body. He couldn’t stand it if she were injured.
“I think so,” she said in a shaky voice. Her accompanying nod was barely perceptible against the expanse of his chest. Her hurried breaths fanned his left biceps sending shivers up and down his spine.
“That was far too close,” he whispered in a husky tone, fighting his inner demons. Roxie could have been killed right in front of his eyes.
“Uh-huh.” She didn’t stir against him, her arms tightly circled around his neck, the soft suppleness of her body pressed along the length of his. The fragrance from her hair enveloped him, teasing, coaxing, arousing.
He was oblivious to the traffic passing by until a gravelly male voice called out, “Hey guys! Get a room!”
She gave a little laugh, but Charlie couldn’t make out whether it was of embarrassment or some other emotion. As he rushed across the street with her tightly pressed against his aching body, he wondered if she’d felt the same heightened sensations he had.
Angry with himself for being wound up to fever pitch by his own desire, he paused under the bus shelter’s roof and spun Roxie around. “Were you trying to get yourself killed?”
He hadn’t meant the words to sound so harsh and bit his lower lip. Where had his self-control gone? He released her enough to push her down onto the unyielding wooden slat bench. Of all the stupid things to do, to want a woman after she’d just about been run over by a maniac trucker.
Her blue eyes went wide. “I wasn’t intending to get killed,” she murmured, her gaze fixed somewhere on his nose. “I thought you might like something cold to drink.”
He cleared his throat, struggling to find the right words to say.
She’d been crossing the street with a cold drink for him? Had she been watching him?
Her tiny earrings glittered in the strength of the sunlight. His gaze slid from her twinkling eyes to her quivering mouth. Her glossy upper and bottom lips parted slightly. He could bend ever so slightly and kiss her, taste her, drive himself further into this insanity of longing. And he did. Ever so slightly. “Charles Vernon,” he said, introducing himself. “Most people call me Charlie.”
“Oh.” She bit into her lower lip, and seemed to hesitate. “Roxanne, Roxie Abernathy.”
Highly erotic thoughts of what those parted lips could do to him flooded his feverish mind. She’d kiss his mouth with a fierce onslaught, and they would leave a fiery trail down the length of his body, from his throat, to his navel and beyond.
Oh God, Charles Vernon. Stop tormenting yourself like this.
Why couldn’t he think anything but sex in Roxie’s presence? Heck and out of it too, he told himself, remembering his much too vivid fantasy on the ballroom floor.
“That semi would have run you over,” he told her. It wasn’t hard to drum up the fury rising from within his chest. His blood still boiled, not only from the exertion, but from the fear he’d felt as he’d seen what was about to happen.
She touched his forearm. “Thanks.” She blushed prettily and tantalizingly. “For saving me.”
Roxie clearly meant every soft-spoken word. Her gaze caught his and her pupils narrowed. Her nipples budded against the thin fabric of her bodice.
Skilled at hiding his emotions, Charlie couldn’t let go of his anger. He should have been thankful that she cared enough about him to come out into the sweltering heat, but his mind’s imaginative eye conjured up a terrifying picture of mangled, bloodied limbs. “Do you understand that you could have been severely injured or worse yet, even killed?”
Blue eyes squinted closed in shock before she flashed them open. “You were clearly miserable. I was trying to do something nice for you.”
“If you want to do something nice—” Charlie cut his retort off just in time, or else he’d have admitted that if Roxie did want to do something for him, she could take care of the raging need she’d inspired. No, that
Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson
Susan Sontag, Victor Serge, Willard R. Trask