Mother, Please! - By Brenda Novak & Jill Shalvis & Alison Kent Page 0,80
off from the doors they’d only recently opened. He didn’t want to see her shut down when minutes before she’d been ready to give him his dream.
Instead, he went after his salad with a vengeance until the tines of his fork wouldn’t hold another lettuce shred and more than likely wouldn’t fit in his mouth. “You’re afraid I’m going to throw you across the table, is that it?”
She said nothing, and he thought for a moment that walking away and leaving her to her salad and her King Ranch Chicken would be the smartest thing to do. He was getting close to taking things too personally when this dinner was simply a date with no promises made. He shouldn’t be having this much trouble remembering that.
Her continuing silence, however, finally drew his gaze from his bowl to her face. And the purely prurient grin lifting the corners of her mouth hit him like a fist to the solar plexus. It was a full ten seconds before he could breathe.
“No, David.” She leaned forward, both wrists now resting on the table’s edge, her blue eyes uncannily bright, the tone of her voice suggestive. “I’m afraid I’ll be the one to throw you across the table.”
He dropped his fork against the edge of his bowl. Avery’s lashes drifted down to hide her eyes, her voice going soft as she said, “I know. I’ve avoided you for ten months and now I want you to take me to bed. What an about-face, huh?”
Oh, yeah. A big one he wouldn’t have seen coming had he been looking through the Hubble. And here he’d been determined to take things slow, not wanting to lose the ground that had taken him so long to gain.
He sat back in his chair and considered his dinner partner intently. “Well…I’m not about to complain.”
“God, it’s so hard to talk about.” She laughed as she shoved her hair from her face. It fell back in big blond waves he wanted to feel sweep over his skin. “It’s as if since my mother brought us together Saturday morning, nothing about my life has been the same.”
He watched as she picked up her fork and toyed with her salad, finally taking a bite as if eating would keep her from having to speak. He followed her lead, pushing cucumbers here, tomatoes there, not the least bit surprised to find his appetite for the food long gone.
Finally he reached for his wine. “Strange how one moment in a lifetime can change everything, isn’t it?”
Her expression grew solemn. “That’s what happened to you, isn’t it? It was that night beneath the bleachers.”
He nodded, because he couldn’t deny his actions had started the chain of events that had brought them full circle. It wasn’t something he’d ever planned to get into with her, but now that she’d brought up the subject he wasn’t going to avoid the truth of their connection.
The oven’s timer buzzed, and Avery pushed back from the table, appearing relieved to have the interruption. She set the casserole dish bubbling with cheese, green chilies, corn tortillas and chicken on the table. The smells set his stomach to rumbling, yet he didn’t move a muscle. He simply waited for Avery to make up her mind.
He saw her indecision in the way she took too long turning off the oven and pulling the hot mitts from her hands, the way she was slow to grab the wine bottle off the countertop and refill both glasses. By the time she returned to the table, David’s gut was tied in knots—knots that tightened and throbbed and tangled beyond repair when she picked up her place setting and moved to sit in the chair at his side.
For a long, tense moment, neither of them said a word. David sat with his shoulders back, his hands gripping the railings that joined the top of his chair to the seat. Avery spread her napkin in her lap, smoothing it out repeatedly until not a wrinkle remained.
He listened to her shallow in-and-out breaths and shifted to face her. He watched the throb of her pulse in the soft hollow of her throat, longed to place his lips to the spot and feel the heavy beat. Suppressing a groan, he released his grip on the chair back and flexed his fingers. This evening was going to become a big fat disaster if they couldn’t deal with the heat of this simmering tension.