between their sweat-slick bodies and pressed it against his bare chest. "But I'm at risk of suffocating to death if you don't get up so I can breathe." She pushed harder. "Besides, I'm not about to risk that condom leaking."
"Spoilsport."
It was what she always said. Not that Randy could blame her. To hear her tell it, she'd had her career mapped out by the time she was seven years old, back when she'd been designing clothes for her Barbie doll.
By age ten she was sewing for her mother and sisters. By eighteen, she'd saved up enough money to attend the Savannah College of Art and Design by creating knock-offs of pop celebrities' outfits for her high school classmates back home in Chicago.
She was the most driven girl—person—he'd ever met, which occasionally made him feel guilty about his parents' not only footing his tuition bill but also springing for a three-room apartment in Savannah's historic district.
Although there wasn't anywhere else he'd rather be at the moment, Randy sat up, grabbed a paper napkin from the take-out bag on the floor and cleaned up.
"Besides, unless I lost my memory when you blew the top of my head off, sugar," he said, "it seems you're the one who talked me into stopping for a quickie."
They'd made the trip out to Swann Island today so he could finish up a portfolio for his Villa and Garden class. The professor had already covered the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Alhambra, Versailles, Monticello, and Fallingwater as examples of locations where art and nature coexisted in ideal harmony.
But Randy considered Swannsea Plantation, with its green fields of tea plants, peach orchards, acres of holly trees, kitchen gardens, and gleaming white antebellum house dating back to when cotton was king, to be right up there with those more-famous sites.
"Like getting you to stop took any convincing." Her voice was muffled by the sundress she was pulling back over her head. "And I'm not even going to let myself wonder how you knew about this place."
"I used to gig frogs in this pond when I was a kid." It wasn't actually a pond—more a wide spot in the marsh.
"Ooh, ick." She was searching on the floor for her sandals. "Is that what it sounds like?"
The sandals were white, with pink flowers that she'd hot-glued to the leather. He found one under his jeans, which were still in a heap on the floor.
"Pretty much. Some folks like to use a gun, but—"
"A gun? For frogs?" She took the sandal he held out toward her and slipped it onto a tanned bare foot tipped in nails the color of a ripe peach. "Wouldn't that pretty much blow them away?"
"Not if you use a .22 loaded with snakeshot."
"You country boys have the strangest ways of amusing yourselves."
He wisely didn't point out that some of the kinky things she'd thought up to do in bed sure as hell topped any amusements he'd ever known.
"When you're a kid, nothin' beats staying up past midnight to slither around in muddy water, playing with a flashlight and hunting bullfrogs."
"It sounds delightful." Her dry tone said otherwise.
"It may be a guy thing. But it was a helluva lot of fun. And unlike for a lot of sports, you don't need to go out and buy a bunch of equipment. All you need is a gig, an old broom handle, a flashlight, and a sack to put the frogs in."
"Eeeww." She shuddered dramatically. Randy often thought that if she weren't dead-set on a career designing clothes for the rich and famous, she could make a good actress. "Disgusting."
"Hey, aren't you always going on and on about all those French designers you get off on—Christian Lacroix, Valentino, and who's the other one, John Paul Jones, or something like that?"
"Jean Paul Gaultier." She corrected him on a lift of her cute pointed chin.
Which he knew, since she was always quoting the guy like he was the Bible or something. Randy liked teasing her because, although he had enough sense never to tell her, she was as cute as a speckled bluetick pup when she got on her high Yankee high