by JoAnn Ross
Annie wished they’d be so lucky, but she doubted they would, especially once they showed up with Emma and Mac’s father. Wouldn’t that get speculative tongues wagging? She suspected Dottie and Doris, the elderly owners of the Dancing Deer Two boutique, would immediately start looking through wedding dress catalogs. With so many people getting married lately, their stock would have to be depleted.
“Though Sedona and her date didn’t exactly look as if they’re going to be part of those festivities,” he said as he turned onto Harborview, which ran along the bay. Most of the commercial boats were out to sea, though more sailboats were skimming across the water, sails raised to catch the wind.
“He’s some rich tech guy who was interviewing her for a start-up he’s doing,” she explained. “A matrix match-up service that supposedly fixes you up with your perfect partner. Like that’s going to work.”
“You never know.” He opened the sunroof, then rolled down both front windows enough to let the fresh air in. “Look at us.”
“We didn’t meet online.”
“No. But the situation was much the same. We probably talked more honestly because we didn’t know each other than if we had, at least that first night you called in.”
And wasn’t that what she’d been thinking herself?
“We did skip past all that early getting-to-know-you stuff,” she said. “Like favorite foods, music, top three fave movies—”
“That’s an easy one. The Godfather. Platoon. And Die Hard. Oh, and I’m adding a fourth. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“Ah, the usual guns, guts, and glory.” She wasn’t the least bit surprised.
“I am a guy. We like that stuff.” The hot-guy look he shot her spurred a bone-melting desire that had her rethinking her moratorium on men. “Your turn.”
“It’s hard to pick just three. Or even four. But I tend to lean more toward the classics. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. When Harry Met Sally. Dirty Dancing.”
“‘Nobody puts Baby in a corner,’” he said, quoting the famous line from her third choice.
“You’ve seen it?” Unlike his choices, that one didn’t have a single weapon in it.
“Since women usually end up choosing the video for movie nights, once you reach a certain age, odds are you’ve seen that one.” He made the right turn toward the iron drawbridge leading out of town. “Swayze was always pretty much a guy’s guy, even when he was dancing, which made watching it not that much of a sacrifice.”
Annie was thinking that she wouldn’t mind if Midnight Mac put her in a corner. Up against the wall, with her skirt hitched up, and her legs wrapped around his waist . . .
And she was totally losing her mind.
“Favorite ice cream,” she said, desperate to change topics.
“Vanilla.”
Which came as a surprise, since there was nothing vanilla about him. Then he flashed her a wicked grin. “With chocolate sauce and whipped cream on top.”
The way he was looking at her, as if she were a hot fudge sundae that he’d like to eat up, made her feel as if she were coming down with the flu. How else to explain her swimming head and the swarm of butterflies flapping their wings in her stomach?
Not to mention that tingling under her skin when he put a tanned hand on her thigh as if it had every right to be there.
“We’re just talking about a kiss,” she insisted. “Nothing more.”
“Agreed.”
“That first one was pretty good,” she admitted. Which was a major understatement, but it was important to keep this relationship, whatever it was, on somewhat equal ground. “But it could’ve been a fluke.”
“What happened wasn’t any fluke.” The loud blast of a warning horn shattered the air; a gate went down in front of the truck, and a moment later the bridge began going up to allow a ship to pass through. “Which I’ll prove to you soon enough.”
Those wickedly clever fingers slipped beneath the hem of her dress, continuing upward, making little circles that were leaving sparks on her skin.
“We’re going to be stuck here for a while,” he said as a gleaming white yacht headed toward the bridge. “Let me give you a sample. To help you make up your mind.”
He unfastened his seat belt.
“Driving without a seat belt is illegal,” she felt obliged to point out.
“I’m not driving.”
To accentuate his point, he twisted the key, turning off the engine. Then leaned toward her, and with unnerving sensual intent, took off her Marilyn Monroe glasses and put them carefully on the black leather dashboard.
With that out of the way, and radiating testosterone, pheromones, and a dangerous male vibe that, instead of making Annie want to run, had her holding her breath, he inched closer to her.
He cupped his warm hand at the back of her neck, then closed the gap between them.
This wasn’t their first kiss. She should have known what to expect. She’d told herself that she could handle Mac Culhane. After all, as the song lyrics from Casablanca—another movie she would’ve added if she’d cheated like he had and gone for four instead of three—went, “a kiss is just a kiss.” Right?
Wrong.
The instant his mouth claimed hers, hot, hard, demanding, she realized she’d miscalculated. And even as she told herself this was crazy, that she barely knew him, she lost her ability to think and was clinging to him as if he were a lifeline in a storm-tossed sea, which it felt like as their tongues tangled and her heart started beating so hard and fast she wouldn’t have been surprised if it had burst out of her chest.
She had so miscalculated. This kiss was not just a kiss. And the rough male groan that rumbled from his chest as his open mouth moved down her throat was definitely not just a sigh.
Oh, wow! The man could kiss.
Really, really kiss.
A blaring sound reverberated through the roaring in her ears.
