Page 28 of Take Me Tender

There wasn’t a chance he was going to sleep tonight, not with all that was rolling around in his head. And he didn’t think Nikki truly wanted to be alone after her scare or flashback or whatever the hell it was that she wasn’t being entirely truthful about. Her friend.

Christ.

Leaning to his left, he snapped off the light beside the couch. The room dimmed to flame-gilded shadows. Outside the bank of windows, the spotlight on the roof illuminated the lacy-looking surfline.

He slid lower and set his head against the back of the cushions, then rolled it left to take in Nikki. In profile, she looked so damn vulnerable and so damn sweet. His chest ached. “How do you feel about waiting for sunrises?”

Her back stiffened. Her head whipped toward his. Uh-oh, Jay thought. She was going full prickle. What had he done now?

“‘Waiting for sunrises’? Is that what we’ve come to?” She stabbed a finger at him. “I don’t think so, buddy. Instead, I think we’re going to have sex.”

Twelve

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

—ANAÏS NIN, AUTHOR

There was no need of defibrillators with Nikki in the room, Jay decided, his mind spinning. She’d just startled the hell out of him.

And she continued to stare him down. “Well?”

He pushed his hands through his hair. “I thought we were having a tender moment here, God damn it.” So he sounded more aggrieved than understanding, but for pity’s sake, she’d knocked him on his ass.

Again.

“Tender? You’re looking at me with pity. You’re afraid to touch me just because I had a bad moment on the beach tonight.”

“Nik—”

“I’m not some victim, you know.”

He tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “Not like your young friend in the past.”

The eight inches separating them evaporated. “She isn’t a victim any longer either.”

He groaned in frustration. “I thought you were against us having sex!”

“That was before I learned that you’ll lose interest after our one-night stand, Wally Weasel. I figure one bout in your bed and then I’ll be free from your attentions. I can go back to making you delicious meals while wearing my favorite mannish footwear.”

He resisted the urge to search for hidden cameras. MTV’s practical joke series, Punk’d, had ended years ago and he didn’t know of one on the current television schedule titled Single Guy Seared By His Own Stupid Words. “Look…”

She drew her knees onto the couch and edged even closer. “What’s the holdup? Don’t you want me anymore?”

He’d never wanted to want her, damn it! Not only had he sworn off women, but she made him crazy with her abnormal eyes and her abnormal attitude. In his experience, women didn’t want just one night with a man, and even though he’d been looking his whole freakin’ lifetime for someone who’d take just such a casual approach, now that he’d found her…

Now that he’d found her…

“I like it fast,” she said. “And you don’t have to worry about finesse.”

I like it fast.

Don’t worry about finesse.

Now that he’d found the woman his buddies wrote to Penthouse Letters—all lies—about…

“I want this, Jay.”

Now that he’d found this exasperating, confusing, infuriating, fascinating bundle of contradictions that was blue-eyed and green-eyed Nikki Carmichael, he couldn’t move a muscle. Jay Buchanan, man-about-town, more important, man-who-knew-his-way-around-women, was scared shitless.

The fact was, she’d been betrayed by men—most recently in restaurants and before that at fifteen years old when some butt-ugly, dick-for-brains, cowardly boy had hurt her. Had hurt Jay’s private chef.

Oh, God. He recalled every dumbass thing he’d ever said to her.

Chef with benefits.

She’d been traumatized by sex in the past and from the first he’d placed sex squarely into their business relationship, just because it amused and entertained him. How shallow was that?

Maybe she really was a witch because she seemed to be reading his mind again. “Jay Buchanan,” she said. “If you don’t make a move on me right now, I’ll never again make you my barbecued ribs.”

She swept her hair off the side of her neck, holding it away in one fist so he was looking at the fragile shell of ear, the skin so transparent that the firelight shone through it, making the pink flesh glow. The one earring in the rim winked at him, yet another temptation. “Didn’t you say you were going to start here?”

Christ. Suddenly his vision did something like the cameras in a crime show, his focus ch-ch-changing in little bullet sequences, getting closer, tighter, until he swore he could see the blood moving under all the delicate, female, sweet Nikki skin.

