And stumbled into his kitchen to the sight of his sisters at the breakfast bar.
“How did the date go?”
They were drinking his good wine, a Pinotage he’d picked up on a recent trip to South Africa. He scanned the bottle and saw it was just about empty, which wasn’t a difficult feat between the two of them.
“It went fine.” He tried to walk past them, but Devyn jumped up from her seat and grabbed his arm with one hand, the other clutching a half-gone glass of wine.
“Well, you’re here instead of being in her bed—”
“It’s only their first date!” Aisha protested.
“—so it mustn’t have gone that well,” Devyn finished.
“I told you, it’s for the radio station, it’s not real.”
“That’s not what that cologne you wore out of here said.”
“Or those buttons undone on your shirt.”
He touched the buttons on his shirt then winced to find that his sister was right—they had been undone while he and Elle had been kissing. And when she dug her nails into his chest, pressing close enough that he felt the imprint of her nipples through the layers of cloth between them.
“Aha! So you did make out with her.” Aisha laughed like she’d won some sort of victory.
Devyn shook her head, looking like Ahmed had disappointed her personally and on purpose. “But he didn’t seal the deal.”
“For the last time, it wasn’t that kind of deal,” he insisted.
“I don’t believe it.”
“It doesn’t really matter what you believe.” His eye caught the nearly empty bottle again, a red he’d been saving for something special. Exactly what, he couldn’t say. “Don’t you have wine at your own place to drink?” he snapped.
“Are you pissed at us?” Aisha, his more considerate sister, asked.
Before he could answer, the annoying sister chimed in. “He just needs to get laid. Probably by this woman he went out with. Look, he practically stinks of sexual frustration.”
“Jesus…” He left the kitchen before he could say anything else.
At the best of times, he loved having his family close. A shared property and different houses at least a quarter mile apart meant he had the best of both worlds. His sisters weren’t normally intrusive. But they also knew he didn’t date very often. The women he ended up going out with these days knew the score. Nothing would come of the night or afternoon except decent sex, dinner and hopefully a good time for both parties involved. These women were casual, no one his family would ever meet. But Sam had mentioned Elle. Then Aisha listened to the radio show. And his mother wanted him to be happy, get married and have a family of his own.
Ahmed slammed his way out of the kitchen, down the long hallway and up the stairs to his top-floor loft, which served as his bedroom suite. The guilt set in almost immediately.
*
He loved his sisters. He loved his family. Elle bit the corner of her mouth and smiled, even though she knew there was a bit of sadness in it. His love for them made her ache for something she’d never had. Worry and intrusive curiosity that stemmed from a sure and selfless love.
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” she said.
Ahmed shrugged. “It was bad enough. As nosy as they are, they love me. And they’re curious about you.”
“Did you let them know there’s nothing to be curious about? If anything happens between us, I’ll probably end up as one of your casual chicks, nothing serious. You should let them know that.” But the thought of being one of those emotionless screws twisted unease in Elle’s belly.
“That wouldn’t happen,” he said softly. And something in her chest caught.
Cheeks warming, Elle picked up the cupcake and nibbled on its edge, avoiding the curl of frosting sitting right on top. But her teeth caught a candy, and the sweetness burst across her tongue with an unexpected flavor that made her moan. Lemon. Huh. A bit of tart with the sweet.
Ahmed’s eyes latched on to her mouth. “Good?”
“Amazing.” Elle swiped her finger through the frosting and put it to her mouth. “Carole is a genius. She did something different with this one.”
The combination of sweet and tart on her tongue was divine, so Elle tasted it again and again, drawing out the pleasure so it would last as long as possible. All the while, she was aware of the way Ahmed watched her, like she was a cupcake he wanted to devour.
“So, you come to this place often?” he eventually asked.
She sucked a smear of frosting from her fingertip. “Did you mean to make that sound like a pickup line? Because…” She gave him a teasing look.
“Are you going to answer the question or not?”
She laughed, the simple pleasure of their conversation, his company, fizzing through her like champagne. His eyes sparkled back at her, and the moment felt…warm, like they were caught in a feedback loop of simple happiness, and it made her laughter bubble up again. “I’m here often enough. I only recommend the places I actually like on my website. And I love this place.”
The voices of Carole and the women talking about wedding cakes and the clink of saucers from the couple that had come in and were sitting down to cups of hot chocolate nearby buzzed pleasantly in the background.
“I can see why. I’m not really a dessert kind of guy,” Ahmed said. “But the coffee is good.”
“Really? You should try her cupcakes. The red velvet ones are my favorite.” She stuck an icing-flecked thumb into her mouth. Hmm. So good.
He shook his head, but she felt his gaze on her mouth like a physical touch. “None for me, but I’ll get a dozen for my sisters and mother to share.”
“Don’t say you don’t like it until you try it.” She decided to be generous. “Here, taste.”
His eyes flashed dangerously at her. The hunger in them made her stomach clench and sped up her already accelerated pulse.
“Are you sure that’s what you want me to do? To taste?” He was asking about more than the damn red velvet cupcake, that much was obvious.
