by Ren Benton
“The kind that requires collateral, so kindly refrain from throwing the plate against the wall in celebration of my glorious cake victory.”
“You dare tell me to refrain?” She raised her nose haughtily, braver when the game was between just the two of them. “Do you know with whom you are dealing?”
“A woman who listens better when her mouth is full, or so I’m told.”
He held up a fork laden with something she could barely see by the light leaking from the restaurant’s windows. Because she was brave, she opened her mouth and closed her lips around the tines. Dense mocha cake, a ribbon of gooey fudge, and a cloud of hazelnut mousse slid onto her tongue and melted.
Sweet food delivered, he tried the sweet talk. “Please don’t throw the plate I have to return to the nice man to get my wallet back.”
As promised, cake made her agreeable. “I would never, but what’s your policy on licking?”
“Strongly in favor of. Have another bite.”
Not while the taste of the first lingered — that would be like cheating. She leaned her back against the post at the end of the trellis. “Your turn. I want to know what you’ll go along with when caked up.”
“Is it not enough that I agreed to the licking?” He took a bite and was quiet for a long time. When he had savored the many texture combinations of cocoa and sugar, he offered, “I will paint your house.”
Her suburban abode dated back to the era of solid masonry construction and had red brick on all sides, not just a veneer facing the street. The faux-historic personality of the exterior was her favorite thing about the house. “If you’re one of those people who advocates painting brick, I’ll have to break up with you again.”
“I would never. Need your garage cleaned?”
Her dad hadn’t raised a garage slob. “That’s my chauffeur’s domain. What else do you have?”
He thought about it for a moment. “I have more cake.”
“Now you’re talking.”
The doom-prophesying woman from the wedding came around the corner as Ivy accepted her second forkful of chocolate. She acknowledged them with an upward jerk of her chin. “No cake and a cash bar. I give ’em two months.”
Ivy’s solidarity extended toward her, too. “The restaurant has cake.”
“I have a bottle of rum in my room, sweetie. I’ll stick to the booze.” She pointed at Griff as she passed. “A man who feeds his woman is a keeper. You two will last.”
Ivy waved goodbye while Griff loaded the fork again. “I don’t have the heart to tell her you’ve already dumped me.”
“It’s kind of you not to shatter her youthful optimism.”
“I’m nothing if not kind.” He demonstrated by letting her have the final bite of chocolate.
It was gone too soon. She took the fork from him and took her time sucking the last bit of ganache from between the tines. When she emerged from her blissful reverie and opened her eyes, she caught him staring at her mouth.
He raised his gaze to meet hers and arched a brow.
She lifted one shoulder. There must have been some monetary sleight of hand involved in the acquisition of the cake. The least she could do was make sure he got his money’s worth.
She licked the back of the fork one more time to make sure it was clean, then placed it on the plate with a tink.
The strains of music drifting from the reception changed to something slow and indistinct. Griff bent to set the plate on the ground. When he straightened, he held out his hand. “Shall we dance?”
She wasn’t a dancer, but she could stand and sway without humiliating herself too badly. She bypassed his hand and stepped into the circle of his arms, which he cooperatively cinched around her.
His callused hand zipped over the fabric covering her hip. “It sounds like... an inner tube.”
She tipped her head back and inhaled sharply. “That’s it! It leaves the same friction burn when it scours across my skin, too.”
“If I haven’t mentioned it already, I am so sorry.”
She hoped so. Without the protection of a bra, her nipples were taking the brunt of the abuse. A little remorse was called for. “On the bright side, in the event of a flood, you can use me as a flotation device.”
He turned her in time with the music. “If it’s any consolation, you look beautiful in the moonlight without that hideous color turning you gray.”
She squinted up at his face. “In the store, you said I looked good.”
“Would you have come if I said you looked like an extra from The Walking Dead?”
“I’d have appreciated the honesty. It’s not like I didn’t know I look ghastly.”
“That’s all the fault of the dress. You put it on, and the life drained out of you before my eyes. It was all I could do not to rip it off you and perform CPR.”
“Alas, we’ll never know if my gratitude toward you for saving me from the blight would have offset the mortification of public nudity.”
“Every woman there would have envied you.”
Only because he was giving her mouth to mouth. “Not Bikini Girl.”
“What Bikini Girl?”
“The one with three times my tits and half my ass, but nice try.”
“You are a tough crowd, Duchess.” He twirled her — slowly enough that she felt delicate as a feather — then brought her back into his arms. “You are beautiful in moonlight, and in daylight in anything other than that dress. I would still like to get it off of you.”
Delicacy deserted her, and she stumbled over his feet. When she untangled her hooves and looked up at him again, he was grinning. Relief washed over her. “You said that just to fluster me.”
“I tell one little white lie to spare your feelings—”
“And facilitate getting your way.”
“—and suddenly you don’t trust me at all.” His voice lost its teasing note. “I said it because around the time you squeezed my thigh during the ceremony, my thoughts shifted from my good fortune in finding a tolerable bodyguard to wanting you touching more of me, preferably while you’re wearing nothing but mascara.”
