The next few minutes were filled with clumsy attempts at positioning themselves. It felt like a game of Twister, a very sexy game of Twister, with arms, legs, and hands moving everywhere.
“Oh, sorry,” she apologized after accidentally elbowing him in the eye.
“I didn’t mean to…sorry,” he apologized after his hand brushed against her backside.
There was a calf kick and another elbow, this time to his gut by her. And he had several more ass grazes, which she couldn’t blame him for, she had a lot of junk in her trunk.
The problem was, they were both trying to get into place without actually touching one another. Which sort of defeated the purpose of body heat. She knew that he was too much of a gentleman to say that’s what the issue was, but she had no problem taking charge and addressing the issue.
She shifted toward him, so that she was facing him and for the first time got an eyeful of his body. Oh, what a body it was. She’d known that he was big but seeing him like this he was so overwhelmingly male. His shoulders were so broad and rounded. Her eyes flitted over the chiseled planes of his muscular chest and down his tight rippled abs. He wore dark gray boxer-briefs that, like her underwear basically covered the same amount of skin as a bathing suit.
Realizing that she was just gawking at his bare upper body, her eyes quickly travelled back up his body to his face. That’s when she saw that she wasn’t the only one staring. His eyes were focused below her neck, and she had to admit, she wasn’t mad about it.
Most men appreciated her hourglass shape. It was something that she and all her sisters had inherited from their mom. But no man had ever looked at Grace the way that her sexy stranger was. The way he was looking at her made her feel like she was a work of art, a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. As flattering as it was, it also made her feel a little shy. Which was something she was not used to feeling.
“You should lay down with your back against there.” Her throat was tight as she motioned to the bags piled up behind him.
His eyes shot up to hers and if she wasn’t mistaken, the apples of his cheeks turned red. Had he just blushed because she’d caught him looking at her?
“Are you blushing?” she heard herself ask and instantly wished she could take it back.
What man wanted it pointed out that he was blushing.
“Am I?”
He looked surprised by her observation, but he didn’t seem defensive at all. His reaction made her want to lean down and kiss him. She felt her head lowering and snapped her neck back before she made an idiot of herself.
Turning to her side, she scooted down so that her back was facing his chest and she snuggled against her duffle bag. Their bodies weren’t touching, but heat radiated off of him, eliminating any chill she was feeling.
She felt…exposed, so she said, “Um, the blanket is on your side.”
“Oh, right.”
He pulled the blanket, so it was covering them both and when he did, his arm stayed draped over her.
“Is this okay?” he asked.
She nodded, loving the feeling of being wrapped in his arm. Knowing that she needed a distraction, before she turned around and planted one on him, she decided that she should continue Q&A time. When they were eating, she’d asked him what he was most grateful for in his life, it was a question that she’d gotten from a book she’d read by Dr. Vanessa Cupid on relationships and intimacy. She’d memorized the questions that people should ask each other to create an emotional bond.
She hadn’t done it for any romantic reason. She’d mainly done it for research purposes. Grace had wondered if it actually worked and since most of the dating she did was casual, she’d figured she’d give it a try.
To her great surprise, it had worked. Well, partially. The bond and intimacy had been one-sided. Every single man she’d used the questions on had wanted to date her exclusively. Two of five had even asked her to marry them. One after dating for less than a month and the other after only six weeks of dating. Not being in a relationship, just going to dinners, hikes, a movie, and hanging out.
The system had worked so well she’d had to stop doing it. She didn’t need or want the complication of anything serious. And as nice as it sounded in theory to have men wanting commitment, when that wasn’t what you wanted it was actually somewhat of a mood killer.
But now she found herself asking those same questions to a man who she was lying half naked in the back of her SUV with, in one of the most intimate settings she’d ever been with someone in, and she didn’t want to look too closely at what her motivation for dusting off her old experiment was.
The easy, safe answer was that she wanted to pass the time and distract herself from how badly she wanted to kiss him. But the real, truthful answer was that for the first time in her life she wasn’t scared of a man getting emotionally attached to her. It was the opposite actually. She was scared he wouldn’t. And she was pulling out all the stops so that didn’t happen.
“Would you ever want to be famous? And if so, what would you want to be famous for?” She’d only been able to ask three of the five men that she’d used in the experiment this particular question because the other two were famous. One was an actor and the other was an R&B singer who regularly topped the charts.
“No,” he answered immediately.
“Why not?”
He was quiet for a moment; the only sound was the wind whipping outside and their breaths. Finally, he said, “It’s not real.”
“What’s not real?”