Mother, Please! - By Brenda Novak & Jill Shalvis & Alison Kent Page 0,74

the strength he so easily checked as he touched her gently, reverently, as if he was the one who’d been nervous. David Marks, nervous. She couldn’t even imagine.

Shivering, she fluffed at her blown-dry and bouncy blond layers that she usually wore pulled back in a scrunchie. See? She was primping and preening when she had no guarantee of seeing him and no business making herself up for a man in the first place. She was setting the women’s movement back decades, dressing for a man instead of for comfort and practicality.

She glanced at her watch. Ack! She was out of time and probably too late as it was. He left for school at seven, and it was already three minutes after. She quickly finished her eye shadow, having decided to add it at the last minute after applying her mascara. It would serve her right for her vanity to ruin her seduction.

Seduction? Funny! She stopped, frowned, then shook off the ridiculous thought and returned the rest of her makeup to her bag. If anything, she was engaged in a harmless flirtation. A simple testing of the waters that had been swirling around her ankles now for months. Or that’s what she would have been doing had she been more on the ball here this morning.

As it was, when she finally pulled open her door, it was to the sound of the triplex’s shared entrance closing downstairs. Well, crap. She was obviously more out of practice flirting than she’d realized. So much for the best-laid, last-minute plans, she thought with a sigh, turning her lock and closing the door behind her.

She’d only just headed toward the staircase when she heard the door at the foot of the stairs open. She paused on the edge of the landing, looking down as David walked inside and glanced up. Her stomach’s resident butterflies fluttered their wings wildly at the smile spreading over his face.

One hand on the staircase railing, she took her first step down. “Forget something?”

He nodded, climbed two steps toward her. “I heard your door.”

The butterflies were joined by dozens of hummingbirds.

“You came back because you heard my door?”

Another step up, another nod. “I wanted to test my new staircase theory.”

She forced her feet to move, managing to descend two whole steps. Her chest tightened. Her throat ached with her effort to speak. “What theory would that be?”

“It’s pretty simple, really.” One step, two steps, three steps, four. His eyes glittered and he stopped. He stood almost at eye level now. Only one lonely step remained untaken. “Now that there’s not so much baggage in the way, I thought we might want to test out how narrow this staircase really is.”

She pulled in a deep breath. “That baggage has weighed me down for a very long time, you know.”

He nodded. “I know.”

“I just wanted to be sure that you did. That you didn’t think I’d forgotten anything that happened.” A shiver coiled sharply at the base of her spine; her fingers trembled and she tightened her grip on the railing. “That I’d blown it off as if it were nothing.”

His expression softened as he studied her, his hands shoved into his navy Dockers front pockets. She watched him flex his hands, wondering if he wanted to reach for her because she so wished he would. “I never thought you blew off anything, Avery. You’re not that type.”

Curious that he thought he knew her, she mused, tilting her head to one side. “What type am I?”

He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly. His knee shook as if he wanted more than anything to move up that one last remaining step. But he stayed where he was. “Do you remember when we played that football game in Alpine? Our senior year?”

She smiled. “And it was, like, ten degrees?”

“More like twenty,” he said with a laugh. “But, yeah. It was cold. And afterward everyone was on the bus ready to go and yelling at me to hurry up?”

“But your zipper was stuck and you could only get halfway out of your costume.” She hadn’t thought of that night for years.

“Pretty damn humiliating, I gotta say.” The corner of his mouth quirked enough for his dimples to appear. “But you got off the bus and came around behind me to—”

She interrupted him with a laugh. “I almost smacked you because you wouldn’t stand still. It was like trying to help a dog who wouldn’t stop chasing its tail.”

“You were so close,” he said, his face coloring slightly. “I