Page 49 of A Shot at Love
“As soon as I know anything, I’ll tell you.”
It was amazing how swiftly he could go from being and sounding calm and nice, back to stern and hard.
“Your sister cans this jam?” he asked, changing the subject, and then took a pull from his water bottle.
Gemma nodded, confused at the topic switch. “Every year since she was nineteen and inherited grandma’s recipes.”
“I think this is the best strawberry jam I’ve ever had.”
Gemma chuckled. “No lie. And you’re not the only one. In the beginning she only gave it out to family. Once word spread, she increased it to friends and then friends of friends when they begged for it. Everyone keeps telling her she should market it commercially, but she won’t.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “Kandy’s very faithful to our grandmother’s memory. Some recipes she just doesn’t want the whole world to have access to. Keeping them private makes it seem like Grandma’s still with us, cooking only for us and no one else.”
She polished off her sandwich, silently wished she had another and then licked the jam that had seeped out from the bread and onto her fingers.
Ky’s swift inhale had her gaze whipping across the table. Nothing had changed in his outward demeanor. He sat, leaning back in his chair, his body relaxed, yet she felt he was anything but. It was his eyes. The green and blue flecks swirling in them had melded into one solid ball of deep and vibrant seafoam, mirroring the color at the bottom of the ocean. They were trained, unblinking, on her mouth. So intense was his stare, Gemma stopped, one of her fingers frozen in place between her lips.
The overwhelming sensation of being trapped and unable to move shot through her.
He lifted his gaze to her eyes and her heart quite simply stopped.
A well of sexual heat so deep it seemed bottomless, stared back at her. Want, desire, lust and—God save her—need, poured from him.
In the next instant he blinked, that blank wall of ice she was getting used to seeing, back in place as if she’d only imagined the scorching heat of a moment before.
But she hadn’t.
That longing had been as real and as potent as the dangerous situation she currently found herself surrounded by. Where she was terrified of one, the other, she was surprised to admit, she’d welcome. If he so much as leaned in toward her, gave her any indication the hunger she’d seen in his eyes was real and needed to be slaked, Gemma would have crawled onto his lap and cleaved herself to his body without another word.
But she knew in the light of the morning she’d be filled with regrets.
Kyros Pappandreos, all six foot plus and dangerously handsome, was the type of man Gemma was drawn to because of his looks, but the kind of guy she’d made a lifetime habit of avoiding. He was a man she knew instinctively would claim her body and demand her heart and there was no way Gemma was going to ever give her heart away. She would never put herself in a position of actually caring enough for any man that her heart would get involved.
Ky struck her as the type of man who’d want a woman to be all in: mind, body, heart, and soul. Total intimacy, shared thoughts and feelings, a true couple in every sense of the word. He didn’t strike her as player, like his partner Jon did, and she knew down to her toes he wasn’t. A woman who found herself involved with him would have to be willing to forego part of herself for the sake of true intimacy.
Gemma had dated a fair share of men since she’d grown out of the naiveté of her teens but had never been truly emotionally vested in any of them. Sex was one thing. Affection was quite another.
It dawned on her as Ky’s gaze zeroed in on her mouth that, sitting across the table from him in the dead of night, barely clothed, and eating a simple sandwich while they talked was the most intimate thing she’d ever done with a man that didn’t involve sex.
Her initial impression of him as an arrogant and self-important jerk had subtly begun to shift over the course of the days they were forced to be together. Yes, he was single-minded and stiffly superior at times, but the realization he presented that face to the world in order to meet the demands of his job was starting to change her opinion of who he really was. A man who, if she let him in, had the ability to destroy her.
