Brambleberry Shores: The Daddy Makeover / His Second-Chance Family

A quick peek into Chloe’s room showed him she was still asleep as well, the blankets jumbled around her feet.

He closed her door with gentle care and returned to the family room. Okay, so he hadn’t worked all the restlessness out of his system, apparently. Some of it still simmered through him, especially as he watched Sage sleep on his couch. She looked rumpled and sexy, her lashes fluttering against the olive skin of her high cheekbones and the slightest of smiles playing over those lush lips.

What was she dreaming about? he wondered, hunger tightening his insides.

Maybe it was a reaction to the blood still pumping through him from the good, hard run—or, he admitted honestly, probably just the delectable woman in front of him—but Eben wanted her more than he could remember ever wanting a woman.

He cleared his throat, again fighting back his heretofore unknown voyeuristic tendencies. “Uh, Ms. Benedetto. Time to go. The run’s over.”

Her mouth twitched a little in sleep but her eyes remained stubbornly closed. She made a little sleepy sound and rolled over, presenting her back to him, looking for all the world as if she were settling in to nap the morning away.

Now what was he supposed to do?

“Sage?” he said again.

When she still didn’t respond, he sighed and reached a hand out to her shoulder. “Sage, wake up. You have to go to work, remember? We both do.”

After a moment, she heaved a long sigh and turned over again. She blinked her eyes open and gazed at him in confusion for a moment before he saw consciousness slowly return like the tide coming in.

She sat up, gave a yawn and stretched her arms above her head. Eben swallowed and did his best to remember how to breathe.

“I have to say, that had to be just about the best jog I’ve had in a month,” she murmured with a sleepy, sexy smile.

She rose, stretching again with graceful limbs, and Eben stared at her a long moment—at the becoming flush on her features, at the wild tangle of her hair, at her slightly parted lips.

He sensed exactly the instant his control slipped out the window—when she smiled at him again, her head canted to one side. With a groan, he surrendered the battle and reached for her.

She was soft and warm and smelled of the leather sofa where she had been sleeping and an exotic spicy-sweet flowery scent that had to be purely Sage.

He told himself he would stop with just a tiny taste. He had taken her dog out running, after all. Didn’t she owe him something for that? Stealing a little morning kiss seemed like small recompense.

He didn’t expect her mouth to taste of coffee and mint and he certainly didn’t expect, after one shocked second, for her to make a low, aroused sound in her throat then wrap her arms around his neck as if she couldn’t bear the idea of letting him go.

From that point on, he lost all sense of time and space and reason. His foolish idea of giving into the heat for only an instant with one little taste went out the window along with the rest of his control.

The only thing he could focus on was the woman in his arms—her intoxicating scent and taste, the texture of her sweatshirt under his hands, the soft curves pressing against him.

He needed to stop, for a million reasons. He barely knew the woman. She barely knew him. Chloe could wake and come out of her room any moment. He had just jogged three miles down the beach and back and probably smelled like a locker room.

All these thoughts flickered through his mind but he couldn’t quite catch hold of any of them. The blood singing through him and the wild hunger burning up his insides were the only things that seemed to matter.

He deepened the kiss and she sighed against his mouth. He was intensely aware of her soft fingers in his hair, of the other hand curving around his neck. Even with the heat scorching him, the wonder of feeling her hands on him absurdly drew a lump to his throat.

How long had it been since he’d known a woman’s touch? Brooke’s shockingly sudden death from an aneurysm had been two years ago and he hadn’t been with anyone since then. Even for months before her death, things had been rocky between them. He knew he had failed her in many, many ways.

The specter of his disastrous marriage finally helped him regain some small measure of control.

He stilled, then opened his eyes as the sensation of being watched prickled down his spine.

Not Chloe, he hoped, and swept the room with a glance. No, he realized. Sage’s big red dog watched them through the wide windows leading to the deck. And if Conan had been human, Eben would have sworn he was grinning at them.

Though he ached at the effort, Eben forced himself to break the kiss and step back, his breathing uneven and his thoughts a tangled mess.

“Well. That was…unexpected,” she murmured.

Her color was high but she didn’t look upset by their heated embrace, only surprised.

He, on the other hand, was stunned to his core.

What the hell was he thinking? This kind of thing was not at all like him. He was known in all circles— social, business and otherwise—for his cool head and detached calm.

He had spent his life working hard to keep himself in check. Oh, he knew himself well enough to understand it was a survival mechanism from his childhood—if he couldn’t control his parents’ tumultuous natures, their wild outbursts, their screaming fights, and substance abuse, at least he could contain his own behavior.

Those habits had carried into adulthood and into his marriage. In the heat of anger, Brooke used to call him a machine, accusing him of having no heart, no feeling. She had to have an affair, she told him, if only to know what it was like to be with a man who had blood instead of antifreeze running through his veins.

This new, urgent heat for an exotic, wild-haired nature girl sent him way, way out of his comfort zone.

“My apologies,” he said, his voice stiff. “I’m not quite sure what happened there.”

“Aren’t you?”

He sent her a swift look and saw the corner of her mouth lift. He didn’t like the feeling she was laughing at him.

“You can be certain it won’t happen again.”

A strange light flickered in the depths of her dark eyes. “Okay. Good to know.”

She studied him for a moment, then smiled. He wanted to think the expression looked a little strained but he thought that was possibly his imagination.

“Thank you for taking Conan jogging for me. I admit, I’m not crazy about the whole morning exercise thing. I’m trying to warm up to it but it’s been slow going so far. I thought after a month I would enjoy it more, but what are you going to do? It seems to cheer him up a little, though, so I guess I’ll stick with it.”

He couldn’t seem to make his brain work but he managed to catch hold of a few of the pieces of what she said.

“You’re telling me your dog is depressed?” he asked, feeling supremely stupid for even posing the question.

“You could say that.” She glanced out the window where Conan still watched them and lowered her voice as if the dog could hear them through the glass. “He misses his human companion. She died a month ago.”

The dog’s human companion had died a month ago and Sage had been jogging with Conan for a month. Even in his current disordered state, he figured the two events had to be connected.

“She left you her dog?”

“That and a whole lot of other problems. It’s a long story.” One she obviously had no intention of sharing with him, he realized as she headed for the door.

“I’d better go. I’ve got thirteen eager young campers who’ll be ready to explore the coastline with me in just an hour. I’m sure you’ve got things to do, people to see, worlds to conquer and all that.”

His mouth tightened at the faint echo of derision in her voice, but before he could defend himself from her obviously harsh view of his life, she opened the door and walked out into the cool morning air, to be greeted with enthusiasm by the dog, who jumped around as if he hadn’t seen her in months.

Just now the animal looked far from the bereft, grieving animal she had described. She patted his sides, which had the dog’s eyes rolling back in his head. Eben couldn’t say he blamed him.