He didn’t let her finish. “Sammie said she didn’t get a chance to really thank you. She was late to class.” He shot a sharp glare in Becky’s direction, which Natalie suspected explained his current attitude toward her teacher. Becky must have given him an earful. “We’re going to pizza on Friday. Why don’t you join us?”
Was he asking her out? Natalie wasn’t sure, and neither apparently was Becky. But even if she hadn’t just noticed the slight flicker of hurt in her new friend’s gaze before she started studying the ground, the last thing Natalie wanted to do was go on a maybe-a-date with the county sheriff. “I’m afraid I can’t,” she said. “I already have plans.”
She glanced across the street, hoping to make a quick getaway to where her car was parked when she suddenly froze—and gasped as she caught a glimpse of a man staring at her from behind the wheel of a black sedan stopped at the light. But it was only for an instant. The light turned, and he drove off before she could react.
But it was as if she’d seen a ghost.
She swayed from the force of the shock. Her knees buckled. She gave a strangled cry of “Scott!” right before everything went black.
* * *
• • •
I must be dreaming.
It had seemed like a dream the night Scott Taylor walked into Natalie’s life.
She hadn’t felt that kind of excitement—that kind of teenage lust—since she was, well, a teenager.
Maybe not even then.
She hadn’t been the one to see him first. Her friend Hannah, whose engagement they were celebrating, had noticed him the moment he walked into the Capitol Hill bar with two also nice-looking and clean-cut companions.
Hannah leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Serious eye candy at six o’clock.” She let out an exaggerated dreamy sigh. “If I wasn’t engaged, I’d go for it myself, but that guy is exactly what you need to make you forget about Todd. Six months is too long to mourn a breakup, Nat.”
Her breakup with Todd wasn’t what had been bugging her. Todd had been great: kind, solid, steady, understanding, and wonderfully uncomplicated. In other words, exactly what Natalie needed after Mick.
They’d dated for over two years, but Todd wanted really long-term—as in marriage—and she didn’t. How could anyone in her life be long-term?
But Natalie didn’t object to Hannah’s premise. It was easier to let her friend think that she was nursing a broken heart than explain about Mick.
Mikhail “Mick” Evans was a dark cloud looming over Natalie’s life that she couldn’t escape. But God, how she wished she could. Even if just to forget for a little while.
She turned and did just that, forgetting everything in the space of one very hard slam of her heart against her ribs. She forgot that her life was a mess, that she was probably going to end up in prison—for espionage or for murder if she could figure out a way to get rid of Mick—and that she wasn’t a normal twenty-eight-year-old woman who was free to do what she wanted.
There was no question who her friend was talking about. That dreamy sigh of Hannah’s hadn’t been exaggerated. The guy—the man—commanded attention. He stood out, and not just because of his golden-ticket good looks—although they certainly didn’t hurt.
Eye candy was putting it mildly. He was gorgeous. Tall and incredibly fit—she hadn’t missed the muscular arms below the short-sleeved edge of his polo shirt or the flat stomach where his shirt was tucked into nicely tailored flat-front khakis—his face was tanned and chiseled masculine perfection. Wide brow, straight nose, sensually curved mouth, and slightly squared jaw. His dark blond hair was short but impeccably groomed. Everything about him was impeccable. There didn’t seem to be one thing out of place. He was seriously put together. She did a surreptitious scan of his body again. In every way.
She shouldn’t have been able to tell the color of his eyes from this far away, but she’d bet her favorite broken-in pair of jeans that they were a riveting blue.
And she was completely, 100 percent riveted.
He gave off this aura of confidence bordering on arrogance that was almost hypnotic. Actually not almost. It took Natalie a moment, and a nudge by her friend, to realize she was staring. Gaping. All right, inwardly drooling.
Nonetheless, Natalie turned back to her friend and said with a chagrined smile, “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
Natalie shrugged. How could she explain that she didn’t need any more complications in her life, and a guy like that practically screamed serious complications?
But it didn’t take long to change her mind.
A short while later, as she fought her way through the crowded hallway from the bathroom, she’d accidentally bumped into him and spilled his beer. Embarrassed, she’d tried to buy him another one, but he’d insisted on buying her a drink instead.
One drink had led to two, and somehow they’d ended up talking in a mostly secluded corner of the room. It had been dark and noisy but undeniably intimate. When he leaned in to listen to her responses, the heady scent of his spicy aftershave had sent her pheromones into overdrive.
Actually her pheromones had been in overdrive pretty much since her breast had come into contact with his arm and knocked the beer out of his hand. The hot flush that had flooded her body hadn’t just been embarrassment; it had also been attraction. Instant, very hot, and very kinetic attraction. She could practically feel the sparks flying between them.
She wanted to kiss him, and every time he leaned in her breath hitched and her pulse raced with anticipation.
It was hard to remember that he was a complete stranger. Except that he didn’t feel that way anymore. She’d been cautious at first with the getting-the-basics-out-of-the-way introductions. He was one of those guys who walked into a room and took command. The natural-born leader type. A guy like him was probably a high-up somewhere and important men were off-limits. Natalie wouldn’t make Mick’s job that easy for him.
