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hauling ass across the room in the same instant.
    He opened the door. “Lisa?”
    The room was dark, but there she was. Crouched on the floor on the other side of the bed, picking up pieces of the water glass he’d left on the nightstand the evening before.
    “I’m sorry. I couldn’t sleep. I was going to get up, so I reached for the lamp... I didn’t see the glass until it was too late.”
    Duarte swore in relief that’s all it was. He stepped inside and flicked on the light switch. “Don’t worry about the glass. You’re all right?”
    “Yeah.” She blew out a quiet laugh. “Just clumsy as usual.”
    He rounded the bed to where she was hunkered down on the floor, and his mouth went dry. All she wore was her T-shirt. Her full breasts bobbed freely beneath the dark blue cotton, nipples peaked like hard buds.
    Fuck.
    God help him if he found out she wasn’t wearing panties under there either.
    He wrenched his gaze away from her and that dangerously tempting question. Broken shards surrounded her bare feet. “Don’t move.”
    He went out to the bathroom and brought back a small trash bin and some damp tissues to pick up the smallest chips of glass. She helped him clear away the pieces, apologizing profusely even though he was the slob who’d left the glass there to be knocked over in the first place.
    He wasn’t used to thinking about anyone but himself. Now, with Lisa in his house for just a handful of hours, he was having a hard time thinking about anything but her.
    Her warm skin. Her sweet vanilla scent. Her soft fingers brushing his as they worked together to dispose of the mess on the floor.
    The dick-inflaming knowledge that she was as good as naked beneath that flimsy cotton shirt.
    Yeah, he was having an undeniable, obviously very hard time thinking of anything else.
    “It’s all right,” he muttered as her whispered apologies kept coming.
    “No, it’s not. I should’ve been more careful. Bad enough I show up here uninvited to drag you into my problems. Now, I’m hogging your bed and breaking your things...”
    “Hey. Listen to me.” He reached out to caress her cheek. “I don’t give a fuck about a broken glass or losing my bed for the night. As for dragging me into your problems, they’re mine now, too. They were mine even before you came here tonight.”
    She blinked up at him, frowning, her bottom lip caught slightly between her teeth. And now that the glass was cleaned up and there was nothing but heat and silence separating them, Duarte realized his mistake in touching her.
    He couldn’t pull his hand away from the softness of her skin.
    “Shit, Lisa...”
    She looked drowsy and sleep-rumpled in the dim light overhead. Just the fact that she had been in his bed a few minutes ago brought his hard-on to the verge of agony.
    Against his better judgment, he looked at her—really looked at her. Christ, she was beautiful, even more so now than before. More mature, the roundness of her early twenties gone from her cheeks now, refined to a delicate, lean elegance.
    She was still girl-next-door pretty, but with a devastating sensuality now.
    Sexy as fucking hell.
    As he stroked the pad of his thumb over her velvet skin and moist lips, the air between them crackled with a charged anticipation. He felt it in his fingers, in his bones. He felt it in every hard beat of his pulse as he tried to tell himself to back off, that kissing her right now would be a colossal mistake.
    His brain knew that. Hell, even his heart warned him against complicating his solitary, dangerous existence by getting intimate again with this woman.
    But neither head nor heart seemed able to convince his limbs to make the first move.
    Lisa wasn’t moving away either.
    Leaning in closer, he cupped her face tenderly in his palms. His fingers curled around the back of her warm, soft nape, and a small sigh leaked out of her. When she licked her lips and those pretty, long-lashed eyes went dusky with desire, Duarte was done