by Cindy Gerard
She’d never thought of a man’s feet as sexy. But then, she’d never seen Daniel Barone’s feet. She’d seen them a lot this week. And they were attached to such spectacular legs, tanned and toned. The way the muscles rippled beneath his skin and the way his baby-fine, silky-soft hair lightly dusted that skin—
“Phoebe?”
“Huh?” She looked up and realized she’d spaced out on him again. Drawing a bracing breath, she tried to look interested in his lesson. “I’m listening.”
If he noticed her little side trips into lust-land or any of the other mini vacations she’d taken this week—he didn’t let on. All business, that was Daniel Barone. He showed up looking like eye candy that shot off the calorie charts and ran through his bulging repertoire of self-defense moves with the single-minded determination of a drill sergeant training a raw recruit.
It was as hard on her ego as it was on her heart, this buddy business.
“This is a great technique against an attack from behind,” he began.
It was all she could do to keep from glaring at him. Did he feel nothing? Sense none of the heat that threatened to spike her temperature into the meltdown zone?
“Let’s say you’re waiting at a bus stop—”
“Why would I be at a bus stop?” she asked a little testily and used the opportunity to back a step away. Anything to put a little distance between her and the way he smelled, the heat of his body, the way he was going to touch her.
Already there had been a lot of touching this past week. Just thinking about lesson number one put her poor little heart out of commission again.
“It’s a for instance, okay? For the sake of illustration, just go with me here.
“Now, you’re at a bus stop,” he restated, setting up his scenario, “maybe reading the newspaper while you wait. It’s dark, you’re alone and someone approaches you from behind. Okay, you play the attacker and we’ll walk through this.”
He turned his back to her. “Move in fast and grab my shoulder. Yeah. Like that.”
Phoebe closed her eyes and endured.
“My reaction is to drop the paper, turn and deliver a right palm strike directly into your face.”
He turned in slow motion, walking through the technique. “See how I keep my arm straight? The idea is to hit him like a bullet.”
Again he demonstrated, shoving his hand toward her face at striking speed but pulling up short so he didn’t make contact and hurt her.
“What happens next is that he’ll double forward. Double forward, Phoebe,” he instructed, “and then I follow up with a knee strike to the chest.”
Again he demonstrated in slow motion. As she doubled over at the waist, he lifted his knee toward her chest, stopping just short of contact.
“See, that’s going to throw him off balance, and when that happens, you move right on in and push him away.”
With steadying hands, he showed how her body would react. “Then you finish him off with a front kick right in his breadbasket.
“Okay,” he said, looking down at her. “Do you think you’ve got it?”
“Yes.” Actually, it was kind of a blur. She’d say just about anything at this point to get all of this touching and looking and concentrating over with. “I’ve got it.”
“Okay. Now you try.”
She’d already known this was coming. There was a lot of rehearsing, she’d learned, in practicing self-defense moves. Which was why they called it practicing, Daniel had said with a tolerant grin after their Wednesday-night session.
It was with no small amount of frustration that she let out a bothered breath, turned her back and waited for his attack.
He touched a hand to her shoulder. With a speed fueled by three days of frustration and the nervous dispatch of a gun with a hair trigger, she whirled around. She slammed the flat of her hand into his face, hiked her knee into his chest when he doubled over, shoved, then drove her foot into his diaphragm.
He landed spread eagle on his back with an “Umph.”
Then he just lay there.
For the longest moment Phoebe stood looking down, waiting for him to get up.
He didn’t so much as move a pinkie.
“Um, Daniel?” she asked carefully as she gave the bottom of his bare foot a cautious nudge with her toe.
His chest started to heave.
“Oh my God.” She dropped to her knees by his side. “I hurt you!”
“No,” he said just as she realized he wasn’t fighting for breath. He was laughing. “Damn, Phoebe.” His blue eyes danced as they met hers. “When you finally decide to put your heart into it, you really make a statement.”
