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It was the only way to ensure that the red-hot attraction didn’t lead to her getting burned.

* * *

Justin immediately recognized the address that Avery had given him because it was on the opposite side of Memorial Park from his own place. He knew their dinner wasn’t technically a date, but he picked up flowers for her, anyway, and had the bouquet in hand when he buzzed her apartment at precisely seven o’clock—just as she rushed in through the front door.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I got caught up at the clinic so I’m running a little bit behind schedule.”

“That’s okay,” he said.

She fumbled with her keys. “Why don’t you come back in half an hour?” she suggested. “By that time, I should have everything well under way for dinner.”

“Because I’m here now and I can help,” he told her.

“I invited you to eat dinner not make dinner,” she pointed out, clearly unhappy that he wasn’t going away and letting her control the timetable.

“I don’t mind.” He followed her into the elevator, where she stabbed a finger at the button for the fifth floor.

It was a corner unit of the U-shaped building, with a view of the tennis courts and pool. The interior was exquisitely—and he suspected professionally—decorated, with comfortable furniture in neutral colors, framed generic prints on the walls and a bookcase filled with medical texts. They were no personal touches in the room. No magazines or candles or decorative vases or bowls.

She went directly into the kitchen and, when he followed, he saw that the galley-style cooking area was equally pristine—the cupboards were white with simple steel handles. The white quartz countertops were bare of clutter except for a single-serve coffeemaker. The deep stainless steel sink was literally spotless, without even a spoon or a cloth in sight.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.

“What are you having?”

“Water.” She opened a cupboard to take out a glass and filled it with ice then water from the dispenser in the door of the refrigerator.

“That works for me,” he said.

She turned to hand him the first glass—and nearly dumped the contents all over him when she discovered that he was directly behind her.

Thankfully, he caught it before it tipped too far. “Relax, Avery.”

She managed a strangled laugh as she filled a second for herself, drinking down half of it before setting it aside.

“We can go out if you’re not comfortable with me being here.”

“It’s not you—or not specifically you,” she amended. “It’s just that I’m not used to other people being in my space.”

“Apparently,” he noted, offering her the bouquet.

“Oh.” She looked at the bright blooms as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.

“They probably want some water, too,” he told her.

“Of course,” she agreed, moving to the cupboard above the fridge to pull down a clear glass vase.

She seemed more comfortable when she was doing something, and she kept her attention focused resolutely on the task while she filled the container with water, trimmed the stems of the flowers, then arranged them in the vase.

“These are really beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She carried the vase to the dining room and set it in the middle of the table. When she returned to the kitchen, she pulled a plastic container—neatly labeled and dated—out of the fridge, then dumped the contents into a glass bowl. He glanced over her shoulder at the thick red sauce with chunks of sausage and peppers, onions, mushrooms and tomatoes.

“That looks really good,” he said.

“I don’t always feel like cooking when I get home from work, so a couple of times a month I go on a cooking binge where I make all kinds of things that I can throw into containers in the freezer for quick meals later on.”

“What do you make besides pasta sauce?” he asked.

She bent to retrieve a large pot from the cupboard beside the stove, then filled it from the tap and set it on the back burner. “Enchiladas, jambalaya, chicken and broccoli—”

He must have instinctively cringed at that, because she laughed, the unexpected outburst of humor surprising both of them and easing some of the tension.

“You don’t like broccoli?” she guessed.

“Much to my mother’s everlasting chagrin,” he admitted.

“That’s too bad, because my chicken and broccoli casserole is delicious.”

“Well, it’s been my experience that the right company makes any meal taste better, so it’s possible I could change my mind if you wanted to make it for me sometime.”

She smiled at that. “Let’s see if we get through this meal before making any other plans.”

He sipped his water as she went back to the fridge and retrieved various items for a salad. She washed the head of lettuce under the tap, then spread the leaves out on a towel to dry. It was apparent that she had a system and she lined up her ingredients and utensils on the counter as if they were surgical instruments.

