Lying on the couch behind them, Samantha watched Mike, thinking that it was odd that in such a short time all other men seemed to pale beside him. She watched him move, watched the way his muscles moved under his thin T-shirt, looked at the dark curls of his hair.
Suddenly, it hit her how close she had come to death. Remembering the man’s hands on her throat, she could almost feel her life being squeezed from her. Yet, in the middle of that, she had known, known, that Mike would come to her if she could just make som
e sort of signal.
Now that she thought of it, she knew that hitting the wall with her heel was a very weak signal to send to someone who was asleep. How had Mike heard her three puny knocks? How had he known they were cries for help and not just normal sounds? She could have turned over in her sleep and hit the wall.
Yet somehow, Mike had heard her and he’d come to her rescue. When she thought of the door to her apartment with the hole in it, she felt chills run up her spine. Mike had put his foot through the panel and had reached inside to the lock. He had come through a solid oak door with the force of a bulldozer. Or a superman, she thought.
Now, she looked at him, at his profile. Was he actually the most beautiful man on earth, or was that just the way she saw him?
Looking down from his face to his strong neck, to his bare arm, the tricep well defined, to his small waist, his stomach hard and flat, her eyes moved downward to his legs, hairy and brown beneath his shorts.
When she looked back up at his face, Mike had turned to her and was watching her. Samantha looked away from his eyes, not wanting him to know that she had been looking at him.
Moving away from his friends, Mike came to sit by her on the couch. Behind him the men were arguing over the game, and the women were outside looking at Mike’s garden.
“Are you all right?” Mike asked, tucking the blanket around her, even though it was warm in the house.
She nodded, looking down at her hands.
Leaning toward her, Mike slipped her high collar down and put his hand on her throat, on the ring of yellow bruises there. As his fingers slipped around the back of her neck, his thumb rubbed over her lower lip.
Samantha’s breath caught in her throat as she looked into his dark eyes. It was as though they were alone in the room, but at the same time she was well aware of the other people around them. When Mike moved closer to her, she didn’t pull away, and when his lips were inches from hers, she still didn’t pull away. His breath was warm on her lips, warm and sweet and fragrant.
When he touched his lips to hers, she closed her eyes, but when he moved away, she opened them. He was looking at her, looking at her in a way that she didn’t understand.
“Sam,” he whispered, then kissed her in earnest, kissed her sweetly, not aggressively, but meltingly, as though he wanted to tell her something, as though he wanted to reassure her—as though he wanted to tell her that he cared for her.
She put her hand up to his neck. Ah, she thought, to touch Mike, to feel the warm skin that she looked at so often, to feel the curls of his hair about her fingers. She applied pressure to his neck with her fingertips and he moved his head, his kiss deepening.
Samantha lay back against the pillows, her fingers tightening on his neck, her mouth opening a bit as she felt the sweetness of Mike’s tongue touch hers. He wasn’t jumping on her, wasn’t forcing her, wasn’t overwhelming her.
It was he who pulled away. Her heart was pounding and her breathing was deep and fast.
“You like that better, sweetheart?” he whispered.
“I—” she started to say, but he put his lips to hers again and didn’t allow her to speak.
Putting his hands on the side of her head, he ran his thumbs over her cheeks, then moved and touched her eyelids, her nose, her lips. After a moment, he pulled back and held up his hand. It was shaking. “You do something to me, Sammy-girl. I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve felt it since that first day.”
It was the women coming in from outside that brought them back to the present. Straightening, Mike stood up from the couch, but the way he was looking at her with eyes so hot, eyes that asked so much of her, he may as well have still been kissing her.
“Have we interrupted something?” Anne asked. “Mike, you and your…tenant want us to leave?”
Mike grinned at her. “Actually, I’d rather you stayed. This house seems to get a little, ah, friendlier when there are people around.”
Looking down at her hands, Samantha tried to keep anyone from seeing her blush. What Mike said was true: She felt safer when there were other people with them. When there was an audience, she was sure Mike wasn’t going to do something that would take her where she didn’t want to go.
At four everyone was starving, so Jess ordered food, enough for at least twenty people. When it was set up on the picnic table, Mike insisted on carrying Samantha outside.
“Shut up,” he said when she started to protest. “You act like I’m a sex deviant when we’re alone, but you let me kiss you when the house is full of other people. If the presence of other people loosens you up, I will consider keeping the house packed. Now be still and let me enjoy myself.”
She couldn’t keep from smiling as she put her head into the curve of his shoulder.
Mike kissed her forehead. “Sam, you go to bed with me and I’ll show you a real good time. I swear.”
She laughed—but she wasn’t tempted, not actually. She liked this much, much better than what people did in bed together. She liked the touching and the caressing, the kissing, liked the feel of Mike’s breath on her lips, the sight of his muscles moving beneath his clothes. She liked sitting close to him, liked the way he leaned over her when he tucked the blanket around her. All in all, she liked the way a man treated a woman before he’d had what he wanted from her. After he got that, everything changed.