She gazed admiringly at the colorful assortment as he set it down. “Thank you, Connor. They’re beautiful. Unnecessary, but appreciated all the same.”
“They’re entirely necessary,” he said gruffly, rejoining her in the living room, “I was way out of line.”
She lifted a shoulder. “You thought you were protecting Brian; I understand the compulsion, trust me.”
Brian. The mental splash of ice-cold reality was just as effective today as it’d been the other night. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he switched over to small talk. “Yeah, he’s one of the good ones. Have you two been dating long?”
She replied very…carefully, “What has Brian told you?”
“Nothing at all, really. I was actually surprised to see you with him at the party.” Stunned was more like it. Seeing Brian with any woman other than Beth had been an altogether surreal experience. “You look cute together.”
Okay, now the shifty woman looked like she was chewing on an old wad of gum.
His eyes narrowed.
Had he been right in his accusations earlier? Maybe she’d just used Skylar as her cover. A very effective one.
“How serious are you about Brian? If you don’t mind me asking.”
With a quick glance at the clock, she evaded poorly, “Oh, look at the time. I’ve got a meeting to get to and I need to shower first.”
She reopened the front door. Subtle.
“Thanks for the flowers, Connor. I accept your apology, of course.”
Briskly ignoring his body’s response to the image of her in the shower, he caught her by the elbow and crowded her against the wall.
“You’re hiding something. What is it?”
She shook her head in denial and suddenly, the warm scent of chocolate assailed his senses.
His gaze dropped down to her lips. “Hot cocoa,” he murmured. So the empty mug on the kitchen table hadn’t been filled with coffee then.
Her response was barely a whisper. “I was cold.”
His blood fired. Imagining all the ways he could’ve helped warm her up nearly brought him to his knees.
Tugging on her elbow once more, he pulled her body flush against his.
Jesus, every inch of her fit him perfectly.
Damn it.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I’M NOT POACHING my brother’s woman,” he rumbled in her ear, his words a hot, rough brand against her skin.
Abby shivered, arched her neck at the sensation. No, of course he wouldn’t poach. Not Connor. She’d been hearing about Saint Connor for years now from both Brian and Beth. A bit of a man whore, yes, but an otherwise great guy.
A noble bad boy.
And all the more irresistible for it.
A large part of her reasoned she should set the record straight right now. Explain that she wasn’t Brian’s woman. Free Connor’s guilty conscience.
Give the green light for the kiss they both wanted.
Instead, she turned her head away. “You should go.”
His sharp inhalation cut the air like a knife as he backed quickly away from her. “Abby, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
The slamming of a car door had them jumping apart another three feet. Abby shifted her gaze to the driveway and saw Brian bounding toward them, sprinting through the rain.
Geez, when it rained it poured.
“Hey, Brian. What’s up?”
“We just wanted to make sure you got home okay.” He sluiced water off his jacket and pointed back to the SUV.
Seeing Skylar rapid-fire waving from the passenger seat, Abby smiled and waved back. “What’s with all the worrying? You’d think this was acid rain I ran home in.”
Instead of replying, Brian slid his attention over to Connor. “Skylar mentioned you might be here. Everything alright?”
“Never better.” Connor’s face was the picture of innocence. “Just checking in on Skylar’s guardian angel here, same as you.”
“Uh huh.” Brian nodded over at her kitchen. “Nice flowers. Who died?”
Abby drew out a forlorn sigh. “The perils of ordering flowers online. Small summer bouquet, my ass.”
Connor’s shoulders shook in silent laughter.
Brian rolled his eyes. “You suck at lying.” He turned on his brother. “What’d you do?”
“Nothing!” Abby broke in, cutting Connor off at the pass. “It was just a small misunderstanding. No biggie.”
Arms folded over his chest, Brian silently looked from her to Connor then back to her. “This misunderstanding wouldn’t have anything to do with you and me would it?”
Abby shot Brian her loudest shut the hell up glare, knowing that the power of telepathy she’d secretly wished for as a kid was still on back order.
“You did the big brother thing, didn’t you?” he sighed, shaking his head at Connor. “Did you grill her ‘til she broke?”
Connor pinned her with a dark look. “I tried. But Abby apparently keeps secrets extremely well.” Suspicion and something…weightier than distrust rolled off of him in waves.
Brian frowned. “Hey, ease up. I asked Abby to play along so you’d stop looking at me with such pity.”
Connor snapped his gaze back over to Brian. “What? I haven’t been doing that have I?”
“Yeah,” Brian said softly, “you have. Look, I get it—my wife died, I’m a single dad of a preteen daughter, and my last date before Beth was at a bowling alley when I was fifteen. If the shoe were on the other foot, I’d be a pain in your ass too. But it’s been a year; I’m doing fine. Better than fine. You’ve got to stop worrying so much about me.”
“Not happening,” grunted Connor. “It’s all a part of the sibling platinum package. And you have a lifetime membership.”
Brian grinned. “I wasn’t asking you to revoke my club card. Just…try to lay off the kid gloves around me, will you?”
