The Love Experiment (Stubborn Hearts 1)

What would it mean if he flipped his hand over? If he tangled her fingers in his? If he wanted touch now like he wanted the next inflation of his lungs?

“I don’t want to ask the next question either.”

He slid his hand out from under hers. “Pain, remember?”

“How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?”

He had an obligatory and grudging relationship with his mother, but how to tell her that? “I messed up my mother’s career. That’s not a guess. She told me. She couldn’t work through part of her pregnancy because it was difficult, and then she took a leave of absence for six months and was penalized by the hospital system for t

hat. She’s never gone so far as to say she wished she didn’t have me, but that’s the territory we flirt with. To both my parents I was an inconvenience on my way to being a disappointment. My parents aren’t a factor in my life. They’re people who should never have had children.”

She stood. Martha opened one eye, but didn’t otherwise stir, not even when Honeywell stepped over her on her way around the table. He pushed his chair out to stand, but she put a hand to his shoulder.

“I’m not going to tell you how great my mom is. She was the opposite to your mom. Us kids were made to feel like we were her universe.” She put pressure on his shoulder until he opened his body to her and then she was in his lap, her arms around his back, her face tucked into his neck. When he didn’t immediately move to touch her, she said, “If you don’t hold me I’m going to be very embarrassed.”

What choice did he have? He banded his arms around her, shifted their bodies so her hip rested on his belly, and they were chest to chest. He bit down on a groan. She was soft and smelled like soap and fruity shampoo. He shouldn’t have her in his arms again. It was where he wanted her, but it made him feel vulnerable.

“If you knew that in a year you’d die suddenly, would you change the way you’re living now?” she said, without lifting her head.

He wanted to touch her hair, take it out of the band that held it, but he kept still, enjoying her weight and warmth. This was what he’d change. He’d add this—a strong, willing woman he admired. Someone to share a meal with at night, to share a bed with.

He breathed her in. Not a colleague, not a rookie he was charged with teaching, not an experiment, not a friend. “I’d want this in my life. I’d want not to be so alone.” To stop being a bystander, to make himself a life outside work.

The admission went so deep it might’ve stopped his heart.

“Me too.”

Her voice hitched with emotion. She meant she’d want touch, comfort. “You’d go home to your family.”

She lifted her face, and they were eye to eye. “I’d go home, but I’d want more.”

Now he touched her hair, smoothing his hand from her temple to the knot of it at the back of her head. “What would be more?”

She rested her head into his hand with a satisfied sigh. It was the only answer he was going to get, and he liked it too much. He stretched a hand out to reach for her cell. They had two questions left in this set.

He had to clear his throat to get his voice in gear. “We’re supposed to share five positive characteristics about each other.”

“I’ll start.” He felt her fingers at the back of his neck, playing in the short hair there. “You care about people.” What she was doing with her hand sent shivers down his back. “You’re honorable.” She brought her other hand to his chest, rested it over his heart. “You use your skills for good.” She had to be able to feel it trying to leap into her palm. “You write like you can change the world.” She brought her face close, brushed her nose on his. He quit breathing and closed his eyes. “You kiss like you can stop time.” And it did stop when her lips glanced across his; a whisper, a phantom ache, and then she started the clock again. “Tell me five positive things about me.”

She made him hungry, greedy, wishing he had a different life, longing for a place to retreat to when things got tough. He was jealous of her sense of adventure. His was scuffed and tattered, but hers might be enough for both of them if he could find a way to tell her he was nothing without the work he feared the world no longer valued. He was interviews and story outlines, headlines and paragraphs. He was facts and figures and the impact they had on people, but without those things he was a hollow person, living in an unkempt apartment with an untidy cat, with bad housekeeping habits and poor coping skills.

He’d end up punched into one too many concussions, or smoke himself into bad health. He’d end up pointless and bitter and alone and bitter all over again. He’d question everything but a future where he was a different man with a woman who loved him, who he could worship in return, because it was too much to believe he could have that from twenty-four questions.

But Derelie sat on his lap, her eyes full of trust, and he had enough honor not to question that.

Chapter Fifteen

Jack’s heart pumped strongly under Derelie’s resting palm, his arm at her back held her securely. He wanted her body close, but he’d hesitated on the question and he wasn’t a hesitant man. He looked younger and less authoritative without his glasses. He looked curiously uncertain for a supremely confident man.

“You can say I’m brave.” He’d said that before, but she regretted prompting him, regretted the impulsive decision that landed her in his lap and the way both of those things made her feel small and soft and needy. And still she wanted to kiss him, forget about the questions and the emotions they shook loose, and simply feel the heat and strength of him; concrete and steel to her sunshine and birdsong.

And he wasn’t taking the prompt.

She pressed her feet to the floor and made to stand, a lump of hope turned rancid in her throat, only to feel his arm tighten around her.

“Five things are not enough.” His voice was pitched so low it curled inside her. “Five things puts a limit on you. You’re not five positive things. You’re five hundred, five thousand.”

She drew back a little because Jack sounded angry, and since she’d barged in and made herself at home in every sense of the word, he had a right to be.