“Damn,” he muttered against her mouth, “the bridge is going back down.”
Now that was a sigh as he pulled away, refastened his seat belt, and started the engine. A deep, ragged sigh that, as she shoved her glasses back onto her face (which didn’t do a whole lot of good because her vision seemed to still be blurred from rampant lust), assured her she was not the only one who’d felt on the verge of drowning.
“Okay,” she said after they’d crossed over to the other side, when her head had stopped spinning and she was pretty sure she could speak again without sounding like Minnie Mouse. “You win. That kiss in the store? It wasn’t a fluke.”
“I’m taking that as a compliment,” he said. “But it takes two. And, sweetheart, you are one hot babe.”
She knew women who would have taken offense. There’d even been a time, when she was struggling to become a proper Washington Junior League matron, that she would have at least attempted to pretend annoyance.
But not today. Because today, for the first time in her life, she actually felt like a hot babe.
“We’re still not having sex,” she felt obliged to warn him.
“That’s your call. But may I ask a question?”
She didn’t entirely trust him. Oh, she knew she was in no physical danger, but she’d already heard the way he had of getting people to say things they’d never told anyone else. Hadn’t she done exactly that herself when she admitted to at least partially blaming herself for the breakup of her marriage?
“All right.”
“Are you talking about a sex moratorium for this afternoon? Or no sex ever?”
“Ever. I told you, I’m not into the idea of a friends-with-benefits relationship.” At his arched, disbelieving brow, she said, “All right. You’re right.”
“Did I say anything?”
“No. But you were thinking that if we keep this up, we’re going to eventually end up in bed.”
> Or on a floor, or up against the wall, like in that flash of a fantasy, or on the beach, beneath a sky of whirling stars . . .
“I sure as hell wouldn’t object if you take me up on that offer to use my body for sex.”
“I’ve given up men.” She wasn’t sure which of them she was trying to convince. Him or herself.
“Not that I want to get into an argument on such a nice day, but I don’t think you’re doing real well with that game plan,” he said easily.
“It’s you,” she muttered. “You mess with my mind.” Not to mention her body.
“Join the club. And, just in case it’s slipped your mind, you called me. I was just sitting there in the dark, in a shitty mood, trying to do my job on the radio, when Sandy from Shelter Bay gave me a reason not to hate that Saturday night.”
In the hormonal fog that had clouded her mind, Annie had forgotten that he’d sounded depressed and all alone that night when he’d asked the question. The same way she’d been feeling when she’d picked up her phone and made the call.
“It’s complicated.”
“Someone once told me life’s messy. And often random. Which, by the way, I’d pretty much figured out for myself. Before you had me feeling like a sixteen-year-old with a perpetual boner.”
“I didn’t like you at first,” she said, still struggling for a lifeline to avoid getting in over her head. “I don’t mean when I called in. I meant when I ran into you at Still Waters.”
“You didn’t want to like me,” he corrected as he turned onto a narrow, sandy road. “But, like we’ve both already discovered, you don’t always get what you want.”
And wasn’t that the truth?
But today, for just this stolen moment in time, Annie wanted Mac.
And for now, she decided, as this time she was the one who reached across the console and put her hand on his jeans-clad thigh, it would be enough.
29
“Oh, it’s lovely,” Annie said after Mac stopped the truck at the edge of a beach she hadn’t even known existed. Stretching out in both directions, the sun-gilded ribbon of golden sand was completely deserted. “You hung out here with Sax and his brothers?”
“Yeah. His grandfather built that picnic table,” he said, pointing toward the grayed wooden table and benches. “Although the weather’s done a number on it over the years, you can still see where he and Cole and J.T. carved their initials in it.”
He didn’t mention that his were there, too. Along with Jared, Kara Douchett’s first husband’s, who’d been Cole’s best friend in high school and had gotten himself killed on a domestic call as a cop after returning safely home from Iraq. Proving that life wasn’t always fair and often sucked.
One memorable night, before Cole and Jared had graduated from high school, they’d snagged some beer from Bon Temps, which the Douchetts had owned at the time, gotten drunk, and sworn to be best buddies for life. Whatever might happen, wherever they’d end up, they’d always be there for each other.
And there were other nights. . . .
“What’s funny?” she asked, making him aware that he was smiling at the memory of the night he and Sax had double-dated and, after a movie he couldn’t remember, had driven out here for a make-out session. That was the night, in the backseat of Sax’s Camaro, when Mac had rounded second and nearly gotten to third base with Debbie Henley. He might’ve made it, too, if Kara’s father, who’d been sheriff at the time, hadn’t pulled up behind them and flashed his red and blue cruiser lights.
“Just remembering old times,” he said.
“I suspect I’m not the first girl you’ve brought here.”
“Hey, I was in high school.”
“Which answers the question.” Instead of appearing offended, she gave him a knowing smile. “I always used to envy people like you,” she admitted.
“You didn’t know me.”
“You all seemed the same, as I was looking from the outside in. Confident, having a good time, going steady, breaking up, living like you were all part of the cast of Happy Days.”