Connor gave him another burly, noncommittal grumble that made Abby swoon just a tiny bit. If she were the type to keep a checklist for the dream-perfect guy, ‘being a protective brother’ would now be a top ten criteria. It was incredibly sexy.
And their manly bickering was just plain cute.
She smiled, half expecting a poignantly awkward bro hug at some point.
Unfortunately, she realized much too late to do any good that she wasn’t just smiling, she was staring. At Connor.
And he was staring right back.
A slow smile transformed his expression, right before he abruptly asked the inevitable, “So that means the two of you…”
“—aren’t really dating,” shrugged Brian.
“Interesting.”
Lordy, Abby had heard of a ‘wolfish grin’ before, but no one told her it’d make her panties catch on fire.
She quickly moved to usher both brothers out of her doorway. “Well, since that’s all settled, everyone can head on home and I can get back to that much-needed shower I never got to take.”
Great, there was that wolfish grin again.
You just had to bring up the shower didn’t you?
Connor was practically eating her up with his eyes. And she liked it. Far too much. So she chose to treat his heated stare like a solar eclipse and blindly push both men right off her porch back into the rain.
Eventually, they had no choice but to run back to their cars to avoid getting soaked.
And the very moment they were both out of sight, she rushed through her house to her bathroom, pulling her clothes off as she went.
Screw the shower, she needed a long, hot bath.
With some waterproof accessories.
She was stripped bare and just about done filling up the tub when her cell phone jangled from her bag in the bedroom.
Groaning, she hurried out to grab the phone, answering it on the way back into the bathroom without checking the caller id. “Hello?”
“That was a quick shower.”
Abby almost fell headfirst into the tub.
Luckily, she managed to hang on
to her wits though. “You know, I’m really starting to hate your investigator.”
Connor chuckled. “Actually, Skylar gave me your cell phone number before I went to pick up the flowers. She figured I might need it in case you slammed the door in my face.”
“So blood really is thicker than milkshakes,” she grumbled as she stomped over to the tub to shut off the water before it overfilled. “What do you want, Connor?”
“Now there’s a loaded question.”
The sigh she aimed at herself bounced off the tiled walls in stereo. She’d walked right into that one.
There was a brief silence over the phone line and then a very curious, “Are you talking to me from the bathroom?”
Oh my, Miss Manners would have a conniption. “Yes. But to be clear, I’m not using the bathroom or anything.”
His quiet laughter was the stuff of bath-time fodder.
The deep sound went through her like whiskey as she perched on the tub edge and swished a lazy hand through the water.
She heard him suck in a soft breath. And every nerve in her body flared to life at the sound.
“You’re taking a bath.” His voice was a full octave lower, his tone almost reverent.
Startled, Abby looked around to check the walls for eyes. A pair of piercing blue eyes in particular…a distinctly sexy set that always looked deep in thought.
“No. Not yet, anyway.”
Another pause. “So what’s stopping you?”
“You.”
Was it possible to hear someone smile?
“So because of me, your water’s getting cold?”
“Exactly. Now if you’d hurry and tell me what you want, I could get back to my bath before it gets any colder.”
“Maybe what I want is to join you in the tub. What are the chances of that happening?”
“None to none at all.” Liar.
He made a disappointed sound, but didn’t give up that easily. “I promise I’ll behave. Unless…you’re going to do something in the bath that you’d need privacy for.” He put just enough goading in his tone to tick her off, but not enough for her to hang up on him. “Is that the case?”
Yes. And the jerk was being deliberately obtuse about it.
She maintained radio silence.
“Because if that is the case, I don’t have to behave. I could…misbehave.”
Her jaw locked at his audacity.
A firm believer that one should never negotiate with terrorists, she decided to instead fight fire with fire. “Since it doesn’t look like I’m getting rid of you anytime soon, I’m just going to go ahead and start…my bath.”
She grinned in triumph when a quiet groan came from his end.
Placing her phone on the counter, she dropped her towel and slid into the water. The slow, purring sound she let out wasn’t for his benefit.
But it seemed to affect him all the same.
“Am I on speaker?” The words were smoky, stilted.
“Mmm hmm.” Her eyelids drifted closed as she sank back against the tub, letting the hot water unravel the tension from this crazy day. “Connor, you have maybe a minute before I start dozing off so if you have something to say, you better say it now.”
“Have dinner with me.”
She bolted upright—to avoid taking in a gaping mouthful of bath water.
“Dinner? Why?”
“Because the next time you’re in that tub, I want to be there with you. And, well, I figure it’d be wise for us to eat beforehand.”
He was smiling again, she could hear it.
The guy had balls, she had to give him that. “What on earth makes you think I’d agree to take a bath with you?”
“Nothing but sheer hope.”
She resisted the urge to melt at that, reminding herself that this was a veteran player she was talking to here.
And she’d barely even cut it in little league.
“I don’t think dinner would be a good idea.”
“Okay, lunch then. Afternoon baths are fun too.”
Dang it, she was really close to laughing. “No. And don’t you dare suggest breakfast or dessert. Or brunch!”
“Well then we have a problem. Call me old fashioned but I’d really like to feed you before we take a bath together.”
