One Taste

by Cari Quinn

  He swallowed an oath.

  He walked with Tony out to the on-street parking. The line of bars on the strip necessitated a bit of a hike back to their cars, but he needed to cool off anyway. The bite of the sea air and a chaser of chilled smog helped him collect his careening thoughts.

  The walk back to his truck was silent but for the never-ending traffic that zipped up Broadway. He’d specifically gone into that club to think of anything but Miranda and now he had her smell all over him.

  Christ.

  “This is me,” Tony said quietly.

  Nate stopped, letting his head tip back to stare up at the skyline. “Sorry, Tony.”

  “Do you know this girl? It’s not like you to get worked up over a chick. There’s always a bunch around thanks to your brother.” He shrugged. “What’s so special about this one?”

  Nate drilled his fingers into his hair. “I don’t exactly know Miranda. She’s just on my run.”

  Tony frowned. “On your…you mean for work?” His face cleared in realization.

  “Yeah, I’ve been delivering to her place for a long damn time, man. She never looks at me like anything other than wallpaper—boring wallpaper at that—and tonight she comes across the room and…” he trailed off.

  Twists my dick into a knot. Fucks with my head. Treats me like her own personal scratching post. Goddamn, would he like to scratch her itch for an hour or seven to start. “I don’t think she’s called me the correct name twice in the three years that I’ve been delivering to her.”

  “You’ve known her how many years?” Tony slapped his forehead. “I don’t need to pull a stalker intervention or anything, right?”

  Nate snorted. “Jesus, no.” Maybe. “I’ve had girlfriends in between, man. She’s just—well…” He shrugged. “You saw her. She’s hot.”

  Tony rocked on his heels. “Blondes are more my bag, but yeah, I can see the fantasy factor.” His eyebrow quirked. “Does she answer the door naked?”

  “No!” Nate laughed, as his best friend had intended. “She’s all business. She’s usually signing the board with her head swiveled around to her desk the whole time.” Nate rubbed his hand over his face. “I know all of my regulars and they usually get to know me too. It just surprised me when she dragged me onto the dance floor.”

  “Maybe she’s trying to tell you something.” Tony smirked, making a fist and punching forward twice. “Maybe she wants a different kind of delivery.”

  “Right.” He shook his head. “No way. She probably didn’t know who I was.”

  “All the better, you coulda just got her out of your system then not worried about changing your route.”

  “Good night, Tony.” Nate turned toward his truck. She wasn’t just a quick lay. He wanted to get to know her. To see if she even knew how to smile with her eyes. To see just how many freckles she had on that dancer’s body of hers. To see if she tasted as good as she smelled.

  “C’mon, Nathan! Call me tomorrow.”

  Nate just waved at him and kept walking. “Night, Tony.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he heard Tony mutter.

  He climbed into the cab of his ’87 Ford and jimmied the stick shift to find first. He needed to forget Miranda Woods and find himself a real girlfriend. He’d been able to push her out of his mind a few times now. It just took a little persistence and a project. A serious lack of a project was ninety percent of his problem. He pulled into traffic and headed toward home.

  He was high up in the hills of North Beach. Even with the growing sales of his Thumb Lock, this was the only way he was getting an ocean view. He didn’t bother with the alley near his apartment. At this time of night there wouldn’t be any spots left. With the cool efficiency of a city dweller he parallel parked his way into a space and jammed his emergency brake on. One thing every driver needed was an extra brake on the steep hills, especially on the winding hills of the side streets off Columbus Avenue. Wrenching his wheel over as far as possible, he stepped out and slammed the door. He had two good hours before he’d crash. Maybe he could lose himself in an idea and get Miranda out of his head.

  He pounded up the wide stone steps to the lobby and went for the stairs instead of the elevator to his top floor apartment. If he was lucky he could run off some of the itch that no shower or hand could scratch at this point. He dropped his keys in the bowl by the door and stripped down to his undershirt. His muscles felt too tight, as though they were going to bust right out of his skin.

