Heating up the Holidays

by Jill Shalvis

  5

  T ONI WATCHED heat flare in Brad’s eyes as he pressed another kiss against her palm, liquefying her insides. Whoa. His mouth felt reeeally good against her skin. And looked reeeally good there, too. And…oh, God, had he just touched her palm with his tongue?

  Oooh, yes. He had. Mama mia. Good thing she was sitting down, because that single tongue flick left her legs feeling like melted wax. It left her spine feeling that way, too. So much so that she’d like to lie down. With Brad. Right now.

  He brushed his lips against her inner wrist and she actually felt her eyes glaze over. When the hell had that little bit of skin become so sensitive? And who had run the electric circuit from her wrist straight to her nipples-which were now hard and aching? Clearly her six-months-long sexless state had screwed up her internal wiring.

  His gaze dipped and he stilled at what she assumed was the sight of her erect nipples pressing against the velvet of her dress. When he raised his gaze back to hers, his eyes all but breathed smoke. “Toni,” he said softly.

  Just the way he said her name rippled a heated shiver down her spine. Good grief, how had she resisted this man for three months? She was either insane or deserved a medal of fortitude. How could she hope to resist him tonight?

  You can’t, her inner voice flatly informed her.

  Her inner voice was right.

  Sure, she could try to lie to herself, but what was the point? She might as well face it. The guy was hot, sexy, gorgeous, funny, romantic, smart and totally into her. He oozed sex appeal and sex sounded so incredibly…appealing. In a word, he was irresistible.

  Exactly, agreed her triumphant inner voice. So stop trying to resist!

  Sex on a first date wasn’t normally her style, but hey-they’d agreed this wasn’t a date. It was just one little dinner. One little dinner that would lead to one little bout of sex. One little dinner during which it was now time to turn the tables and make him suffer for a while. Heh, heh, heh.

  He appeared about to say something else, but just then the waiter appeared bearing their salads. After pressing another quick kiss to her palm, Brad released her hand and Toni curled her fingers inward to keep the warmth of his mouth against her skin. After topping off their wineglasses, the waiter faded away. She reached for her fork and speared a bit of radicchio, watching him do the same. She waited until Brad had taken a bite then slipped her foot from her shoe.

  “Tell me about your family,” she said. Under the cover of the long tablecloth, she slid her bare foot against his calf.

  He stopped in midchew. Went perfectly still while she slowly rubbed her instep along his shin. For several seconds his hot gaze bored into hers. Then he chewed twice and swallowed. “Huh?”

  “Your family. Any more at home like you…Elf?”

  She had to fight to hide her smile when his face colored slightly. He groaned and shook his head. “Who told you?”

  “Word gets around. I saw your picture, Mr. December. Very nice.”

  “You mean, embarrassing. I’ll never live that down.”

  “Believe me, you have nothing to be embarrassed about.” Her foot snaked up to his knee.

  He set his fork down so quickly it clanged against his salad plate. He shifted slightly, and she felt him stretch out his leg. “Thanks. Glad you approve.”

  Her gaze flicked to his chest. “I liked your tat. Did it hurt when you got it?”

  “Not a bit, thanks to an overindulgence of…” He sucked in a quick breath as her toes brushed against his hard thigh.

  Several long seconds of silence passed during which he looked at her as if she were a glittering diamond and he was a jewel thief. Finally she prompted, “You were saying?”

  “Saying?”

  “About your tattoo.”

  “Oh. Right.” He shook his head and gave a short laugh. “Sweetheart, if you want to make conversation and touch me, you’ll need to expect some lulls.”

  She popped a bit of cucumber into her mouth. “Turnabout is fair play.”

  “Believe me, I wasn’t complaining.” He picked up his fork and stabbed a bite of tomato. “Tequila,” he said to finish his sentence. “A well-documented tattoo-painkiller.”

  “You mentioned a brother-is it just the two of you?”

  He nodded, somewhat jerkily as she continued to stroke his leg with her foot. “Greg’s two years older and got married this past summer. Never seen a guy so happy.”

