CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I’VE ALREADY MADE the coffee, Nolan.”
Ivy watched as he blinked as if he was surprised to see her and she understood. She, a woman who barely got up before noon, had not only awakened before him but had started coffee. What she wouldn’t tell him was that she hadn’t been able to sleep most of the night. And when dawn had eased over the horizon, she had got up and taken a run on the beach. She had returned, expecting to find him up, and when she hadn’t she had showered and dressed for the day.
He rubbed a hand down his face. “Sorry, I overslept.”
“No problem.”
He went straight to the refrigerator to take out the ingredients he needed to prepare breakfast. He glanced over at her. “How long have you been up?”
“Since before six.”
A look of surprise touched his features. “You got up that early?”
“Yes. I even took a run on the beach. Now I’m ready.”
His hands stilled from cracking an egg. “You’re ready?”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“To help you paint.”
A slow smile touched his lips. “I thought you might be a no-show.”
She returned his smile. “I proved you wrong, didn’t I?”
He chuckled and the sound seemed to brush across her skin. “Yes, you most certainly did.”
He didn’t say anything else as he went about preparing breakfast. “Need my help?” she asked when the kitchen got too quiet for her.
He glanced over at her before frying the bacon. “No, you’re good.”
No, she thought, Nolan Madaris, you are good. The reason she hadn’t been able to sleep was because all during the night and wee hours of the morning, memories had plagued her. Memories of how he had kissed her, especially when they had returned from dinner. How he had parted her lips with his tongue and began mating with it in a way that had her groaning in her bed most of the night. What man kissed a woman that way, so deeply and thoroughly? Even the tester at the restaurant had left her breathless.
And both times he had kissed her without her removing her glasses. It was as if wearing them hadn’t hindered him in the least. She couldn’t imagine the kiss in the living room last night going any deeper than it had yesterday. Any deeper would have made her pass out.
“You okay over there?” he asked as he prepared the eggs.
She glanced up and saw him watching her. If only he knew. She was great. She felt great. And because of those kisses, she knew there was hope for them and their plan.
“I’m okay. I think those kisses yesterday were what I needed.”
He paused, holding a spatula midair, and asked, “How so?”
“I felt something, both times. Especially the last one.” It had been right up there with mind-blowing.
He slid a plate of food in front of her. “Have you never felt something before when you kissed a guy?” He sat down across from her.
She shrugged. “Never like that. I know you did that on purpose.”
He paused from taking his first sip of coffee. “I did what on purpose?”
“Kiss me the way you did. Both times. I guess you wanted to arrest my fears. I must have sounded like I was freaking out over dinner.”
After taking a sip of coffee, she watched as he sprinkled pepper onto his egg. Never salt, always pepper. “No, you had some valid concerns that you addressed. And you don’t have to ever thank me for kissing you. I enjoy doing it. Immensely.”
At that moment her phone rang. She frowned when she recognized the ringtone and decided to ignore it.
“Aren’t you going to get that?”
Funny he would ask her that with the number of calls he’d been getting and not answering. “No. I’m hoping if I ignore him, he will stop calling.” She hated admitting the caller was a man, but she didn’t want him to think she would ignore her grandmother’s calls.
“Why don’t you just block his calls?”
She shrugged. “He just started calling me last week after two years.”
“Why?”
“He said to apologize but I refused to accept his apology. I don’t want anything from him. If he calls again, I will block him.”
She continued eating. “This food is good, by the way.”
“Thanks.”
She glanced over at him and wanted to ask something she had wondered about most of the night. It was something most people wouldn’t be concerned with but because of her history, she was. “Nolan?”
He glanced over at her. “Yes.”
She placed her coffee cup down and looked directly at him. “How did you kiss me like that without taking off my glasses?”
* * *
NOLAN FIGURED TO anyone else Ivy’s question was probably a real stupid one. But not to him. “From years of practice.”
“Practice?”
“Yes.”
A confused look covered her face. “Why would you practice kissing females who wore glasses?”
He couldn’t help but smile. “I didn’t. I was the one wearing the glasses and refused to take them off whenever I kissed someone. My vision was so bad that without them I might have been kissing their nose instead of their lips.”
