Page 26 of Take Me Tender

“You are so full of it.” Irritated, she tossed her plate to the tablecloth and shoved him over. But he made a last-minute grab and brought her down with him.

She stared into his laughing eyes. “Did you make that whole thing up?” she demanded.

“No, no, it’s all true, or at least as far as my foggy recollection goes. And you should have seen your face. For a minute there you looked ready to do it with the next confirmed bachelor who walked by. You were feeling so warm and fuzzy I could have fixed you up with the biggest horndog in Hollywood.”

Not that she’d tell him, but the only man she’d been thinking about getting warm and fuzzy for was Jay.

The jerk.

Hef Junior.

Her boss.

And all those thoughts flew out of her head as he speared his hand in her hair and drew her lips to his. She was going to protest, any moment, but his tongue was cool and tart in her hot mouth and his hand had snaked under her sweater and then under the corset lacings of her T-shirt. He palmed that hot shiver once again racing up her spine. The kiss went deeper.

He shifted, and then his knee split her legs. Her skirt was loose enough that she could part them for the hard muscle of his thigh. His other hand left her hair and smoothed down to find the curve of her butt. He caressed her there, pressing down as his knee rubbed in suggestive counterpart.

The move wasn’t subtle, but neither was her immediate response.

Her body flamed. The throbbing place between her legs turned wet again, as if that would put out the fire. Everything spun away but Jay’s kiss, Jay’s hands, Jay’s long, hard body against hers.

A raucous cry from down the beach pierced her haze of smoky lust. Reality descended like an upturned pail of water.

Nikki scrambled back, breaking Jay’s hold on her. She found her feet, felt the brisk slap of the ocean breeze, took a deep breath of cool common sense.

Then glared at him. “We’re on a public beach!” That was supposed to keep clothes and secrets safely in place. And lust under control.

He took his time sitting up, rubbing his thumb against the edge of his mouth. His lower lip gleamed wet in the flickering candlelight. “Not my smoothest move,” he admitted.

“We should go,” Nikki said. Another scream from down the beach drew her eyes that way. The flames in the teenagers’ fire ring were leaping higher, and even from here she could tell the party was rowdier than before. A third feminine shriek had her insides twitching.

Jay glanced in the same direction and grimaced. “She won’t be happy if she catches me, but I better check on Fern again.”

“I’ll do it.” The walk would clear her head and lower her body temperature. Though she was trembling, her skin felt hot to the touch. “You pick up the food and I’ll be right back.”

She didn’t want to think about what would happen after that. So she focused on the group down the beach, realizing even before she’d reached it that the number of partygoers had tripled in size. The music was as loud as before, and some of the kids were dancing. Girls gyrated, facing each other in little knots. Despite the fast tempo, couples swayed in slow motion, plastered together like they were having sex on their feet.

She smelled beer and the sticky sweetness of wine coolers. Skirting a sleeping bag, she noticed an entwined couple was snuggled inside. As she passed, the boy reached for a tall can of malt liquor half-planted in the sand.

A cold slick of sweat burst over Nikki’s skin as a few feet away she saw another boy, backlit by the fire, pour a stream of liquid from a Boda bag into a girl’s mouth.

She rewarded him with a voluptuous kiss.

He palmed her breast and she laughed, pushing him away. He pushed her in return and she ran, him taking chase.

Nikki wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and squinted through the smoke. Where was Fern?

A trek through the center of the party zone didn’t bring her any answers. She wound her way through more dancers, and then around a circle of young men playing drunken catch with a football. It was an older crowd mixed in with the younger, she noticed, but there was still no sign of Jay’s cousin.

Finally, Nikki moved to the dark perimeter of the gathering, hoping some distance would give her a better view. No familiar, girlish figure. She shuffled back, preparing to turn away and report her lack of success to Jay.

But a hand clamped heavily around her upper arm. “You can’t leave now,” a man’s voice said. She was turned in one quick movement.

Nikki stiffened. “I—” But her protest was stifled by strange, cold lips that tasted like dark beer and garlic. The man’s hands squeezed her shoulders and when she tried yanking away, they only bit harder.