  He bypassed his living room with the television and game consoles. The only thing that was going to put him to rights was work. He hooked his thumbs into the tank straps, sliding them up and down as he studied the stretch of white that took up the entire wall. He’d jury-rigged a crank and a huge roll of paper so there was a never-ending supply of sketching space.

  A roll of shit designs were buried on one side. How many ideas had he scrapped in the last four months? All of them were far from original and beyond useless both in production and cost versus return. Grabbing a fat black marker, he twirled it along his fingers, up and down as he stared at the white. Something had to come to him. He grabbed his iPod and headphones, cranking Nickelback as he stalked the length of his workshop and back to the other end. He needed to do something. On his third circuit, he stopped at the framed schematic of the Thumb Lock that his parents had given him after it had gone into its first week of production.

  Pride swelled in his chest at the candid portrait that hung next to it. One of the last times all of his brothers had managed to get together in one spot and his mother had managed to take a clear picture. The perfect Fourth of July picnic, when life had been easier for everyone in his family.

  Noah sported a lopsided twist of lips that was his version of a smile. Noah was the oldest followed by him and then Luke. Hell, Luke still wore his Inspector shield at his hip. The vice squad hadn’t punched holes in him yet. Matt was the baby of the clan. All of them were lined up shoulder to shoulder, arms around necks. Laughter and sunshine and his parents’ manicured lawn framed them. He missed them. Schedules, his and theirs, got in the way too much lately.

  Wandering away, he picked up the latest modification he’d made to the Thumb Lock. A woman at work had mentioned that she wished she had a better lock for her safe and he’d started messing around with ways to adapt his lock for more than padlock purposes.

  He’d always tinkered with things, building and pulling things apart until he figured them out. It was enough to make his mother crazy when he was a kid. He’d followed it up with college, figuring that engineering was his calling. But he hadn’t wanted to build bridges and cities. Science held even less appeal.

  He ended up in mechanical engineering, since it was the study of how things worked that interested him most. But he could never quite focus on what it was that truly made him happy. In the end he’d ended up with a liberal arts degree.

  And that was just a piece of paper.

  He’d started working for FedEx to supplement his income as a student and just moved into that full time after college so he could work on his own inventions. It had worked out beautifully when he’d had ideas. Now he was using his day job to hide from the blank paper that stared at him daily. As a bonus, he was able to sock money away for his house fund. It wasn’t cheap to own property in San Francisco.

  He made a decent living on the patents he’d copyrighted, both the Thumb Lock and a modification on a mountain bike that was now an industry standard. Inventions were all about luck and timing. But lately, he was wondering if his luck had run out.

  He sat down at his desk and stared at the white page, listening to Chad Kroeger scream out about the unfairness of yesterdays and agreeing with him. He wasn’t sure how long he stared at the page. It had to be a while, since he’d made it through Nickelback’s album and moved into Metallica.

  He leaned his head back, closing his eyes. Instead of schematics and the usual rush of ideas, Miranda was there. Her soft skin under his hand as he’d slid his
fingers across her belly. The way she’d moved against him.

  He threw the marker at the page. At least the jagged line made the page less glaringly white. “Fuck.” Slamming his fist into the battered metal desk, he stood and headed for the shower.

  Chapter Three

  “Can you hand me that printout?”

  “Get your own printout,” Ryleigh crabbed at Max.

  Miranda winced, logging into her email with depressing results. She still hadn’t gotten anything back from the two new potential clients she’d met with yesterday. Had she been underbid by the Declan Thorne Studios again?

  Declan had been a pain in her butt for the last six months. No one knew anything about the studio. You couldn’t even set up a meeting with the group. Their entire business was handled via email or hard copy correspondence. That burned her the most. She still had to go out there and hustle for business and Declan Thorne was just sitting back waiting for them to come to him. And damn if their work wasn’t good enough to pull it off. They were her biggest competition locally.

