Page 12 of Take Me Tender

She stood, and he remembered why it wasn’t so strange after all. The girl had a body, he’d discovered, now that she was out of that chef shroud she’d been draped in the first day. This morning he could see her true form, thanks to the bright turquoise T-shirt she wore tucked into a pair of hip-hugging white jeans that were cropped at the calf. The tee exposed her delicate collarbones, some of her smooth-skinned shoulders, and was tight enough to advertise a nice set of breasts.

But his favorite part was on the other side of her. She had the most enticing sway at the small of her back, a pronounced dip that was just begging for the flat of a tongue. It sloped to a sweet curve that was the round little swell of her perfect ass.

He admired that in profile as she gathered up her purse that was perched on the end of the counter. As was usual for her, it looked as if she was headed to the market now, and so he let himself indulge a few minutes longer. She’d be off soon enough and then he’d boot her from his mind and get back to the business of editing NYFM’s online edition.

Her head turned toward him. She frowned.

He loved her frown. Her bottom lip pooched out and somehow her eyebrows turned all bristly over her two-color eyes. Who could take the disapproval of a pouting mermaid seriously? He smiled at her.

She hooked her pinkie around one earbud and pulled it free. “Don’t you have to work…not to mention wear a shirt?”

His grin widened. She’d threatened to put up a sign in the kitchen stating “No Shirt, No Service” until he pointed out that these days he made up the rules and that how he wanted to be serviced was her sole consideration. Just to remind her of it, he let his palm rub a slow path from his heart to his hips, and watched her eyes track the movement. When his thumb hooked inside the waistband of his low-riding 501s, her gaze jerked back to his face, and then away from him altogether.

There she went again, tamping down those little flares of sexual heat, and it bugged him how good she was getting at it. She muttered something as she retucked the earbud.

“What’s that?” he called. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Never mind.” She tugged both headphone wires free and curled them into her hand, then withdrew her phone from her front pocket. “I’m going to the store. Can I get you anything while I’m gone?”

He shook his head, gesturing at her cell phone with his coffee mug. “What are you listening to?”

“A self-help book. I’ll let you borrow it when I’m through.”

“The Kama Sutra? Tantric Touches for Dummies?”

She looked up, unbalancing him with her cool regard from the polar shades of her sky-and-ocean eyes. “The Expert’s Guide to Strap-on Sex.”

His last swallow of coffee bubbled back up his esophagus. He choked. “You didn’t just say that.”

Leaning toward him, she repeated the words. “The. Expert’s. Guide. To. Strap-on. Sex.”

He cleared his throat again, at the same time clearing away the images that had sprung to his mind. “Really. You didn’t just say that.”

“What you truly want to ask is if I didn’t just do that.”

“Not just now you didn’t.” Those images were back, but hey, he was a guy, and NYFM had done a study that proved his girl-on-girl flights of fancy put him squarely within the heavy majority.

Shaking her head, she tucked her purse under her arm. “No, Jay. Not just now. There’s no woman hiding in the broom closet. However, last night…”

It was a joke. She was yanking hard on his leg, because she didn’t really like girls. That was just their little game, right? Right? But hot damn, if the woman wasn’t playing it to win.

She started out of the kitchen, then paused. “Are you okay? You seem a little, I don’t know, poleaxed by the idea, which seems an overreaction from the hot stud of Malibu known to his friends far and wide as Hef Junior.”

He winced. “Don’t go there.”

“Why not?”

“First, because the one-and-only Hef—may he continue resting in a bed of infinite sexual bliss—is an original. And second…well…” Suddenly he didn’t want Nikki viewing him as some randy alley cat always on the prowl. “You don’t see a bunch of women traipsing in and out of here as if it was the Playboy mansion, do you?”

“Only because I scare them off.”

She threw a mean curveball. “You did? How? Who?”

“A brunette named Alicia. Another one with black hair who calls herself M.K. And there was a Trudy, who teared up when I told her you weren’t home—and that you’re currently taken.” Her blue and green eyes were wide with innocence. “I did the right thing, didn’t I?”

Oh, yeah, if she wanted to make him feel like a dog as well as look like that alley cat he’d been thinking of. “Sure. Great. Fine,” he mumbled.

