Borrowing a Bachelor

by Karen Kendall

  But it didn’t.

  And she did want it to.

  Almost unconsciously she lifted her hips, searching for his mouth. And he chuckled again, damn him.

  He slid his hands under the cheeks of her bottom and squeezed, then started to play her cleft, down low, with his thumbs. She bit her lip and pushed against them, lifted herself again and swayed.

  She could feel her pulse pound all along that most private of areas, swollen from pleasure already and yet eager for more. He seemed to know. Still without touching that tiny nub at her center, he stroked the whole length of her, all the way down to her bottom.

  Back and forth he trailed his fingers, and she thought she’d go crazy because it felt so good.

  “You like that,” he said. A statement, not a question.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “You’re wet for me again.” His voice echoed in her ears, vibrated in her bones.

  “Oh, yes…”

  That’s when he slipped three fingers into her. And when she whimpered, just a little, begging him for it, he at last brushed that bud at her core with his thumb, rubbing it gently until she came completely apart.

  Still he didn’t let up, and it became too much for her to take. “Stop…you have to stop.”

  “Why?”

  She found his hand with her own and grabbed it. “Because I can’t handle any more. I can’t.” She clamped her thighs together, raised her head and shoulders and looked into his eyes, which held a sweet, if smug expression. He knew he’d done his job right—done it to perfection.

  “Worn you out, have I?”

  She could get drunk on the cognac of his eyes. She nodded, and released their clasped hands from between her thighs. Adam freed his hand from hers and held up a specific number of fingers, still moist from her body. He waggled them at her.

  “Three,” he said, his voice a mixture of affection and raw, masculine desire. “Always a lucky number.”

  Nikki blushed. Three orgasms in a row, from a guy she’d only met less than three hours ago? Yeah…she had to admit, she’d gotten pretty lucky.

  And he had, too—at least she could tell herself that as long as she didn’t look too closely at his poor, swollen nose.

  6

  NIKKI TOOK FULL ADVANTAGE of Adam’s hotel-room shower, trying to soap and rinse all the “bad-girl” cooties off her body. The problem was that despite the niggling sense of shame she still felt at being scantily clad, popping out of a cake for dozens of men and burning up the sheets with an unknown guy—being bad felt really, really good. Being bad felt excellent, truth to tell. Liberating.

  She felt as if she’d spent her entire life until now squeezed into a brutal pair of polyester support hose, and she’d just cut herself free. What a great feeling. She laughed out loud in the shower, and the sound bounced off the tiles.

  She now had a delicious secret, like the famously nonexistent Victoria. Nobody ever had to know besides her and Adam. But as her laughter faded, spiraling down the drain with the water sluicing off her body, Nikki hugged herself.

  For all that the sex had been spectacular, Adam had never once kissed her or touched her anywhere intimate with his mouth. Translation: he thought that she might have something communicable, like an STD. Translation: he didn’t believe that this was the first time she’d danced nearly naked for men. Translation: he thought she was at best loose and at worst some kind of—

  She put that thought out of her mind. Adam may have given her three orgasms, but she would probably never see him again.

  Well. That was for the best. She was quite sure he wouldn’t respect her in the morning. And it was up for debate whether or not she’d respect herself then. Though why women were somehow more worthy of blame than men in these situations, she’d never understand.

  Oh, who cared? Sex wasn’t about respect anyway. It was about tossing panties on the lamp shade and having a good time. So there.

  But Nikki scrubbed her privates again, until they practically squeaked. She rinsed off and stepped out of the shower, avoiding her own face in the mirror as she groped for a towel.

  Nikki dried herself then wrapped the towel around her head. The terry cloth had aggravated the twin mosquito bites on her butt again, which completed her crazy emotional arc this evening: she’d gone from scared to slutty to horrified to ashamed to laughing-at-herself to orgasmic to euphoric to ashamed, part two, and now back to dorky.