His hands burned where they rested on her hip and back in an entirely appropriate fashion, arousing entirely inappropriate feelings — warm, tingly, gaspy ones.
He was accustomed to having that effect. If he’d enlisted any other woman to be his date, he would be playing the same seduction game.
Which was why it seemed more habit than genuine interest in her. His voice conveyed more desire when talking about the cake. He didn’t spend many nights alone, and on this one, she happened to be convenient.
Why did her vagina do the wave for a man who didn’t care that he didn’t even know her name? Why had it never been this reactive to the decent, dependable guy who asked her to marry him?
Parts of her — the erogenous parts — wanted to go for it. How could she know meaningless sex with strangers wasn’t for her if she never tried it?
But the try-one-lima-bean argument wasn’t working on her other parts. If she did something so far out of character on a whim — which would also be out of character — who would she be afterward?
Her parents already had one daughter with an impulse-control problem and a long history of bad decisions.
Regret made her words husky. “As much as it pains me, physically, to admit this, I’m not the kind of woman who has one-night hookups with strange men. I can’t even pretend to be.”
“What kind of woman are you?”
“Sensible. Responsible. Inoffensive.”
He whistled softly. “Thanks for the warning. Those are terrible qualities.”
“They are when they’re polite synonyms for boring.”
Any other day, Ivy was content to leave excitement to those who didn’t have to pick up their sister’s kids from school or work late off the clock getting the store ready for a sale because she needed to be known as a team player to get a management position or any of the other boring but necessary chores s
he performed on a daily basis to keep life running as smoothly as possible on the track toward a pleasant future. Any other day, everyone she interacted with was equally dull, getting through the present as productively as possible to create a future they would enjoy someday, when they had the time, as long as no disasters occurred in the meantime to rudely disrupt their dreams.
Any other day, her dissatisfaction with that way of life was only a vague nagging in the distance. This day, attracted by a handsome stranger with an appreciation for the ridiculous and fancy cake, it surged to the fore and flourished dramatically to make sure she saw how much of life she was missing by devoting every minute to responsibly squirreling away nuts in preparation for a far-off future that might never come.
Griff murmured against her hair, “I wouldn’t describe a minute of our time together as boring.”
Her dissatisfaction roared. Never in her life had she wanted so much to be exciting to someone, and all the temptation she needed to do something reckless, daring, unexpected was pressed against her body from chest to thigh, swaying out of sync with faint music that had changed a while ago to something bouncy and irritating.
If only the sensible, responsible, inoffensive aspects of her weren’t rallying to contain that wild urge like a dangerous animal, tranquilizing her hands, her lips, her voice when they threatened behavior in violation of security protocol.
The beast paced the perimeter of its cage but couldn’t find an escape route. Thwarted, it retreated to the shadows to hibernate for another few decades, when the jailers might be too old and feeble to enforce the bonds of propriety.
She relinquished her fantasies of bad behavior with a sigh. “It was fun while it lasted. Thank you for playing along.”
There was such a thing as a friendly goodbye kiss. She had exchanged them with relatives, friends, the occasional excitable client. She meant this to be one of those.
None of those kisses began lips to lips. Nor did they evolve into lip sucking and proceed to tongue sweeping. Never had she gripped hair to hold the other participant in place. She would recall if big hands had cupped her ass and boosted her up to give her better access to an equally demanding mouth. None of those kisses made her nipples so hard they stabbed back against her when smashed against a hard chest. There had certainly been no whimpered mmf when she saw spots from lack of oxygen and pulled back for air and his teeth scraped her swollen, sensitive lower lip and sent a yearning echo to other soft, membranous regions of her body.
The man was scorching and unsafe, and sensible women did not play with fire. “I have to go.”
His hands loosened their grip on her ass, sliding around to bracket her hips.
She remained on her tiptoes, her body pressed fully against his. “I mean it.”
His stubborn hair remained wrapped around her fingers.
With visible effort, he restrained his grin to one corner of his mouth. “Do you want me to walk you to your room?”
She’d be humping him in the elevator.
She pried herself from him, clenching her grabby hands into fists to keep them to herself. “No. It’s... I can... I’m good.”
He turned the smile loose to prey on the nearest bystander. It gnawed savagely upon her willpower. “Unfortunately.”
She took a reluctant step backward. “Will you be all right? With the bridesmaids, I mean.”
He glanced in the direction of the reception. “I’m unmotivated to suffer through an encore. I’m going to return the china and silver and go hide in my room, too.”
He let her go without so much as a word of protest. He wasn’t the reason she felt trapped.
She was the jailer of the cage she couldn’t escape.
5
Ivy tossed and turned until Camille, who shared the queen bed with her, hit her with a pillow. After that, she stared quietly into the darkness until her travel clock read 4:03. She got out of bed and put on her workout clothes.
Alone in the hotel’s gym, she pounded her feet against the treadmill until her toes, arches, ankles, knees, and hips hurt and sweat pasted her T-shirt to her torso. Then she ran another mile, then two. She shut down the machine only when queasiness caught up with her.