Somehow, she managed to smother the life out of a burgeoning giggle. “That was a blanket no. To the bath also.”
“Fine. But you don’t know what you’re missing. I’ll have you know, I give a pretty mean underwater massage.”
Ooh, that was low. Her achy muscles wanted in. But her common sense knew better. “Oh, I believe you. I’d be more surprised if you told me you gave a nice one.”
“Ouch. Okay, okay, I deserved that. Well, since you’ve now clearly moved on to the brutally honest portion of our phone call, why don’t you explain why you told me to leave earlier?”
“Brian already covered all that,” she skirted.
“So that was the only reason? Honoring that favor?”
God save her from insightful men. “Not exactly,” she confessed. “It was just…easier to let you believe it.”
“Easier than…”
“Saying no to you.” She stared at the water, admitting quietly to herself as well as to him, “When all I wanted was to say yes.”
“Abby.”
It came out as a groan.
And sounded like pure sin.
She couldn’t help it, in the thick quiet that followed, her hands began drifting over her skin without any preauthorization from her brain whatsoever.
Eyes closed, she let her fingers roam. Until her broken breathing fractured the silence.
“Invite me over, Abby,” Connor rasped. “Let me see you. Help you.”
Her eyes shot open and she yanked her hands back to safer territory.
What the heck was she thinking?
“What? No.”
“Why not?” His voice sounded strained.
“Because we just met!”
“No, we met well over a decade ago. And as you so delicately reminded me the other night,” he added almost teasingly, “we’ve kept in fairly regular contact since.”
She tried to keep her smile from showing in her voice. Why was it so easy to like this man? “You can’t come over.”
“Then at least agree to dinner, Abby. Just one night.”
“Coming from you, Connor, that sounds less like a reassurance and more like a mandate.”
Crap. She hadn't intended for that to sound so bitchy. She had no right to judge him. “Errr...not that that's a bad thing.”
He was silent for a second. “Are you saying you’ve never had a one-night stand? Ever?” All their earlier playfulness was wiped clean from his voice.
“Nope.”
But for once, she was tempted. Boy, was she tempted. “Besides, even if I were that kind of girl, I couldn’t have one with you. Our lives are too connected. There’s Brian and Skylar to think about.”
Not to mention, you’d utterly break my heart.
“We both know it wouldn’t be a good idea, Connor.”
A resigned grumble vibrated over the phone line. “You’re probably right.”
“Sheesh, you don't have to be so upset about it...don't worry, I'll let you be right next time,” she teased without thinking.
A big, surprised chuckle burst out of him. “If you want to take the sting out of this rejection you just handed out, you’re going to have to work on being a hell of a lot less cute. And smart. The snappy comebacks are becoming a major turn on for me.”
She bit her lip. That was just about the sweetest compliment she’d ever received. “You know, we can still be friends.”
This time his laughter sounded almost regretful. “What’d I say about cutting down on the cuteness?”
“Is that a no?”
He sighed. “That’s a maybe. Or at least an ‘I’ll try.’”
“I hate it when people say that,” she complained. “It’s such a copout.”
“Well, it’s the best you’re going to get. ‘I’ll try’ means I’m going to let you go finish your bath alone, and not hit on you again for at least another twenty-four hours.”
She’d never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Fine. You have a deal. For now. I’ll work on wearing you down later.”
“Funny, I was just about to say the same thing to you.”
A strange thrill ran up her spine. “Goodbye, Connor.”
“Bye Abby…and have a good bath.”
“You too.” She frowned. “Wait. That came out weird. I meant a good one; have a good one.”
She paused again. Was it her or did that sound a little dirty?
Pinching her bridge of her nose, she tried again, “A good one as in a good time. Like I’m planning to have in the tub.”
Jesus.
A double-shot of oxygen hissed past her teeth.
Flustered, she attempted one more fix, “Not that I’m implying you’ll be doing what I’ll be doing—”
Oh. Good. Lord!
He growled. “Twenty-four hours, Abby. We’ll be ‘friends’ for twenty-four more hours and then you better believe we’ll be having this conversation again.”
She dunked her head under water as soon as he hung up, dazed at the prospect of resisting a man like Connor Sullivan.
Soon, she was the one spouting copouts.
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE WAS A COWARD. She’d spent the entire day working on her dissertation in the campus library instead of at home. Just in case Connor decided to call.
Not that she was under the fanciful impression that a big time lawyer like him had the time to be lounging around calling her all day.
Still, she liked to err on the side of caution.
And apparently, it was a good thing she did. Because when she finally threw in the towel and returned home at half past five, the shiny black Lexus awaiting her arrival confirmed yet again why cautious should’ve been her middle name.
“Busy day?” The question was casual, though Connor’s expression was anything but.
She decided to try for facetious. “As I’m sure you’re aware, stalking is a legally actionable offense in all fifty states.”
“God, don’t use legalese on me, Abby. Hearing it in your sexy teacher voice is just making it that much harder for me to stay your ‘friend’ for the next…” he checked his watch, “fifty-six minutes.”
Summer Heat: A Steamy Romance Boxed Set Page 90