Bachelor Boss

by Christie Ridgway

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At the last second, Carlo hesitated, his breath mingling with Lucy’s. What the hell was he doing? He prided himself on his honesty and he honestly couldn’t figure out what impulse was driving him. As that straightforward and truthful man he knew himself to be, he shouldn’t start something that he was never, ever going to see through.

  But it’s just a kiss, the devil on his shoulder whispered. You’re not promising anything more.

  And Lucy was so much more. So much more than the girl who used to amuse him. Now she was a woman with glistening, berry-colored lips and breath that smelled faintly of chocolate.

  He wanted just a sample. An experimental caress. A small, not-enough-to-startle-her taste.

  And she looked ready to startle. She stood frozen before him, her gaze somewhere south of his, and he cupped her face between his hands to guide her mouth to a better alignment with his own. When she didn’t protest, when instead her feathery lashes drifted down, so did Carlo’s mouth.

  His lips brushed across hers. Careful, man, he reminded himself. He reversed directions for another light stroke.

  She trembled. God. The vibration traveled through him like a jolt of pure energy. He fought against the possessive need to tighten his fingers on her warm skin. When he caressed her mouth again, she gave another shiver, and the honesty of her instant response pierced him once more. It was like holding a butterfly in the gentle cage of his hands.

  More energy buzzed through his body, tightening his muscles, but he fought against the tension. Lucy tasted so sweet. Lucy was sweet, so he was determined not to come on too strong.

  But he wasn’t yet ready to end the experiment. Not quite yet. With his fingers still cupping her from jaw to cheekbones, he brushed over her mouth again, giving her another soft kiss. She shivered again, and he felt another energizing buzz.

  Slow, deliberate, he pressed his mouth harder against hers and felt her lips part under the new pressure. Still gentle, still careful not to startle her, he slid his tongue inside to give the tip of hers a tender greeting.

  At the warm, wet touch, she made a small sound in the back of her throat and…

  She bit him.

  A sharp, edges-of-the-teeth erotic nip on the very tongue that he’d been trying so hard to keep gentle and nonthreatening.

  He jerked his head back just as all his muscles jerked in hot, sexual reaction.

  She was staring up at him, narrow-eyed, with a glint of something—anger?—in her eyes and a flush on her cheekbones.

  “I’m…” Carlo started. Sorry? Was she warning him off? But she hadn’t moved away, and when he started to lift his hands, she reached up to hold his wrists. Her cheeks felt hot against his palms.

  “Do you call that a kiss?” she demanded.

  Her voice echoed in his head. Do you call that a kiss?

  If he was honest—and hadn’t he just been thinking of his pride in that?—the restrained caress hadn’t been a Carlo Milano kind of kiss. Carlo Milano didn’t like fragile women or tentative touches. He was a red-blooded Italian male, and the kind of kisses he liked to give out were designed for grown-up females. Grown-up females like…

  Lucy.

  Lucy was all grown up, with her berry-pink lips and that damn, tantalizing, two-hankie dress. All. Grown. Up.

  She must have read his mind. “I don’t want a fuddy-duddy kiss, either.”

  At the taunt, his fingers tightened on her face and he tilted her sassy mouth higher. Oh, yeah, she was devilish, no doubt about it. Her hands dropped their hold on his wrists and wrapped around his neck to draw him nearer.

  “That’s right,” she whispered, pulling him close. “If you’re going to do this, I insist you do it right.”

  It was all the permission he needed. His lips crashed into hers and they opened immediately for him. She made that sound in her throat again, but it was needy now, womanly, and he thrust his tongue into her mouth to taste her yearning.

  Sweet. Hot. Sexy.

  Their tongues tangled and he slid his hands from her face down her back to the flare of her hips. He scooped them up against his and then barely suppressed his own groan. She was such a warm, curvy armful. When she trembled, his own muscles shuddered in response.

