Melt For You

36

His voice is as warm as his gaze when I meet it over the bottle. He shaved today, but somehow his usual scruff suits him better. He’s not the kind of guy who should be buffed to a shine, manscaped and manicured, pretty. All his rough edges combine to make something more interesting. More . . .

Masculine.

I guzzle the green goo and wipe my hand across my mouth when I’m finished, looking away because my face is suddenly flaming.

Cam c***s his head. “Uh-oh. You must’ve had a dirty thought about pretty boy Michael. Your face just turned to beet.”

When I answer with only a smile and a stiff nod, Cam chuckles again. “A little early in the mornin’ to be feelin’ frisky, innit, sweetheart?”

Hearing him call me sweetheart makes my face go even hotter, and now I’d like to kick my own ass for being a dope.

“Let’s get started,” I tell him, a little too sharply.

He’s amused by my sudden shift in manner. “Okay, okay, no need to get testy.”

I leave the empty bottle on the floor next to the door and we do warm-up stretches in the hallway while I listen to him ramble about target heart rates and runner’s euphoria and all kinds of other healthy things I can’t focus on because I’m too busy trying to avoid noticing his rugged good looks again.

It must be the lack of sleep that has me so flustered.

Either that or I just realized that in his own annoying, arrogant way, the Mountain is actually pretty hot.

THIRTEEN

By Friday I’ve lost five pounds—five!—and Cam and I have settled into our routine of morning runs and nightly dinners. True to his word, he’s kept his music off so my ears haven’t bled all week. He also designed an eating plan for me focused on lean protein and veggies and ransacked my pantry and fridge in search of food he deemed inappropriate for my new diet. He took what he found to the local homeless shelter in a cardboard box.

An embarrassingly big cardboard box.

Then we went grocery shopping together, and I found myself the object of so much envy from other women I thought they’d all get together and make a voodoo doll of me to stick pins into. Their jealousy was palpable, and all I was doing was walking next to him. They probably thought I was his housekeeper, but the looks I got . . . yikes.

The looks he got gave me a glimpse into how his ego had inflated to its Godzilla dimensions. Those women looked at him like he was the juiciest filet in the butcher’s case. Like they wanted to rip off all his clothes and mount him, right there in the organic vegetable aisle. Like he wasn’t even an actual person, really, just a big ol’ piece of tasty man meat they wanted to sink their teeth into.

I was embarrassed for my own gender.

He took it all in stride, though. It was hard to tell if he was absorbing the admiration or deflecting it, because in public his smiles were more brittle than when we were alone together. He clearly enjoyed the attention, but my female intuition told me he wasn’t as easy with it as he seemed.

Or maybe that was my overactive imagination again. Either way, neither of us mentioned all those hungry eyes at the grocery store when we got home.

I’m standing in the kitchen in the office Friday morning, making myself another cup of coffee, when a male voice says behind me, “What a pretty dress.”

I whirl around so fast I almost topple over but steady myself against the counter before I can fall flat on my face. Two feet away stands Michael, wearing a charcoal-gray suit with a pocket square, looking like a movie star.

He smiles at me. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear a dress. Is it new?”

I glance down at myself. “Oh. This? Um.”

I struggle to think of some excuse for this dress that doesn’t involve the embarrassing truth that I dug through my closet last night looking for something he might like on the off chance we’d run into each other and this was the only thing I came up with. It’s blue, which I remembered is his favorite color. Also, due to some ingenious quirk of design, it performs the minor miracle of making my childbearing hips look slimmer.

I open my mouth to answer and hear Cam’s mischievous brogue in my head. Tell him you have a date.

“I have a date,” I blurt so loudly Michael blinks.

“Oh?” His gaze flickers over me, up and down, head to toe, assessing. “Well, whoever he is, I envy him.”

My fingers curl so hard into the Formica counter I’m surprised it doesn’t shatter. I attempt a coquettish laugh but end up sounding like I’m trying to expel a hair ball.

Michael must sense my impending mental break, because he c***s his head, his smile growing wider. “Do you mind?” he motions to the coffee maker directly behind me.

“Oh! Of course, sorry!” I leap out of the way and stand to the side, where I can admire his beauty from a safe distance.

Michael wordlessly holds out the mug of coffee I left on the machine. I take it with shaking hands, avoiding his eyes because all my nerve endings are pulsing with lust and I’m afraid he’ll be able to see it if we make eye contact.

He smells crisp and clean, like fresh linen. Like new one-hundred-dollar bills.

Busying himself with brewing his own cup of coffee, he says casually, “I reviewed your application for the associate editor position.”

I stop breathing. It’s a good thing I don’t have a mouthful of liquid because it would be all over his elegant suit right about now.

He glances at me from beneath thick black lashes. His blue eyes sparkle. A dimple flashes in his cheek. “Sonnets?”