Excerpt of Discovering Sofia by Mel Teshco

"I think you're totally delectable."

She snorted inelegantly and accelerated the last eight kilometers toward town but inwardly, a different warmth infused her. Warmth she hadn't felt for anyone—straying husband particularly—for too many years to contemplate.

"Sorry," he apologized again. "I have a habit of speaking my mind."

"Don't be sorry," she managed in an even tone. "You're really quite the charmer."

And probably a decade younger.

He chuckled. "My mother used to say I could charm the birds right out of the trees."

"I believe that," she said, smiling now too. "What else did she say?" She resisted clapping a hand to her mouth. She wasn't a nosy person. She was a shy and gauche, I-don't- make-waves kind of girl. But just this once, she wanted to know a little something extra about a man—this man. Discover what made him tick, what made him who he was today.

He shrugged and she glanced over to see his ever- widening grin, dimples appearing on his lightly whiskered cheeks. "She said I was a lover, not a fighter."

She turned away, hardly seeing the cream-colored Brahman cattle grazing in the big, grassy paddocks to the right or the endless rows of sugarcane on her left. It was as though his words had pushed the temperature up another three or four degrees, pushed her mind into thrilling places it hadn't been since…before Stefan.

They topped a rise and in the valley below, the small town of Marshville awaited, shimmering beneath a late afternoon sun.

"I've made you uncomfortable," he noted with a shake of his head. "I guess I'm not used to a beautiful woman being so insecure."

Heat burned her cheeks. She bit her bottom lip, feeling his eyes study her profile, her body, as if he were a connoisseur of women. She shivered then, goose bumps prickling her sweat-dampened skin. She held no doubts he was well practiced in the art of seduction, though he certainly didn't try to hide a hard cock behind smooth lies and twisted slurs. "You really are forthright, aren't you?"

He plucked off his hat, and from the corner of her vision she saw him run an outspread hand through the blond- tipped waves of light-brown hair. "It's the way my mother raised me," he said, plunking the hat back onto his head and glancing out the side window.

He must miss his mother, she realized, and guessed that she'd just recently passed away. Sadness engulfed her at his loss, followed as quickly by envy. What she'd have done to have known her mother and father before drugs and alcohol had decimated their minds and tainted their souls. Instead she'd done the rounds of foster homes, where ill will and mistreatment too often waited.

Townhouses appeared on either side of the road and as the first intersection loomed ahead she said almost reluctantly, "I can drop you off anywhere in town. Just let me know where."

He nodded. "Thank you." Turning back to her, he asked throatily, "Any motel you care to recommend?"

She immediately understood his bold suggestion, if she wanted to take it.

Don't even think about it!

Yes!

No!

Looking straight ahead, her hands fisted the steering wheel as her pussy seeped with anticipation. "Yes." She swallowed hard. "Yes, I do, actually." Holy smokes, she was doing it! She was going ahead with it! And she knew just the motel to use.

Jake's hand was suddenly on her bare thigh, his fingers caressing the flesh just below the hem of her butter-yellow skirt. "I'm glad you stopped back there and picked me up," he murmured huskily.

"I'm glad too," she said, and realized she meant it. Too long now she'd believed her ex-husband's taunts about her sexual inadequacy, her inexperience and shyness. Jake seemed the perfect candidate to prove Stefan wrong, to prove to her that she was all woman.