  Her hands tangled in the hair at the back of his neck, and the sensation burned a trail down his spine and then raced to his groin, pulling his skin—and everything else—taut. She had to feel him against her flat belly, but her only response was to slant her head and take the kiss deeper.

  Deeper. He’d give his right hand to find himself as deep inside her as he could be. No, no, not his right hand. He needed that, he realized, as it slid between their bodies and then up the delicate ladder of her ribs.

  He needed it for this.

  Her spine bowed as his hand moved between their bodies then cupped her breast. Her hips pressed harder to his as his thumb brushed across the hard bud of her nipple.

  The smoke of desire’s fire obscured everything but touching more, having more, wanting more, more, more. Behind a hazy screen was his good sense, his cop hunches, his sense of who he was.

  There was only this: Lucy in his arms, Carlo alive for the first time in God knew how many years, every part of him tingling with a rush of blood he hadn’t experienced in longer than he cared to remember.

  Maybe it had never been this good.

  Maybe he’d never been this alive.

  He slid the hand at her hip lower, cupping the round cheek of her cute behind in one hand while the other continued to play with her breast.

  This was heaven.

  “Whoops.” Stifled laughter broke through the fog in Carlo’s head. He opened his eyes without breaking the kiss and saw the interrupting couple disappear back inside the ballroom. Reality crashed like an anvil in a Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon.

  This was hell.

  They were on a public patio at a public, professional event, and he’d been all but ready to go all the way with his paid employee.

  He leaped away.

  Cleared his throat.

  Buttoned his jacket to hide his erection.

  Picked up the tepid coffee sitting on the nearby table and downed it in one bitter swallow.

  Then there was nothing else to do but look at Lucy.

  She was looking right back at him.

  “Well.” He drew one hand down his face. “I…That…” Taking a breath, he tried thinking of what to say next. What the hell was wrong with him? He still couldn’t think, not with the smell of Lucy’s perfume on his hands and the taste of her still delicious on his tongue.

  Clearheaded Carlo Milano, former cop Carlo Milano, successful businessman Carlo Milano, was knocked on his butt by one blue-eyed, blond, family friend.

  Oh. That’s what was wrong with all this! Now he remembered. Lucy Sutton was enmeshed in his life in ways that went beyond the reception area. Though she might be his employee only temporarily, she was forever a part of his life—at least through his friendship with her siblings and parents.

  He couldn’t just play with Lucy, and that’s all that he had in him when it came to women. Fun and games.

  “Well, I…Well, you…” He gave an inward groan at his bumbling ineptitude. You kissed the woman, Milano. Now straighten out the mess you’ve made.

  He cleared his throat, adjusted his jacket, looked at her face, looked away. “You…I…”

  “Am going to freeze my buns off if we don’t get somewhere warmer soon,” she said. “Me, I mean. I can’t speak for you, but this dress doesn’t cut it against the sudden cold.” Then she looked away, as if embarrassed about mentioning the abrupt change in temperature—when they both knew the abrupt change in temperature was because they were no longer in each other’s arms.

  His thumb tingled at the memory of the small round button that had been her nipple.

  Shoving his hand in his pocket, he took a bracing breath. “Let’s get you inside, then.”

  “And maybe out to the car?” s
he suggested. “It’s late and I have that mean boss who’ll expect me to be on time tomorrow, I’m sure.”

  “Yeah.” Carlo strode for the door that would take them to the ballroom and pulled it open for her. Then he held his breath as she passed so he could avoid her sweet, beguiling scent.

  All the way to the car and on the road to her sister’s he stewed about what to say about the kiss that should never have happened. As much as he wanted to beat himself up about it, it didn’t make the memories of those minutes any less compelling. How the hell were they going to work together without him thinking of it every damn second? How was he going to explain to her and himself how he’d let that interlude get so out of hand?

  “It was just a curiosity queller,” he murmured, trying out the sound of it.

  “What?”

  Oh, damn, he’d been muttering louder than he thought.