  Toni sighed. “I wish my brothers would get married. Then maybe they’d concentrate on their own love lives rather than mine. I love them and they’re good guys, but ridiculously overprotective. They can’t seem to grasp that I’m not twelve years old any longer.”

  “Is that why you put some miles between you?”

  “Yes. I love my family, but we clash. I guess I’m something of a rebel and the black sheep. My mother literally took to her bed when I said I wanted to be a firefighter. You’d have thought I’d announced a plan to blow up a major city. I’m the first one not to work in the family business.”

  “But you did for a while.”

  She took a sip of wine, then said, “Yes. But I found it impossible to live my own life. Mom and my sister-who’s married-were always trying to fix me up, and Mom constantly poured on the guilt that I wasn’t married and giving her grandbabies. Yet she hated every guy I dated. And believe me, dating wasn’t easy with three overprotective brothers scowling at anything with a penis that came within ten feet of me.

  “Then, last year, my Nana Rose moved in with Mom and Dad. She’s exactly the same as my mom, only feistier. I like peace. Quiet. But there’s practically this glowing ring of nitpicking tumult surrounding all of them. And when they form groups…” She shook her head. “Run for the hills. I truly do love them and I know they mean well, but I can only handle them in small doses. Sometimes I think even fifty miles isn’t enough distance between us. Five hundred might have been smarter.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “The calm eye in the storm. He just smiles and goes to work and enjoys his hobbies and lets all the chaos roll off him like water off a duck’s back. I think he’s the only one not hoping I’ll fail.”

  “Fail at what?”

  “My business. Even though they haven’t said so out loud, I strongly suspect the rest of the family secretly hopes Blooming Pails will go belly-up, thus making it necessary-in their minds-for me to move back home and work again at the family nursery.”

  “Any chance that’ll happen?”

  “The business going belly-up or me moving back home?”

  “Both.”

  “Absolutely not to moving back home. I’ve fought too hard for my independence. As for Blooming Pails not making it…a lot depends on what happens in the next three months.” She gave him a brief overview of her loan situation and the bank evaluation coming up at the end of the next quarter. “If my interest rate goes up, I’m afraid that will be the beginning of the end, so this is really make-it-or-break-it time for me. Which is why I’m devoting all my time and attention to work. Which is why I don’t date.” She didn’t bother to add especially not firefighters.

  “No problem, since we’ve agreed this isn’t a date-it’s just one little dinner.”

  “Right.” She skimmed her foot beneath his pant leg, brushing her toes over his sock until she encountered warm, firm skin. “Now that you know all about my crazy family, what about yours?”

  The way his eyes smoldered made her feel as if she’d stepped into a furnace. “My folks are great. Very little nitpicking and tumult. Like you, I like peace. My job is stressful enough-I’m lucky I don’t have any extra because of my family.”

  “Very lucky. Is your dad a firefighter?”

  “Nope. Schoolteacher. So are my mom and brother. Right in Ocean Harbor Beach, where I was born and raised. I might have followed that path except the summer I was fourteen I worked on my uncle’s ranch in Wyoming.”

  “Where you learned your cowboy wisdom.”

  �
��Right. There was a drought that year and a brush fire broke out on some back acres. It quickly spread, and if not for the fast work of the firefighters, my uncle might have lost everything. Watching those guys work…the die was cast right then and there. Made me the rebel who broke with the tradition in my family.”

  “Well, not completely-you’re still a teacher.”

  “True. I guess it’s in the blood. Still…” He raised his wineglass. “Here’s to rebellion.”

  She touched her glass to his. Then slipped her toes from beneath his pant leg to shimmy her foot along the top of his thigh. “Right. To doing things we probably shouldn’t.”

  He briefly closed his eyes. When he opened them, the fire in their depths scorched her. There was no doubt he wanted her. And God help her, she wanted him. More than she’d expected to. Certainly more than she wanted to. But no way she was willing to stop now. She shifted her foot to slowly caress his inner thigh, stopping just short of touching him where she was most tempted to touch.

