Page 6 of Tomlin

She shook her head at him.

“I told you to call me Etta.”

He preferred to use titles, not only as a sign of respect, but also as a way of maintaining a distance between himself and others. And yet…

“Goodnight, Etta.”

He could hear the softness in his voice and their eyes met again, hers warm and dark in the soft lamplight. He took a half step towards her before he regained control and bowed stiffly instead.

Now he was in her room, her delectable scent surrounding him. He’d automatically tidied the room but that hadn’t taken long,despite the amount of clutter filling the small space, and he’d ended up pacing.

This is ridiculous.It was just a bedroom - no matter how much her presence filled the room. He forced himself to sit down on the bed, still fully clothed, then cautiously laid back against the pillows. As soon as he did her scent deepened, and the vision of her he’d had earlier, sprawled across the bed and smiling up at him, filled his head and his already half-hard cock immediately became fully erect.

Fuck.This was totally unacceptable. He was a normal male with - mostly - normal bodily responses. He often woke up with an erection but he ignored it and it quickly went away. He had trained himself to ignore all sexual stimuli while he was conscious, but just the thought of her sharing this bed with him overrode his normally rock solid control.

He sprang back to his feet, curling his hands into fists to overcome the desire to go in search of her. He tried to tell himself that it was simply because of his earlier weakness in the city, but he couldn’t quite convince himself. No matter. If he couldn’t overcome his weakness through mental discipline, he would simply have to take a more physical approach. He stripped down to a pair of training shorts, doing his best to ignore his aching cock, then slipped quietly out of the house.

He took a deep breath, trying to take in enough of the cool air sweeping down from the mountains to replace her scent, and then he ran, moving rapidly through the night in what he already suspected was a vain attempt to outrun his attraction to the woman he was leaving behind.

CHAPTER 4

Etta hesitated outside the door to her bedroom. It was still early but while she’d told Tomlin truthfully that she frequently slept in her lab and was quite comfortable there, she’d been unusually restless, her dreams filled with visions of her intriguing visitor. She’d risen with the dawn, intending to return to her work, and was annoyed to find that he still continued to occupy her thoughts.

She’d decided that the sooner he was on his way the better, and yet, here she was, hovering outside his door like some nervous teenager.Nonsense.She squared her shoulders and knocked briskly on the door. No response. She knocked a little louder.

“Tomlin?”

There was still no response and he hadn’t struck her as the type to sleep late. She cautiously opened the door. The room was empty and the bed neatly made - which it had not been the last time she’d left the room. In fact he’d worked the same magic he had in the rest of her living area, restoring everything to the type of pristine order she was always too busy to manage.

A part of her felt as if she should view his actions as intrusive, but instead it felt soothing, as if she no longer needed to worry about the everyday details of her life. She felt… cared for in a way that was new to her.

But where had he gone? Surely he hadn’t decided to leave without even saying goodbye? He must still be around somewhere. But the living area was equally neat and empty and when she opened the door, she didn’t see him outside.

That’s fine, she told herself firmly. He’d already provided her with information which might prove useful. She was especially intrigued by the possibility that if a stone was separated into two parts, the pieces might retain an attraction to each other. But even though she returned to her lab considering ways to test her theory, her usual concentration eluded her. His image popped into her mind far too often, both the actual memories of his visit and the rather more… explicit images in her dreams.

She had never been the type of woman to moon over a man - which was probably just as well considering that most men were equally unimpressed by her. It hadn’t helped that she was always the youngest, and smartest, person in her classes and she hadn’t developed even her present very modest curves until she was well into her teens. So why was she obsessing over him?

It wasn’t just his physique, although she had to admit that he possessed a remarkably fine example of the male body. There had also been a… connection when their eyes met, a sense that they already knew each other. Listening to him telling his tales, sitting across the dinner table from him, even watching him move around her kitchen, had felt familiar, right. A part of her that she hadn’t even recognized as being lonely had felt comforted by his presence.

Nonsense, she told herself again. She had become accustomed to being on her own long ago and she was fine with her own company. Forcing herself to focus, she began setting up her new experiment. Despite that, her heart still skipped a beat when there was a quiet knock on the lab door.

Doing her best to arrange her face into a calm mask, she opened the door. Her pulse certainly did not speed up to find him filling her hallway once more.

“I thought you might be hungry.”

“I thought you were gone.”

Damn.That came out sounding more annoyed than she’d intended, but at least he didn’t seem smug about her reaction. Instead he looked almost… embarrassed? His expressionless mask was much better than hers but she was sure she caught a flash of discomfort.

“I went for a run.”

His voice sounded as composed as ever, even as she gave him an astonished look.

“Why?”

“In order to… exercise. After the long ride yesterday.”

That didn’t ring true either. There were people in the city who ran for exercise, but she’d never seen anyone out here on the frontier who needed to do such a thing - everyday life was much too demanding.