‘Poppy, why don’t you go get your hairbrush,’ he suggested, pushing them into safer territory. ‘We can get a head start while we have coffee on the porch.’
‘’Kay.’ She paused on her way out to remind him. ‘But I don’t want coffee.’
‘I know, baby.’
He waited until her little feet sounded up the stairs before turning back to face Nina.
Before he could say anything, she pushed to her feet, whispered, ‘I’m so sorry. I froze. I didn’t know what to say.’
‘Neither did I,’ he admitted. He went to pour himself a cup of coffee from the pot behind her. ‘But we figured it out.’
She raised that hand back to her cheek. ‘That might have been the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.’
Because her voice shook, he nudged her arm with his elbow. ‘You okay?’
‘Not really.’ She laughed tiredly and turned those sad eyes on him. ‘But I’m trying really hard not to fall apart after everything you’ve done for me. And Poppy …’
‘Nobody does emotions like kids. They don’t regulate their own, and they don’t judge other people for having or expressing them.’
Nina didn’t shy away from the personal topic or change the subject as he’d expected her to. She said, ‘I’m terrified that if I let too much of it in, I won’t be able to pull myself out of it again.’ She stared into her coffee mug. ‘I just want to go back, you know – back to who I was ten days ago. It’s hard to explain …’
‘Hey …’ Maverick waited for her to look at him again before he spoke again. ‘You were seriously hurt. It’s gonna take a while. It’ssupposedto take a while …’
She didn’t reply. But she was standing so close that every one of her soft exhalations whispered across his throat at his open collar. She sighed softly, and his concern started shifting, started taking on a sharper edge.
Her eyes darkened and lowered to his lips as if considering …
Christ, he wanted her.
Feeling the pull of those huge, dark eyes, he lowered his head, moving closer. Though he wasn’t aware of doing it, he put his mug on the counter.
Nina didn’t shy away. To his absolute shock, it was her who rose onto her toes and kissed him gently. It was only one kiss. A sweet, soft meeting of lips that should have been innocent but that tore through him in a river of black greed.
Knowing what she had been through, Maverick tensed against it, against the urge to pin her hips against the counter and hold her in place as he took her mouth.
Nina felt it, and she misinterpreted his tension. She broke away immediately. ‘I’m sorry. That was an accident. I—’
‘Do it on purpose this time.’
She stopped moving and stared up at him. ‘What?’
‘If that was an accident, do it again. On purpose this time.’ The request came out as a demand, but only because he desperately needed to know if he’d imagined that rush of need.
Nina seemed unsure of herself for only a moment, but one look at his face seemed to fill her with enough courage to close the small space she’d put between them. She rose up on her toes and roped both of her arms around his neck. She stared up at him, those big eyes wide and uncertain. ‘I’m not good at this,’ she whispered.
Astounded by her insecurity, but too afraid he might scare her, Maverick didn’t pull her against him as he would have liked. She only needed to feel how impossibly hard he was to know that she was doing just fine. Instead, he raised one hand to her face. He gently tilted her eyes back to his and let his own barriers down, showing her the intensity of his need. ‘There’s nothing you could do that I wouldn’t find impossibly sexy.’
Nina nodded uncertainly, but she took a deep breath, pressed her lips to his, and when he opened, welcoming her, she sighed into him as if she hadn’t known something as simple as a kiss could be so consuming.
Mav wasn’t entirely sure he had known either, but when Nina Keller kissed him, the world fell away. It was just the two of them, spinning into eternity, together.
Bending a little to compensate for their height difference, he took them deeper, and when Nina didn’t shy away but pressed her lithe body against his, he cautiously placed his hands on her narrow waist.
She trembled, and instead of moving away, he broke the kiss to trail his lips down her neck as his hands ran up and down her sides in soothing strokes. But when the trembling didn’t stop, Mav wrapped both arms around her and held her gently against his chest. ‘Are you scared?’
‘A little,’ she admitted. ‘But not of you.’
‘I’m a little scared too,’ he said. Half of him regretted that he’d told her such a personal truth, while the other half of him had known it was coming and had started to prepare for the fact that this woman would turn his careful life upside down.
