The Brothers Rule - Carolyn Faulkner Page 0,3

and pregnant and in the kitchen, preferably.

But she had to admit that she liked it when a guy opened her car door for her, held out her chair, and even stood by to let her enter a room first.

And the three men she was dating even stood up when she came into a room! It was unreal to be treated that way nowadays—with a certain unspoken respect that they all seemed to have, simply because she was a woman.

Jace—Jason, but he'd told her that everyone called him Jace—was probably the most overtly old fashioned, but again, it wasn't in the least stifling, and she'd never gotten the idea from him that he thought of women as lesser beings in any way.

He'd said his last name, too, but it was a crowded room and she hadn't really gotten it and didn't much care. She thought it was something like Rule but couldn't be absolutely sure.

He had surprised her, though, in that he had quite forthrightly asked her out at a party one of her friends was throwing. She'd thought he might be gay, because he had been garnering a lot of attention from the women who were there—some of whom she knew—and yet he had steadfastly turned all of them down.

And she was already dating two guys, which was, well, frankly, two more than she was used to dating. Adding a third—especially an extremely potent man, such as Jace—was going to be dicey, but she figured she ought to try juggling multiple men once in her life. It wasn't likely to happen again that so many men at one time found her attractive.

And, although she got the idea—while they were talking during their dinner together a few nights later at a very good steakhouse—he was somewhat unbending in his beliefs, they weren't dissimilar from the core of her own.

He was just annoyingly better at sticking to them, she realized.

Because of that impression, she'd been very surprised when he'd asked to take her to bed once they got back to his car, in which he had kissed her into a state of desire she had rarely attained before—at least, not that quickly, and not with a man she didn't know reasonably well. But his undeniable kissing skills had made her much more susceptible to that suggestion.

Laurie leaned back a bit, within arms that seemed very reluctant to allow her to get very far away from him, especially now that he'd posed that very powerful question.

"Well," she said, tucking her hair behind her ear in a nervous gesture that at least he wouldn't recognize as such, "I, frankly, I don't usually do that on a first date."

"It might surprise you to know that I don't usually, either. But I'm very attracted to you, and I had to ask."

He was smart and could be very persuasive when he wanted to be, she'd seen already in their conversation, and that confession, which she didn't doubt in the least, was quite persuasive in itself. To say nothing of the fact that he was a big guy. He could have done a lot of different things to try to change her mind, as most men probably would have. But he didn't.

Instead, he had hugged her tightly, kissed her gently, right behind her ear—making her shiver violently—then he withdrew, saying, "I understand completely." Then he asked, "Would you like to go out tomorrow night? There's a concert in the park in Daviston that's always good. We could bring a picnic—"

He never got to finish that sentence because she kissed him then, pressing herself up against him.

When she drew back, Laurie whispered a little tentatively, "Would you like to be the exception?"

He didn't smile triumphantly or anything like that, as she'd somehow known he wouldn't. He didn't seem like the type of man to crow about his successes. He took them quietly in stride.

Instead, he pulled her even more tightly to him, saying, "I don't want to be the exception. I want to be the rule, but—for the moment—I'll take what I can get."

The play on his last name had made her want to smile, but he was busy making her want to groan, so that won out. It also overwhelmed her fleeting thought about the familiarity of his last name, but that was gone almost instantaneously, too—never to be heard from again—as he buried his fingers in her hair and slanted his mouth over hers.

But now, he was calling her to set up their third date, and it