Scarlet Nights (Edilean 3)

Mike turned his head away and didn’t release the pillow.

“Michael Newland!” Sara said, her hands at her waist. “You must get out of bed. I’m not facing church alone. Everyone will drive me insane with questions about you. You can—Oh!” she squealed as Mike’s hand shot out and pulled her off balance. She fell forward, her hands out. When they touched the bed, Mike swiped his hand across her wrists so she landed facedown on the bed, her feet still on the floor.

“Good. Quiet,” he said, sounding more like Tarzan than ever.

Sara pulled herself upright. “Brute strength will get you nowhere. I said get up and I mean it!” She grabbed the quilt and threw it back. Mike didn’t move so much as a muscle—which was unusual, since it seemed that he slept in the nude.

For a long moment Sara stood there looking at him, her eyes wide. “Then I take it he has his clothes on,” Tess had said that first night, and now she knew what his siste

r meant.

Mike’s body was magnificent. He could have modeled for a Grecian statue of an athlete. His wide shoulders tapered down to a narrow waist, and even lying absolutely still as he was, she could see the deep muscles on his back. There were mounds and valleys that she very much wanted to touch.

Below his waist, his round, firm buttocks were perfectly shaped above legs that curved down to the back of his knees.

“Cold,” he murmured.

“Wh … what?” Sara asked but the word came out in a croak. “What?”

“I’m cold. If you’re through examining me, doc, put the cover back.”

Sara swallowed and took a breath. Heaven help her but she wanted to skip church, forget about her promise of marriage, and climb into bed with this Adonis.

Instead, she got herself under control. “Inspect you, ha! I’ve seen the Frazier boys stark naked, and you’re not even a close second.” As she went to his closet to pull out his only suit, she didn’t add that the boys had been in preschool and she was little more than a baby. “If you can stop showing off, you have thirty minutes to shave and dress.”

When she heard movement behind her, she didn’t look back because she knew Mike had turned over. She’d resisted him once this morning but she didn’t think she could do it a second time. Besides, she didn’t know if he’d pulled the cover over the lower front of him.

“Thirty minutes,” she repeated as she left the room, shutting the door behind her.

A minute later, she was running out the back door to go to her own apartment. She was dressed for church, but once she was inside, she began to remove her clothing and toss it on the floor. She was happy to see that Luke had put in a new toilet, but that wasn’t her objective. She quickly got into the shower and turned the cold water on full blast. If she’d had time, she would have filled the tub with ice and jumped in.

She ran the shower as long as her ecologically minded conscience could stand, then turned it off. She was covered in goose bumps, but they didn’t remove the images in her mind. Mike naked, facedown on the bed. His muscular arms, legs … his back! The valleys of muscles in his back were deep enough to plant seeds in.

Sara stood there, dripping, and put her hands over her face. She did not want to be one of Mike’s women who he took to bed in order to win a case. She didn’t want—

“The hell I don’t!” she muttered as she wrapped a towel around her bare body.

She looked in the mirror at her red cheeks, and her lips were nearly blue from the cold shower. She’d been to bed with only two men in her life. All through school she’d saved herself for love, and ten minutes after she met Brian, she knew they were going to get married. She’d had no idea of his aristocratic origins or the money and property he was to inherit, she just knew that he was perfect for her.

But he had left her, and Greg had taken his place. Greg was as different as it was possible to be from Brian. Brian was gentle and sweet and loved to sit back and let Sara run their lives. His interest was in archaeology, so Sara made it possible for him to study and write. She took care of his food and clothes and their social life. The first time Sara met his parents, she saw that they were just like her and Brian. His mother ran everything, while Brian’s father piddled on a book he hadn’t completed in twenty-three years.

To Sara, she and Brian had been perfectly suited, but when she’d received the letter from him saying sorry, I’m marrying someone else, it was as though her entire foundation was destroyed. In one typed letter, the future she’d been so sure of had disappeared. For weeks, she couldn’t see clearly. If it hadn’t been for her mother forcing her to work at the grocery, Sara would have stayed in bed and cried.

She’d started getting her life back together and was doing a great job of pretending that she’d never been in love and that her heart hadn’t been broken, when Joce arrived in town. Soon afterward Sara’d been introduced to Greg. That he was wildly different from Brian pleased her. Maybe if she followed a man rather than led, she’d do better. Sometimes, she was glad that the townspeople of Edilean disliked Greg. It repaid them for all the looks of pity they’d given her after Brian had so coldly left her. “She gave up everything,” she’d heard two women in the drugstore say. “She even gave up her career for that young man and he dropped her flat.”

Sara pulled a garment from her closet and realized how good it felt to be in her own home. She took out a freshly ironed dress of dotted Swiss—her mother’d said, “Sara, you’re the only female on earth who still wears that fabric”—and put it on.

After a couple of deep breaths to regain her courage, she went outside. Mike, wearing a suit and tie—and marvel of all, shaved clean—was sitting at the iron table, reading the Sunday newspaper and drinking coffee.

“Where have you been?” he asked without looking up. “Church is probably over by now.”

“They don’t start until I get there. It’s in the bylaws.”

Chuckling, Mike folded the paper, put it on the table, and looked at her. “So why did you change clothes?”

“You had a pillow over your head. How did you see what I was wearing?”

“I saw everything.” The dimple in his cheek showed.