Heaven, Texas (Chicago Stars #2)(37)

His hand stilled on her shoulders. “Are you telling me you’re a virgin?”

“Of course I’m a virgin! Who would want to have sex with someone as h-homely as me?”

Bobby Tom was too much of a gentleman to let that one go by. “Why just about any healthy red-blooded male, honey.”

“Ha!” She withdrew her hands from her breasts and reached for another tissue.

“I’m serious.”

Even drunk, Gracie wasn’t taking any of his malarkey . . “Prove it.”

“What?”

“Have s-sex with me. Right now. Yes! R-right this very minute.” Her hands flew to the buttons on the front of her white blouse, and she began pulling them open.

He stilled her arms and kept a firm rein on the smile that wanted to break loose. “I couldn’t do that, sweetheart. Not with you so drunk and everything.”

“I am not dr-drunk! I told you before, I do not drink.” She snatched her hands from beneath his and clumsily stripped the blouse off her arms. Before he knew it, she was sitting before him, bare from the waist up except for a bra made of transparent pink nylon embossed with tiny hearts that looked like little love bites sprinkled over her breasts.

Bobby Tom swallowed hard as his groin shot from soft to hard in 0.9 seconds. He had the wild thought that he was going crazy, right along with Gracie. After secretly worrying because his sex drive seemed to have deserted him at the same time his career had ended, he was now even more worried to find himself being turned on by something so tame.

She looked at the expression on his face and promptly burst into fresh tears. “You don’t want to have s-sex with me. My br-breasts are too small. You only like women with gr-great big ones.”

She’d spoken the truth, so he didn’t understand why it was so hard for him to drag his eyes away from those pint-size morsels curving out from her chest. Probably because he was tired and coming back to Telarosa had lowered his emotional defenses to the point where he’d react to anything. He was careful not to hurt her feelings. “That’s not true, honey. It’s not size that counts so much as what a woman does with what she has.”

“I don’t know w-what to do with what I’ve got,” she wailed. “How am I supposed to know when nobody’s ever sh-shown me? How am I supposed to know when the only m-man who’s given me any encouragement is a p-podiatrist who kept asking me if he could k-kiss my instep?”

He didn’t have a good answer for that one. One thing he did know, however, was that he wanted Gracie to put her blouse back on.

As he reached over to pick it up from the floor where she’d dropped it, she jumped unsteadily to her feet. “I’ll bet if I stripped n-naked right in front of you, you still wouldn’t want me.”

His head shot up just in time to see her fumbling with the button on the side of her ugly navy skirt.

He got to his feet. “Gracie, honey…”

Her skirt dropped to her ankles and he couldn’t quite conceal his surprise. Who would have thought those ugly clothes could have been hiding such a sweet little figure? Sometime that evening, she’d gotten rid of both her shoes and her hose, leaving her only in bra and panties beneath her clothes. Her breasts were small, it was true, but she had a slim waist to match, round, well-proportioned hips, and straight, slender legs. He told himself the contrast she presented with those perfectly toned, hard-muscled Amazons he’d been keeping company with for half his lifetime was the only reason he found her appearance so appealing. Her hips weren’t rock hard orbs sculpted by two hours of step-aerobics every day, and her biceps hadn’t been molded with free weights into ropes of steel. She had a natural woman’s body, soft and slim in some places, round in others.

His groin ached as he noticed that her underpants matched her bra. The panties, however, had only one heart on them, a large pink one right at the center that wasn’t quite big enough to hide the wisps of curly hair peeking around the sides. He experienced a perverse desire to strip them off her right here in the living room of his mother’s house, right here with Sparky looking on. He wanted to open those legs and see if she was as dried up as she claimed. And if she was, he wanted to use every trick he’d learned to make her sweet and wet and ready for him.

He actually found himself toying with the idea. Investing a couple of hours under the sheets with Miss Gracie wouldn’t kill him. It would almost be a humanitarian gesture. Then reality asserted itself. The last thing he needed in his life right now was another woman. He’d been trying to get rid of them, not add a new one to the menagerie. Besides, even though he had almost twenty years of sexual experience, none of it was with an almost middle-aged old maid who’d probably have a stroke if she saw a man naked, no matter how much she might think she wanted to taste the forbidden fruit.

He wasn’t heartless, however, and the misery on her face got to him. He walked over to take her in his arms. She gave a long, heartrending sigh and molded her body to his as if the two of them had been heat-fused.

Something went off inside him that felt like a Fourth of July rocket. She smelled sweet and old-fashioned, like lavender and lilacs. Her ugly hair was soft under his chin, the smooth skin of her back turned into silk beneath his fingers. He let his hands slide down along her spine to her waist and then lower still. He was surprised at how small she felt against him. Because of her bossy nature, she seemed like a much larger woman.