sweat, the desire of sex.

The need was deep, visceral and sent shock waves right down to her hiking boots. “My grandfather,” she said swiftly, trying to regain control of herself. “I was thinking of my grandfather. We had many good years together before he died.”

Trevor didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. She could see the reflection of her own quivering response in his gaze. He made no attempt to move back and break the invisible vines that held them to the spot. His grip tightened suddenly on her jaw. “Hell, Kass. This was going to happen sooner or later.”

Then he crushed her mouth with his lips.