  To top it all off, she couldn’t stop thinking about how Adam hadn’t kissed her. Why she would obsess about that when the sex had been spectacular made no sense. He wasn’t her boyfriend, they weren’t dating, so there was no intimacy between them. She should be glad that he hadn’t put his tongue in her mouth or put his lips all over hers because that was like sharing something more. But she wasn’t glad.

  Which meant she was just plumb crazy.

  Nikki threw on the hotel robe and belted it. She had the weekend to recover and then she’d start her new job as administrative assistant to the dean at the medical school. She’d be covered from head to toe in a professional outfit, and nobody would ever guess that tonight she’d burst, mostly nude, out of a cake for a bunch of howling, wolf-whistling men. Nobody would ever know that she’d gone back to a hotel with one of those men. This embarrassing incident would remain her own sordid little secret.

  Thank the good Lord.

  Nikki wiped a pathway through the steam on the mirror and stared herself right in the eyes. I may be fallen, but I can get up. She did her best to get Adam’s comb through her wet, curly blond hair. Then she threw back her shoulders and drew herself up to her full height. She’d face Adam like a queen.

  ADAM LAY SPRAWLED buck naked in the center of the bed, unable to move despite the call of his medical books and the throbbing of his nose. He knew he should turn his eyes to the texts and return the ice to his nose, but his body ignored his conscience and continued to make like an amoeba dug into the ocean floor.

  When the bathroom door flew open and Nikki emerged breasts-first, like a blond battleship in a bathrobe, he did manage to blink, though. “Wow,” he said inanely. “You’re all clean.”

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  She seemed to be waiting for something.

  Adam searched his amoeba-brain for what it might be and came up blank. Then it hit him: she was a dancer and she probably wanted a tip. Well, he didn’t have much, but—

  Then it hit him much harder. Oh, no. She was a dancer whom he’d taken to bed. Easily. Way too easily.

  Hooker, man. She’s a hooker! And after handing three hundred dollars to Gib, you have the sum total of forty-three dollars in your pocket, give or take some change. Better yet, after paying tuition a month ago, and your co-payment at the minor emergency center tonight, you have…

  He did the math quickly.

  Only fifty-two dollars and ninety-three cents left unused on your debit card.

  What were the chances that her rate was—he did more math—under ninety-five dollars and ninety-three cents?

  Nada. Nil. Zilch.

  She was a babe.

  He chewed the corner of his mouth as he wondered exactly how luch she charged and how in the hell he was going to come up with it. Then, worse, he wondered if she’d faked all three orgasms.

  “Is something wrong?” Nikki inquired.

  “No, no. Not at all.” Adam wanted to crawl under the bed. His only option was to call Devon, and he really, really didn’t want to do that. Not even a little bit. Shit! How had he gotten himself into this situation?

  He rubbed the back of his neck and stared at her hopelessly. Could you put a trick on layaway?

  No. He’d already taken delivery of it, so to speak.

  Could he get on some kind of payment plan with her?

  “Well,” she said. “This is awkward.”

  He produced a feeble smile. Oh, honey. You have no idea.

  “I think I’ll, um, go home, now.”

  “Sure. I’ll walk you to you
r car.” He shot off the bed and into his jeans. He fished around on the floor for his shirt and shrugged into it.

  “You’ve got that on backward,” she told him.

  So he did. Adam found that he didn’t care, though. He really wanted to get this awful explanation over with. He sat on the bed again and ducked his head down on the pretext of putting on his boat shoes, which he could have slipped into easily. “Ah, Nikki. I don’t, you know—as a student—have much, ah, money.” He risked a peek upward.

  She’d drawn her eyebrows together. “I know the feeling. Neither do I.”

  Great. She wasn’t going to give him an inch, was she?

  “Yeah. Well, the thing is that I may have, ah, misunderstood the situation, here. I don’t know what you normally charge—”

  She stared at him, clearly perplexed. Then her face cleared. “Oh, I see what you’re getting at. Adam, the dance was free. It was me making things up to you for hurting your nose. I told you that.”

