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.“You’re very good at working things out.Are there any difficulties you don’t think you should overcome? Any situation you shouldn’t handle?” he asked softly.Delanie felt the warmth of his hand where he clasped hers, his question echoing in her mind.He sat before her, large and reassuring, his gaze intently focused on her.“What did you say?” she whispered, her awareness of him fogging her already disjointed thinking.His grip tightened and he tugged her down on the tub’s edge next to him.“I asked if you’re supposed to handle everything, all the time.”She shook her head at the crazy thought.“I don’t think I’m omnipotent, of course, but—““No,” he said, laughing softly.“You can’t turn aside hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes, but everything else comes under the heading of ‘do-able’?”Delanie smiled in rueful humor.“You’re forgetting tidal waves.I’m not responsible for those, either.”“But all other difficulties can be overcome if you work it right?” he quizzed, a warm light in his eyes.Not Jenna’s father.There was a man out there who deserved to know he had a child.I hadn’t worked that right, she thought swiftly before banishing the disturbing thought to concentrate on the fragile moment in front of her.Mitchell sat next to her, his body relaxed, his hand still holding hers.“No, I don’t overcome…everything.Not even close,” she said, aware the clean masculine smell of him, his broad shoulder brushing hers.“But this, this was business and not even all my business.I owed it to you to keep this renovation cost-efficient.”She drew in a distracted breath, suddenly conscious of her hand pressed palm-to-palm with his, their fingers somehow having entertwined.“I know I can’t overcome everything.”“But you think you should try,” he concluded, his gaze scanning her face intently.“Because, most of the time, you manage to overcome things.”“Well, yes,” she answered slowly, her heart slowing to a heavy, sensual rhythm.“Not everything can be…fixed.But most situations can be, if you look for a way to make it work for everyone.”“You handled that health inspector like a pro,” Mitchell said, his thumb moving slowly to and fro along the back of hers.“He never knew what hit him.”“He was being unreasonable,” she said, aware of the air around them growing warmer and her body tightening with a thrumming awareness.“I just helped him…to see he could do…what we needed him to do.”“And the wedding came off without a hitch,” Mitchell concluded.“But having this ‘power’ to manage situations, these apparently limitless possibilities, makes you expect a lot of yourself.”She looked at him, startled by the thought of seeing herself as having limitless possibilities.“I don’t think I’m invincible or all-powerful.”The words came out hesitant as she grappled to understand what he was trying to say to her.“Don’t you?”Delanie shook her head.“I am all too human.I make mistakes…sometimes big ones that effect other people.”Poor beautiful Jenna with no father to love her.“And then you give yourself hell for it,” he said.“You should have remembered about leaving the heat on for the pipes.Now I’m out more money for the renovation,—““I’m paying for this,” she said stubbornly.“—you should have driven your father to the hospital when you were a child even though you’d never handled a car.Your father died because you didn’t find a way to save him.”She turned her head to look at him.Their gazes caught and tangled.Delanie heard the thundering of her own heart in her ears.“Limitless possibilities,” he murmured, so close she could feel the waft of his breath on her cheek, “leads to limitless responsibility.”“I’m not…limitless,” she said, still trying to fathom what she saw in his eyes.“No,” he agreed with a faint mocking smile.“Not super-human.Just very beautifully…human.”Delanie looked at him, her suddenly-fuzzy brain noting the way his short dark hair curled slightly at his ear, her eyes drawn to trace the firm line of his jaw.He sat next to her on the edge of the old-fashioned tub, her hand clasped in his, their bodies brushing.All she could think was how comforted she felt, how the tight knot of frustration and self-recrimination in her chest eased as they talked.This was Mitchell, the annoying, demanding, perfectionistic tightwad telling her that it wasn’t so bad.That she shouldn’t be so hard on herself.Mitchell, for whom money was god.“Thank you,” she said, the whisper seeming to echo faintly in the small tiled room.His gaze fastened on hers and the smile faded from his face.Tension, fine and taut, grew between them.Delanie’s breath tripped on her thundering heart.The heat in his eyes so exactly called to the sweep of incandescence growing in her.Leaning forward on impulse, she kissed him, her mouth touching his.The merest brush of lips, the faintest stroke.Not hesitant or pleading.Just contact, a kind of physical underscoring of her appreciation for his tenderness.That’s all she’d intended.But there, so close, the warmth of his lips still lingering on hers, she drew in a breath, a pale, shuddering draught of oxygen—and captured the wild scent of him on her tongue.In that gossamer moment, that time-disoriented, fragile space, wanting and longing raged over her.She looked at him with desolate eyes.How long had she met life alone? Struck out seeking adventure on her own, faced work and life and love without any hand holding hers?Here, in the midst of her self-disgust, Mitchell took her personal definition of burdensome duty and questioned it.Challenged her near-sacred memories, called into question her tightly-held belief about her father’s death.Why had she told him about that?He told her she was nuts…and she loved him for it.Wanted him with an instantaneously blazing need.In that one raging moment, she had to have more.Her hand still locked in his, she leaned closer, layering her lips more firmly against his.He went still.She felt the rock hard immobility of his muscles, the sudden, startling immovability, but she didn’t care.His mouth.Oh, his mouth against hers.He tasted of everything, of sex and longing, of permanence and hope.Of blinding erotic possibilities.CHAPTER EIGHTFor the longest moment, he held still, not kissing her back but letting her kiss him.In a sensory haze, fueled by an inexplicable sense of connection, Delanie kissed him, her lips sliding over his, her heart pounding in her chest.She felt his hand tighten on hers, sensed the answering passion held restrained in his body.Blindly pressing her mouth to his, lost in the sampling, savoring of him, she angled her face to his and reveled in how perfectly right kissing him felt.Time shifted—long or short, she couldn’t tell, so lost in the taking of Mitchell’s mouth.Seconds, maybe minutes later, she felt the quiver of response through him, as if his own hunger had slipped its leash.His hand dragging suddenly free of hers, he bracketed her shoulders, his fingers tight there as the kiss progressed into a mating of mouths.No longer resisting, he took her mouth with complete dedication, kissing and nibbling, one kiss sliding into the next.His tongue met hers, not delicately, but with mastery, as if he wanted to devour her, to consume her until she merged with his soul.Delanie felt the wash of his hunger, as if a wave had broken free in him.Reveling in the biting pressure of his hands on her upper arms, she opened her mouth wide to him, her breath drawn in gasping sobs, her body shuddering beneath the onslaught of the needs he evoked in her.Lifting her hands to his face, she held him there, her fingers splayed across his firm jaw
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