When Scott—Taylor, as he’d introduced himself—told her that he was a navy seaman on leave visiting an injured friend at Walter Reed she was more than a little surprised. He looked more like a successful lawyer or lobbyist who’d just stepped out of GQ magazine. But the military certainly explained his neat, put-together appearance.
It also made her hesitate. Getting involved with someone in the military was asking for trouble—even if he was just an enlisted sailor—if Mick ever found out.
She probably should walk away, but she was wedged into the corner and those broad shoulders were kind of blocking her way. It was hard to look—or think—past them.
She was also having trouble looking away from his deep blue eyes—she’d guessed correctly on the color—the dazzling white grin, and the faint shadow of whiskers that were beginning to show through his clean-shaven jaw.
She kept thinking naughty thoughts about those whiskers grazing against her flushed and very sensitive skin, thoughts that were proving distracting. Especially for someone who didn’t have those kind of thoughts.
But for the first time in a long time, she felt perfectly—wonderfully—normal. Like a girl at a bar who’d met a guy who she wanted to hook up with.
That Natalie had never done anything like that even before Mick came into her life didn’t seem to matter. She felt like that girl now, and it felt pretty darn amazing. Standing in that corner with this guy who didn’t know anything about her, except her name and that she worked on the Hill as an “assistant,” Natalie felt free. What was that thing that Amish kids did in their teens? Rumspringa! That was what it felt like.
“How long will you be in DC?” she asked, standing on her toes so that her mouth was in line with his ear and he could hear her.
She wobbled—and it wasn’t from the wine. It was from the heat radiating from him and the nearly overwhelming urge to put her hands on his chest and see if it was as hard and
solid as it looked.
His hand circled her arm to steady her, but not before their bodies touched for an instant. Touched in all the right places that made her heart leap right through her throat and her nerve endings flare with awareness. Red-hot, “I want to kiss you right here to heck with PDA” awareness.
“Not long,” he said in his rich, dark voice. She liked how he talked. Short and to the point. There wasn’t a lot of messing around with him. “Only a few days.”
Her body was still humming from the brief moment of contact and from the hand that was around her arm so it took her a moment for her synapses to connect again.
Under normal circumstances she might have been disappointed by his response. Actually, even under these extraordinary circumstances, she felt a twinge of it, knowing that he would be leaving soon and she wouldn’t be able to get to know him better.
But then, she realized that “a few days” might just be the answer—or excuse—that she needed. If Scott wasn’t around, Mick wouldn’t be able to find out about him, and she wouldn’t have a reason to put the brakes on where this was heading. And she didn’t need to be a mind reader to figure out exactly where this was heading.
His eyes were dropping just as often to her mouth as hers were to his, he was getting into the close talking just as much as she was, and his hand didn’t seem to be too eager to release her arm. Actually it was sliding down and doing a little caressing.
But she had to make sure. He’d said he was on leave, right? “Then it’s back on the ship?” she asked.
His mouth curved in a wry smile that revealed a dimple in his left cheek, which made her heart skip a few beats.
God, this guy was almost too much to take. “Dreamy” was putting it mildly. Despite his interest in her, he’d been a little reserved at first. But as they’d talked he’d relaxed considerably.
“Something like that,” he said.
“You guys are at sea for months at a time, right?”
“Can be.” He stopped the movement of his hand over the bare skin of her arm that was turning her knees to mush and frowned. “Do you have a boyfriend or something?”
“No,” she said, surprised. “Why?”
“You seem kind of eager to get rid of me.”
Her cheeks heated, which she hoped he took as embarrassment, not guilt. “No. Just trying to get the lay of the land.”
He held her gaze for a moment. She wished she knew what he was thinking, but she got the sense that this guy would be very hard to read if he didn’t want you to.
“Fair enough.” He took a final sip of his beer and set it down on the bar. “You want to get out of here?”
Her heart slammed against her chest. It was the moment of truth. Now she understood what that look was about. He’d been trying to see whether they were on the same page. The same one-night-stand, casual-hookup page.
Were they?
Natalie’s heart pounded. She didn’t know. Could chemistry really be this good? Could she really do this?
There was one way to find out. She closed the narrow gap between them with more of a sway than a step so that their bodies were touching.
The reaction was instantaneous. It was like walking into an oven. She was drenched with heat. Her skin tightened and tingled.
All over.
It was amazing. Literally amazing. This was a whole new world of desire for her—before and after what had happened with Mick. But what she’d experienced with Todd had been . . . nice. This wasn’t nice. It was raw and fierce and intense. It was mind-blowing terrain.
Scott guessed her intention and took the lead. His arm looped easily around her waist and drew her in even tighter as their lips touched for the first time.
Good God. It was like a shock of sensation going off inside her. She dissolved into the heat of his mouth, consumed by the raw energy of the passion firing between them.
