“Roxacoricofallapatorius,” I say triumphantly.
He makes the sound of a buzzer. “Oh! So close! But no. It’s actually Raxacoricofallapatorius!”
“Just so we’re clear, you do understand this is a theoretical discussion?”
He grins at me. “I forgot to tell you that this is strip trivia.”
I burst out laughing. “And I forgot to tell you that I planned to take my clothes off anyway, so really, no need to get all tricksy.” I stand up and unbutton my silk blouse, slowly peeling it off. I fold it neatly and drop it on the sofa.
His smile fades, and he stares at me with a look of such intensity that I glance down at myself nervously.
“What?” I ask, self-conscious.
He shakes his head slowly from side to side, gaze burning with emotion. “I’ve been craving this all week long. Wanting it until I hurt,” he says huskily.
The naked need in his voice turns my knees to jello, and I sink down onto the sofa. He moves close to me, stroking my hair from my face and running his fingers through the silken strands, then buries his face in my hair and inhales.
“I just love the smell of you,” he murmurs into my hair. “Is that weird?”
“I hope so. Kind of brings you down to my level.” Heat and yearning flood my body. I’ve been fighting to deny the true depth of my craving, but his words, his touch, are undoing my defenses. When he looks at me, I’m not Weird Winona who made a homecoming dress from a thrift store table cloth. I’m beautiful, I’m funny, I’m sexy, I’m a goddess worthy of adoration.
He drops the silky locks of my hair, and I lean in to kiss him. To my shock, he moves back.
“Not until you tell me about peaches.”
Right. Like he wants that more than sex. “Very funny.” I move forward again.
In one swift motion, he captures my wrists and pins them above my head. “I’m not kidding.” And he’s not smiling.
He releases my wrists, staring at me with a burning intensity.
All it will take is one soul-melting kiss, and he’ll forget this nonsense and rip the clothes from my body. I move towards him.
He frowns, shakes his head, and slides to the end of the sofa. “I don’t want there to be any secrets between us. I want to get to know you the way you know me. Not just what’s on the surface, not just what you look like, not even what you taste like and feel like. All of you. I told you my biggest secret, Winona. I gave you the power to humiliate me and my family.”
My jaw drops. “I would never do that!”
“I know. I told you because I trusted you. Why don’t you trust me?” Hurt shimmers in the depths of his crystal-blue eyes.
“It’s not trust…” I trail off.
“Then what is it?”
“I guess…nothing but misplaced pride.” I chew my lip. He’s right. He trusted me with a deeply personal, ugly secret from his past. What he told me is the kind of thing tabloids would pay wads of cash for. And I do trust him. He’d never use what I tell him against me.
“All right. You can’t ever tell anyone this, because it would devastate my parents.”
“Scout’s honor.” He smiles. “Not that I ever was a scout. Okay, Hudsons’ honor.”
I take a deep breath. “My parents are struggling financially because my mom’s drowning in medical bills, but they’d never in a million years take money from me.”
“But they’d force you to move back home when you don’t want to?” he interjects.
Where did that even come from? Anger flares in me, and I cross my arms over my chest, scowling. He’s got a very questionable seduction technique. “Who says they’re forcing me? You’ve made it painfully clear that a relationship with you isn’t on the table, so you don’t get to involve yourself in my life choices.”
“Everything about you says that.” He meets my gaze steadily. “The look on your face when you mention your home town. It’s a completely different look from when you talk about your parents. You talk about them with love. Your home town…you get the thousand-yard stare and your shoulders hunch up to your ears. Don’t shake your head no at me. You haven’t seen you. When you talk about Peach Pit, you could wear your shoulders as ear muffs.”
Ear muffs? Whatever. That just goes to show he doesn’t know me as well as he thinks he does.
“Moving on,” I say irritably. “My parents are struggling to stay afloat. They would be mortified if anyone knew that. They don’t even want me to know. To help them, I formed a fake corporation, based in New Jersey so they wouldn’t suspect it was me. Under the name of that corporation, I order a thousand dollars’ worth of product from their farm every month.” I grimace. “Peach jam, peach preserves, peach butter. I give it to everyone I know. Mostly, I donate to food kitchens. Because I was spending all of my disposable income on peaches, there were times when I didn’t have enough money for groceries, so I’d live off peach preserves for a week at a time. I can barely smell them now without gagging, I’m afraid.”
He taps his lip thoughtfully with his index finger, nodding to himself.
“Makes perfect sense. Do you want me to–”
“No,” I say quickly.
“You don’t know what I was going to say. I was going to ask you if you wanted me to kiss you head to toe, spending the majority of the time south of the navel but north of the knees.”
I shake my head. “No, you weren’t. You were going to ask me if I wanted you to give me or my family some money.”
“Okay,” he says. “I was. But I have money. Why not let me share some?”
I wince at the thought of my parents’ reaction if they knew I was taking any kind of charity. They’d feel like they failed somewhere in their raisin’. And God forbid they ever found out that I was giving them charity. They’d keel over dead on the spot.
“It’s just the way I was brought up. We earn our money. I mean, neighbors help out neighbors, but then you repay in kind. Someone puts a bag of turnips on your porch, you go mow their lawn while they’re out choring.”
“What if I just lent you the money? Low interest, pay me back over time.”
I love that he wants to help me. I do. It’s cracking another chink in the armor around my heart – but I can’t accept it. I appreciate the occasional gift, or having him treat me to dinner, like a normal courtship, but I can’t let my friend with benefits give me pity money.
“I can’t take on more debt. If I keep working for Hudson’s, I’ll get my debt paid off and I’ll be able to start saving, and I can increase the amount I order from my parents, and nobody will ever be the wiser.” I reach out and undo the top button of his shirt. “So…what’s up with all that about kissing me? I thought you were a man of action, Blake. But tonight you’re all talk.”
“I’ll show you action,” he growls, and he moves like a predator, sliding on top of me, his solid, muscular body pressing me into the softness of the sofa. But this time he holds me down as he kisses and nibbles my neck with a heated passion that snatches my breath away.
Then we’re full-on making out, teenager-style, and I try to straddle him but end up pulling both of us off the couch. I land on top of him on the varnished hardwood.