  “Well,” he said, feeling his face flame, “that’s very generous, but I know I need to, um, take care of you, so could you give me an indication of…?” His voice trailed off. Jesus, Joseph and Mary, how did you ask a woman what price her pussy was?

  “Take care of me?”

  Oh, come on. The girl couldn’t possibly be this stupid. He screwed up his courage and tried to make a joke out of it. “You know. For the rest. I mean, maybe you’ll give me a discount since I made you pretty happy, too, but what do I owe you for tonight?”

  All color drained out of her face, her mouth dropped open and her eyes went stormy.

  Adam cringed. Oh, shit. Is she not— Oh, shit upon shit upon shit.

  “I’m not a whore, you disgusting creep!”

  Not a hooker.

  Her face flashed ruddy-red now.

  Not a hooker, not a hooker, not a hooker. So what do you do now, Captain Brains? Adam’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Probably because he had no words to get himself out of this colossal catastrophe.

  “S-sorry,” he croaked.

  “Yes, you are. You’re one sorry excuse for a man!” She whirled around and started for the door like a defensive end bull-rushing the quarterback.

  “Wait!” Adam said. “Where are you—”

  The door slammed on his verb.

  “—going?”

  He cursed. Regardless of his personal mortification, he could not let the girl go running around this neighborhood naked under a robe. Burke men made sure that women got home—or to their cars—safely, under any circumstances. His dad and his grandfather—not to mention his uncle—had drummed that into his head well before the age of twelve.

  Adam grabbed his thin wallet, her stilettos, skirt, tiny top and microscopic panties, then tore after her. “Nikki! Nikki, stop.”

  He caught up with her halfway across the parking lot.

  “Get away from me,” she snapped at him.

  As she spoke, a car came flying into the lot and they both had to jump aside.

  Nikki huddled into the bathrobe as if she were cold, even in the moist, hot evening air. She kept walking toward where she’d parked her car, under the scarce shelter of a pineapple palm.

  “Look, I humbly and sincerely apologize for insulting you. I didn’t think you were a hooker at first, but then you seemed to be waiting for something, and it hit me that maybe the something was money, and then I didn’t know what to do because I have less than a hundred bucks to my name—”

  Nikki raised her arm, keeping it straight, palm out. “Don’t talk to me.”

  He sighed and slipped his wallet into his back pocket. Then he extended his index finger, upon which was hung her lingerie and her high-heeled sandals. “You may want these.”

  She snatched them without a word, then the skirt and top, and stalked barefoot next to him as he loped along next to her like a jackass. “Why are you still here? Go away.”

  “I’m walking you to your car.”

  “Yeah? What a freakin’ gentleman you are. Turn around and walk straight to hell, buddy.”

  Adam sighed.

  “And for your information, the only reason I was in that stupid cake tonight is that I got laid off from my job and I haven’t started my new one yet.”

  They arrived at her car and she was evidently so angry that once again, she had trouble getting her key into the lock. Adam started to reach around her to help, but she smacked his arm.

  O-kay. He let her scratch up her paint.

  “Nikki,” he said. “I really am sorry. And in the interest of keeping the facts straight, I wouldn’t have…you know…if I thought you were a hooker.”

  “Go tell your lies to someone else.” She finally got the door unlocked and wrenched it open.

  “I would actually really like your number,” he said, even though he knew the request was futile.

  She froze and then turned to him with an expression of incredulity. “I know you didn’t just say that.”

  Adam shoved his hands into his pockets. “Yeah. I did. And I’m serious.” And, inexplicably, he was. Something about her sweetness and her outrage—especially now that he’d gotten his head out of his ass and could see her clearly—appealed to him. The fact that she was crazy sexy, and obviously was not a stripper—or a hooker—didn’t hurt.

  She leaned her face close to his. “No, you’re insane. Not to mention brain-dead. You can’t possibly be in school—unless you’re studying fiction.” She threw herself into the car and slammed the door.