  She and her staff had been doing ten-hour days just to stay in the game. Either he had a huge operation or the man never slept. She’d done her research, and still couldn’t find out anything more than Declan wanted to share. She wanted to hate him, but she envied him instead. Oh to be that anonymous and successful… There was the dream right there.

  Keeping her lovingly restored antique doors open required more than fantasies. She could operate at a loss for a little while if she needed to, but her family’s money couldn’t be hidden forever. Max, Leo and Ryleigh were on her payroll for a reason. They were smart and would figure out that they could only hang on for so long without signing new clients.

  She didn’t want to rely on her grandmother’s money to keep her business running. She wanted to create something that was just hers—it was bad enough that the seed money had come from the Woods’ trust fund.

  Disgusted at the direction her thoughts were headed, she pushed away from her desk and headed into the small kitchenette for another refill. Not that she needed any more coffee in her over-stimulated system.

  Max met her over the carafe with his own empty mug. “So, tell me—”

  The doorbell buzzed. Miranda held up a finger and put down her coffee. “Hold that thought,” she said over her shoulder. Pushing her glasses up on her nose, she opened the door.

  “Hi, Ms. Woods.”

  She sighed. God, it could only be another set of signed changes that she would have to go through and verify. She understood the need to dot I’s and all that, but it was so much easier to do things through email, dammit. Her eyes didn’t rise past the navy polo with the FedEx logo—bold and white. She held her hand out for the electronic clipboard, scribbling her signature. She reached for the envelope, blinking up as the delivery guy held tight. “Thank—” Her breath caught and her mouth dropped open.

  No.

  No.

  No. Freaking. Way.

  His eyes were wary this time. His hair was just as soft and mussed, the overlong cut framing his angular face with a hank that fell into his eyes. Telling her hand not to touch was a helluva lot harder than it should have been.

  Club guy. Dance guy. Dirty dance guy who had tossed her hormones into a frenzy guy.

  White noise fuzzed around her head, but ages of training and learning how to professionally snub someone kicked in and she gave him her fake smile. “Thank you,” she said, slipping the large envelope from his suddenly slack fingers and slamming the door.

  “Miranda!” Max came up behind her. “Was that—”

  “Nope, just a delivery,” she said carefully as she hurried to her desk.

  “You don’t even know what I was going to say,” Max said and followed her.

  Her brain scrambled. Was that a new FedEx guy? He couldn’t be the regular one. Surely she would have recognized him at the club.

  She sucked in a breath, closing her eyes. She honestly couldn’t say she’d ever looked him in the eyes before. Surely she would have remembered that misty gray color if she had.

  She’d grown up with service people all over her house. For a time, she’d known every maid, butler, housekeeper or nanny who worked for the Lyons family. But her father and mother went through the help like Pez candy. Thanks to her mother’s temperament and hushed lawsuits because of her father’s wandering hands, she’d stopped learning their names around age seven. She’d even stopped looking at their faces.

  Something inside her remembered the shaggy hair. How could she not notice him? He was down on his knees more often than not when he brought a package to her door. Stella loved him. Stella couldn’t wait to get her big, stupid tongue all over his face.

  Max went back to the door and opened it, looking up and down the corridor. “Dammit. I saw him. I know I saw him.”

  “No way,” she said quickly.

  Max turned back around and shut and leaned on the door. “You are lying, Ms. Miranda Woods, and I want to know why.”

  “Lying?” Ryleigh piped in, her head popping up from behind her screens.

  “Max, leave it,” Miranda said firmly.

  Max shook his head. “No way.” He turned to Ryleigh. “You know that guy I told you about the other day? The one that Miranda danced with?”

  Ryleigh’s eyebrow winged up, a burgundy hoop dangling from the top of her arch. “The god in plaid?” she asked as she rounded her desk.

  “Yes, that’s the one.” Max crossed his arms, baby-blue silk pulling across his chest. “Of all that is good and beautiful in this world, that man—who is totally wasting his life on FedEx and should be modeling for Calvin Klein, thank you very much—is Miranda’s hot and heavy dance partner from Tuesday night.”