  “You’re driving me crazy,” he said in a strained voice.

  “Just like you did to me. Want me to stop?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Good.” She enjoyed another taste of her salad, chewing slowly, still stroking him, watching him watch her. After she swallowed, she asked, “So what do you like to do when you’re not fighting fires or teaching classes?”

  “Take beautiful florists to dinner.”

  “Thank you. Besides that.”

  “Surf. Swim. Hike. Kayak. Fish. Kick back and watch TV. Take beautiful florists to dinner.”

  She shifted her foot a hair higher on his leg. “You said that last one already.”

  “Did I? I’m afraid I’m…distracted. But at any rate, it bears repeating.” He cleared his throat and took another bite of his salad. “So, what else do you like to do besides arrange flowers and play a wicked game of footsie?”

  She smiled. “Swim. Run. Hike. Read. Cook. Play tennis. Fix up old cars.”

  “Fix up old cars? Seriously?”

  She nodded. “Something I inherited from my dad who’s an automotive genius. I drive a ’64 Mustang convertible that I rebuilt. Took me six years to do it, but I love that car.”

  He leaned forward. “That’s my dream car.”

  She glided her foot a bit higher, until it just brushed his groin. He sucked in a sharp breath. “Maybe you’d like me to take you for a ride.”

  With his eyes burning into hers, he set down his fork, reached beneath the table, and lightly clasped her foot. Then he shifted a little lower in his chair and pressed her instep against his erection. “There’s no maybe about it.”

  Oh, my. Whoever had nicknamed this man Elf didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.

  “The question is,” he said in a low, husky voice, “are we still talking about cars?”

  “What if I said we weren’t?”

  He rolled his hips slightly forward, a gesture that set up an insistent throb between her legs and made her yearn to touch that lovely hard, male flesh with more than her foot. “I’d say you’d been peeking at my Christmas list.” Then he did something exquisite with his hands on her arch that brought a gasp of pleasure to her lips.

  “Ohhh…that feels…hmmmmm. If you don’t stop that in about three or four hours, I’m going to get really angry.”

  “Did you just give me permission to touch you for the next three or four hours? It sounds like you’ve been peeking at my Christmas list again.”

  “I thought only children made Christmas lists.”

  “Clearly not, as I have one. And you’re all over it. And there’s nothing childish about it.”

  Good God, Toni was ready to slither to the floor. She loved having her feet rubbed and he had very talented hands. Hands that she wanted on more than her feet. As quickly as possible. Summoning the remnants of her wilted strength, she slid her foot from his grasp and slipped it back into her shoe.

  “You didn’t like?” he asked.

  She pushed back her hair from her overheated face. “Oh, I liked. But if you kept doing whatever glorious thing you were doing to my foot, I was going to have an orgasm.”

  His eyes darkened. He pushed aside his forgotten salad and reached for her hand. “I wouldn’t have minded that one bit. Seems to me that when you reach boil…well, that’s a bad time to turn down the heat.”

  A breathless laugh escaped her as his fingers entwined with hers. “I think Santa needs to know that you’re naughty.”

  He gave her a slow smile that melted what was left of her spine. “And that you’re nice. And that I really like you.”

  The unsettling realization hit her that she liked him, too. Which she hadn’t counted on. And wasn’t particularly happy about. In an effort to lighten up a moment that suddenly felt way too serious, she said, “You don’t know me.”

  “Aside from the obvious fact that you’re gorgeous, I’ve managed to pick up quite a bit over the last three months during my visits to your shop. I know you’re creative, talented, independent, smart, hardworking and have the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen. And now I know a lot more than I did an hour ago. And I like everything I’ve seen. And heard.” He drew her hand to his mouth and touched his tongue to the center of her palm. “And touched.”

  “You want to go to bed with me.”

  “True. But that’s a statement you could safely make to any breathing guy on the planet.” He reached out his other hand and traced his fingers gently over her cheek. “But-I also want to get to know you.”

