He shifted so he faced her, leaning back against the wrought iron railing. “Stéphane helped you get there?”
“He did,” she said as she turned her head to gaze at him. The setting sun burnished her hair and brought out the copper highlights, reminding him of a Caribbean sunset full of reds and oranges and golds. Her eyes were the blue of a morning sky, her freckles smudges of color down her cheeks and throat, disappearing into the open collar of her shirt, reappearing at her forearms. Ryan suddenly, and rather irrationally, hated knowing that Stéphane was intimately acquainted with the patterns of her freckles.
“You really shouldn’t look at me like that.”
He didn’t say like what? He knew how he was looking at her, knew it was totally and completely obvious that he wanted to know each curve and swell of her body, that simply thinking about it sent blood thumping to his cock. Instead he tipped back the bottle of beer and finished it. Without saying a word she twisted the top off a second bottle and handed it to him.
“Are you going to tell me a story?” she said.
From the tone of her voice he couldn’t tell if she wanted him to say yes or no. What popped out of his mouth was a question he wasn’t even aware he was thinking. “Do you want to hear one?”
“No, but I think you want to tell me one.”
She was too perceptive by half. He waited. She’d said she didn’t want to hear it. He would respect that.
“Perhaps the lingerie didn’t facilitate your mood. She chose the full coverage panties, not bikinis or a thong. You probably prefer thongs,” she said knowingly.
He actually didn’t have a preference one way or the other. The thought cheered him, as if there was still a little bit of ground left between him and rock bottom. At least he wasn’t the kind of man who felt insulted when a woman let him touch her and he discovered plain cotton briefs rather than cheeky lace panties, a garter belt, or a barely there thong. “It’s actually about the body inside the underwear. No, that’s wrong. It’s actually about the woman inside the body inside the underwear inside the clothes.”
She tilted her head and gave him a little grin. “Really? I’ve had gentlemen in my dressing rooms who complain at length of the horror of getting a hand up a girl’s skirt and discovering a pair of saggy cotton panties.”
“They weren’t gentlemen.” It was only after the words came out of his mouth that he realized the hypocrisy.
“Point taken.”
He tipped his bottle of beer back and thought about it for a moment. “I actually like the feel of skin through cotton,” he mused. “It’s very real. I guess at some level it reminds me of being young, when girls wore cotton blouses from discount stores, when you could feel the heat of their skin through the shirt they were wearing. Now it’s all really refined fabrics, the kind of thing that you know cost more than I used to make in a month in tips when I was waiting tables to put myself through college. I guess I miss that. I miss being the kid who was happy to feel cotton against the sweet curve of the hip or breast.”
She grinned and looked at him through her eyelashes. “I’m having trouble deciding if I should mock you for your first-world problems, or validate your feelings as particular to your circumstances and very real.”
“You should mock me,” he said. “Nostalgia is always for an imaginary past, and I’ve made my bed.”
“So you’re imagining the sensation of cotton against skin?”
“Yes,” he said quietly, then glanced at her button-down. “May I?”
She was sitting on the landing with her back to the railing, while he occupied the first step down to the street. She thought about it, and while she thought, his heart began to pound in his chest, his fingertips and palm tingled with that sense memory of warm, slightly rough cotton against his palm, the weights of the breast, the realization that a nipple was hardening because of his touch. It yanked him back in time to his teenage years, before he even had sex, when girls were mysteries and summer was a sheer delight and he had no understanding of greed or depravity or the heights he would attain and how far from himself he would drift.