With that, years fell away. She was fifteen. So young. Stupid. Sad.

Another dark party. Other drunken guests. Other hands biting, other lips that were too hard and then too wrong.

You can’t go now.

You can’t leave me like this.

Give it to me, baby.

You owe it to me, baby.

A hand clamping her breast. A palm over her mouth to stifle her protest. Biting pain between her thighs. And the last tears she’d ever shed, colder than snow, colder than death, trickling from the corners of her eyes to her temples and into her hair. Until then she’d thought sex was a way for him to make her feel loved. Now she knew it was a way for him to make her feel less.

A strangled oath brought her back to the present. She was on the beach and on her feet, the stranger’s kiss over. No one was touching her breast. There was nothing between her thighs. But a sick dread still held her in its thrall. Fear tasted like blood in her mouth and her skin jittered, the old memory continuing to crawl across it like spiders.

“You’re not Connie.” The hulk of a young man who’d caught her was staring down at her, his eyes blinking with the rapidity of a strobe light. His hands still held her shoulders, but now Nikki realized they were holding her upright. “Shit, lady. You’re not Connie.”

She didn’t stick around to introduce herself. She broke free of him, if not from the past still swirling like dark smoke in the air, and ran back the way she’d come, her breath loud in her ears, her knee stabbed by fiery pains. But that didn’t matter, not when she was trying to outrace the years and all that she’d promised herself she’d leave behind. Nothing would have stopped her until Ventura, maybe even until Oregon, but then another man’s hands found her shoulders and caught her up against him.

Jay. She knew him instantly. Jay. Jay. Jay.

Nikki flung her arms around him and buried her cold face in his warm throat.

“Cookie. Nikki. What’s wrong?” His embrace was firm and his chest wide. He was keeping her as close as Connie’s guy had, but this was different. So different.

Jay bent his head and pressed his cheek to hers. He smelled so good, like one of the slick, scented inserts between the pages of NYFM. His touch was as gentle as his voice was urgent. “Nikki, tell me what happened.”

And she did. The words she’d never told another soul. They crept out of their burial plot at the back of her mind like creatures from the dead, covered in dirt and rattling like bones. The truth came out, yet still she found a way to detach herself from it, if only a little.

“He hurt her. She didn’t want him to, and she told him no, but still, still, he hurt her.”

Eleven

I’m a Method actor. I spent years training for the drinking and carousing I had to do in this film.

—GEORGE CLOONEY, ACTOR

In his kitchen, Jay made his crappy version of coffee. He didn’t think Nikki would notice it anyway, not after he dumped some whiskey in her mug to disguise its bitter taste. With the half-and-half in hand, he slammed shut the refrigerator door with his elbow, rattling the relish jars and beer bottles inside. As violent as the action was, it didn’t do a thing for his vicious mood.

Damn the woman! Each time he thought things between them were going to be simple, she scrambled them up.

He glanced over to where she was sitting on the couch in the living room, before the fire he’d lit to warm her up. His eyes closed. Hell, at least he should be truthful. The person he was mad at was himself, because he couldn’t get his feet to move backward like they usually did when a woman made things complicated.

Instead, here he was, hovering: lighting a fire, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, making Irish coffee—the kind of things that made him uncomfortable when a lover was doing them for him.

She’d wanted to head to her own home once they’d left the beach, but he’d even gone so far as to pocket her keys to keep her near. What had happened to the Jay Buchanan who’d written to his fellow men that he’d given up on women?

More important…so much more important…

What had happened to Nikki?

He took the heavily doctored coffee into the living room and pressed the hot mug into her hands. She took it without a flash of her usual smile and that bugged him, too. Christ! He didn’t need this. Inhaling a breath, he told himself he’d get the story out of her and then take her home himself.

She pursed her lips—he looked away—to blow across the top of her coffee, then ventured a sip.

“Feh!” The mug landed on the coffee table in front of her with a clunk. She glared at him. “Are you trying to poison me, Buchanan?”

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