“You mean I really laid you out? You weren’t just acting?”
“You got me good, girl.” He sat up, propped his elbows on his knees and grinned at her. “Congratulations. I think you just passed the course.”
She felt the blood drain from her head, felt her stomach roil at the knowledge that she, passive Phoebe Richards, had committed a violent act on another human being.
“Phoebe?” His voice tightened in alarm. He grabbed her arms to steady her when her knees folded and she plopped down on the floor with a thud.
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
“You okay now?” Daniel asked a few minutes later.
Embarrassed, Phoebe stood and, to make sure he understood that she really was okay, she brushed off her sweatpants and forced a smile. “Fine. Thanks. I told you I was a weenie when it came to physical violence.”
“You aren’t a weenie. You just had a strong reaction when you realized that you actually have the ability to put a man on his back.”
I’ve put plenty of men on their backs, mister, she thought, suppressing the urge to glare. Well, not plenty. A few, though. Okay, two. Counting him. And he didn’t really count since she hadn’t ended up on top of him. Where was the satisfaction in that? she wanted to know.
At least she hadn’t completely embarrassed herself and gotten sick, even though it had been touch-and-go for a while there. Daniel had shoved her head down between her knees, ordered her to breathe and hadn’t let her stop until she’d turned from green back to pink again.
“You know what?” he asked once he was satisfied that she really was okay. “I think this calls for a celebration.” He checked his watch. “If we get moving, we can catch a movie. We could even grab a bite to eat and make it before the coming attractions if you’re up for it.”
Phoebe was up for a lot of things. One of them wasn’t torturing herself by sitting across from Daniel for another chat-and-chew session that could only end with her feeling frustrated and edgy and sexually supercharged by all the pheromones he emitted to the tune of about a bazillion per second. Another thing she wasn’t up to facing was the prospect of sitting beside him in the dark intimacy of a movie theater, their arms accidentally brushing and their fingers tangling in a tub of buttered popcorn.
A thousand excuses winged through her mind. She had to do laundry. Scrub her bathroom tile with a toothbrush. Clean her refrigerator and send the mold she found there to the lab for analysis. Any one of them would ensure that she avoided both the dinner and the movie. Most of them were viable; all of them were wise.
She opened her mouth to spout one, and to her utter amazement what came out instead was, “Okay.”
“Great. I brought a change of clothes. Mind if I use your shower?”
She couldn’t manage a verbal response to that one. He was already on his feet and heading toward the basement stairs anyway.
She was still sitting on the floor when she heard the shower go on upstairs. He was naked. And wet. And tonight, she was going to sleep wrapped in the towel he used to dry himself off.
With a groan, she lowered her head to her knees again. And breathed.
Seven
Phoebe made it through dinner, but only because the restaurant had been packed and she’d taken the opportunity to avoid a potentially difficult one-on-one with Daniel by ent
husiastically volunteering to share their table with a middle-aged couple from some obscure little town in Idaho. She now knew more about potatoes than she’d ever dreamed possible.
She even made it through the movie, but only because she’d insisted they see a macho action-adventure flick with lots of sweating, grunting, flying bullets and random acts of violence. And blood. There had been lots of fake blood.
Of course, Daniel had laughed a lot because she’d watched most of it between the index and middle finger of the hand that she’d slapped over her face. That was fine. She’d rather be squeamish over fake blood than steamy love scenes any day.
And there’d been no popcorn. Not for her. Not even when he’d offered several times. She wasn’t going to take a chance on any tangled, buttery fingers.
It was with a huge relief that the ending credits rolled, the lights came up and it was time to leave. Now all she had to do was make it home, cuff him on the shoulder like a good ol’ boy—would a belch be taking it too far—and escape inside her house. Alone.
“So, you really enjoyed that, huh?” Daniel asked as they walked out of the theater lobby and into the sultry August night.
“You bet.”
