âWe did make this decision together, Liv,â he reminded her.
âUh-huh. Iâm just not finding this platonic angle as easy to deal with as I thought it would be, thatâs all.â
âAnd you think I am?â Grant pulled his chair closer and took her hands in his. âYou think Iâm enjoying not being able to make love to you? Do you know how many cold showers Iâve taken in the last week? How often Iâve been tempted to change the rules and just carry you off to some quiet inn for the weekend?â
âWould it be such a mistake to do that, Grant? The time for subterfuge ended the night we pledged to try to resurrect our relationship.â
âNot ârelationship,â Olivia,â he said. âWhat weâre trying to revive is the love. So, yes, it would be a mistake. On the other handâ¦â He grinned, that devilish, disarming grin sheâd never been able to resist. âIâm not made of stoneâ¦.â
GRANT saw Olivia before she noticed him. Or, more precisely, he saw her legs, because her face was hidden under the brim of a cream straw hat extravagantly ribboned in gold.
Heâd have recognized those legs anywhere. Long and lusciously smooth as silk, theyâd wrapped themselves around his waist too often for him not to know their every curve as intimately as he knew the back of his own hand.
Still, he was unprepared for his reaction to them again, all these years later. Arrhythmia was something he diagnosed in other people, not himself, and for his heart to behave so erratically at the sight of his ex-wifeâor her limbsâwas absurd. It wasnât as if he hadnât been expecting to see her, after all. He had come prepared.
She stood chatting with a guy who looked exactly like the kind of man her father would approve of. Nicely anemic and thoroughly tame. A ventriloquistâs dummy, with Sam Whitfield no doubt literally putting the words into the poor guyâs mouth.
Circling the tail-end of the receiving line, Grant waited until Oliviaâs date went off to refill her glass, then came up behind her and, just loudly enough for her to hear him over the buzz of other voices, murmured, âHello, sweet face.â
She reacted just as heâd hoped she would, spinning around so fast she almost fell out of her high-heeled pumps. âGrant?â she gasped, in a way that would have had him diagnosing respiratory distress if sheâd been his patient.
âOlivia,â he replied, working overtime to keep his own breathing under control. From a distance, sheâd looked the same as always, but, up close, he saw that sheâd changed.
It wasnât so much that sheâd aged. She was still only twenty-eightâhardly in her dotage, after all. But her posture and the tilt of her head as she regarded him told him that not much remained of the eager, insecure girl heâd met and married eight years before. She would have looked at her feet and blushed. Fiddled with her hair or her pearls, and run her tongue nervously over her lower lip. But, recovering herself quickly, this latest model stared back at him as though daring him to blink in her direction.
Blink, hell! He stood there transfixed. Sheâd always had lovely eyes. Large and luminous, they were that particular shade of hazel able to switch from soulful brown to exotic green practically at will. But since heâd last seen her sheâd learned to accentuate them with make-up. Not that she looked painted or anything, but someone had taught her to shape her brows into a more delicate arch, and to emphasize her long, fine lashes with mascara, so that the effect was not merely pretty but distractingly gorgeous. As for her mouthâ¦
He tried to swallow inconspicuously, no easy feat given that his Adamâs apple seemed to have swelled to the size of a watermelon.
Her mouth, he decided, looked like a freshly picked strawberry. Ripe and sweet and delicious. And he found himself remembering the first time heâd kissed her and how sheâd tasted of summer and innocence. He couldnât have sworn to it, but heâd been pretty damned sure his was the first tongue to have slid past those lips and explored that naive mouth.
She obviously wasnât indulging in similar nostalgia. âHow are you, Grant?â she said, her manner, like her voice, as polite and chilled as the French Chablis her father favored.
âGreat,â he croaked. âAnd you?â