Best of all, she actually felt confident that her little apartment was in good shape for receiving guests. Her first day of work had meant a fresh start spring cleaning of it the night before. It might not be one of the nicest places in the world, but she had at least made it one of the tidiest places.
Of course, there was no guarantee it would make it to the end of the week in the same condition, but for right now, she was safe.
She parked and got out, rejoining him in the balmy night air.
The sky had decided they deserved this strange, intense little fling and given them nothing but stars in a black velvet background. Tiffani tilted her head and looked up at them. Martin put his arm around her shoulders and did the same.
He was so warm and so solid. She wanted to stay in his arms all night long.
She hadn’t known a whirlwind romance could feel this—safe.
She tilted her head back against his chest. “Beautiful night.”
“It is,” he said quietly. “Makes me want to go flying.”
He flew? Cowboy and pilot and US Marshal—had he been going for some sort of seductive jobs bingo?
She started to ask what he flew. Did he kept a little plane somewhere?
But she could sense he was in his own world even as his arm tightened around her, holding her so securely that she leaned even further into him, cuddling up against his chest. She felt like a high school girl sheltering under her boyfriend’s letterman’s jacket.
“I could take you up,” Martin said in the same wistful way. “You’d love it.”
“I’m sure I would.”
She wasn’t, actually—or she shouldn’t have been. For some reason planes had always made her a little nervous, as though one of them might throw a bolt at any moment and send her plunging out of the air.
No matter how afraid she was, though, she knew Martin wouldn’t let her fall.
Her priorities right now were a little different, however.
“But Martin, for tonight, I’m thinking... please don’t make me come up with some kind of horrible wordplay about cockpits.”
“Right.” Martin cleared his throat. “Airplanes. No, not tonight.”
He skimmed his hand down her arm. She had ditched the cardigan as the night had gone on and the feeling of his touch on her bare skin made heat rush across her body in a delicious wave.
“Inside,” Tiffani breathed. “Or we’ll get into the habit of getting things halfway started out in public.”
Not that there was anything too appalling about that idea. She could very easily picture stepping back into her car and riding him in the seat right there in the parking lot, her hands braced against the headrest and his hands perfectly tight on her hips. Looking into his eyes as she moved herself up and down the length of him—
That didn’t sound like a recipe for getting any steno practice anytime soon.
She unlocked her apartment and ushered him inside.
It was a small place. She’d had to scrounge around a little just to find a reasonably priced one-bedroom. For a while, it had seemed like she’d be stuck with a studio that just had a calico curtain strung across the bathroom portion of the apartment. That had had its own peculiar Little House on the Prairie charm, but the moment she had seen this place, she knew it was the one for her. She would have signed the lease even if she’d had unlimited money and unlimited options.
After years of rattling around an enormous and mostly empty mansion, her new apartment didn’t feel small. It felt cozy. And everything in it was something she herself had picked out, not an awkward mish-mash of the interior decorator and the previous wife and Gordon’s creepy nutcracker collection.
Thrift stores and garage sales had even let her find a few traces of affordable, slightly-dented grace and charm. She loved her little rose-colored pouf of an ottoman, settled at the base of her favorite reading chair, and she loved her nicked and scratched white kitchen table with its mismatched zebrawood chairs. Some of Jillian’s old drawings were safely stowed away in a scrapbook on one of these shelves.
She’d had a house for a long time. Now it finally felt like she had a home.
She cleared her throat nervously. “What do you think?”
Martin looked around. She liked that he actually looked, that he did her the favor of taking her question seriously.
A smile crept across his face, just as warm as the ones he had shared with her before but more wistful now. “It’s like a garden.”