Fall from India Place (On Dublin Street 4)

“It’s straight tonight. Your hair,” she heard him say.

“It’s dry outside.”

“I can’t decide how I like it better. Curly or straight.”

She pressed her face to his chest and planted a kiss. She liked the sensation of crisp male hair and thick, smooth male skin against her lips. “I hate when it goes wild.”

“Why? You look pretty with it curling around your face.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, stroking his biceps, wondrous at the density of the muscle, the curving shape. “I can hear your heart beat,” she said after a moment of silence.

“What’s it telling you?”

She listened carefully, taking his idle question seriously. She absorbed the strong, steady beat. “That you’re a very healthy man who is quite content at the moment?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?” he asked, and she heard the smile in his voice.

“Telling you,” she whispered, her mouth moving against his skin. She closed her eyes and purred when he kneaded the nape of her neck with his fingertips. “Who will you use for a test subject when you do a test of your biofeedback mechanism?”

“I don’t know. What about you?”

Her eyes blinked open. “Do you think that would be a good idea?”

“Yes,” he stated unequivocally.

“Well . . . if you need me . . .”

His low grunt as he leaned down to kiss the top of her head seemed to say, Isn’t that obvious? She smiled. It was a nice, having him tell her he needed her even in such an indirect way.

“Did Ian tell you that I’m going to move into an apartment in his building?” Kam rumbled.

“Yes. We have things arranged so that you can move in tomorrow morning, if you like.”

“I know, he told me. Will you come by in the afternoon?”

“I’ll be working on a project that I have to get done before leaving town on Monday for a couple of nights in San Francisco,” she murmured.

“Tomorrow is Saturday,” he said disapprovingly. “Don’t you ever take time off?”

“It’s a special circumstance,” she lied. She often worked on the weekend, although this really was an emergency situation. “I even had to ask some of the support staff to come in to help me finish. And then we have the dinner tomorrow night with Jason Klinf,” she reminded him.

For some reason, it made her feel guilty when Kam chastised her for working too much, which was ridiculous. Somehow, her work had gotten all mixed up in her head with her feelings for Ian. Maybe that’s why she was so sensitive talking about it to Kam. Maybe she should be ashamed of how dedicated she’d been in the past years to her work; how dedicated she’d been to a man who didn’t return her feelings.

It really was pretty pitiful on her part, she realized irritably.

“It’ll only take an hour or two to program the device for your body,” he said. She lifted her head and gave him a doubtful glance. “If I tell you it’s a work task, will that convince you?” he added dryly. “The Gersbach demonstration is on Wednesday, and you’ll be out of town on Tuesday.”

She thought there was a good chance Angus would arrive tomorrow afternoon and wanted to see his reaction to seeing the dog firsthand, so maybe Kam’s proposition was a good thing.

“Okay, I suppose I could fit it in . . .”

She was distracted by the sound of Kam’s stomach growling. She gave him an amused glance. He looked very appealing lying naked on her bed, his head on her pillow, his dark hair mussed and falling onto his forehead.

“You haven’t eaten?” she asked him.

He shook his head, his sexy lips tilted in amusement. “You?”

“No. I was going to when I got home, but then . . .”

“You made a meal out of me instead,” he muttered dryly. A flash of heat went through her at his reference and the erotic memory it evoked. “Can I take you to dinner somewhere?” he asked.

“Do you really want to get up and get dressed?”

“It depends.” She gave him a querying glance. “On whether or not you’re going to let me back in your bed after dinner. If not, I’d just as soon stay here and not forsake my claim.”

She laughed. His brows quirked and he palmed her jaw, running his fingers gently over her smiling lips.

“You have a very gentle touch when you want to,” she said, his fingertips moving along with her lips.

“Does that surprise you?”

Her smile faded as she considered him soberly.

“No,” she said at last. “It doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

•   •   •

They cleaned up and dressed, then went downstairs. There was a nice restaurant in her building’s lobby. When the host seated them at a cozy booth, Lin started to sit across from Kam. He grabbed her hand, however, and pulled her into the seat next to him. The host gave them a rather smug, patronizing grin, which Kam quelled immediately with a glare.

“Have you been dancing a long time?” he asked after they’d placed their orders and the waiter had left them alone.

“No. I just started it as a hobby four years ago.”

He gave her a sideways glance that made her go warm. “You look like you were born doing it.”

She smiled, flattered. “Thanks. My grandmother wouldn’t have liked my learning traditional Chinese dance. She would have hated knowing about the Kung Fu classes I took several years back. That was both traditional and inelegant—or at least Grandmamma would have thought so,” she said, and laughed. “I actually kept both hobbies from her in the last years of her life, which made me feel terrible. It was ballet Grandmamma encouraged. My mother, on the other hand, holds my Chinese dance hobby up to our family as a stellar accomplishment.” She gave Kam a wry grin. “My only one, mind you, because I botch my Chinese, I don’t work on my cooking enough, and worst of all, I’m still not married to a nice Chinese doctor.”