Mother, Please! - By Brenda Novak & Jill Shalvis & Alison Kent Page 0,73

already having put the last few minutes behind her. “And I was wondering if we could come up on Saturday evening for dinner at your place?”

“Dinner?” After a morning of witnessed kisses and confessions, her mother was making weekend plans for dinner?

Suzannah’s expression was hopeful and also a bit mischievous. Even challenging. “We were talking about our children this morning, and I would like very much for the two of you to meet. David, you come, too. We’ll play cards and have a relaxing evening.”

Avery looked from one to the other, thinking it would be a miracle if she ever had a nice, relaxing evening again.

CHAPTER FOUR

LEANING CLOSE to the oval mirror hanging over her bathroom’s pedestal sink, Avery applied a light pink gloss to her lips, the shade a match to the summery frost with which she’d painted her nails earlier.

Painting her nails, of course, had brought to mind David’s touch. Shivering, she curled her toes in her purple leather slides. Two days later, Monday morning now, and the feel of the thumb he’d rubbed over her blue polish was as real as that of his mouth pressed to hers, as that of the imprint his fingertips left on her shoulder.

She needed to shake this obsession that had intensified a thousandfold in the past forty-eight hours. It had to be unhealthy the way he seemed to be so much on her mind. She’d spent too many stolen moments over the past fifteen years allowing her thoughts to drift in his direction.

It had to stop here and stop now.

No, she hadn’t put her life on hold waiting to hear from him or wondering about what might have been and what had happened to him. That would have been even more absurd than thinking of him in the first place as often as she had.

In fact, until he’d walked back into her life, she still pictured him as the freckled and gangly teen he’d once been.

That image had been erased in one long breathtaking moment the day he’d followed her mother up the staircase to where Avery had been standing on the second-floor landing, trying to fit her key into her front-door lock.

She’d known, of course, that her mother was showing the empty third-floor space to a new tenant, but when she’d looked down to see broad male shoulders taking up most of the narrow staircase’s width, she’d reacted the way single women did to gorgeous men—she’d checked for a wedding band and then she’d moved her gaze to his.

It was a strange thing, the familiarity she’d felt, looking into eyes that searched out hers with the same curiosity—though a curiosity more intense. After all, David had been well aware of who she was. She’d been the one at a disadvantage.

And then he’d smiled.

That moment, that smile, had defined the past ten months of unrest she’d been living—just as that moment beneath the bleachers had impacted her life. She’d wondered so often what sort of boy David Marks had really been that he would take on Johnny Boyd for her? Why had she never taken the time to know him? She’d been so self-involved, so shallow, that’s why.

She slipped the pot of lip gloss down into her bag and chose a small compact of smoky-mauve eye shadow, her stomach tightly knotted with old guilt but also with a new anticipation brought by Saturday’s kiss. And, oh, what a kiss.

She couldn’t remember any man’s mouth ever sweeping her away as David’s had. Sure, she’d dated, had relationships, come close once to an engagement until realizing that something didn’t click quite right.

Not the way she and David had clicked there in her mother’s kitchen.

The fact that she was putting on more than her usual mascara and blush, that she was wearing lacy rather than practical panties, that she was timing her departure for work to coincide with his, tempting fate and that very narrow staircase…those were the most obvious pieces of evidence that she was skating on thin ice here by focusing on that kiss. She had no way of knowing if taking this risk—God, but she hated risk—would result in another disaster.

The fantasies she’d had of taking their kiss further, of unbuttoning David’s shirt and slipping it from his shoulders, of moving her fingers to his belt buckle, the button fly of his jeans, of what might have happened had her mother not interrupted….

She hadn’t yet shaken the feel of his bare skin, the resilience of flesh and muscle on his back,