by Betina Krahn
Too bad she didn’t have a clue how she was going to bag this big game…yet.
“I did. But even when I don’t have an early flight, I’ve been trying to leave on time on Fridays so I can have some sort of social life.” He speared a bite of chicken. “A guy can’t work all the time.”
Her pasta stuck in her throat.
“Are you seeing someone?” Visions of him with some elegant socialite daughter of a gazillionaire flashed through her head as jealously pinched.
“Not lately.” He took a sip of his wine and his hand brushed hers as he replaced the glass on the table. “But the thought’s definitely occurred to me. More wine?”
She realized she’d guzzled the entire contents of her glass at the thought of Luke being taken. Clearly, the idea of hitting on him had grown on her more than she’d admitted to herself. She wouldn’t write off this encounter as another case of bad timing. Not after he’d shown up right before Valentine’s Day, at a time when she’d been thinking about him so much.
“I’d better not.” She moved her glass to the other side of her placemat so she wouldn’t pour any more without thinking. The last thing she needed was a repeat of that night they’d both indulged a little too freely and said things they hadn’t meant. If anything interesting were to happen this night, she wanted to be sure they were both very well aware of it.
“What about you? Got a guy in your life?” His warm chocolate gaze landed on her and lingered, making her feel the effects of the wine. Or maybe, it was just his effect on her. Whatever it was, she felt warm and tingly inside.
Until she realized why he asked.
“My brother put you up to this visit, didn’t he?” Now that she thought about it, Luke asked her a similar question every year. Indignation rose.
Daisy barked, possibly catching the vibe. The dark Lab peered up at Luke expectantly.
“I’ll take that defensiveness as a…yes?”
She noticed he’d dodged her question neatly. Leave it to a lawyer.
“No.” She needed to make that clear, even if Luke wasn’t asking out of any personal interest. With any luck, he’d have a personal interest sooner or later.
Too bad she still had no clue how to go about shifting this relationship from friends into something more. It’d been a long time since she’d hit on a guy. She hadn’t trusted her judgment for a long time after her romance with the ex-con.
“No interest in the cavemen?” he prodded, polishing off his bread and cutting another slice. “Because the one with the mermaid tattoo was definitely checking you out.”
“Hardly. He was barely twenty-five years old. Guys that age check out every female over eighteen in a three-mile radius. I think it’s a biological fact.”
Which brought home to her how much more discerning a man like Luke would be. He was a few years older than her at thirty-two. He knew what he liked and wouldn’t get roped into some torrid affair with her just because of rampant hormones. She needed to go about this with skill. Finesse.
“Is that right?” He tipped back in his chair and she realized he’d finished eating while she’d barely touched her food. “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”
“Growing up on a farm put all the he-man posturing into perspective.” She’d been raised alongside goats, sheep and dairy cows in the ever-changing menagerie her father called a farm. He’d gone green and “off the grid” long before either were cool. “Males of a certain age seek to mate all the time. Females decide who they want for partners and when they’re in the mood. If they don’t send out the signals, the males move on.”
Luke said nothing, his expression inscrutable. Prompting her babble reflex.
“What I don’t know, however, is if the females can ever successfully initiate the mating dance,” she continued. She couldn’t think of any examples of that in nature. Females were either willing or they weren’t. They didn’t hunt down a guy so they wouldn’t be alone on February the fourteenth. “I think humans are unique in this. Sex for us is often purely recreational.”
And wow. Hadn’t she talked herself into a corner? She braved a glance at Luke while she reached blindly for her wineglass and found it empty.
“I’ll drink to that.” Luke grinned as he picked up the bottle and refilled her glass. “To recreational sex.”
Her heart fluttered in her chest. Was this her opening? A moment of flirtation where she could suggest there be something more between them.
But then he clinked his glass against hers, not even waiting for her to lift it, and downed the rest of his wine. He tipped back in his chair with a self-satisfied smile and folded his hands behind his head. The exchange had been friendly and not flirtatious in the least. Hell, her brother would have drank to recreational hanky-panky, too. Men liked the concept. That didn’t mean they were ready to engage in the act with someone they’d pretty well considered a kid sister their whole adult life.
So, fueled by wine and determination, Tori made her proposal anyhow.
“Maybe we should have some.”
ALL FOUR LEGS OF Luke’s chair hit the floor with a jarring thud. “What?”
Luke recalled that his brain didn’t always operate well around Tori, especially when the conversation ran to topics like sex. So he had to have misunderstood her comment. No way could she want what he thought she wanted. She must be asking for him to pass the bread. Or pour her more wine.
Anything but engage in a recreational hook-up.
“Sex,” she clarified, her eyebrows raised meaningfully. “We’re both unattached—”
“No.” He had to put the kibosh on this fast, before it turned any more awkward. He’d known she was impulsive but—Holy hell. His blood simmered at the thought of what she suggested. “You’re right about the whole recreational sex thing and I agree it’s fun in theory. But, Tori, we’ve known each other forever—”
“All the more reason to consider a pairing that won’t be a total disaster—”
“And you’re Tim’s sister.”
