‘Not at all,’ Miranda said, rubbing at her still-tingling wrist. ‘You’ve a perfect right to date whomever you chose.’
But please don’t do it while I’m under the same roof.
CHAPTER FOUR
LEANDRO WAITED AT the foot of the stairs for Miranda. He had showered and changed and tried not to think about how close he had been to kissing her earlier. He had always kept his distance in the past. It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed her. He had. He was always viscerally aware of how close she was to him. It was like picking up a radar frequency inside his body. If she was within touching distance, his body was acutely aware of her every movement. Even if it was as insignificant as her lifting one of her hands to her face to tuck back a stray strand of hair. He felt it in his body.
If she so much as walked past him every cell in his body stood to attention. If she sent her tongue out over her beautiful mouth he felt as if she had stroked it over him intimately. When she smiled that hesitant, shy, nervous smile every pore of his skin contracted with primal need as he imagined her losing that shyness with him. As soon as he caught a trace of her scent he would feel a rush through his flesh. His blood would bloom with such heat he could feel it charging through his pelvis and down his legs.
But he kept his distance.
Always.
She was the kid sister of his two closest friends. It was an unspoken code between mates: no poaching of sisters. If things didn’t work out, it would strain everyone’s relationship. He had seen enough with the angst between Jake and Jasmine. The air could be cut with a knife when those two were in the same room. The fallout from their fiery spat still made everyone uncomfortable even seven years after the event. You couldn’t mention Jaz’s name around Jake without his expression turning to thunder. And Jaz turned into a hissing and spitting wildcat if Jake so much as glanced her way.
Leandro wasn’t going to add to the mix with a dalliance with Miranda, even if she did somehow manage to move on from the loss of her teenage boyfriend. She wasn’t the type to settle for a casual fling. She was way too old-fashioned and conservative for that. She would want the fairy tale: the house with the picket fence and cottage flowers, the kids and the dog.
He wondered if she had even had proper sex with her boyfriend. They had started officially dating when she’d been fourteen, which in his opinion was a little young. He knew teenagers had sex younger than ever but had she been ready emotionally? Why was she so determined to cling to a promise that essentially locked her up for life? He didn’t understand why she would do such a thing. How could she possibly think she’d loved Mark enough to make that sort of sacrifice?
He had always had the feeling Mark Redbank had clung to Miranda for all the wrong reasons. She believed it to have been true love but Leandro wasn’t so sure. Call him cynical, but he’d always suspected Mark had used Miranda, especially towards the end. He thought Mark had played up his feelings for her to keep her tied to him. The decent thing would have been to set her free but apparently Mark had extracted a death-bed promise with her that she was stubbornly determined to stick to.
But touching her had awakened something in Leandro. He had never touched her before. Not even when he came to visit the family at Ravensdene. He had always avoided the kiss on the cheek to say hello, mostly because she was too shy to offer it and he would never make the first move. He had never even shaken her hand. He had made every effort to avoid physical contact. He knew she saw him as a cold fish, aloof, distant. He had been happy to keep it that way.
But being in that room with all those memories and all that crushing grief had pushed him off-balance. Something had been unleashed inside him. Something he wasn’t sure he could control. Now he had touched Miranda he wanted to touch her again. It was an urge that pulsed through him. The feel of her creamy skin beneath his palm, against his fingers, her silky hair tickling the back of his hand, had stirred his blood until it roared through his body like an out of control freight train. It made him think forbidden thoughts. Thoughts he had never allowed himself to think before now. Thoughts of her lying pinned by his body, his need pumping into her as her cries of pleasure filled the air.
The brief flare of temper she had shown confirmed everything he had suspected about her. Underneath her ice-maiden façade was a passionate young woman just crying out for physical expression. He could see it in the way she held herself together so primly, as if she was frightened of breaking free from the tight moral restraints she had placed around herself. Kissing her would have proven it. He wanted to taste that soft, innocent bow of a mouth and feel her shudder all over with longing. To thrust his tongue between those beautiful lips and taste the sweet, moist heat of her mouth. To have her tongue tangle with his in a sexy coupling that was a prelude to smoking-hot sex.