Brambleberry Shores: The Daddy Makeover / His Second-Chance Family. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ any moment. He had just jogged three miles down the beach and back and probably smelled like a locker room.

      All these thoughts flickered through his mind but he couldn’t quite catch hold of any of them. The blood singing through him and the wild hunger burning up his insides were the only things that seemed to matter.

      He deepened the kiss and she sighed against his mouth. He was intensely aware of her soft fingers in his hair, of the other hand curving around his neck. Even with the heat scorching him, the wonder of feeling her hands on him absurdly drew a lump to his throat.

      How long had it been since he’d known a woman’s touch? Brooke’s shockingly sudden death from an aneurysm had been two years ago and he hadn’t been with anyone since then. Even for months before her death, things had been rocky between them. He knew he had failed her in many, many ways.

      The specter of his disastrous marriage finally helped him regain some small measure of control.

      He stilled, then opened his eyes as the sensation of being watched prickled down his spine.

      Not Chloe, he hoped, and swept the room with a glance. No, he realized. Sage’s big red dog watched them through the wide windows leading to the deck. And if Conan had been human, Eben would have sworn he was grinning at them.

      Though he ached at the effort, Eben forced himself to break the kiss and step back, his breathing uneven and his thoughts a tangled mess.

      “Well. That was…unexpected,” she murmured.

      Her color was high but she didn’t look upset by their heated embrace, only surprised.

      He, on the other hand, was stunned to his core.

      What the hell was he thinking? This kind of thing was not at all like him. He was known in all circles— social, business and otherwise—for his cool head and detached calm.

      He had spent his life working hard to keep himself in check. Oh, he knew himself well enough to understand it was a survival mechanism from his childhood—if he couldn’t control his parents’ tumultuous natures, their wild outbursts, their screaming fights, and substance abuse, at least he could contain his own behavior.

      Those habits had carried into adulthood and into his marriage. In the heat of anger, Brooke used to call him a machine, accusing him of having no heart, no feeling. She had to have an affair, she told him, if only to know what it was like to be with a man who had blood instead of antifreeze running through his veins.

      This new, urgent heat for an exotic, wild-haired nature girl sent him way, way out of his comfort zone.

      “My apologies,” he said, his voice stiff. “I’m not quite sure what happened there.”

      “Aren’t you?”

      He sent her a swift look and saw the corner of her mouth lift. He didn’t like the feeling she was laughing at him.

      “You can be certain it won’t happen again.”

      A strange light flickered in the depths of her dark eyes. “Okay. Good to know.”

      She studied him for a moment, then smiled. He wanted to think the expression looked a little strained but he thought that was possibly his imagination.

      “Thank you for taking Conan jogging for me. I admit, I’m not crazy about the whole morning exercise thing. I’m trying to warm up to it but it’s been slow going so far. I thought after a month I would enjoy it more, but what are you going to do? It seems to cheer him up a little, though, so I guess I’ll stick with it.”

      He couldn’t seem to make his brain work but he managed to catch hold of a few of the pieces of what she said.

      “You’re telling me your dog is depressed?” he asked, feeling supremely stupid for even posing the question.

      “You could say that.” She glanced out the window where Conan still watched them and lowered her voice as if the dog could hear them through the glass. “He misses his human companion. She died a month ago.”

      The dog’s human companion had died a month ago and Sage had been jogging with Conan for a month. Even in his current disordered state, he figured the two events had to be connected.

      “She left you her dog?”

      “That and a whole lot of other problems. It’s a long story.” One she obviously had no intention of sharing with him, he realized as she headed for the door.

      “I’d better go. I’ve got thirteen eager young campers who’ll be ready to explore the coastline with me in just an hour. I’m sure you’ve got things to do, people to see, worlds to conquer and all that.”

      His mouth tightened at the faint echo of derision in her voice, but before he could defend himself from her obviously harsh view of his life, she opened the door and walked out into the cool morning air, to be greeted with enthusiasm by the dog, who jumped around as if he hadn’t seen her in months.

      Just now the animal looked far from the bereft, grieving animal she had described. She patted his sides, which had the dog’s eyes rolling back in his head. Eben couldn’t say he blamed him.

      “Thanks again for exercising Conan,” she called back.

      “No problem. I enjoyed it.”

      Stepping outside, he decided he wasn’t going to think about anything else he might have enjoyed about the morning.

      “The run was good for me,” he said instead. “Helps keep my brain sharp while I’m swindling retirees and gullible widows out of their life savings.”

      Her mouth quirked a little at that but she only shook her wild mane of hair and took off down the stairs of his deck and across the beach, the dog close on her heels.

       Chapter 5

      She tried to tell herself that heated kiss was just a one-shot deal, some weird anomaly of fate and circumstance that would never, ever, ever be repeated.

      She and Eben were two vastly different people with different values, different tax brackets. Their lives should never have intersected in the first place—and their mouths certainly shouldn’t have either.

      But as she showered and dressed for work, Sage couldn’t shake the odd, jittery feeling that something momentous had just happened to her, something life-changing and substantial.

      It was silly, she knew, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that her life had just turned a corner down a route she was not at all sure she was prepared to follow.

      Just a kiss, she repeated in a stern mantra as she gave Conan one last morning scratch, pulled her bike out of the garage and cycled through the strands of morning fog that hadn’t yet burned off. Two people reacting to their unlikely attraction to each other in the usual fashion. One never-to-be-repeated kiss certainly was not about to alter the rest of her life, for heaven’s sake.

      She was still working hard to convince herself of that when she arrived at the nature center and let herself into her office. She was answering e-mail from a school СКАЧАТЬ