Trusting Again by Peggy Bird Read Free Book Online Page B

through his eyes. He gently kissed her forehead, his hands still on her shoulders. “Shall we go to my house?”
    She didn’t say anything for a few moments, not sure if she wanted to change her mind or race him there. When she tried to speak, she could hear how breathless she still sounded, how high pitched her voice was. She swallowed, gave a cough or two to clear her throat — her head was a lost cause — and tried again. “Remind me how to get there?”
    In spite of the two times he’d given her directions, she made three wrong turns getting to his house driving through a city she knew like she knew her own name.
    Marius Hernandez, she decided, should have a warning label on his forehead: Exposure to this man can result in confusion, dizziness, and erratic behavior. Women who kiss him should not operate machinery immediately afterwards.

Chapter 5
    Because of her detours, Cynthia arrived well after Marius had gotten home. As she walked through the front door he’d left open, he said, “I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind.” He’d shed his jacket and, from the aroma, started the coffee brewing.
    “Sorry, I got turned around and ended up going south instead of north. Must have had more wine than I thought.”
Yeah, right, it was the wine,
she thought.
    “That’s okay. You got here just in time. Coffee’s almost ready. Let’s have it outside. It’s always a shame to waste a nice evening — we don’t have too many of them.”
    “Oh, you out-of-staters are always complaining about the rain. You never complain about all the lush trees and flowers we have because of it, do you?”
    “No, and we don’t complain about the beautiful skin the women in the Northwest seem to have because they can’t bake themselves to leather in the hot sun.” He opened the sliding glass door to the deck for her, a wicked smile on his face. “I’ll bring the coffee out in a couple minutes.”
    When he returned five minutes later, she was at the railing. “I could look at your view forever.”
    “It’s almost as beautiful as you are,
querida
.” He put two mugs of coffee down on a small side table. She saw that he’d remembered she liked cream in her coffee.
    “
Querida
is such a pretty word. What does it mean?”
    “Sweetheart or dear. Spanish endearments always sound pretty, I think.”
    He was so close to her that it was tempting to nestle into his chest. Instead she asked, “Does your family speak Spanish at home?”
    “My mother does. She was born in Honduras. My father had to brush up on the language when he fell in love with her — no one in his family had spoken it regularly for a generation. My brothers and sisters and I were raised with both languages, although we mostly speak Spanglish at home. No self-respecting Spanish-speaker would claim it as their language.”
    He turned her around so she was facing him. “But I know the correct Spanish to describe a beautiful woman when I’m standing next to her.” With the pad of his thumb he outlined her cheekbones, her eyebrows, down the crest of her nose as he said, “
Bella, preciosa, encantadora, maravillosa
. You are all those things.”
    The impulse to move into his arms, press her body against his, was becoming overpowering. Then he made it worse.
    Taking her face in both hands, he said softly, “If I kiss you now, I won’t want to let you leave tonight. You know that, don’t you?”
    Closing her eyes to the intensity she could see in his didn’t help. She could feel his desire wash over her in waves. Barely nodding her head, she managed to get out “Uh-huh.”
    “So,” he whispered, his mouth now almost touching hers, “shall I kiss you?”
    In answer, she put her hand at the back of his neck and pulled him the few millimeters it took for his mouth to reach hers.
    • • •
    When he’d given in to his need to taste her, to kiss her, on the street outside the restaurant, he was sure she’d change her mind about coming to his home