And Elle nearly drowned in the loud and insistent throb of her heart and the pulse beating powerfully between her legs. She licked her lips. Under the table, she shifted her thighs, and the brush of skin on skin made her shiver. “That’s not fair,” she said in a voice that rasped low.
“Does that mean you changed your mind about giving me a taste?” Ahmed leaned closer, the scent from his body, crisp and intoxicating, rising up to pull her damn near across the table. Beyond words, Elle shook her head.
“Okay,” he growled. “Give it to me.”
Feeling herself practically moving in slow motion, she tugged the paper from the base of the cupcake, the thin white wrapping releasing with a low and moist noise, and she bit her lip, extending the bottom of the cupcake, free of icing, toward his mouth. She licked her own lips when he opened his mouth, white teeth flashing against his sumptuous skin. He bit into the cupcake. His mouth sealed around the bite, and he held himself there, mouth on her cupcake, eyes plunging into hers. Then slowly, slowly, he drew back and began to chew.
A few moist crumbs clung to his lips, and she fought an irrational jealousy of them. She reached across the table, brushed them from his skin with her thumb and, when the crumbs stuck to her finger, drew it into her mouth.
Ahmed rumbled deep in his throat. His mouth worked as he chewed, and she couldn’t look away, not when he licked an errant crumb from the side of his mouth, not when he swallowed the moist dessert, not when he drew in a deep breath to speak again.
“It’s very good,” he said.
Elle swallowed thickly. Yeah. She cleared her throat once, then twice. “Does this mean you’re a convert to sweets?”
“This one is definitely growing on me,” he said.
Drawing in a shuddering breath, Elle retreated back to her side of the table. Her hand, she noticed, was shaking. “You did that to me on purpose.”
His eyes were pools of wicked desire. “Me? Never.”
/>
“God… I feel like I’m about to slide right off this chair and into your lap,” Elle murmured, impossibly turned on and nearly shameless from it.
“If you two are done having eye sex, is there anything else in the case I can get for you?” Carole appeared at their table, apparently done with the wedding-cake women.
She stood with her hands on her hips, looking down at them with a maternal look that should have been out of place on her young face but somehow wasn’t.
“Yes,” Ahmed said without looking away from Elle’s fiercely blushing cheeks. “A dozen of the red velvet cupcakes, please. Actually, make that two dozen, one dozen per box.”
“Let me guess, one box is for Elle?”
He looked away from Elle with a soft laugh. “You see right through me.”
Carole giggled, obviously loving the whole situation, especially since she was getting a big sale out of it. Elle was only grateful that with the sound of the radio along with the other humming noises in the small bakery, her earlier words had mostly been muffled. “Two dozen red velvet cupcakes coming right up. It’s a good thing I have some extra in the back.” Then she left.
“Oh, God.” Elle felt like burying her face in her hands but just restrained herself from doing something so dramatic. “I probably won’t be able to show my face in here again.”
“I doubt that. She likes you and your business.” He brushed her hand lying uselessly on the table next to her half-devoured cupcake. “Besides, you have nothing to be embarrassed about.”
Then he picked up the cupcake with the imprint of his teeth and devoured it in two bites. He licked his lips after it was all gone. “This is a taste I can definitely get used to,” Ahmed said.
*
After they finished their coffees and settled up the bill with Carole, he walked her out of the shop, following closely behind her with the pastry boxes deftly balanced in one hand.
“Let me walk you to your car,” he said.
Because it was a busy Sunday in the trendy neighborhood, Elle had had to park on a side street. “I’m that way. It’s a little far,” she cautioned.
“I don’t mind. My legs work just fine. Come on.”
Their steps synchronized on the uneven brick sidewalk.
“I hope I didn’t embarrass you too much back there,” he said.
A breath of laughter left her mouth. “I thought you said there was nothing to be embarrassed about?”
“That’s what I think, but I know you have your own very strong mind about things.”
Elle could still feel the heat in her cheeks from their blatant flirtation, a flirtation she’d allowed to power along on all cylinders until she remembered that Carole was watching along with anyone else in the bakery with even a little curiosity. She’d never been an exhibitionist and didn’t intend to start being one now that Ahmed was… Her brain stuttered. Exactly what was he? And what was she doing with him?
She was so distracted by the dilemma of him that she almost walked past her car.
“This is me.” Face flaming, she took a few steps back on the sidewalk until the driver’s-side door of her little green Audi was at her hip.
“This isn’t too far,” he said. “From what you said, I thought we’d be walking all the way to Midtown.”
“Close enough,” she said, although the walk had felt short to her, too. Elle took her keys from her purse, proud that her hands were absolutely not shaking. “Okay. I guess I better get going.”
“If you have to. But I could stand here with you all day.”
She laughed at his foolishness. “Doing what?” she asked, although she felt pretty much the same thing. Their conversation had been surprisingly easy, their flirtation fun and some of the best foreplay she’d had in months. Elle’s core clenched at the thought, and she turned her back to the car, the sun-warmed body of the vehicle pressing into her butt and thighs through the slacks when Ahmed reached up to put the boxes on top of the car.