  It took all her willpower not to lean into his hand and purr like a kitten. Her mind was warning her to slow down, reminding her that as charming as he was, he was a firefighter and she wanted no part of that ever again. That, except for tonight, she had no time to devote to getting to know him. But her heart and her body were screaming at her that for the purposes of sex, his occupation didn’t matter, and to move full steam ahead. And those screams quickly drowned out everything else.

  “What if I said I’m only interested in sex?” she asked.

  She expected him to agree instantly, but instead he studied her through very serious eyes. Finally he replied, “I sure as hell wouldn’t turn you down, but I think we’d both be missing out. I know we’ll be great together in bed-I think maybe we could be great together out of it, as well. For the purposes of full disclosure-I’d like to find out.”

  Given his honesty, she couldn’t give him less than the truth in return. “For the purposes of full disclosure-as much as I appreciate that, I’m not looking for a boyfriend. I’m not looking for anything past tonight.”

  His gaze searched hers. “I’ll take tonight.” He traced the outline of her lips with a single fingertip. “But be warned-I’m going to do my damnedest to change your mind.”

  A sensation that felt alarmingly like eager anticipation rippled through her. “I won’t change my mind.” And she meant it. She’d take this night to douse the fire he’d lit in her, but that was it. No point in prolonging something that couldn’t lead anywhere.

  “Well, in that case, I don’t want to waste any time. What would you say if I suggested we get our meal to go?”

  Toni captured his hand and gently bit the end of his finger. “I’d say how fast can you get the waiter over here?”

  6

  T HE SIX MINUTES and forty-two seconds-not that Brad was counting-it required to take care of the bill and get their meals to go were an exercise in torture. He would have been perfectly happy just to leave the gift card and some cash to cover their wine and tip and forget the meal-he was starving, but not for anything packed in a container. The only thing that kept him from grabbing Toni’s hand and dragging her out of the restaurant immediately was the fact that he knew they’d soon be working up an appetite. And since his fridge was pretty bare, and he wasn’t much of a cook under the best of circumstances, better they have some decent food available later.

  Now, clutching the bag filled with to-go containe
rs in one hand, and his other hand holding hers, he led the way through the crowded restaurant to the exit, trying to curb the edgy impatience clawing at him. Even though he’d barely touched her, hadn’t even kissed her, he already felt like a powder keg with a lighted torch waving over it-one instant away from detonation. His house was only fifteen minutes away. He’d waited three months to kiss her. He could wait another fifteen minutes.

  The instant they were outside, however, he realized he wasn’t going to make it another fifteen seconds. Walking so fast he was almost jogging, he rounded the corner of the brick building and drew her into the deep shadows. Dropped the bag. Then pulled her into his arms.

  “Can’t wait,” he said in a harsh whisper, barely realizing he said the words out loud.

  “Thank God,” she whispered back, winding her arms around his neck.

  With his heart rapping against his ribs, he lowered his head. Her lips parted and she rose on her toes, meeting his mouth with an urgency that matched his. He’d meant this to be a soft, exploring kiss, but the instant their lips touched, the powder keg exploded. In a heartbeat, the kiss turned fierce. Demanding. Deeply intimate. Their tongues met, and with a groan, he stepped back several paces until his shoulders hit the brick wall. He spread his legs and, curved one splayed hand over the luscious swell of her ass, urging her tighter against him, while his other hand plunged into her soft mass of curls to hold her head.

  She tasted…perfect. Felt…perfect. She squirmed against him, a full-body caress, all her feminine softness touching all his male hardness, and he swore he was going to lose his mind. His control teetered dangerously close to the edge and she wasn’t doing a damn thing to keep it from plunging into oblivion. She fisted her hands in his hair, dragging his head lower and opened her mouth wider. With a growl he sank deeper into their kiss, dancing his tongue against hers with a rhythm that blatantly imitated the act his body was screaming to share with hers. Right here. Right now. He rolled his hips, pressing his erection against the juncture of her thighs, and she responded by rubbing herself against him.