Anything but Vanilla(38)

She grinned. ‘What do you think?’

Women drivers in general didn’t bother him. It was this woman driver in particular that had him breaking out in a sweat.

This morning he’d had a clear vision of what he was going to do. Close down the ice-cream parlour and, once that was done, go and find Ria, reassure her that everything was sorted. She could stay and spend the summer with her friends if she wanted, or come home. No worries.

He’d spend a few days dealing with the paperwork that piled up in his absence but, that done, he could return to Pantabalik and continue the search for an elusive plant he’d been hunting down for months. The one that the local people sang about, that he was beginning to think might simply be a myth. Or that they were deliberately hiding from him, afraid that he would steal it, robbing them of its power.

An hour or two in Sorrel’s company had not just diverted him from his purpose, it had completely trashed it. Tired as he was, she had filled him with her scent, with colour, with her enthusiasm and distracted him with a straight-to-hell smile. Touched him with a look that had been filled with yearning for something lost. A memory that he had inadvertently stirred. He was good at that...

‘Don’t be such a macho grouch,’ she said, laughing at his apparent reluctance to surrender himself to her unknown skill behind the wheel. ‘I promise you, I didn’t get my driving licence from the back of a cornflake packet.’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ he replied. ‘Everyone knows that women get their driving licences with coupons they save up from the top of soap-powder boxes.’

That provoked a snort of laughter. ‘You are outrageous, Alexander West,’ she said.

‘Am I? What are you going to do about it?’

‘Me?’ She was looking up at him, her eyes dark and lustrous in the shade of the yard.

‘There’s only you and me here,’ he said.

‘Oh...’ Her mouth pouted around the sound, invitingly soft. All he had to do was lean in and kiss her. Rekindle the fizz of heat that had continued to tingle through his veins all day. Take her up on the invitation to sit in a darkening garden with the scent of wallflowers filling the air, listening to the last lingering notes of a blackbird, watching for the first swooping flights of the bats.

How lucky could one man get?

Even from this distance he knew the answer. He didn’t just want to kiss her. He wanted to draw her close, curl up somewhere quiet with her and go to sleep with the weight of her body against him. Wake up with her still there and see her looking at him just like that.

‘One of these days, Alexander West, someone will take you seriously and you will be in such big trouble,’ she said.

‘You think?’ He thought he was already in more trouble than he could handle. He would have happily fallen into bed with her, giving and receiving a few nights of no-commitment pleasure before kissing her goodbye and returning to work. But those sorts of relationships had rules. No eating with the family. Meeting grandparents, sisters. No getting involved.

Too late...

Time to bail before this got even more complicated and he did something really stupid that would end in a world of regret.

He dragged his hands over his face in a gesture of weariness that was not entirely faked. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m already in trouble,’ he said. ‘The day has caught up with me and I’m going to fall asleep with my face in your grandmother’s pie.’

Sorrel’s shiver as she slid the key into the ignition, started the engine, had nothing to do with the fact that she’d been digging out her ices from the depths of Ria’s freezers. It had everything to with the way that Alexander had been looking at her. A look that had bloomed, warm and low in her belly, and sent shivers of anticipation racing down her thighs. Shivers that every shred of sense told her were wrong, wrong, wrong.

So why did it feel so right?

‘You have to eat,’ she said, tugging on her seat belt, knowing that she was playing with fire, but unable to stop herself from striking the matches. ‘A good meal is the least I owe you for rescuing my cucumber ice cream. And saving my nails.’ She looked up and in that moment she knew exactly what he was doing. His reluctance had nothing to do with tiredness, or being driven by a woman. He was simply trying to find a polite way to excuse himself from the invitation that she’d thrown at him, and hadn’t given him a chance to refuse.

That was her. Organising, a bit bossy... Well, she had to be if she wanted to get anything done. But this was different.