me.” She’d always been bright eyed in the morning. Always well rested from a full night’s sleep while he’d been barely able to keep his eyes open in class.
“That was before I realized what I was missing.” She gestured toward the table of women, their drinks raised in a toast. She waved. “The party’s just getting started.”
“I never figured you for a party girl.”
“Oh, I love parties!”
“Since when?”
“Since I left this hole-in-the-wall town and realized what I was missing.”
“A vicious hangover the morning after?”
“Hours of fun the night before.” Her eyes sparkled with meaning and his body throbbed. “Don’t be such a fuddy-duddy. At least finish the dance before you call it a night.” She stepped up against him and twined her arms around his neck again.
He drew a deep breath and resisted the urge to pull her close and show her what she could do with her fuddy-duddy. Instead, he anchored his hands on her waist and did his damnedest to ignore the heat seeping into his fingertips and the sweet scent teasing his nostrils.
“So how are the libraries in Dallas?” he blurted, eager to prove that she was still the girl he remembered.
She’d loved the library. She’d spent every afternoon sitting in the corner with her nose buried in a book, a muffin beside her, while life at Cadillac High had passed her by. “Huge, I bet. Fully stocked with everything from Madame Bovary to The Life and Times of Marie Curie.” He recited two of the books he’d seen her with way back when.
“Actually, I’ve never been to a library in Dallas. I’m too busy.”
“You probably spend all your time in your lab. You were always holed up in the chemistry room when you weren’t in the library.”
“I do spend a lot of time at work, but not just in the lab. I’ve got marketing meetings and product demonstrations, and I do try to take time off to have fun.”
He remembered the so-called social activities she and her geeky friends had engaged in on Friday and Saturday nights when everyone else had been at football games or out cruising in their cars. Only sexy Sarah who’d had a reputation almost as bad as Austin’s had been the exception. “Poetry readings and baking?”
“Bungee jumping and rock concerts.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Rock concerts?”
“Creed. I’ve seen them twice. My first time, I marked the occasion with this.” She moved the veil of blond hair hanging over one shoulder and turned so he could see the back of one delectable shoulder. A small red devil smiled back at him.
A she-devil. As in hot, as in wild, as in give it to me now.
While his mind tried to register the fact that sweet, demure Maddie Hale had a tattoo, his body simply reacted. His mouth went dry. His heart jumped. The hard-on stretching his jeans tight throbbed in anticipation.
“It was my first concert and I went a little crazy.”
He swallowed and searched for his voice. “Damn straight you did,” he finally croaked.
“I was going to get something a little more tame, like a heart or Tweety Bird or something cute. But then I saw this and thought, what the hell? I can be as wild as the next woman.”
Hardly. She was sweet. Wholesome. Respectable. She couldn’t have changed that much, and Austin intended to prove it.
“You still eat blueberry muffins every afternoon?” He zeroed in on the memory of her sitting in the library, munching away as she waited for him. “One jumbo muffin every day at four.”
“Sure do.”
He drew in a deep breath. See? She hasn’t changed that much.
“English muffins. No butter.” At his outraged look, she added, “A girl’s got to watch her figure.”
Okay, so she’d climbed the thermometer a few degrees since high school. She was counting calories, worrying about keeping her curvaceous body in shape so that she could show it off with revealing clothes rather than flower-print dresses.
So what?
A great figure and revealing clothes and a party life and a tattoo didn’t mean she truly had morphed into the exact type of woman he’d sworn off when he’d made up his mind to settle down.
“But you loved blueberry muffins, and people shouldn’t give up things they love because society tells them to.” He recited the words she’d told him every time she’d seen one of the “in” girls scarfing carrot sticks. She’d wrinkled her nose and given him a lecture about society’s oppression of women, and how he should open his mind to all sorts of beauty. And he’d enjoyed every minute. Very few people had ever cared enough about his opinion to try to change it.
Except Maddie.
“Muffins are way too fattening.”
“You always wore a bike helmet when you pedaled around town on that three-speed of yours.” He was grasping, but a guy had to do what a guy had to do.
“Yeah, but now I like to feel the breeze blow through my hair. I even graduated to a ten-speed.” Her eyes lit. “It’s really fast.”
“You always carried an umbrella even when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.”
She shrugged. “It’s fun getting caught in the rain.”
“The girl I remember wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a leather halter top in a place like this.”
“And the boy I remember wouldn’t be wasting time talking with a woman wearing a leather halter top in a place like this when he could be doing other, more important, things.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She eyed him, licked her lips and murmured, “Kiss me.”
Austin stared at her damp mouth for one heart-stopping moment and imagined what she would taste like.
Tart, like the wine she’d been drinking. And hot. Like the woman she’d become—his hottest, most erotic fantasy.
“Pretty please.”
Her soft plea pushed past the frantic pounding of his heart and chipped away at his resolve.
He drank in a deep breath of her, let his gaze linger on her slick, full lips for a long, hungry moment and then Austin did the only thing a man who’d made up his mind to settle down for good could do—he turned and walked the other way.
Because Austin had given up indulging his fantasies. A fantasy was temporary. One night. Maybe a few if it was a really good fantasy. But he wanted more. He wanted each day, every day, from here on out. He wanted to plant roots and build a home and make babies with a woman who wanted the same.
The new and improved Madeline Hale, with her big-city ways and her big-city life, had one-night stand written all over her.
4
“HERE’S THE FLIGHT NUMBER and the arrival time.” Cheryl Louise scribbled the information on a napkin the next morning as she sat across from Madeline at Chester’s Diner.
Madeline slathered fat-free yogurt on her whole-wheat toast and did her best to ignore the smell drifting from across the table of pancakes drenched in butter and syrup. While she indulged in Oreos for the sake of creativity, there was nothing at stake now except her deprived taste buds.
Back in Dallas, it was so much easier to keep her normal routine. She worked so hard that she barely had time to think about food. When she did, it was much easier to shake the cravings. She had only to glance around V.A.M.P.’s executive offices at the svelte women in their designer suits and name-brand shoes to motivate