He moved away from the glass. “What were you doing here, anyway? If I may be so bold?”
She laughed loudly, then. “The man who played his rewards status to gain this room is worried about being too bold?”
To his credit, he grinned, and Lily softened. The man had a wonderful smile. Straight, white teeth, and one side of his lip curled up slightly more than the other. She loved that tiny imperfection.
Whoa, what? You love something about Komarov? Her inner voice was reeling.
She gave a mental shrug. So what? He was attractive, relatively normal—or at least seemed to be—and he was impossibly sexy. After tonight, she’d never see him again. So she was allowed to bask in him for the short time he was in her life. Right? Right. Well, here goes nothing. She took a deep breath.
“This was supposed to be my honeymoon trip.”
…
Bruno felt it like a sucker punch to the gut. What the hell? If she was supposed to be on her honeymoon, where was her supposed to be husband?
Holy shit, was she married? His eyes flicked to her left hand, but it was bare. Unless her husband was European, maybe the right hand…nope. No ring.
But that didn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t married. It was one thing to share a suite for a few hours with an unattached woman. But he knew how he would feel if some guy were here with his wife, and no way was that gonna go down.
“Are you married?” he barked at her, more forcefully than he’d intended, but this was throwing him off.
She furrowed her brow. “No…” She spoke slowly to him as though he‘d just surfaced from a deep underwater dive and needed time to reacclimate to the terrestrial world. “It was supposed to be my honeymoon, but my ex-fiancé and I broke up four months ago and the tickets, the deposit on the villa at the resort—none of it was refundable.”
He relaxed in relief. She wasn’t married. “So you came anyway.” It was more of a statement than a question, because of course she had come, anyway, but he wanted to hear more of the story. It was a ballsy move, going on a vacation alone after breaking an engagement.
“I came anyway.”
She shrugged when she said it, as though trying to make it seem like no big deal, but she sounded so dejected that he decided to throw caution to the wind and touch her. He reached out and rubbed her shoulder, while simultaneously making appropriate corresponding sounds of sympathy.
And immediately regretted it.
He should not have touched her.
Because now his pants were tight, his hands were practically burning where they skimmed over the fleece of her top, and he could feel his lungs seizing up.
He was about to draw his hand away when she purred, “That feels really good,” and tipped her neck forward in invitation. “Do you mind doing it a little harder?”
?Pedro, Pablo, y María! as Mami liked to say. This was so wrong, so so wrong…
But he took half a step forward, anyway, and started gently squeezing the fine muscles just above her shoulder. She closed her eyes and let out a long breath, swaying toward him just enough that he caught the faint scent of her in the air between them, something clean and crisp that reminded him of autumn in Napa. Home.
“Wow, you are really good with your fingers,” she said, and he realized he was now kneading the muscles of her slender neck. How did this happen? “Did you study massage therapy or something?”
He tried to focus on what she was saying. She wanted to know if he studied how to touch a woman and relax her? No, but he sure as hell was up for a lesson right now…Okay, man. Settle down. Not going to happen. Just rub her damned neck.
“No.” He used the word to test his voice, relieved when it didn’t crack like an adolescent’s. “I studied finance in college, actually. But all three of my sisters are pregnant right now, one of them with her fourth kid and the other two with their second ones, so there’s a lot of massaging of necks, feet, backs, you name it. If it’s not a husbands-only place, you can bet my sisters have roped me into rubbing just about every part of their tortured bodies.”
Lily laughed and Bruno’s chest swelled with pride that he’d made her happy. She had looked so miserable a moment ago, when she had confessed that she had gone on her honeymoon trip by herself, and he’d wanted nothing more than to see her smile again. In fact, he wanted to see her wear that full-blown, so-damned-sexy-it-should-be-outlawed smile.
And nothing else.
He pulled his hand away. Dangerous territory.
“Want to talk about it?” He slid his hands into his pants pockets, striving to look purposely casual. He knew how his sisters were. If they felt he cared too much, they’d withdraw and not share a thing. But he’d perfected the art of caring just enough that every woman he’d ever known would spill everything within seconds of his asking, just like that. And they usually served him pie, or brownies, or some other delicious treat while they dished their woes along with it.
He should work for the State Department.