Her whole body was quivering, he noticed, moved by just the tiniest of tremors. He could almost smell the bravado rising in the air along with her vanilla-based perfume.

“Baby,” he said, his voice as soft as the touch he placed on her free hand. It was cold. “You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

She squeezed shut her eyes and yanked her hair farther from her pretty neck. She bent her head to offer him a clearer shot at her smooth skin. Her voice hardened. “You said you wanted to start here.”

His heart stopped beating. Sometimes being a storyteller was a bitch, because it not only made him an observer, but gave him the skills to connect the dots and create a narrative that fit the evidence before him. And now Nikki’s response was killing him, killing him, because the tale this evidence told was that she was hell-bent on proving something—but to herself, and she was trusting him to help her accomplish it.

And who was Jay Buchanan for any woman to trust? He’d never stayed with one long enough to buy anything but thanks-for-the-boink gifts. He’d messed with Shanna next door and then messed her up, too.

“Cookie,” he murmured. He didn’t know where to start, what to do, how to approach the situation. What if I screw this up?

It was a hell of a question for a man who’d always considered himself an expert at this particular game.

But there was all that exposed skin from Nikki’s ear to her collarbone. It called to him, made him hungry to taste it, and he almost smiled, thinking of the NYFM article last month that had explored the phenomenon of vampires in popular entertainment. Maybe he understood, now, what those fictional descendants of Dracula were all about.

He bent to put his mouth on the pulse at her neck. Her skin was cold here, too, and he moved his mouth over it to warm it before tasting with his tongue.

Nikki jerked, and he reassured her by squeezing that cold hand under his. Cold skin, cold hand…God, he wasn’t really going to do this, was he?

Because what if I screw this up? This time the question screamed at him.

But then she leaned closer, her body language talking, asking for him to touch her again with his tongue, and he did, running it along the rim of her ear, then flattening it against that sweet spot behind it. She gave another little jerk, and then she was leaning even closer, her hand losing its grasp on her hair so she could catch herself on his shoulder.

This hand was warm. The one under his warm now, too.

Nikki was heating up. Despite everything, she was heating up for him and his body tightened, his cock going hard and I-can-do-this ready in two slamming heartbeats. He pulled her across his lap, so that her fabulous ass was cradled against his hips and her mouth was right where it should be—just a breath away from his kiss.

Her lips parted as he lowered to them. He noticed her eyes were still squeezed shut, but then he closed his, too, and slid his tongue into her mouth. Key to lock. Warm to wet. Take to give.

Oh, hell, he thought, groaning to himself even as the kiss went deeper and the pleasure of it rolled down his spine. This wasn’t time for poetry. This was time to give Nikki a safe place and safe partner with which to demonstrate she was no man’s casualty.

His hand splayed against her back, feeling her silky skin in between the strings that held her stretchy shirt together in back. When he slid a finger beneath one of them she sighed, and he took that as a good sign.

More good signs followed: the way she wiggled in his lap as he traced the crisscrossed lacings with a lazy thumb, the way her hand tightened on his shoulder when he pushed up into the cushion of her tush, the way she sucked on his tongue as he tried to back off for air.

Okay, the way she sucked on his tongue eliminated his need for air. He grunted, goaded to grinding his lips against hers like he wanted to grind his hips between her thighs—and then she moaned. For a second it scared him—had he scared her?—but quickly he saw she was still warm and flushed and pliant against him.

The sight—that sign of continued trust—struck him somewhere north of his raging hard-on. Maybe it was perverse of him, but at this moment he could only think how thankful he was for all his many and varied sexual experiences. Because surely he’d learned something along the way that would help him out here. That would help him make this good, very good, for Nikki.

Another moment of wallowing in that wet and luscious kiss, and then he finally managed to lift his head. Drawing in the oxygen, he watched his hand edge around her side to her breast, where he thumbed the nipple that was peaking against the soft cotton of her shirt. It tightened even more at his touch and he glanced at her face, at her closed eyes and the worry wrinkles between her brows.

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