Saying Yes To The Dress!. Сорейя Лейн

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СКАЧАТЬ back through the wetness of his shirt, and felt the sinewy strength there. The strength that had saved her.

      She leaned closer yet. She touched her forehead to his, as if she could make him feel what was going on inside her, since words could not express it. He had a chance to move away from her. He did not. He was as caught in what was unfolding as she had been in the wave.

      And then, she touched her lips to his, delicately, needing the connection to intensify.

      His lips tasted of salt and strength and something more powerful and more timeless than the ocean. That desire that people had within them, not just to live, but to go on.

      For a moment, Drew was clearly stunned to find her lips on his. But then, he seemed to get whatever she was trying to tell him, in this primal language that seemed the only thing that could express the celebration of all that lived within her.

      His lips answered hers. His tongue chased the ridges of her teeth, and then probed, gently, ever so gently...

      It was Becky’s turn to be stunned. It was everything she had hoped for. It was everything she had missed.

      No, it was more than what she had hoped for, and more than what she could have ever imagined. A kiss was not simply a brushing of lips. No! It was a journey, it was a ride on pure energy, it was a connection, it was a discovery, it was an intertwining of the deepest parts of two people, of their souls.

      Drew stopped kissing her with such abruptness that she felt forlorn, like a blanket had been jerked from her on a freezing night. He said Moose Run’s most disapproved-of word again.

      She liked the way he said that word, all naughty and nasty.

      He found his feet and leaped up, staring down at her. He raked a hand through his hair, and water droplets scattered off his crumpled hair, sparkling like diamonds in the tropical heat. His shirt, crusted in golden sand, was clinging to his chest.

      “Geez,” he said. “What was that about?”

      “I don’t know,” she said honestly. But I liked it.

      “A girl like you does not kiss a guy like me!”

      She could ask what he meant by a girl like her, but she already knew that he thought she was small town and naive and hopelessly out of her depth, and not just in the ocean, either. What she wanted to know was what the last half of that sentence meant.

      “What do you mean a guy like you?” she asked. Her voice was husky from the salt and from something else. Desire. Desire was burning like a white-hot coal in her belly. It was brand-new, it was embarrassing and it was wonderful.

      “Look, Becky, I’m the kind of guy your mother used to warn you about.”

      Woo-hoo, she thought, but she didn’t dare say it. Instead, she said, “The kind who would jump in the water without a thought for his own safety to save someone else?”

      “Not that kind!”

      She could point out to him that he obviously was that kind, and that the facts spoke for themselves, but she probed the deeper part of what was going on.

      “What kind of guy then?” she asked, gently curious.

      “Self-centered. Commitment-phobic. Good-time Charlie. Confirmed bachelor. They write whole articles about guys like me in your bridal magazines. And not about how to catch me, either. How to give a guy like me a wide berth.”

      “Just in case you didn’t listen to your mother’s warnings,” she clarified.

      He glanced at her. She bit her lip and his gaze rested there, hot with memory, until he seemed to make himself look away.

      “I wouldn’t have pictured you as any kind of expert about the content of bridal magazines,” she said.

      “That is not the point!”

      “It was just a kiss,” she pointed out mildly, “not a posting of the banns.”

      “You’re in shock,” he said.

      If she was, she hoped she could experience it again, and soon!

       CHAPTER SIX

      DREW LOOKED AT Becky English. Sprawled out, belly down in the sand, she looked like a drowned rat, her hair plastered to her head, her yellow shirt plastered to her lithe body, both her shirt and her white shorts transparent in their wetness. For a drowned rat, and for a girl from Moose Run, Michigan, she had on surprisingly sexy underwear.

      She looked like a drowned rat, and she was a small-town girl, but she sure as hell did not kiss like either one of those things. There had been nothing sweet or shy about that kiss!

      It had been hungry enough to devour him.

      But, Drew told himself sternly, she was exceedingly vulnerable. She was obviously stunned from what had just happened to her out there at the mercy of the ocean. It was possible she had banged her head riding that final wave in. The blow might have removed the filter from her brain that let her know what was, and what wasn’t, appropriate.

      But good grief, that kiss. He had to make sure nothing like that ever happened again! How was he going to be able to look at her without recalling the sweet, salty taste of her mouth? Without recalling the sweet welcome? Without recalling the flash of passion, the pull of which was at least as powerful as those waves?

      “Becky,” he said sternly, “don’t make me your hero. I’ve been cast in that role before, and I stunk at it.”

      Drew had been seventeen when he became a parent to his brother. He had a sense of having grown up too fast and with too heavy a load. He was not interested in getting himself back into a situation where he was responsible for someone else’s happiness and well-being. He didn’t feel the evidence showed he had been that good at it.

      “It was just a kiss,” she said again, a bit too dreamily.

      It wasn’t just a kiss. If it had been just a kiss he would feel nothing, the same as he always did when he had just a kiss. He wouldn’t be feeling this need to set her straight.

      “When were you cast in that role before? How come you stank at it?” she asked softly. He noticed that, impossibly, the flower had survived in her hair. Its bright red petals were drooping sadly, kissing the tender flesh of her temple.

      “This is not the time or the place,” he said curtly before, in this weakened moment, in this contrived atmosphere of closeness, he threw himself down beside her, and let her save him, the way he had just saved her.

      “Are you hurt?” he asked, cold and clinical. “Any bumps or bruises? Did you hit your head?”

      Thankfully, she was distracted, and considered his question with an almost comical furrowing of her brow.

      “I don’t think I hit my head, but my leg hurts,” she decided. “I think I scraped it on a rock coming in.”

      She rolled onto her back and then struggled to sit up. He peered over her shoulder. There was СКАЧАТЬ