Avril Tremayne – The Dating Game (страница 18)

‘So, Sarah,’ he said, and welcomed the chill he could hear in his voice. ‘Are you going to tell me that was “okay”?’

‘That was a little bit more than okay,’ she said shakily, and smiled.

The smile. Her mouth. So sweet and pliant. Almost too perfect to be real. He wanted to touch it, touch her. God, this was bad.

‘Rulebook moment,’ he said, very deliberately not smiling back at her.

‘Rulebook?’ she asked, and something flickered and died in her eyes as a frown slowly replaced the smile. ‘I see.’ She patted the flared skirt of her sexy scarlet dress into place, smoothed a hand over her hair, made a small adjustment to one shoulder strap. And then she smiled again. She’d pulled herself together, it seemed—which irritated David almost enough to kiss her again, because she should not be able to pull herself together like that, not when he was still having trouble keeping his hands off her.

‘Rulebook,’ she said again. ‘So what’s the takeout? Okay is not okay? Something like that?’

‘Nothing like that!’ he snapped. And then, more temperate, ‘I mean … yes.’

‘I see. Not!’

‘Look, the thing is, you’ll know when it’s time to have sex, and it’s not when a kiss is just “okay”, the way it was with Craig. Not even when it’s “a little bit more than okay” either, like it was just then.’ Liar. ‘You wait. Until it’s tense and electric, and your insides are clenching, and your blood is boiling, and your skin is tingling …’ He was going to fucking die in a minute. ‘And then you’ll know it’s time. Whether it’s the first date or the fiftieth.’ He bent down to sweep the sketchbook up off the floor, then inclined his head towards the French doors. ‘Now, let’s keep going.’

***

Let’s keep going?

How was a girl was expected to ‘keep going’ when her body was screaming for an orgasm? As in screaming for it! If he could get her that far with one kiss, Sarah didn’t want to think what she would have been reduced to if he’d actually got his hands on the good stuff. A begging, mewling, grovelling mess, no doubt!

Let’s keep going?!?!?!

Easy for him to say.

Which of course was the crux of the problem. It had been easy for him to say.

Rulebook moment. A splash of cold water on a hotplate. The coolness of him, when everything inside her had felt so indescribably hot. At least it had stopped her from flinging herself at him and demanding he not only keep kissing her, but put that supersized erection of his where it could do them both some good! How embarrassing would that have been?

And how … how traitorous, to not even think of the after-effects, of how she’d face Lane, face Adam, if things had gone any further. All things considered she should be thanking David for stopping when he did, not resenting him for it. And she would be thankful, just as soon as her hormone levels returned to an acceptable level.

Everything aside, though, that zinger of a kiss proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that David was the right man to break her curse. Boy, oh boy, did he know women! He was so far above Craig as to be in a different stratosphere. He was the apex, the apogee, the pinnacle. The zenith of men. The final frontier. The summit, the high point, the capstone, the climax.

No! Not the climax.

She refused to even think of the word ‘climax’ in association with David Bennett, who definitely wasn’t thinking in those terms in relation to her, or he could have had her, right there on the couch.

The only conclusion she could draw was that his kissing her had nothing to do with him wanting to have sex with her. It probably had precious little to do with the rulebook either. Nope, her best guess was that David had wanted to teach her a lesson because he hadn’t liked being lumped in with Craig as an ‘okay’ kisser. He’d decided to demonstrate his mastery with disinterested precision—warning her to brace herself, positioning her as he’d wanted her, coaxing her to set the pace, bringing the kiss to an end the moment he’d fulfilled his goal.

A salutary reminder to use him, not fall for him. In fact, she was going to look on it as a bonus lesson.

But lesson time now appeared to be well and truly over for the evening, because since they’d taken up their respective positions, not a word had been spoken between them.

Sarah had been consumed with the memory of that spectacular kiss, which explained her contribution to the heavy silence, but what was David’s story?

He seemed to be in his own world, scowling as he drew. Was his morose silence a temperamental artist thing? If so, she hoped it wasn’t going to be the pattern for the next five weeks. Excessive silence was always so oppressive.

‘The Langman Portrait Prize,’ she said, latching on to the least controversial subject she could think of, just to hear a voice in the gloom. ‘Have you entered it before?’

No answer. David simply kept sketching, and brooding.

She cleared her throat and tried again. ‘I guess you must have. Who did you paint last time?’

He stopped, then. No, it wasn’t so much a stop as a start—an almost violent one—as he stared down at his sketch. ‘No,’ he said, but it had to be to himself because that was so far from an answer to her question as to be classified a non sequitur. Unless he was a question behind …?

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