He laughed. “Do all librarians make lousy liars or is it just you who’s particularly inept?”
She looked up into his warm blue eyes and fessed up. “I think maybe it’s just me.”
He draped a companionable arm over her shoulders and gave her a little squeeze, pressing his body against hers from shoulder to thigh. He lowered his mouth to her ear. “Well, here’s a tip,” he whispered confidentially. “Don’t ever cheat on your taxes. You’d never be able to lie your way out of an audit.”
She didn’t hear anything past the word tip. A soft, low buzzing sounded in her head, drowned out the rest of his words as his breath stirred the fine hair above her ear and the long, hard length of his body jolted every erogenous zone to high-alert status.
“Um, uh, what?” she heard herself mumble when she realized he’d stopped just outside the theater doors and had asked her a question.
He grinned at her. “I said, do you want to go for ice cream?”
“Ice cream?”
“You know? Cold. Sweet. Sometimes comes with hot fudge and—” He stopped midsentence as his eyes cut across the street. His expression turned hard as stone. “Son of a bitch,” he swore and pulled her protectively to his side.
Startled out of her mini-stupor by his drastic shift of mood, Phoebe gathered her wits enough to follow his gaze. Her heart rate kicked up several beats when she saw what had drawn his attention.
Jason Collins was parked across the street from the theater. He’d rolled down his window, making sure that he was seen and recognized.
“The bastard is stalking you.”
In a slow motion that was frightening for its staged and precise casualness, Daniel’s gaze shifted from his combative stare-down with Jason to Phoebe’s face. His features softened as he looked down at her then touched his hand to her cheek.
“Let’s see if we can funnel some of his anger in another direction,” he said, nudging her backward.
Before she could assimilate what was happening, her back connected with the outer wall of the theater and Daniel connected with her front.
“He wants to be ticked off at someone, let’s get him ticked off at me. Hold on,” he whispered as his mouth descended. “We’re going to make this look good.”
Look good? she thought. Make what look good?
Eyes wide and round, Phoebe opened her mouth to ask but the words stalled in her throat. In the end, it didn’t matter anyway. Just as it didn’t matter that she’d lifted her hands and pressed them to his chest to…to do exactly what, she didn’t know.
Maybe she’d been about to suggest that he rethink this. Maybe she’d been going to tell him that this was a really, really bad idea. Maybe she’d been going to push him away.
But then his mouth touched hers, covered hers, opened over hers. With the press of his body, he demanded that she do the same.
Then nothing but his mouth mattered anymore.
He kissed her, deeply, sweetly, and wrapped her so tightly against him it was hard to breathe, let alone think. Let alone protest. Let alone remember why she’d thought this was a bad idea in the first place.
She blinked and watched his face, watched those thick dark lashes lower to brush his cheeks, and on a groan that married surrender to desire, she let her eyes drift shut and let him take control.
His kiss. Oh, his kiss. It was everything she’d ever dreamed a kiss should be. Everything that Jason’s kisses had never been. It was rough yet tender. It was intense and demanding. It was filled with passion and need. She lost herself in it and in him and totally forgot that it was all for show.
She lifted her arms, wrapped them around his neck, and with a sigh that was part shock and all swift, instant arousal, let him nudge her legs apart with his knee. When his big hands skated down her back and settled over her bottom then pressed her up and into his hips, she lifted up on tiptoe to encourage the contact, enhance the fit.
He was so…so much as he slanted his mouth over hers, changed the angle and dived back for another long, lingering mating of their mouths that involved tangled tongues and sultry sighs.
Someone whimpered—probably her—when he lifted his head. He heaved a deep breath and touched his forehead to hers. She swallowed, then dared to meet his eyes, slumberous and dark, full of wanting and wonder and desire.
“Maybe,” he said, his voice gruff, as he pressed her deeper into the brick wall at her back, “we ought to give him another demonstration. Just to make sure he gets the message.”