His lips were soft and firm at the same time as they moved over hers skillfully and possessively. This man knew how to kiss and how to take charge.
And he did so fantastically. Perfectly. Incredibly. Nothing had ever felt more natural. It was almost too easy. It was hard to think. Hard to be rational when something felt this good. This right.
He was also a man used to getting what he wanted, and she’d just jumped to number one on the list.
She opened her mouth, wanting to taste him deeper, and he was already there. The sensation of his tongue stroking and sliding against hers sent her stomach right to the floor. The strokes grew deeper and deeper. Hotter. Wetter. More frantic. It was too much to take. She rode up against him, needing to feel the hard press of his desire. She wasn’t disappointed. The thick slab made her stomach drop again. Her moan mixed with his groan as a pool of heat flooded between her legs.
She had her answer. Yes, chemistry could be this good, and yes, she could definitely do this.
But unless they were going to put on a show for the rest of the bar, which they kind of were already, it was time to make a decision. She wasn’t romantic enough to call it fate, but whatever the sexual equivalent was, this was it. It was something that she might never have a chance to experience again. An opportunity to put what had happened with Mick behind her for good.
Mick had stolen her life from her, but she wasn’t going to let him take this from her. She felt normal. Free to do what she wanted. She wanted this for herself.
She’d like to have said it was a moment of recklessness that made her pull back and say, “Yes. Let’s get out of here.”
But it wasn’t. She knew exactly what she was doing.
It took his eyes a moment to clear the haze and focus. “I have a room at a hotel nearby.”
He gave her the name of a well-known, upscale hotel a few blocks away.
Her brows lifted. “The navy must pay you well.”
He looked mildly embarrassed. “Not really. I used points.”
She nodded and let him lead her out of the bar, but not before saying good-bye to Hannah and making sure she knew exactly where she was going and with whom.
Natalie wasn’t oblivious to the danger of leaving a bar with a guy, but neither was she going to let it stop her. She was going to trust her instincts—something else she wasn’t going to let Mick take from her. And every bone in her body was screaming that Scott Taylor was a good guy. Safe. A man worthy of her trust.
Even if she wasn’t of his.
Her friend couldn’t contain her glee. “Did I call it or what?” she whispered. “You naughty girl.”
Natalie blushed, not disagreeing. She did feel naughty—but in a good way. In an exciting way.
In a way that was rewarded a few minutes after he opened the door to his hotel room. She barely even glanced at the fancy suite before he pulled her into his arms and started up right where the kiss at the bar had left off.
From there it went fast—very fast—as in up-against-the-door fast. One minute she was melting into his erotic kiss, and the next she was melting into him.
The door behind her had become her support as her body turned to molten lava. Boneless. Fluid. Hot.
She didn’t know how to describe it other than their bodies just came together. First their mouths, then their tongues, then her breasts to his steely hard chest, and then her hips to his even harder erection.
She was grabbing at his shoulders, sliding her hands under the shirt that she’d tugged from his waist to spread her hands over the fevered skin of his stomach and chest, needing all the contact she could get. Her fingers were clenching, trying to dig into the hard slabs of muscle as she fought to hold on.
Faster.
He had one hand under a leg that she’d somehow looped around his waist and the other on her breast. Cupping . . . squeezing . . . kneading as their hips bumped and grinded to the ever-increasing frenzy of pleasure.
And that’s what
it was. A wild, wicked frenzy of pleasure that washed over her and transported her into a different world. A mindless world. A world where the only thing that mattered was him being inside her.
A stroke of his hand between her legs, the hurried biting off the top of a condom wrapper, the lifting of her skirt, the unfastening of his pants, and her prayers were answered with a hard, body-jarring, heart-stopping thrust.
She cried out at the possession. At the relief. At the feel of him deep and hard inside her—filling her.
Good God, was he filling her. The size of the erection she’d felt was no joke.
Their eyes met for one brief instant and something equally as fierce and possessive passed between them.
“You okay?” he asked through gritted teeth. His handsome face was taut with the effort that it was taking to stop—to hold back at the freight train of need that was barreling down on them both. It wasn’t going to stop, and she didn’t want it to.
She was better than okay. She was fantastic. She was free. The black cloud was gone. If only for this brief moment.
It had to be a dream.
She met the concern in his gaze with a smile that reached from somewhere deep inside her. Somewhere that hadn’t been touched in a long time. “I’m perfect.”
At least she thought she was until a few minutes later when he showed her exactly what perfection was. What it felt like to reach the highest peak of pleasure while looking into the eyes of the man who had possessed her so completely.
She had no idea how completely. But over the next two days, locked together in that hotel room and barely coming up for air, she would find out.
Scott Taylor was everything she’d dreamed of and she just wanted to hold on to him for a little while. Was that so wrong?
* * *
• • •
Natalie blinked, recoiling from the light that set off an explosion of pain in her head as she slowly came back to consciousness.
It had been a dream. If only she could keep her eyes closed and never remember what had come next.
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