  Miranda shook her head. “Nope, you are completely wrong.” The phone rang and she snatched it out of the cradle.

  “Just because the phone rang doesn’t mean I’ll forget delivery boy, you know,” Max hissed.

  Ryleigh frowned. “Man, I didn’t get a chance to see him.” She held her hands up a good foot taller than her petite self. “He’s like huge though, right?”

  “Everyone’s huge to you, midget.”

  “Shut up, Max.” She wrapped her unbendable black hair around her finger. “I don’t bother answering because Miranda always has to sign, but I seem to remember big shoulders.” Ryleigh snapped her fingers. “Oh and eyes!” Her voice dropped into a purr. “To-die-for eyes that should be in contact commercials.”

  Miranda slid down in her chair, trying to concentrate on her phone call. Even just that quick flash of him at the door had her crossing her legs under her desk, ankle twitching. She pulled her headset off the clip she kept on her screen and fit the dual headphones on to cut out their conversation. She didn’t need to hear Ryleigh talk about his shoulders and eyes. She remembered, dammit.

  She let her client’s stream of incomprehensible words come into focus. Making a few clicks, she pulled up her Daniel McKay folder and made notes for the changes his agent wanted. She reassured him that she could update the author’s website that weekend. Daniel had a new book coming out at the end of the month so she would need to overhaul his front page. A few hours’ worth of work and more billable hours, thank God.

  “She did what with her hips? Miranda? Are you sure?” Ryleigh asked.

  Miranda swung around at the incredulous tone of Ryleigh’s voice. Okay, so she wasn’t exactly Miss Sexy Siren these days, but she wasn’t dead. “Thanks, you have a good afternoon too.”

  Hanging up the phone, she pointed a finger at Max. “You shut up about my dance partner.” When Max tried to interrupt, she pressed on. “It was a dance. You dared me to go over there and if I did what you asked I could actually have some peace about my happily nonexistent love life.” She pointed a thumb back at his station. “Don’t you have photos to edit, or were you too busy sexting with Will?”

  Max had the good grace to blush. “Owning your own company doesn’t mean you have to go upstairs alo
ne every night.”

  “Contrary to popular views, I like going to bed alone. I like living alone. I like being single. I don’t have to answer to anyone, nor do I have to worry about fitting one more thing into my crazy life.” She spun around in her chair to face her screen. “Now get back to work!”

  The sharpness in her tone must have finally sunk in because they both went back to their desks without another word. Miranda slid her hand across her belly, remembering his wide hand there and his breath on her neck.

  Alone was better, dammit.

  Nate planted his fist into the side of his delivery truck before locking it up for the final trip into the local loading dock. Of course she hadn’t remembered him. He’d thought there was a flicker of something there but then nothing, just that cool façade he was used to. Nothing personal, nothing that reminded him of the woman who had rocked his world a few nights before, just the customer he had the unfortunate habit of lusting after.

  And that was stopping now. He didn’t need to throw himself at a woman to get noticed. He knew the Cross gene pool had been kind enough to all of them. He’d enjoyed a healthy social life as soon as he’d figured out why God had blessed the world with females.

  At this point, did he even like her or was it just the thrill of the chase? Was getting her to notice him what drove him, or was it something else? He dropped his empty truck off and signed out of his service log for the day.

  “Nate!”

  He turned around at the baby-doll voice, smiling down at the petite blonde who worked the desk. “Hey, Ash. Ready for Cabo?”

  Her pouty lips went even more pronounced. “No, Jeff and I broke up.”

  “Aw, man, I’m sorry.” He patted her shoulder.

  Ashley shrugged. “Eh, no big loss. He was a jerk.” Her tiny hand wrapped around his wrist, tugging him to a stop. “I was wondering if you wanted to get some dinner.” She peered up at him, her overglossed lips turned up at the corners and the scent of pineapples making his nose twitch.