Grady's Wedding by Patricia McLinn Page A

and her breathing grew shallower.
    How ridiculous! Afraid to walk through a room because of a man! She resolutely pushed aside the question of whether fear was an accurate description of her reaction.
    She put on her robe, allowed herself a deep, steadying breath, then eased open her door. Finding her way through the dark living room, she kept her eyes from the couch.
    But opening the front door produced a squeak that jerked her head around to see if it had trumpeted as loudly to the couch’s occupant as it had to her.
    Moonlight picked out the white of the sheet that draped across his hips and one leg, leaving bare the other leg and his chest. From where she stood, it was entirely possible that he was naked under that sheet.
    More important, she reminded herself, he wasn’t moving.
    She slipped outside and padded barefoot to where she’d left the brush. Back through the open door, with one hand on the knob and one on the frame, she closed it inch by unsqueaking inch. When the door was closed and locked, she released a breath, but she did that quietly, too.
    Two steps away from the door she stopped.
    She turned back and looked at Grady. His position hadn’t changed. But something about him suggested movement. She counted to ten. Nothing. Letting out a breath, she relaxed.
    Maybe too much, because that’s when it struck her, with the golden body she’d seen being bronzed by the sun now shining silver in the moonlight. Lord, he was an attractive man, with a smoothly sculpted body to match his handsome face. A smile that heated cool blue eyes. A touch that knew how to please a woman. And heaven help her, she was attracted to him, though she’d fudged her answer to him.
    Well, of course she was attracted to him. And of course she fudged her answer. She needed distance from him. Even at the cost of producing that bleak expression on his face when she reminded him of his pattern with women. An odd reaction, she thought again; she would have expected a veritable Don Juan to be proud of his conquests.
    She shook her head. He was an expert at making himself attractive to women and he had all the raw material to work with. He also was far from stupid. He’d recognize that his reputation wouldn’t appeal to her; he couldn’t hide it, but he could make her wonder, so his other appeals came through. And she did, and they did. Yes, she was definitely attracted.
    Physically.
    Lust, that’s all. Little case of lust never hurt anybody, as long as you didn’t act on it.
    I seem to be everyone’s knight in shining armor except yours, Leslie.
    There was his kindness to friends. His humor. His need for remedial gift-buying lessons. His pleasure in pleasing his friends. And, most disconcerting of all, that aura of basic isolation.
    All right, maybe lust was complicated by less clear-cut issues.
    That didn’t change the bottom line. The reasons she’d told him for remaining strictly friends were as strong as ever.
    The one she hadn’t told him was even stronger.
    “You better hurry back, Leslie. Back to the safety of your room.” She jumped at his voice, but he didn’t move. As far as she could tell he hadn’t even opened his eyes. But his whisper in the dark was very sure. “And you better do it fast.”
    She hesitated, adding another ounce to his discomfort of lying still and silent under the weight of her regard. Then she left without a word, without a sound, except, finally, the click of a door closing down the hallway.
    “It wouldn’t hurt to lock it, too, Leslie,” he whispered into the shadows that still carried her scent.
    * * * *
    With Paul and Bette staying on at the beach a few days before flying back to Chicago, Grady joined Leslie in Michael’s and Tris’s car for the return to Washington.
    Grady watched Leslie arrange herself in a far corner of the back seat and turn to watch the scenery out her window. Then he stared unseeing at the view out his. Tris looked straight ahead, answering Michael’s comments with