Excerpt
I braced myself when I exited the bathroom, wary of the neon light I expected to
find streaming in through my one large window. But surprisingly, the curtains
had been pulled tightly closed. Dorian must have done that. He’d know my
headache would be coming on hard and fast, making my eyes sensitive to the
lights from Mrs. Patel’s grocery sign. She had thoughtfully hung it just outside
my window, and it made the whole apartment glow with bright green and yellow
light all night long.
I threw a quick glance in Dorian’s general direction as I
came out of the bathroom. Holy hell. There should be some kind of law against a
guy looking that good.
Honestly though, as much as I could appreciate the view,
I was tired, and my head was already pounding too hard for it to have a
substantial effect on me. Sad but true.
Like a coward, I avoided looking
directly at him. My circa 1980s, thirteen-inch television set with the manual
dials along the side panel was turned on with the volume down low, and if I
didn’t know better I’d say that Dorian was engrossed in the final minutes of the
hockey game. He was quiet as I walked past the sofa where he sat. Too quiet.
I
kept my gaze averted as I passed him on the way to my bedroom. There was a thick
tension suddenly swirling in the air, so I knew he wasn’t asleep.
Despite my
best intentions, the draw was too strong and I finally looked. He was staring
back at me. I met his gaze. I drowned in the depths.
“Stop it!”
He blinked,
surprised. “Stop what?”
“Stop that…that thing you’re doing with your eyes. Stop
looking at me like you want to devour me.” I hesitated. Maybe that was a poor
choice of words, because it sounded more like an invitation than a rebuff even
to my ears. Heat crept up my throat and into my cheeks.
His breath caught and I
could see golden flames starting to leap and dance in the deep brown of his
eyes. All of a sudden I wasn’t worrying so much about my headache anymore. What
headache? And I didn’t really care that my body ached.
Now I ached in a whole
new set of places.
He sighed and dropped his head. “I can’t,” he said. “Believe
me, Sarah. I would if I could.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” Whoa. That sounded
a lot like an admission. Was Dorian actually acknowledging that he was attracted
to me? Was he saying it right out loud for the public record? Was this the
Twilight Zone?
Wait a minute. “What do you mean you would if you could?”
It
wasn’t that I doubted Dorian might feel something for me. I’m not exactly
hideous, even if I haven’t had a date in an eon and a half. I just never
expected him to admit it, or ever do anything about it.
But that didn’t mean it
wouldn’t have come up sooner or later. I know I couldn’t have continued to
ignore the snaps of electricity crackling between us forever. In the last
several weeks it had built to what could only be termed explosive levels. In
fact, I felt like I had been walking through a brambly field strewn with
fifty-year-old land mines. Each step was measured, careful, because they
couldn’t all be duds and it was just a matter of time before I put my foot down
on a live one and it blew me to smithereens.
After a slight pause and a deep
breath, Dorian stood and walked to me. I wasn’t sure of the wisdom of that idea.
The part of me that worried over my self-preservation knew that Dorian and me,
together, was a nuclear disaster waiting to happen and wanted to take a
corresponding step backward. But the wilder, more daring part of me wondered if
the crash and burn might be worth it. That part knew that Dorian and me,
together, would be the hottest, sexiest, most explosive disaster that ever
rocked the Casbah.
|