“Appearances can be deceiving.”
Mac thought back to Kara getting pregnant her senior year of high school, and Lucas and Maddy breaking up. And, how, if they’d actually been living a Happy Days life, Sax would’ve been the Fonz. On steroids.
“I suppose so. But there’s such a sense of continuity about you all. Of connection.” She sighed. “This probably is a terrible mistake.”
“I’ve made mistakes a helluva lot worse,” he said. “It’s just a kiss.”
“We’ve already kissed twice. In the store and on the bridge.”
“They don’t count.” He brushed a thumb against her lips, which parted slightly at his touch. “The first was public, so I couldn’t really do my best. And the second was just a test. Let’s see what happens when we both really put our minds to it.”
“If my mind was even halfway working, I wouldn’t have come out here,” she complained.
She dragged her hand through those thick curls and looked out over the water. Fishing boats were chugging along the horizon, while another trio of boats, with tourists standing on the decks, had gathered around what he guessed was the pod of Shelter Bay whales. The familiar scents of seaweed and salt rode on the air.
Being the father of a six-year-old had taught Mac patience. So, although it wasn’t easy, he waited, as seagulls whirled noisily over the boats and pelicans flew by the windshield.
After what seemed like forever, apparently having made a decision, she unfastened her seat belt, then leaned toward him, touching her fingertips to his cheek.
Her eyes were as fathomless as the sea. A stormy sea as turbulent emotions swirled in those gray depths. Feeling himself drowning as she moved closer to him, Mac cupped her chin in his fingers. Then tangled his hands in her hair and tilted her head, covering her lips with his, kissing her lightly at first, nipping, teasing, tasting.
A low moan of arousal trembled against his mouth as she parted her lips, offering more.
Being male and human, Mac needed no further invitation. His mouth conquered hers as he hauled her onto his lap, held her tight against him, and deepened the kiss.
He’d known there would be pleasure. But never before had a kiss brought him pain. For the first time in his life, every atom in his body ached. His blood heated, pounding in his head. Boiling in his veins.
The passion that had been simmering since that first kiss in her pretty little store surged through him. As she responded, hands grasping the front of his shirt while her avid mouth drove him to the brink of sanity, Mac was struck with an almost overwhelming urge to touch her. Everywhere.
But the one thing he’d learned since returning from Afghanistan was that sometimes a guy just needed to be a grown-up. Which was why, instead of ripping her yellow and white dress apart, sending those little heart-shaped buttons flying all over the cab of his truck, with hands that were not as steady as he would have liked, he cupped her bare shoulders and set her a little bit away, breaking the heated contact.
“The deal was a kiss,” he said, as her unfocused eyes stared into his.
“That wasn’t just a kiss.” She glanced down at her hands, which were still clutching his shirt, and slowly loosened her fingers. “That was foreplay.”
“Sweetheart, if you think that’s foreplay, your ex wasn’t doing it right. That was like a warm-up to the preview of foreplay.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you can be more than a little arrogant?”
“Sure. I took it as a compliment.”
“You would.”
“I may be arrogant, but you’re lethal.”
He could tell that surprised her. “I am not.” She shook her head. “Damn. I knew this was a mistake. It can’t go anywhere.”
“Here’s a surprise for you. . . . You’re not going to get
any argument about that. You deserve a guy who can put you at the center of his life.”
He’d already suspected it from their phone conversations. But what she’d said over lunch had pretty much nailed his belief that he really should stay away from this particular siren call. Which didn’t explain what he was doing here with a woman who represented trouble.
“To treat you the way you deserve to be treated,” he continued. “Right now, Annie, I’m not that guy.”
She lifted her chin, surprising him by seeming annoyed at that. “Did I say anything about wanting to be at the center of anyone’s life?”
“No. But face it—you’re not the kind of woman who’ll settle for a hot one-night stand or booty calls. You’re a settle-down-in-a-nice-little-house-with-a-picket-fence type of woman.”
“As it happens, I already have a very nice house,” she said. “Which also has a picket fence. So, if you think I need you to provide one—”
“No, that’s not what I was trying to say. And I know I’m going to regret turning down anything you might be inclined to offer, but you’ve got a point about chemistry not being enough. Not for you. And right now, that’s all I can offer.”
“And to think that I actually liked chemistry in school,” she muttered.
His body was aching and his mind was engaged in a full-scale war between what he wanted to do and what he should do. Because he was tempted, too tempted, he merely said, “We’d better get you back to work.”
“I suppose so.” Her annoyance faded, like morning fog lifting, as she scooted over and fastened her seat belt. “What are we going to do about the Fourth?”
“What about it?”
“I don’t want to bail on spending the day with Emma.”
“We’re grown-ups.” He was reminding himself as much as her. “It isn’t like we’ll be having any hot make-out session on the lawn in front of everyone. There’s no reason we can’t still be friends.”
“As long as we stick to being together in public,” she amended, revealing that she was every bit as tempted as he was.