Mr. Undeniable by Karina Bliss

Author:Karina Bliss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Karina Bliss
Published: 2008-11-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The first thing Roz noticed about the house when she arrived at 7:25 p.m. was the silence.

Normally, Liam and Cassie were racing around in pajamas in a final play frenzy, while Sam had the sound on The Simpsons cranked up, trying to drown out their noise, and Roz called for everybody to please use their inside voices.

Surely Jack hadn’t got them to bed early?

She dropped her car keys on the telephone table, and they skittered off the polished surface to the floor. He’d found time to clean? As Roz bent down to pick them up, she noticed the pencil marks on the skirting board had disappeared, and her astonishment grew.

Not just cleaned, but spring-cleaned?

She sniffed. The whole place had the unmistakable tang of solvents and chemicals. Climbing the stairs to the kids’ bedrooms she found both sound asleep, tucked neatly under the covers. Sam’s room was empty, not just of Sam, but of clutter. She’d been trying to get him to clean his room for a month.

Fighting a growing sense of failure, Roz started for the stairs. Halfway down, she caught sight of Jack sprawled asleep on the couch in the living room, and immediately cheered up—he looked as disheveled as she usually did at this time of night. On the other hand, he’d achieved a hell of lot more, so he’d earned it. Still, his success wasn’t unqualified, if Sam had gone out.

Roz crouched down beside Jack and reached out to shake him awake. Then paused. How many times had she watched him sleep? His hair had fallen forward over his brow and she had to fight the urge to smooth it into place, slide her fingers through that silky springiness.

But she couldn’t resist a slow visual journey over his face. This close, she could see his eyelashes and brows were tipped with the same honey-gold as his hair. Once the only lines he’d had were when he smiled, that slow-burning, lip-curving grin that crinkled those green eyes and never failed to ignite a melting, come-to-me-baby response.

Fortunately, he didn’t smile at her anymore.

Now new lines added harshness to the Hollywood good looks that had once bowled her over. Before Jack, she’d been dating the kind of guys who invariably gravitated to nurturers—boyish charmers with mommy complexes. There was nothing little-boy about Jack. Comfortable in his masculinity, he admired smart women and relished being challenged intellectually. During their marriage, he’d been a huge supporter of Roz’s professional goals, and not the least threatened when she started earning more than his fledgling business.

Playing hard to get was the sensible course to follow with a man used to women falling all over him, and Roz had a reputation in that area to uphold herself.

But faced with the raw vitality of a man she’d instinctively recognized as her soul mate, she’d folded on the second date and all but dragged him into bed. Ironically, it was Jack—the player—who wanted to take things slowly, but Roz figured he’d had it his own way for far too long.

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