He hadn’t meant to interrupt her and she appeared fairly miffed that he’d done so. Or maybe she was miffed that he’d nixed the idea so fast. Either way, her arms were folded tight, her shoulders tense and straight as she glared at him across the table.
Still, he couldn’t believe she’d suggested it. He’d come over here to steer her away from making a bad decision and—Crap. Maybe he was her next bad decision. Talk about being between a rock and a very damn hard place.
“You’ve barely given it any consideration,” she pointed out.
Ah, that was rich.
If she only knew how much consideration he’d given it at different points in their lives. But his occasional fantasies about Tori had always been just that—delectable mental diversions. He couldn’t afford to mess up his friendship with her whole family because she had some wild idea to…
His mouth went dry just thinking about it.
“Can I ask what brought all this on?” he asked, edging past the sawdust in his throat. She’d never looked at him in a romantic way before. He damn well would have noticed if she had. “You’re not on the rebound. Why the sudden rush to…”
He couldn’t even say the words.
“Get laid?” she supplied, a mischievous gleam in her mossy green eyes.
A cool breeze off the water drifted through the screen door and almost blew out the flame on a tall taper jammed in an empty wine bottle near the stove. He’d seen that look on her face before.
She’d cast that same wicked grin his way right before she stole the keys to her father’s ATV, long before she had the license to drive it. And just as she’d roared off on the back of some guy’s Harley. Her look said she was ready to make trouble.
And there was no way he was going to let her talk him into joining her in mayhem. One of them could damn well end up hurt.
“I can explain why there’s a sudden rush,” she assured him, switching gears from wild-eyed troublemaker to—oddly—a rational busines
swoman in a flash. Standing, she waved for him to follow her as she turned away from the table. “But you need to see it to believe it.”
She swished past him in the lightweight linen skirt she’d put on for dinner, her bare feet silent on the hardwood floor as she headed for her living room. Luke wanted to lift his gaze from the subtle swing of her hips as she moved, but apparently her outrageous proposal was messing with his head. Because he watched her like he’d never seen her before. A small ankle bracelet made of tiny bells jingled as she moved, and the rolled-up sleeves of her white cotton dress shirt exposed a tattoo on her wrist. He vaguely recalled hearing that she’d had the Japanese ideograph for destiny inked on there some time in college. No doubt she’d had it done moments after that devil-may-care gleam lit her eyes.
“Have a seat.” She pointed toward a love seat near the area she used for her studio.
No sooner had he made himself comfortable than she’d plunked down beside him, snagging her laptop off the coffee table on the way.
“We’re surfing the Web?” He couldn’t imagine what was on her computer that could possibly explain her haste to hook up.
He could imagine how sitting this close to her would wreak havoc on his self-control, though, especially given the topic at hand. The scent of her shampoo already teased his nose, the clean coconut fragrance taking him back to the day he’d brought her to a shooting range for her twenty-third birthday. He’d idiotically thought he’d show her how to use a gun in case she ever needed to protect herself. He’d forgotten that a farmer’s daughter would know her way around firearms. But there’d been those moments before she’d actually fired, when she let him show her how to level the weapon and his chin had grazed the top of her head….
The memory was blasted out of his brain by the image Tori brought up on her computer. It was a photo of a man and woman in the rain, under the shelter of an apple tree. The dude was stretched out on the ground—no shirt and a pair of jeans coming undone—while the chick crawled over him on her hands and knees. The woman’s rain-soaked dress hugged her curves, as tantalizing as the whole rest of the scene.
Any hope Luke had of keeping a lid on his libido was vanishing. What the hell was she showing him this for?
“You see?” Tori tapped the computer screen with the backs of her fingernails, sending a ripple of distortion through the image. “This is what I do all day long.”
Fire scorched his veins at the thought of her in a soaking-wet dress. His brain slowed its functioning.
“Straddle half-naked men?”
“Photograph sexy encounters.”
Yes, that made more sense. Still, the heat in his blood didn’t ease. Awareness of the woman next to him made his hands itch to touch her. It would be so easy to wrap an arm around her and press her back against the sofa cushions.
But oh, man, he was beginning to see her point about being around hot images all the time.
“A lot of people would think your job sounds fun—”
The words dried up on his tongue as she clicked through a series of eight or ten other photographs in a blur of changing erotic scenes. A black and white of a man and a woman in the backseat of a taxicab, the man’s hand palming a fishnet-clad thigh as the woman’s trench coat slid open to his touch. A man and a woman in an elevator, where the woman was tugging the guy’s dress shirt off while she placed a kiss in the middle of his chest. A close-up of a man’s hand dragging a strawberry over a woman’s hip bone.
And on and on it went….
“Fun?” she asked, lowering her voice to a seductive whisper as she continued flashing the stream of photos. “Would you call what you’re feeling right now ‘fun,’ Luke?”
Words escaped him. What he felt was the need to shove aside her computer and re-create every decadent, pulse-thrumming scene. With her. Right here. Right now.
“This is a low blow,” he finally ground out between clenched teeth.
“I agree completely.” She closed the laptop with a snap and set it back on the rolling work cart she used to store equipment for her photo shoots. “It is miserably unfair that I’ve created a niche for myself in a market that is getting hotter and hotter every year. You saw what I was photographing today.”