Wait a minute. He didn’t remember any Trudy. And wasn’t M.K. the fifty-something Judi Dench duplicate who picked up his FedEx packages? “Hey, hey, hey. You—”

“Not to forget Shanna. Your neighbor came over yesterday afternoon while you were out surfing and explained to me all about your single night of sin.”

Guilt pierced him as deeply as Nikki’s knowing gaze. Shit. While he’d had a few affairs-gone-bad and one-night stands he wasn’t so happy to remember, he’d never botched it so badly as he’d done with Shanna. Sin was the right word. What for him had been the simple act of scratching an itch had wounded the woman who lived next door. A woman he’d known his entire life.

It meant he had a hell of a lot to make up to the fairer sex, even as he resented the hell out of them that they couldn’t look at things as light and loose as a man. Running his hand over his hair, he trailed Nikki toward the front door, resenting her just a little bit, too.

She’d shut him up, hadn’t she? And she did it every time: turned him upside down with her little gibes, turned off the sexual heat between them with the flick of an eyelash, turned away without a second glance, even when he was following like a goddamn puppy at her heels.

She opened the door, her every move casual and relaxed.

Easy.

Breezy.

It made him nuts and he was glad she was leaving the house, by God.

“Oh, damn,” she muttered, her back turning stiff.

He peered over her shoulder. “What?”

“My car’s boxed in.”

Sure enough it was. Her sedan was parked close to the curb, with both her front and back bumpers just a kiss away from cars that were more massive than hers and very expensive to fix. She sighed and lifted her palm over her shoulder. “Give me your keys.”

He stared at the back of her head. “What?”

Turning, she spoke to him like a kindergarten teacher. “Your car is in the garage. The driveway is not blocked. If I take your vehicle, I’ll be able to get to the market and buy the milk and graham crackers you requested for your afternoon snack.”

So snarky and cool. So unruffled, even though they stood toe-to-toe. Her hand was still proffered, waiting for the keys, and he could smell on her fingers the grapefruit and oranges she’d cut that morning. Fresh. Sweet as well as tart.

He imagined himself drawing a digit into his mouth and sucking on a fingertip. Her nails were unpainted and short, not the long, elaborate canvases of most women he knew. What would she do if he took her littlest finger between his lips, teasing it by running his tongue along the inner skin of her pinkie until he could tickle the pale web at the juncture of her palm? How would she react if then he wet each of the whorled pads of her fingers and drew them down his chest to cool his hot skin before making introductions to the other heat she fired in him? Would she greet his happy cock with five warm welcomes? The idea only made him hard.

But knowing Nikki as he was beginning to, she’d likely look at him just as she did now, her bi-colored gaze revealing nothing as it stayed patiently trained on his. Unaffected. Undisturbed.

Or not. Because then his own gaze managed to escape the snare of hers and drop. The pulse at her throat was throbbing, the thin skin over it trembling with each beat. Lower down and three inches away from his chest were her breasts, and topping those luscious handfuls like berries on top of ice cream were her nipples. Her hard, aroused nipples.

Hard and aroused like him.

He had a boatload of work to finish in his home office. He was minutes away from a peaceful house without a distracting, attracting faux-lesbian in the kitchen. All he had to do was hand her his keys and get that caffeinated, quiet atmosphere he was after. But right now work happened to be the last thing on his mind.

So sue him. It was high summer in Malibu and what man could resist playing hooky with a woman who smelled like citrus and who was doing her damnedest to resist sex?

It was like waving a red flag in front of an angry bull.

“As if I’d let you drive my Porsche,” he scoffed. “C’mon, cookie, I’ll play chauffer and you can take the role of the rich missus who’ll later lure me into the master bedroom before hubby arrives home for his martini.”

She didn’t blink. “Just as long as I get to use my strap-on.”

Good God, Jay thought. It was almost as if the woman could read his mind. Because though Nikki hadn’t taken the bull that was him into a china shop, what she had done was close enough. Ten minutes after leaving his house she had him escort her into a yarn shop, Cassandra Riley’s Malibu & Ewe.

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