Roark (Women Of Earth Book 1) by Jacqueline Rhoades

sure she had just received one of the nicest compliments she’d ever had. She was also being offered the chance to live in a luxurious, even by prewar standards, home with a gorgeous hunk of manhood and she was turning it down. In spite of what it might mean for her family, she just couldn’t do it. The war had taken almost everything she had. She couldn’t let it take her dignity, too.
    “What do you find hard to believe? Has no one ever told you how beautiful you are?” He watched her with an intensity that made her heart beat faster.
    “Dear God, why couldn’t you have made him look like Mohawk? And why did you put a tarnished silver tongue in the mouth of a golden Viking? I could use a little help here,” she silently prayed.
    “Why?” she asked aloud though she knew it was a mistake. “Why me when we both know the world, this one and probably every other one, is filled with better looking women than me?”
    “Those women did not touch my heart.”
    Damn, this guy was good. The flat way he said it, as if stating a fact and not a pick-up line, made her want to purr, “Aw,” and melt into him. She fought the temptation and won. “Thank you, God.”
    “When did I touch your heart? How, when this is the first time we’ve really talked since I met you?”
    Roark lifted her hand and held it against the left the side of his bare chest. “Like this, when I lifted you from the ground and into my arms.”
    His hand was atop hers and she could feel the warmth of him and the slow, steady thump, thump of his heart beneath her palm. He ran his thumb along the length of hers and she felt that, too, travelling to places that had lain dormant for a long, long time.
    “Did you really feel something?” she whispered and didn’t care that it sounded like a purr, because damned if she didn’t feel something, too, and she had no idea what it was.
    “I did.” His voice was a quiet rumble that also transferred itself through her palm.
    Mira closed her eyes. “Dear God, if I go to hell it will be all your fault.” The Good Lord must have been listening and decided to save this poor sinner from perdition, because she suddenly thought of Ahnyis. Her head snapped up.
    “Is this heart thing like Mason stroking Ahnyis’s tail and turning her on? Because if it is, we need to know about it and get the word out there or we’re going to have a lot of misunderstandings to contend with.”
    Roark’s face clouded over and became thunderous. “That potatek healer touched her tail?” He stared over Mira’s shoulder as if he could see Mason through the door and might just leap through it to kill the poor shithead doctor. “He dares?”
    “No! Wait!” Mira put her hand to his cheek and drew his eyes back to her. “That’s my point. I’m not sure Mason knew what the action meant. By touching you there, did I send some inadvertent signal?”
    “Hundreds of females have touched me there.”
    And wasn’t that just what every girl wanted to hear? Next, he’d tell her how lucky she was to be chosen from the cast of hundreds.
    “None have touched my heart.” He said it in that same flat, statement-of-fact tone.
    Holy crap. If he kept talking, she was going to lose this battle. She had to get out of there or she wouldn’t have to worry about the First Commander working his way into her pants. She’d be stripping them off and handing them to him.
    The comlink vibrated on the little table next to the door. Roark swore a word she couldn’t translate before he hit the transmitter button.
    “Saved by the bell,” she mumbled inanely, not sure if she was pleased or not. She smiled and wiggled her fingers at him with one hand as she reached for the doorknob behind her with the other. “I’ll just toddle along now. I know you’re busy.”
    She didn’t make it three steps before his big hand grasped hers and she was being dragged along beside him.
    “We will walk,” he said.
    She was about to protest, but one look at his angry