San Antonio Rose by Fran Baker

to be able to take her face into both hands.
    “I can’t.” She shook her head, denying him. Denying herself in the process.
    He kissed the throbbing pulse at her temple. “We’ll have dinner on the Riverwalk—”
    She cut him off at the pass. “Tony will be home from school in a little—”
    “And then later—”
    “You’ll show me your collection of empties?”
    “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”
    “You’ve seen mine,” she said in a constricted voice.
    He nuzzled her cheek and the corner of an eye, sending shivers along her skin. “Not lately.”
    “And not now,” came her sharp reply.
    Rafe got the message then, loud and clear. He let her go and laid his head back against the leather seat, staring out the windshield at the solid brick wall in front of them as if it were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.
    “We did it all backward, didn’t we?” He rolled his head her way, the regret in his blue velvet eyes echoing in his voice as he answered his own question. “Made a baby before we ever even had a real date.”
    Jeannie breathed in but couldn’t breathe out past the tight little pain in her throat. She swallowed and looked down at her lap, blinking back the tears that threatened to spill.
    “I wanted to take you places—to the movies, to the Dairy Queen, to your senior prom.” He chuckled bitterly. “But good little Anglo girlsdidn’t go out with big, bad greasers. So instead I took you to the backseat of my car.”
    “You took me into your arms.” She reached over and smoothed his wind-rumpled hair back from his forehead, erasing his pained frown with her tender ministrations. “And that was the only place on earth I wanted to be.”
    Rafe captured her hand, linking their fingers over the console. “Believe me when I say I never meant to hurt you.”
    Jeannie looked down at their joined hands. “Nor I, you.”
    “If I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have let it happen.”
    “It wasn’t
all
your fault.”
    “But I was older. I could have controlled things if I’d tried.”
    “And I could have said no if I’d wanted to.”
    He squeezed her hand. “Too bad we can’t go back and start over.”
    She saw her opening and jumped in with both feet. “Maybe we can.”
    That got his attention. “Oh, yeah?”
    “Yeah.”
    “How?”
    “Walk me back to my car, and I’ll tell you how.”
    He grinned. “You drive a hard bargain.”
    “Don’t I, though?” she agreed saucily.
    Rafe rubbed Jeannie’s knuckle with his thumb, wondering how she would react if,instead, he just scooped her into his arms, carried her upstairs to the loft over his office and took her straight to his bed.
    For eleven years she’d been off-limits, forbidden to him first by her father and then by his own innate respect for the marriage vows he’d been led to believe she had taken. Now he wanted to make up for lost time.
    He wanted to touch her again. See his hands on her ivory skin, feel her naked and quivering with need beneath his questing fingers, trail fire paths along her breasts, her ribs, her belly, and lower. He wanted to taste her again. Sip at the taut sweetness of her nipples, feast on the banquet of her femininity, lap at the honey of her. He wanted to make love to her again. Bury his face in the curve of her shoulder, his body in her creamy warmth, and take her all the places he’d never taken her before.
    But what he wanted to do and what he did were two different things. He released her hand, one slender finger at a time, and said, “Deal.”
    Jeannie experienced a small pang of regret as she reached down to pick up her purse. For a moment there she’d thought she’d detected that old flame burning in Rafe’s blue eyes. The one that had always ignited a torch in her. But when he got out on the driver’s side and came around to open the passenger door, thefire was gone and only the remembered glow of friendship remained.
    Hand in hand, the feeling so