“Here, let me.”
He took the keys from her and clicked open the car door, slid one of the pastry boxes into the passenger seat, and straightened back to his full and impressive height.
“Thank you for having coffee with me,” he said. “And for introducing me to something sweet I can sink my…teeth into.”
Despite her resolution not to let Ahmed rattle her in any way, Elle felt her face heat again. This was getting out of control. “I need to get in my car and go before you get me accused of public indecency.”
He chuckled, his voice low and sexy as it rumbled from deep in his chest. “I’m surprised at you, Princess Elle.” And this time, there was no twist of cynicism to his mouth when he called her that. “None of that was even close to threatening the public’s decency.” As he spoke, he moved closer until his big body was crowding her against the car, and Elle was breathing in a deep lungful of his intoxicating scent. Faintly smiling, he dipped his head and showed her what a real threat to public decency felt like.
Elle trembled at the brush of his warm breath over her lips. He settled his big hands on her waist and moved close enough for her to feel the firm line of his belly against her own.
“Will you let me in, princess?”
Her breath trembled out, and she breathed him in. “Yes.”
Ahmed pressed the gorgeous line of his mouth against hers. Heat. Firmness. A delicious pressure that weakened her. Elle braced her palms against his belly, trying to find something to steady her shifting world, but she ended up gripping his shirt, her fingers digging into the soft material over his hard flesh while his mouth brushed hers.
She groaned into his mouth as their tongues touched, a delicious wet stroke that made her panties feel abruptly tighter. She opened up for him, gasping when he sucked gently on her tongue and licked the damp insides of her mouth, making her whimper in delirious pleasure.
He didn’t play fair. Ahmed caged her against the car with the hard furnace of his body while his hands on her hips grounded her against him—his hands all that prevented her from flying away. The slow stroke of his tongue was sinuous and hot, conjuring the stroke of other things, waking up every bit of her body, setting her lips tingling.
Wow, he was good at this. So good.
And his scorching kisses made her wonder what else he might be good at. Made her gasp and moan into his mouth and strain to get closer to his heat, her legs falling open and making her grateful she’d worn pants so she could feel the hard inches pushing rhythmically against her.
Oh, God…
She stood on her tiptoes to get more of him. He cursed into her mouth, groaning.
“We should stop… We should…” But his hips ground into hers, and she felt just how much he didn’t want to stop. And she was just far gone enough to—He pulled away from her, their lips parting with a wet noise.
“Jesus!” he growled into her throat, and he leaned heavily into her, nearly crushing her with the heady heat of his body. “I’m this close to climbing into the back seat of your tiny car,” he rumbled into her skin.
Elle shook herself. No. This wasn’t something she did. Ever.
But she greedily reached for him again despite knowing better, their mouths latching together again. It was another long moment before they pulled apart.
“I really hadn’t planned on having sex with you in the middle of Grant Park, Elle. But I’m a weak man.” He pressed his hips into hers again and they both groaned.
Elle flushed. She stepped away from him and delicately wiped the corners her mouth with trembling fingers. An invitation for him to come with her to her bedroom hovered just a breath away.
“Do you have somewhere you want to be?” he asked, his voice rasping and deep.
She shook her head.
“I know a place. A hotel.” He sounded nearly as desperate as she felt. But then the meaning of his words washed over her. A hotel. If he’d asked her to go home with him, she probably wouldn’t have hesitated, probably would have broken every speeding law
in Atlanta to get there and be waiting naked on the bed when he locked the door behind them. But this…this was like an invitation to be one of his throwaway women. And she didn’t even realize what that meant until she was shaking her head.
“I’m sorry,” he said with a wry twist of his mouth. “That…” He took a deep breath and looked regretful. “That came out wrong.”
“It probably came out exactly the right way.” Elle crossed her arms and clutched at her own sides, suddenly cold. She wasn’t exactly holding out for marriage, but she wasn’t on the level of Shaye and other women she knew who could have sex without any emotional consequences. She wanted Ahmed Clark. And it meant something. “I, um, I’m going to head home.”
Ahmed reached out to touch her, seemed to change his mind at the last minute and braced his hand against the roof of her car instead.
“I don’t have my head so far up my ass that I don’t know what that means.”
Elle couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make this more awkward. Ahmed pulled away from her, withdrawing the last of his body heat, and left her trembling against the door of her car.
“Okay,” he said, then lightly touched the face of his watch. “I should get going to…to take care of something.” His trembling voice spoke volumes, told Elle he was just as rocked by this attraction between them as she was.
It felt good to know she wasn’t the only one in this. Even if Ahmed just wanted to get his rocks off with her in a hotel room then forget about her before the sheets were even cool. “Okay,” she said.
“I want to call you,” he said, surprising her. “Can I?” Elle may have been back to standing on both feet but she still felt off balance with him, uncertain in ways she hadn’t been since she was a teenager. “Um…sure.”
On-Air Passion Page 10