She wasn’t going to be able to outrun herself that way, either.
She returned to her room to shower before Jen and Camille got out of bed and a fight for the bathroom ensued.
The inner-tube dress hung on the back of the bathroom door, an ugly souvenir of her failure to live dangerously. The shower could wait. She wanted the dress out of her sight immediately.
The front desk was unattended when she arrived. She waited for the clerk to return from his bathroom break until he’d had enough time to read two Playboys and the Wall Street Journal. The longer she was in contact with the dress, the more restless she became — too restless to stand around waiting for someone else to deliver it.
Burning agitation like fuel, she ran up the stairs to the third floor. Two wrong turns and corresponding backtracks later, she found room 325. She pounded her fist against the door, wincing at the volume of those three sharp blows in the predawn quiet. She’d wake the whole floor.
The three timid taps that followed wouldn’t be heard down the hall, and probably not through Griff’s door, either.
Neither variety of summons earned a response.
Normal people on vacation were sleeping at this hour. Gorgeous people who kissed like fantasies she hadn’t known enough to imagine before last night probably didn’t sleep alone often. It was entirely possible such people slept in rooms other than their own. In any event, coming to his room had been a waste of time.
Surely the front desk would be manned by now. Suddenly exhausted, she wrapped the dress around her arm and headed toward the nearest elevator.
A door clicked open behind her. A bleary voice said, “Liv?”
She took five more steps before she remembered that was her adopted name. Only one person knew her as such.
Well, she had his attention now. What was she going to do with it?
Heart thudding heavily in her chest, she turned to face him.
Griff stood in his doorway, bare chested, bedheaded, foggy eyed — until his eyelids snapped wide open. “What the hell happened?”
Before she could ask him to clarify the question, he hooked her hand, reeled her in, and netted her with an arm around her shoulders. The raw panic in his eyes prevented her from objecting to being dragged into a stranger’s hotel room. “Give me a clue here, Griff?”
He hustled her through the living room of his suite and into the bathroom, blinding her when he flipped the light switch. “Where are you hurt?”
“What?” She opened her eyes to a squint and caught sight of herself in the mirror. More remarkable than his fingers combing through her hair was the mantle of bloody red dripping down her face and neck and staining her shirt because her workout sweat had liberated another surge of dye from her hair. Her body quaked with suppressed laughter.
“Who did this to you?”
“There were two of them.” She clasped his stained hands before he made more of a mess of himself. “Merlot and L’Oreal.”
A flicker of understanding crossed his face.
She spelled it out to make it stick. “I’m not hurt, other than being mortally embarrassed. Wash your hands before the dye soaks into your nails.”
He turned on the tap and soaped up in the sink. He met her gaze in the mirror, strain evident around his eyes. “You scared ten years of my life.”
“I’m sorry.” Her voice was gentle to atone for the damage she’d done. “What a lousy way to be woken up.”
“I can think of better.” He dried his hands, then wet the tail of the hand towel he used to dry them under the faucet and used it to wipe her forehead, cheeks, and neck.
“I can do that.” He rubbed behind her ear, and she leaned into it like a cat being petted, making no move to take the towel from him.
The rough terry floated over her collarbo
nes. “I’m happy you weren’t brutalized after I scared you off.”
“You didn’t scare me. And this hotel has exemplary security.” She sighed under his ministrations. “That is the sort of thing I research before committing, as opposed to the pros and cons of dramatic hair color from a box.” Twenty seconds on the internet would have steered her away from the latter.
She gave into that impulse and shortened a man’s life span. If she could do that much harm with just her hair, she didn’t dare be reckless with any other part of her body.
“It’s an effective ploy to gain entry to a man’s hotel room.” He draped the ruined towel over the edge of the sink. “Which leads us to a new, less hysterical line of questioning. What brings you to my door in the middle of the night?”
A scar sliced vertically from the top of his shoulder, shiny and silver like moonlight, emphasizing the round ball of muscle underneath. Distracted, she murmured, “Technically, it’s morning.”
“Liv.”
If she’d been awakened from a sound sleep and needlessly injected with a life-shortening dose of adrenaline, she’d be terse about pedantic distinctions, too. She snagged the hanger holding the dress caught in the crook of her arm and held it aloft. “I have an early flight and wanted to get this dress back to you.”
“And it didn’t occur to you to leave it at the desk.”
She felt her own small shot of adrenaline. She knew it was ridiculous and rude to bang on his door at five-something in the morning, and she was embarrassed to be in his bathroom under these circumstances and thoroughly unsorry. “There was no one there and I got tired of waiting.”
“Probably a good thing no one else saw you. They’d have called an ambulance and carted you off to the hospital without you knowing why.” He leaned against the wall and dragged both hands down his weary face. “Are you always this impatient?”
“I’m never impatient.” She waited all the time — for a promotion at work, for her sister to spring the kids on her, for someone to invent low-calorie ice cream that tasted better than the carton. All she ever did was wait.