“What…what exactly is the message?” Phoebe murmured, breathless and afraid to hope she’d read more into his kiss than a staged strategy to redirect Jason’s anger toward Daniel and away from her.
He answered her with a searching look, then lowered his mouth again. Kissed her again. It was a study in sensuality, all warm breath and thrusting tongue that set a rhythm to mirror the act of making love and turned her legs to jelly. Her heart hammered so hard she could hear every beat in her ears, feel every pulse point in those places where their bodies met and meshed and made promises of the things they could do and the way they would fit in the dark.
The loud squeal of tires had Daniel lifting his head. She peeked over his shoulder. Together, they watched Jason’s taillights disappear down the street in a screaming blur.
“I think,” Daniel said, his voice as rough as sandpaper, his breath as labored as hers, “that might have done the trick.”
Well, it had certainly done it for her.
“You okay?” He slowly pulled away.
She met his eyes, gauged the latent heat there and gave a jerky nod.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
If he noticed the lie in her eyes, he decided to ignore it. “Come on. Let’s get you home.”
On a shaky breath, Phoebe took the hand he offered and walked silently beside him to his car.
So they’d just delivered a message. And she was still wondering exactly what that message was. Wondering—no hoping—that Daniel Barone had just gotten a message, too.
Maybe there was more here. Maybe he could actually care about her a little. Maybe even care a lot.
By the time they’d reached her house after a long, silent ride that did not include a stop for ice cream, reality had crashed her little party with a vengeance.
Daniel Barone, male extraordinaire, was not going to fall for a dowdy, unsophisticated librarian, who, her saner side reminded her, was not only three years older than he was, but was light-years away from the kind of woman who could really turn him on, reel him in and embark on the road leading to happily-ever-after.
But, oh, she thought as she lay alone in her bed that night, could that man fake a kiss.
Daniel stared at himself in the bathroom mirror the next morning. He looked like hell. He dragged a hand over his face.
A sleepless night would do that to a man. Several sleepless nights, in fact.
So would an ice cream–eating, tortoiseshell-toting, pottery-making, mud-packing, red-toenail-polish-wearing liar of a librarian.
He’d always thought of Phoebe as honest. But she’d been lying to him all week. With her eyes. With her tight little smiles. She’d been telling him that all the togetherness, all the touching that resulted from working through the self-defense moves hadn’t affected her. That she wasn’t as hot for him as he was for her.
The little liar.
He splashed cold water over his face then braced both hands on the edge of the sink. He hung his head and finally admitted that he’d been lying, too. To himself and to her.
This could not continue. He could not continue to mosey over to her house, pretend he wanted to be her buddy and then fabricate reasons to touch her, excuses to kiss her. Not when she felt like liquid fire in his arms. Not when her mouth opened so sweetly, so greedily beneath his. Not when she looked at him with those baby-owl eyes that begged him to take her to bed.
Which was exactly where he wanted her.
“So, hotshot, now what?” he asked his reflection.
The phone rang. He considered letting his machine pick up but in the end he walked into his bedroom and answered.
“Barone,” he said on a gruff bark.
“Daniel?”
“Ash? Is that you?”
“Not if your mood is as foul as it sounds.”
“Hell. I’m sorry. You caught me…preoccupied,” he said, amazed at the magnitude of his understatement. “Where are you?”
“In Boston.”
“No joke?”
“I would not joke about something like that, Daniel.”
Daniel smiled. No. Sheikh Ashraf Saalem, the prince of Zhamyr, would not joke about something like that.
They’d met several years ago at the Soldeu ski resort in Andorra in the Pyrenees. Ash had been on vacation. Daniel had just dropped by on the way to somewhere else and Andorra had been a convenient stopover. He’d hit it off with the independent financial consultant immediately. He and Ash had not only forged a friendship over snifters of cognac in the lounge, it had been the beginning of a successful business relationship.