By Jove by Marissa Doyle Read Free Book Online Page B

blissfully burying her toes in the silk Kerman rug. He’d been mystified, even when she made him do the same.
    Now he rolled over in the grass to regard her. She reached up and brushed aside his hair. “Just checking your ears,” she said with a grin.
    “My ears? Why?”
    “To see if you’re a Vulcan. Honestly, can’t you feel what a glorious day it is? Don’t you want to roll in the grass like a colt and be glad you’re alive?”
    “I’m very grateful to be alive,” he said, looking down at the grass, then up at her again. “But thank you,” he added in the same quiet tone.
    “For what?”
    “For teaching me to be human.”
    “Wait a minute. Let me see those ears again.” She reached for his hair. He captured her hand and held it.
    “You have no idea what being with you is like for me,” he said, looking earnestly into her eyes. “You are so here, so in the minute, seeing and feeling and knowing.”
    “Aren’t you here? Don’t you see and feel and know?”
    “Not in the way you do. I see that the sky is blue and that the leaves are changing colors because it’s fall. But they’ve done that for millennia. They just are. Only man can look at them and see the passing beauty in them. Maybe it’s their mortality that gives men the ability to appreciate the things that don’t last.”
    “So you admit it—you are a Vulcan.” She grinned at him again. “But those things do last. I’ll always remember lying here on a perfect October day with you.”
    “Someday that memory will die with you.” He squeezed her hand, then held it against his cheek. She held her breath. “But I don’t want to think about that.”
    “Then don’t think about it.” She stroked his cheek. “I know we all have to die someday. But until we’re dead, we’re alive. They say that where there’s life, there’s hope.”
    “Hope,” he said, with a tight, humorless laugh. “You talk to me of hope?”
    What had happened to Grant that he was this way? “Why not? That’s what it means to be alive. To live in the hope of another perfect fall day. Can’t you see that?”
    He studied her face as if looking for some hint of irony, and she felt the tension slowly leave him.
    “Theo,” he said, his voice hoarse. “ You make me see that.” He bent his head toward her.
    A flutter of excitement ran through her at his closeness. She slid the hand that still rested on his cheek around to entwine in his hair, as soft and dark as mink, and pulled him down to her.
    He touched his mouth to hers carefully, delicately, like the brush of a feather. She felt him tremble, and with a rush of tenderness held herself in check and let him set the pace of their kiss, closing her eyes and keeping her lips soft and yielding as he explored them. Time stretched and slowed.
    But after a brief eternity she couldn’t hold back any longer. With a little sigh she let her lips part and brushed her tongue across his lips.
    “Theo!” he gasped, and gripped her shoulder.
    She murmured into his mouth, “I want you to taste me, Grant. Please.”
    “Taste you…oh, God, Theo…” Now it was her heart pounding as the slow honeyed seconds flew by. He may have had little practice, but the sheer emotion—the passion, the longing—that his kiss summoned in her was making her—
    “Oh, really ,” said a disapproving voice above them.
    “You’re just jealous, Di,” came the cheerful reply. “I know I am.”
    “Jealous? I don’t think so. Kissing is so—unsanitary!”
    Grant sat up as if jerked by a string. Theo made a small, anguished sound, and her dismay threatened to choke her. Past Grant’s shoulder she saw Diana Hunter and Paul Harriman standing over them. Di looked disgusted, but Paul regarded them with interest.
    “That looked like fun,” he said, turning his smile on Theo. “You never told me you were such a good kisser. Or offered to show me, for that matter.”
    Theo closed her eyes for a second, trying to gather her scattered wits