She made a sweeping gesture toward the set, where she’d shot her cavepeople earlier.
“The model was freaked out that I wanted to shoot a threesome,” she continued, shaking her head. “And who can blame her? What will they be asking me to photograph a year from now or the year after that? I’m so overheated now that I can’t imagine facing my next assignment without some…outlet. Last Valentine’s Day, I was so out of sorts, I vowed I wouldn’t let another February 14th go by without—you know. Making an effort to be with someone.”
The rant came to a surprisingly quiet conclusion. Her gaze turned to his and lingered as her mouth pulled into a soft pout.
His heart slammed against his ribs at the invitation, his temperature already spiked from the photo montage. His teenage fantasy woman was inviting him into her bed. And even though he knew it wasn’t wise, temptation howled through him like a hurricane wind.
But how would he cope with the aftermath—of knowing he’d been just another one of her wild impulses?
“I—” He didn’t know what to say. The only words that came to mind were emphatic yeses, avowals of her sex appeal or commands to remove her clothes. With an effort, he searched out the only answer he could give. “We need to think about this before we do something we might regret later.”
Harder words had never been spoken.
She inched closer, tendrils of long blond hair falling forward over her shoulders, framing her breasts. Eve and the apple couldn’t have been more enticing. Luke knew he was seconds away from losing this battle.
“I don’t understand.” she said.
Standing suddenly, he put his body in motion before he acted on his every red-blooded impulse. Heat stoked his insides and crawled all over his skin. His fingers clenched at his sides with the need to sink into her flesh and mold her body to his.
“I’ll call you.”
And without another word, Luke headed for the door.
3
“AND THEN HE JUST LEFT?”
Tori closed her eyes at her friend’s incredulous tone as they sat on her back patio at sunset the next day for drinks. She’d been friends with Barbara Bradley for as long as she’d been a photographer and Barbara had been a fledgling entrepreneur with a small modeling agency to service the Tampa-St. Petersburg area.
“He said he’d call me,” Tori added weakly, realizing how pathetic her non-date with Luke sounded now that she’d spilled her guts to her friend.
She didn’t usually share details of her love life with anyone—although some of that had to do with a very sketchy track record—but the lemon bellinis Barb had whipped up were strong. Tori’d found herself midway through her disastrous dinner tale before she second-guessed the wisdom of sharing something that made her sound like a total loser.
“Well, something’s obviously holding him back,” Barb diagnosed from over the rim of her frosted martini glass, her aviator shades propped up on her sleek, dark chignon. “If it’s not another woman, my guess is he’s freaked about the fact that you’re his best bud’s younger sister. That crosses a line for some of those noble types.”
“It’s not like I’m sixteen or something.” Tori hadn’t been able to just write off the embarrassing encounter as a gamble that hadn’t panned out. Her feathers had been majorly ruffled. Luke’s rejection felt personal.
“You kinda like this guy, doncha?” Barbara didn’t let her Long Island accent run free unless she was around people she was comfortable with, but she distorted her vowels all over the place as she teased Tori.
“Of course.” Tori tried not to make a big deal of the suggestion as the scent of a neighbor’s seafood on the grill made her stomach growl. “He’s been a family friend for ages so I like him well enough.”
“You care a
bout this more than you would if he were just a friend,” Barbara announced, standing suddenly and slicing some more lemon for their drinks. “Trust me, I can tell these things. Although I wish you would fall for whichever one of your neighbors is grilling tonight. Doesn’t that smell fantastic?”
Tori couldn’t comment since she was still trying to process Barbara’s insistence that Tori harbored deeper feelings for Luke. What if it was more than just an old crush?
“Luke is hot,” she confessed, remembering what he’d looked like without a shirt. He’d visited the local swimming pool almost daily when he’d returned home every summer during college.
Then again, he looked damn fine even with a shirt.
“Honey, I need food to absorb all the alcohol I’m consuming, so let’s discuss the merits of your lawyer friend while we’re raiding your kitchen.” Barbara pulled Tori to her feet and led the way into the house, where she proceeded to open the fridge, the pantry and most of the cabinets.
“Here.” Tori snagged a package of frozen tofu burgers. “I’ll throw these on the grill. But you have to help me come up with a manhunting strategy.”
Barb plucked the sleeve of burgers from her fingers and tossed it back in the icebox.
“I don’t know what tofu comes from and I won’t eat it.” Then she proceeded to grab cheese, crackers and a knife and waved at Tori to sit, apparently taking charge of the food. “And since when do you need to resort to strong-arm tactics to get a man to notice you?”
“Since I sent one running for the hills last night.”
“You wouldn’t rather focus your attention on a man who won’t run from you?” Barbara wielded the knife with the smooth efficiency of a sous-chef, slicing and dicing her way through the cheddar and moving on to a sliver of leftover Gruyère.
“I didn’t choose a guy based on how quick he’ll sleep with me.” Tori straightened in her chair, shaking off the bellini buzz, trying to assert a little dignity. “I want Luke because he’s a great person.”