By His Desire by Kate Grey Page B

was sweaty. His fingers tightened around hers in a warm grip, and a shock of awareness went through her. She wondered if he could sense how fast her heart was suddenly beating.
    She pulled her hand away with a jerk, and then blushed. She was acting like an idiot in front of the man who had paid a million dollars for one of her father’s paintings.
    She looked up at the painting in question. If it had been left to her, she would never, ever have sold it. But the portrait, along with everything else, had gone to her stepmother.
    “So I heard you, um, bought this,” she said, wincing inwardly at the inanity of the statement.
    When Keith didn’t say anything, she glanced at him again. He was looking at her, not the painting, with a kind of focused intensity in his blue eyes.
    She wondered if she had a foam mustache from the cappuccino she’d drunk earlier. The urge to brush a thumb over her upper lip was almost unbearable, but she remembered what her therapist had told her about that kind of self-consciousness.
    It wasn’t a reflection of reality. Let it go.
    Maybe Keith was just comparing the way she looked now to the way she looked in the portrait.
    “He, um, painted that the summer before I went to college. So of course I look older now.”
    His gaze didn’t waver. “I was thinking you look exactly the same.”
    She did? Was that good or bad?
    Keith, on the other hand, didn’t look exactly the same.
    He looked better.
    Broad shoulders in a perfectly tailored suit. Black hair, blue eyes, chiseled features. And most of all, a sense of controlled masculine power that sent a tickling sensation to the corners of her body—the insides of her elbows and the soles of her feet and the hollows behind her knees.
    Just like in high school, her intense awareness of Keith Logan made her blush like a furnace. She may have made huge strides in dealing with her social anxiety disorder in the last several years, but right now, at this moment, it felt like she was seventeen again.
    Time to go, Sarah.
    She opened her mouth to say a polite goodbye.
    “Have dinner with me tonight.”
    She stared at him, her mouth still open. He’d spoken the words abruptly, without smiling, which made her wonder if he’d felt obligated to ask—because they’d known each other in high school, or because of the painting, or something.
    “Oh…that’s nice of you, Keith, but I…”
    “Do you have plans?”
    Still abrupt, and still no smile. His blue eyes narrowed a little as he studied her, and something about that focused gaze made her answer honestly. “No, I was just going home.”
    “To write?”
    He knew she was a novelist? “Well…yes.” She wrote historical fiction, and was currently working on a story set in ancient Ireland. “My editor is expecting the first draft next month, so I have to keep my nose to the grindstone.”
    “You need to eat, though. Right?”
    This was starting to feel surreal. Keith Logan, one of the richest men in the city—not to mention the guy she’d had a crush on all through high school—was pushing her to have dinner with him.
    “Um…”
    “We’ll go around the corner to Michael’s.” Then he held out his arm.
    In a daze, she took it.
    The feel of his strong, suit-covered bicep under her hand was so distracting that she stumbled on the edge of the carpet in the museum lobby. Immediately that powerful arm was even closer, around her waist.
    “Okay?” he asked.
    She looked up to tell him she was fine, but the words caught in her throat.
    He was so close she saw the shadow of stubble on his jaw, and the scar on his left temple she remembered from high school. He was so close she caught the faint scent of really expensive cologne.
    He was so close she felt the warmth of his body through his elegant suit.
    “Yes,” she finally managed to say. “I’m fine.”
    Except that she wasn’t. She wasn’t anywhere close to fine.
    But it was just dinner. An hour, maybe an hour and a half.
    She could get