Star Witness - By Mallory Kane Page 0,52

she didn’t even want to think what her granddad would say if he knew. She moaned silently.

“Dani?”

Harte’s soft voice startled her. Her eyes flew open and met his dark gaze.

“Hey,” he said, smiling. “I guess you were asleep. I thought you said something.”

Dani lifted her head from his shoulder and scooted backward, holding the hoodie in place over her breasts and thighs.

He leaned up on one elbow.

“No, no,” she said. “I didn’t say anything.” She wanted to sit up, to take some sort of control, at least of her body’s position, but the hoodie wasn’t big enough to cover everything she wanted covered. Any move she made would expose something.

“So I did wake you,” he said. “Sorry.”

She kept shaking her head. “You didn’t wake me at all. No. I was awake already. I didn’t go to sleep. I was just—” She stopped, clamping her jaw. She was babbling. “I need to—get dressed.

Harte held her gaze for a beat as something shadowed behind his eyes, and then he nodded. “Sure. Give me a second.” He rolled away and sat up with his back to her, straightening and tying the drawstring waist of his scrub pants.

Without turning around he said, “I’m going to take a look around. See how much more damage the storm has done. See if anyone’s moving around outside.”

Dani’s face burned like fire as she looked around for the panties she’d forgotten to put on earlier. She’d let him take all her clothes off, strip her naked. And he’d never even dropped his pants, just opened them. Like a quickie. She grimaced and her hot face got even hotter.

To him, she’d been a quickie. Mortified, her cheeks burning and her eyes stinging, she glanced over to be sure he wasn’t looking, then pulled on the panties and grabbed the scrub pants. She held the hoodie against her breasts as she took off in the direction of the storeroom.

Harte shook his head as he heard her padding quickly toward the back of the store. He’d never claimed to understand women. The things they did never ceased to befuddle him.

Sex with Dani had been better than he could have imagined. Her body was exquisite. Sleek and smooth, enticingly curvy where a woman should be. He’d been entranced with the mix of eagerness and shyness she’d displayed. Then there was their lightning-fast, nearly simultaneous climax. Her immediate, sensual response had surprised him.

His own hair-trigger climax had blown his mind.

Both of them had collapsed afterward, drained. He’d felt sapped, and had basked in the afterglow with Dani’s soft hair against his shoulder and chest as her soft breaths echoed in his ear. He’d thought she was basking too. But despite her seeming boneless as she’d collapsed against him when he’d pulled her close and rested her head on his shoulder, she’d acted embarrassed and escaped as soon as she could.

She didn’t strike him as one of those women who was embarrassed about her body. Shy maybe. He shrugged. That could be it, he supposed.

Now that she had run to the back of the store, he came back around the counter and looked for the long-sleeved T-shirt she’d found for him. Then he remembered. It was in the storeroom. He’d dropped it when she’d screamed.

Not wanting to disturb her, he headed toward the racks of T-shirts to find another one. Just as he got to the rack, she opened the storeroom door and came out. She was dressed in the scrub pants, the Big Easy T-shirt, the pink hoodie and her wet sneakers. She stopped short when she saw him. Her gaze skittered down his torso to the drawstring on the scrub pants, then back up.

She blinked. “Here—here’s your T-shirt.” She held it out for him.

“Great, thanks,” he said. He took the shirt by the tail, shook it out once, then pulled it over his head and down. A slight shiver went through him. He ran his palms down each sleeve, then down his torso. “That feels good,” he said, meeting her gaze.

She looked away. “These wet shoes don’t.”

“Yeah,” he said, looking down at his own wet loafers. “I know.” He patted the pockets of the scrubs. “Where’s my phone?” he muttered. “I must have left it in my jeans.”

She moved out of the way of the storeroom door. “Your jeans are on the floor,” she said, then headed toward the front of the store.

Harte quickly retrieved his phone and followed her. “Damn it,” he said when he checked the display. “No reception.”

Dani pulled