She blinked. “You wore glasses?”
“As thick as they came until my twenty-first birthday. LASIK eye surgery was still new then, but I desperately wanted it. It was a gift from my family.”
“That was kind of them.”
“Yes, it was.”
She didn’t say anything else for a minute, but Nolan had a feeling from the way she would glance up at him every so often that his revelation had filled her with more questions. “You want to ask me something else, Ivy?”
She licked her lips before saying, “I just can’t imagine you wearing glasses.”
“I did and some people weren’t nice to me about it, like doing so was my choice. I got bullied quite a bit. My cousins Reese and Lee used to have to fight for me because I refused to fight for myself.”
He chuckled. “I convinced myself the reason I didn’t fight was because I didn’t want to get my glasses broken. It was my great-grandmother who finally made me realize that Reese and Lee wouldn’t always be around to fight my battles and that I needed to know how to defend myself.”
Ivy’s eyes widened. “She encouraged you to fight?”
“No. Mama Laverne encouraged me to defend myself. There’s a difference. Whenever I could, I needed to just walk away, ignore the hateful comments and barbs. But if someone put their hands on me, then that was another matter.”
She nodded. “That makes sense.”
“I thought so, too. And I was lucky when my grandfather Nolan gave me some boxing lessons. He used to box in his younger days. That helped. Word got around school real fast that I was not a guy to mess with.”
“How old were you when you began defending yourself?”
“Around twelve.”
“You were still just a kid.”
“What about you?” he asked after taking a sip of his coffee. “Did you get picked on for wearing glasses when you were in school?”
She nodded again. “Yes, all the time, but that wasn’t the worst of my problems. My love for technology was, so I was called a four-eyed geek.”
He burst out laughing and she frowned. “I don’t think that’s funny, Nolan.”
“It is since I was called the same thing.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I kid you not.”
Something dawned on him. Only someone who had a similar issue would fully understand what she’d gone through most of her life or was still going through. Where he could see the vast beauty behind a pair of rim glasses, some people could not. And in regard to her being a techie, as far as he was concerned, techie women were some of the brightest and the smartest. What man wanted an airhead?
“Tessa fought mine.”
He glanced over at her. “Excuse me?”
“I said Tessa fought mine. You mentioned your cousins Lee and Reese fought your battles while growing up. Well, my best friend, Tessa Hargrove, was the one who fought my battles. At least she tried. She moved to Houston in our junior year of high school. She was too pretty for the snooty girls at school, so they ostracized her. I was already being ostracized, so Tessa and I became the best of friends. We still are. A very unlikely pair, believe me.” She paused for a minute and then said, “Your sister Victoria graduated with us.”
He sat down his coffee cup and raised a brow. “Are you going to tell me Victoria was one of those snooty girls?”
She shook her head. “No, she didn’t associate with any of them, although they tried real hard to be her friends. By then most people heard one of your granduncles had married actress Diamond Swain, and everyone wanted to be in Victoria’s circle of friends. She was smart enough to stick with the ones she’d always had.”
He glanced down in his coffee. He then looked up and met Ivy’s gaze. “How did Victoria treat you?”
“Your sister was always kind to me and Tessa. She would speak to us and during the one class we had together she didn’t have a problem sharing her notes whenever either of us missed school. She even invited us to her senior graduation party.”
He nodded. He couldn’t imagine Victoria being like those girls who’d treated her badly and was glad to know she hadn’t been. “Did you go to Victoria’s party?”
“No. Tessa and I had planned to go together, but Tessa had to go out of town at the last minute and I didn’t want to go by myself.” Ivy stood. “Do you need my help with the dishes?” she asked him.
“No, it won’t take me long to wrap things up in here.” He glanced at his watch. Because he had overslept this morning, they were getting a late start. It was close to ten o’clock. “I’ll be ready to start painting in around twenty minutes.”
“Okay. In the meantime I’m going to go sit on the dock.”
“All right.”
Nolan watched her leave while thinking he was learning more and more about Ivy every single day. But then that’s why they were here, right? That should be easy enough.
He rubbed his hand down his face. Then why were things suddenly beginning to feel rather complicated?