“I know how to chop and dice,” he told her.

She glanced up. “What?”

“I’m offering to help make the salad.”

“Oh. Thanks, but it’s not really a two-person job.”

And he could tell that the idea of letting someone else help—and mess with her system—made her twitchy.

“You’re right,” he agreed. “So why don’t you let me handle it while you go do whatever you usually do when you get home from work and don’t have someone waiting in your lobby?”

She hesitated a minute before admitting, “I was hoping for a quick shower.”

“So go take a shower,” he suggested.

“I will,” she decided. “After I get this finished—”

He took her by the shoulders and turned her away from the counter. “Go take your shower—I’ll take care of this.”

She still looked skeptical. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

“Of course, I don’t mind. But if you’d rather I forget about the lettuce and come wash your back—”

“I can wash my back,” she interjected. “You handle the salad.”

As he tore up the leaves, he tried not to think about Avery down the hall in the bathroom, stripping out of her clothes. As he chopped up celery and peppers, he ordered himself not to envision the spray from the shower pouring over her sexy, naked body. As he sliced cucumber and tomato, he didn’t let himself imagine any soapy lather sliding over her breasts, her hips, her thighs.

But damn, all the not thinking, envisioning and imagining made him hot and achy. He shoved the finished salad back into the refrigerator and put the cutting board and utensils in the dishwasher. He could still hear the water running in the bathroom, and the mental images he refused to allow continued to tease at his mind.

Desperate for a distraction from his prurient fantasies, he decided to give himself a quick tour of her apartment. There was the spacious and stark living room, which he’d glimpsed upon entry into her apartment, then the kitchen and the dining room that was connected to the kitchen. The first door in the hall was a second bathroom. Like the kitchen, white was the color scheme in here, dominating the floor tile, the fixtures, even the towels and the liquid soap in the dispenser on the pedestal sink.

Beside the bathroom was a spare bedroom that she’d set up as a home office. Two walls were covered in bookshelves made of pale wood and neatly filled with yet more medical texts and journals. Her desk, also in pale wood, was just as ruthlessly organized—with pens, pencils and highlighters neatly lined up in distinctly separate containers.

The Twilight Zone
theme started to play quietly in his head. There were no real personal touches anywhere. No indication of her interests or hobbies or insights into her personality, and if he didn’t know better, he’d think her career was the sum total of who she was.

But he did know better. He’d kissed her and touched her, and she’d responded with a passion that had taken his breath away. She’d wrapped herself around him as he’d thrust into her body, shuddering and sighing and completely coming undone. Yeah, there was a lot more to Avery than the impersonal and sterile environment of her home indicated.

A spot of green caught the corner of his eye, and he smiled when he noted the stubby plant on the windowsill, recognizing it as some kind of cactus. Even her plant carried the same hands-off vibe that she did. Except that beneath her prickly exterior, she was warm and soft and shockingly uninhibited.

The challenge, of course, was getting past that exterior, and Justin suspected that scaling her walls once would only make a subsequent breach that much more difficult. He also realized he didn’t want to breach her defenses—he wanted to tear them down completely.

He turned away from the cactus in the window to return to the kitchen. That was when he saw it. Another bookcase tucked into an alcove beside the door. He moved in for a closer inspection. The books here were mostly classical literature and popular fiction, with some surprisingly racy titles in the mix, all of them arranged alphabetically by author.

On top of the bookshelf was a framed photograph—the only one he’d seen in the whole apartment—of a little boy and a little girl. The picture had been snapped from behind as the two children walked, hand in hand, away from whoever was in possession of the camera and toward the iconic castle at Disney World. He instinctively knew the children were Avery and her brother, Ryder, even before he looked closely enough to see their names embroidered on the matching Mickey Mouse ears they wore.

