“I am not blushing.”
“Are so.” With the pad of his thumb, he brushed the arch of her cheekbone. “Right here.” He touched the other cheek. “And here.”
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered.
“You took me up on a dare.”
“We agreed. We can’t go down there and pretend to be a couple.” His touch on her face was mesmerizing. In spite of herself, anticipation built as his fingers skimmed her jaw. “They’ll see right through it. Especially Grandmother.”
“Who’s pretending?” he breathed, and kissed her.
And there they were, right back under the ivy at the benefit. His mouth, so soft and yet so assured, coaxed hers open as she allowed the dammed-up desire that had been cooking inside her all day to burst free. She melted against him and slid her arms around his neck, pulling him closer, hauling him against her so that his big, hot body was fused to hers.
It was only for a moment. In just a moment she’d stop kissing him, stop falling into this fog of need that seemed to blow up between them and blot out reality.
Dimly, she was aware of noise below, but her senses were so filled with the scent of Mitch as his temperature rose, with the touch of his hands as they slid urgently down her back, with the taste of his lips and how they seemed to stoke the fire deep inside-
“Eve!”
Something small and hard rammed into her legs like a freight train and she gasped, jerking out of Mitch’s arms. Stupidly, she stared at the dark-haired boy wrapping her leg in a hug.
“Eve, it’s my birthday! Did you bring me a present?”
Mitch stepped back and sanity flooded in. Behind him, Emily, Eve’s cousin and Roy’s youngest daughter, hung in the doorway with the earphones of her iPod around her neck. She looked as embarrassed as Eve felt.
“I couldn’t stop him,” Emily said. “He came barreling into my room and then saw you guys across the hall.”
She hadn’t even noticed that Emily had been in her room. What if she and Mitch had gotten carried away, as they always seemed to do whenever they let themselves be alone together? Both Emily and Christopher might have gotten an eyeful that would have warped them for life.
Chris jumped up and down. “Present, present, present-”
“All right, all right, little man,” Mitch said as if he’d known the boy all his life. “The present’s in the car. I’ll get it. And happy birthday, by the way.”
Eve hugged Emily and followed Mitch and Chris downstairs. Now all she had to do was figure out how to keep the kid quiet-or at least distracted. Because what he’d interrupted certainly qualified as “monkey business.”
IN FORTY HOURS of digital TV footage, Mitch had not seen Eve as uncomfortable as she was now. She sat opposite him at a table laid out as artistically as a painting-Anne Best’s work. The lady might not be whipping out fouettés in Swan Lake any longer, but she sure knew how to bring art into daily life.
It was too bad that the whole scene reminded him of one of the photographs behind him on the wall-beautifully posed, with no indication of the emotion rolling around underneath.
“So, Mr. Hayes, where did you meet our Eve?” Charlotte Best asked after neatly cutting up her slab of roast beef.
“At the station,” he replied. “I was there on business.”
“What kind of business?”
How to put this without giving away too much? “I work for a network. We think her show can reach a wider audience, so I had some proposals for her.”
Emily snickered, and her mother frowned at her across two place settings.
“How long ago was this? Since we saw you at the benefit last night, I’m assuming it was before that.”
“That afternoon, in fact,” he said, just as Eve kicked him under the table.
“You only met yesterday?” Charlotte’s plucked eyebrows rose. “My, my. What a fast worker you are.”
“He was kissing her,” Christopher said around a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Gross.”
“Chris!” His mother, who had been introduced to Mitch as Karen, tried to hush him.
“Well, he was,” Chris said.
“You don’t need to point it out,” Karen’s husband, whose name Mitch had forgotten, told him. “Eve might not have thought it was gross.”
“I certainly wouldn’t have,” Charlotte mused. “The next best thing to Pierce Brosnan.”
“Mother!” Roy looked up from his own plate. “You’re embarrassing our guest.”
“Am I embarrassing you?” Charlotte looked at Mitch, and he lost control of the grin twitching at the corners of his lips.
“Not at all.”
“You’re embarrassing me,” Anne informed them. “Can we direct the conversation away from Eve, please? She doesn’t need to be in the spotlight when she’s with her own family.”
Mitch shot a glance at Anne. The words were measured and considerate, but with all that stripped away, what lay underneath? Could this elegant woman be jealous? Of what? As far as he could tell, her life wasn’t tied all that tightly to Eve’s.
“She isn’t in the spotlight,” Charlotte said in a tone as crisp as the baby romaine leaves she speared with her fork. “I was merely trying to get a rise out of her young man. No need to be embarrassed, Anne.”
“Mama, please. Can we discuss something else?”
“I think Eve’s career is worthy of discussion. I hardly ever get to see the girl. So Eve, are you going to take Mr. Hayes up on his proposals? The ones relating to business, of course.”
“I can’t talk about that here, Grandmother.”
“Why on earth not? We’re your family, and obviously you’ve talked about it with Mr. Hayes.”
“As you might expect, any negotiations about the show are confidential.”
“It’s not likely we’ll say anything, is it? Roy’s got no connections to television, and Anne never talks about you anyway. Silent as the grave, that girl. No fun at all.”
Mitch almost felt sorry for Anne Best. She sat so straight in the ladder-back chair that you could draw the proverbial ballerina’s line from her earlobe to her hipbone.
“Just because some of us don’t believe in gossip-” Anne murmured against her wineglass.
“Bosh,” Charlotte snorted. “You like a good gossip as well as any of us. But I suppose we should be grateful that someone gives us an example of discretion to follow.”
“I’m discreet, Grandmother,” Emily said. “I never talk about Eve or her show, even though all the kids at school know I’m related.”
“I should hope not,” Anne said. “Half of what goes on in that show should be rated NC-17.”
“What?” Eve choked on a green bean, and Mitch clapped her on the back. “You can’t watch it anyway. It comes on before you get home from school.”
“I have TiVo,” Emily informed her smugly. “I tape it every day.”
“You do?” her mother asked.
“Plus they post the episodes on YouTube, so if I forget I can watch them there.”
“Emily, I hardly think that rainbow parties and finding out if your man is a keeper are the kinds of things you should be watching.”
“Why not?” Charlotte wondered aloud. “I’m sure the halls of the junior high ring with exactly that kind of thing.”
“Emily,” Eve said, her face pale, “maybe you should consider your mom’s feelings and watch something else.”
“Why? I’m fourteen. It’s a little late for the parental guidance now, and rainbow parties are so yesterday. Besides, you’re my cousin. I learn all kinds of things from you.”
Silence.
Mitch shifted in his seat and watched Anne. Half of him wanted to get Eve’s coat and hustle her into the car. Half of him was fascinated by the veneer of politeness cracking over what was obviously a very sore subject.
“You can ask your mom and dad if you want to know about the things we talk about on the show,” Eve said quietly.
“At least you talk about them,” the girl retorted. “Mom and Dad don’t talk about anything. Except what’s for dinner and who’s who in all these dumb pictures. Not about relationships and boys and stuff that’s important.”