Page 6 of Tempting as Sin
“West Virginia. Just visiting.” It didn’t escape him that she hadn’t told him her last name. “And Lindsay’s a pretty name, but I’m surprised.”
“Oh?” Her blush went a tiny bit deeper, but there was no indentation or any tan line on that ring finger, so that couldn’t be it. “Why?”
“Seems like a Lindsay would be sporty,” he said. “A rock climber. But maybe thatisyou.”
She smiled, soft and sweet, and bloody hell, but she had dimples in both cheeks. She said, “I ride a bicycle in the summer. I garden, too. Does that count?”
“Mm,” he said, then lost the plot a little.
“What are you thinking?” she asked him, then shook her head, making the feathers brush against her skin, and said, “Whoa. Wait. That’s one of those questions women should never ask. It’s been a while.”
Ah.“Now that,” he said, “doesn’t surprise me. Or it does, but…not. I keep thinking, ‘What is she doing here alone?’ And then forgetting to think it. I’m wondering where your shop is, and where you’re from, and…” He laughed and took a final sip of beer. “And when I can see you again,” he confessed. “Dumb, since, if I don’t make a better effort, I won’t see you any more right now. Let me try this again. We could get something to eat. I’m sure there’s a restaurant around here somewhere. After that, maybe you’d like to take that independence of yours out for a spin. Wherever you like.”
She looked at him from under her lashes. “What if I choose bowling? Maybe I’m a champion bowler. Could be embarrassing.”
He was grinning like a fool. He couldn’t help it. “Then I’ll attempt,” he said, “to lose with grace.”
By the time Lily had finished that second Flirtini, she’d decided, with the kind of reckless abandon that wasn’t one bit like her, that the lady’s pleasure was karaoke. Just because she’d never done it, and she’d imagined sitting across a restaurant table from Clay, wondering how she was coming across and feeling the anxiety creeping in, and she couldn’t stand it. She wanted to be spontaneous. She wanted to havefun.She wanted to be carefree Lindsay, who rock-climbed and…and sang karaoke if she wanted to.
When she suggested it, Clay said, “Now, that sounds like a real good idea,” signed a credit-card slip without making a big deal of it, helped her on with her coat, led the way out of the bar and through the lobby, and told to the doorman standing under the awning, out of the rain, “Taxi, please. To wherever the karaoke and the food are both decent.”
The doorman nodded, blew hard on an eardrum-piercingly loud whistle, and waved an arm, and a yellow cab pulled to the curb almost instantly. Lily told Clay, “You realize that an Uber would be half the cost.”
He said, “But then you’d have to wait, and I wouldn’t be doing my job,” stepped back so the doorman could hold the umbrella over her on the way to the cab, and slipped him a bill with enough discretion that Lily couldn’t see how much it was. The sight of it had the doorman paying attention, though, so it wasn’t any five. And the whole thing may have had her knees going a little wobbly.
She knew that letting a man spoil you, believing he could protect you, was the road to perdition, or at least to dependence. But just for tonight, maybe she could allow herself to slip into it, like spending a night on the couch in your PJ’s, eating chocolate ice cream and watching weepy movies. Every once in a while, you needed a treat, right? And she’d never had a treat quite as good as him. So she leaned back in the seat, emboldened by the darkness, the spatter of water on the cab windows, and the shine of streetlights on wet pavement, and told him, “You may live to regret going along with this idea. I’ve never done much singing in public.”
“Nah,” he said, sitting over on his side and not making any moves at all. “We’re having fun. You don’t need to be good to have fun.”
“Life’s not a competition? That’s not an opinion most men share.”
He didn’t tell her that he wasn’t “most men,” like just about every man she’d ever known would have. Instead, he said, “That so? They’re missing out, then. I’ll tell you what. We’ll make a pact. We’ll both make a little bit of a fool of ourselves, and we won’t care.” He held out his right hand. “Deal?”
She slipped her hand into his, got a tingle like she’d been shocked, and saw him go still. His hand was big and warm, and his palm was harder than she’d expected. She swallowed, did her best to control her voice, and said, “Deal.”
Any other man would have kept holding her hand, too, or would have done something else, one of their little tricks that were supposed to make you tremble. Running their thumb over your palm or whatever cheesy move they’d read in a magazine.
Clay, though? Clay let her go.
She didn’t expect nearly enough, Rafe thought. However much confidence he’d seen in those first minutes—a confidence that he could swear wasn’t faked—he heard the lack of expectation in what she said, and in what she didn’t. And in the split second of surprise when he did anything halfway decent. Wary and wild as a bird, making you want to hold still just to see if you could bring her around, because that bird was so pretty, and all you wanted to do was stroke it.
Gently, though. If you were rough, if you moved too fast, she’d fly away, and you wouldn’t get her back.
When they’d climbed the steps to the Japanese karaoke bar and restaurant and were threading their way through the dim lighting behind the waitress, he saw her shoulders relax. The woman on stage wasn’t doing the song any favors at all, but she was laughing right along with the group of girlfriends who were sitting around three tables shoved together and whooping it up. They were all wearing wreaths on their heads, for some bizarre reason, that seemed to be made of tissue, and the whole thing was pretty amateur and not one bit intimidating.
Perfect.
“Bachelorette party, I’ll bet,” Lindsay said, seating herself as gracefully and composedly as she’d done everything else. The woman on stage, whose tissue wreath was white, was doing a bump and grind now. And singing, oddly, Tom Jones’s “She’s a Lady.”
“You got it,” the waitress said. “Wild night. That’s the bride up there. What can I bring you?”
Lindsay glanced at him, and he asked her, “What would you think about champagne?”
She laughed, sounding a little giddy, and there were those dimples again. “I’d love it. And I’d think that I’ve had two pretty strong drinks already, and that I still have to drive home.”
The waitress said, “I’ll give you a few minutes,” and vanished, but Rafe didn’t pay much attention. He focused one hundred percent on Lindsay and asked, “How about if I sent you home in a taxi? Where’s your car?”
She hesitated. “Hotel garage, back at the Clift. And that would be a steep fare. I’m not staying in the City. Plus—there my car would be, stuck overnight.”