It was a snapshot of her childhood, a brief glimpse of a happy moment somehow made more poignant by the realization that she couldn’t have been more than eight years old in the photo and there were no other, later pictures to be found anywhere else in her apartment—or at least in any of the rooms he’d visited so far.

“What are you doing in here?” Avery demanded.

He glanced over, his heart doing a slow roll inside his chest when he saw her standing in the doorway, looking so naturally beautiful and sexy. Her face was scrubbed free of makeup, her hair had been released from its habitual ponytail and skimmed her shoulders. She’d dressed in a pair of black yoga pants and a long, fuzzy V-neck sweater in a pretty shade of blue that almost exactly matched her eyes. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted a bold crimson color that seemed out of character for her but which he knew was not.

“I was looking for you,” he finally answered her question.

She arched a brow. “You didn’t trust I’d find my way back to the kitchen?”

“No, I meant I was looking for a glimpse of you somewhere—anywhere—in this sterile apartment.”

She didn’t blink at his criticism. Nor had he expected her to. It wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to ruffle her feathers if they ruffled easily.

“Remind me not to give you the name of my decorator,” she responded lightly.

“I didn’t think the white was your choice.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked, in a deliberate change of topic.

“I think I did.” He held up the photo.

She took the frame from his hand and carefully set it back into place on the bookshelf. “Dinner will be ready in—” she glanced at the watch on her wrist “—six and a half minutes.”

He smiled. “Precisely six and a half? Not six or seven but six and a half?”

“The pasta takes twelve minutes to cook and I dropped it into the pot approximately five and a half minutes ago.”

“What would happen if you forgot to put the timer on and cooked it for—” he gasped dramatically “—thirteen minutes?”

“Then we’d have to eat overcooked spaghetti,” she said matter-of-factly, but she frowned at the prospect.

He shook his head. “Where did you go to medical school?”

She seemed startled by the abrupt change of topic but, after a brief hesitation, she responded, “Harvard.”

“Figures.”

“I actually wanted to go to Stanford, but my parents thought Harvard was more prestigious.”

“I bet you graduated summa cum laude, too, didn’t you?”

“So? I worked hard and studied hard.”

“I’m sure you did,” he agreed. “And I have no doubt you’re a better doctor because of it. But sometimes, instead of blasting a tunnel through a mountain, you should climb to the top and enjoy the view.”

“If you have a point, I’m not seeing it,” she told him.

“My point is that you’re obviously dedicated, focused and driven, and those are great attributes in the practice of medicine. But when they carry over into your personal life, it suggests that something happened that compels you to rigidly and ruthlessly control every aspect of your life.”

“You’re reading an awful lot into the fact that I use a kitchen timer when I cook my pasta.”

“It’s not just the pasta,” he told her. “You have your highlighters aligned in the spectrum of the rainbow.”

“I didn’t realize being organized was a character flaw.”

“I’m the same way when it comes to every examination and procedure I perform in the ER,” he admitted. “But when I walk out of the hospital at the end of my shift, I let that go and relax.”

“Good for you.”

“You should let go a little, too,” he suggested. “You’re wound up like a torsion spring and one of these days, all of the energy trapped inside of you is going to let loose. Or maybe that
is
what happened in the supply closet.”

“That’s a better explanation than anything I could come up with,” she acknowledged. “And maybe, after more than two years, it was time to let loose a little.”

His brows lifted. “Are you telling me that it was more than two
years
since you’d had sex?”

“I’m sure it’s not some kind of celibacy record.”

“Sorry, it’s just that—wow. Two years.” He shook his head. “I can’t imagine.”

She rolled her eyes. “We both know you can’t imagine—that’s why I wanted the test.”

Chapter Five

“R
ight. The test.”

For a few minutes, Justin had forgotten the reason he was here—the only reason Avery was making dinner for him.

As if on cue, a buzzer sounded from the kitchen.

“That’s the pasta,” she said, automatically turning away.