  Adam opened and then closed his mouth. He fought the urge to tell her that he was in the top ten percent of his class in medical school, and eventually planned to specialize in oncology.

  It was completely alien, this urge, because he spent most of his time deliberately not telling women that he was in medical school.

  Why? Because, unfortunately, that information tended to create instant dollar signs in their eyes. They didn’t understand that after four years of med school, he’d do years of residency for worse pay than a lot of office managers received. And after that, he’d start at a lousy base physician’s rate, also crippled by close to a decade of student loans. On top of which was medical malpractice insurance.

  But most women didn’t have an inkling of any of this. They stuck to him like glue and began to try to do his laundry and bake him cookies and weird shit like that. Then they got resentful when he had no time for them because he had to study.

  So Adam kept his mouth clamped shut and stolidly accepted Nikki’s rage. He supposed he deserved it.

  Nikki turned the key and revved the engine.

  Gloomily, he wished for Dev’s delight and expertise in the fine art of insults. What would Dev have said to the fiction comment?

  Dev would have leaned in close to her and probably blown a ring of smelly cigar smoke around her head, letting it settle like a lasso around that long, sexy neck of hers. Then, the clever asshole would have come up with something brilliant and roped her back in like a baby calf.

  “Darlin’,” Dev would have drawled, “how right you are. I’m studying fiction and you’re the smart, sassy heroine of my dreams.”

  Then, once Nikki had made gagging noises, Dev would wink and add, “Now, what say you take off your clothes and give this villain a kiss before I tie you to those railroad tracks?”

  This might provoke a slap, whereupon—Adam had actually seen him do this successfully in a bar—Dev would commandeer the hand committing the violence, twirl Nikki into his arms, and smooch her soundly.

  Granted, he’d once gotten a stiletto heel stabbed through his instep after pulling this, but Dev being Dev, he’d claimed that it was worth it.

  Adam was so caught up in the extremely disturbing image of Dev kissing Nikki—and he, Adam, wanting to punch him in the nose for it—that he failed to notice that her VW Bug was poised to run him right over as he stood in the glare of its headlights.

  She rolled down the window. “Move or become a pancake,” she growled. “And don’
t think I’ll take you to the E.R. this time, either. I wouldn’t even drag you by the back bumper.”

  Adam decided, especially given the polite nature of her request, to get the hell out of the way.

  7

  DESPITE HER ANGER, Nikki was dead asleep at 2:17 a.m., when someone started pounding on her door. Someone who didn’t care if this was rude and obnoxious. Someone who was, despite Nikki’s attempts to ignore the noise, relentless.

  She had a bad feeling about who it might be. She crawled out of bed and pulled on a pair of shorts under the oversize Miami Dolphins T-shirt she’d worn to bed. Then wearily, blearily, she stumbled toward the door and put her eye to the peephole. She winced when she saw Yvonne standing outside.

  “Nikki, you open this door! I know you’re in there because your car’s in the parking lot. So open up.” Yvonne didn’t look happy. In fact, the brassy-red highlights in her black hair seemed to vibrate with rage.

  Nikki also noted the dark circles under her neighbor’s eyes, the smeared black eyeliner accentuating them, and the rusty-red lip gloss she wore. Her neighbor looked like nothing so much as a zombie ready to sink her teeth into Nikki’s flesh.

  It seemed a very bad idea to open the door to Yvonne of the Dead.

  But she started pounding on the painted metal again, and this time added screaming and cursing to her repertoire. The gist of the message, studded with F-bombs galore, was that Nikki had really screwed up and that she was going to answer for it.

  “Now open this door!”

  Nikki sighed. She was wide-awake anyway, and they might as well get this over with. It wasn’t going to be any more pleasant tomorrow or the next day.

  She reluctantly unfastened the security chain and slid back the bolt. Within seconds, Yvonne’s index finger was stabbing her in the chest.

  “Ow—”

  “What the hell were you doing back there at the bar? You freakin’ coldcock a guy and then leave? Do you know how bad you made me look? Do you?”