  But it was the only halfway decent excuse he could think of. “Curiosity. You know.”

  “Explain, please.”

  He pretended the road needed all his attention. “We had to get it out of the way, right?”

  “The kiss.”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged. “It was there, in the air, you know, and so it was best to get it out of the way. We can forget about it now.”

  “Forget about it.”

  The way she was repeating his words in that monotone was annoying. She was annoying, he decided. Actually, that was an honest assessment of the whole situation, if you asked him. That dress was annoying, the way her blond hair caught the glow of the streetlights was annoying, the damn position he was in, turned on by the woman who was going to be answering his phones, was way beyond annoying.

  He pulled into the driveway at her sister and brother-in-law’s house.

  “Don’t tell Elise about this,” he heard himself grind out. Because, hell, if Lucy told her bigmouth big sister it would get back to their brothers, who would then turn on Carlo…and what would he do then?

  “Tell Elise about what?” Lucy said, her voice without expression.

  “About, uh…”

  “Us?”

  He sighed. “Yeah.”

  “Why would I do that? There’s nothing between us to report, is there?”

  She said it so coolly. So matter-of-factly. In just the way he wanted. In just the way he had hoped for.

  “Right,” he answered. “Nothing to report. All forgotten. Nothing between us at all.”

  He was still mumbling nonsense phrases as she climbed out of the car. He waited until she’d let herself into the house.

  “Nothing between us at all,” he repeated to the closing front door. Then he thumped his forehead against the steering wheel. Bump bump bump.

  With each tap he acknowledged that the man who so prided himself on honesty was now lying through his teeth.

  * * *

  Lucy decided that forgetting about that kiss—okay, series of kisses, and, well, more—on the patio during the Street Beat party was doable, if she wasn’t around Carlo. But of course she was around Carlo, her temporary boss, all the time.

  Even now, when they were on their way to a meeting at concert promoter Claudia Cox’s Del Mar offices in northern San Diego County to discuss the volunteer program Lucy had been assigned to oversee. She snuck a look in Carlo’s direction, then quickly jerked her glance back to the window. Sometimes she’d find herself staring at his face and remembering the sure thrust of his tongue and the thrilling caress of his lean fingers at her breast.

  Oh, great. She felt her face heating up and she squirmed on the leather seat.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” She’d be in hell before she gave away that she was any more affected by what had happened than Carlo “Kiss Me Then Forget Me” Milano. Still, she couldn’t help herself from frowning at him. “I could handle this meeting by myself.”

  “I don’t mind coming along.”

  Well, she minded. He’d given her the job and he should have left her alone to handle it. He probably regretted the assignment. He probably thought she was incompetent, which wouldn’t surprise her since the rest of her family did, too.

  She yanked on the hem of her suit skirt and ironed out imaginary wrinkles with the flat of her hand. Maybe that was why he’d backed away from her so quickly at the party the other night. He thought she was incompetent when it came to kissing, too.

  Hah. She’d prove him wrong. She’d show him she could handle her Street Beat duties just fine.

  And she was never going to kiss him again.

  With those resolves in mind, she strode into the concert promoter’s offices with her best all-business attitude, then halted in the reception area to stare around her as if she was a little kid.

  While Carlo’s company’s offices were dominated by those picture-postcard views of the bay, this office was dominated by…colors. Sounds.

  Each curved wall delineating the receptionist’s space was painted a different shade: cinnamon, goldenrod, turquoise. There was an emerald-green sisal carpet covering most of the blond hardwood floor. The plush chairs were upholstered in fabric that was in a bright Mexican design. On each wall was a flat screen playing music videos, each one at a volume just loud enough to create a cacophony that had Carlo wincing.

  Lucy could only think of the three places she used to work. By some coincidence, in each of them the walls had been painted the same pale cadaver-green of graph paper. By far the most colorful ornamentation in any of the places had to be the freebie calendars the insurance company’s national office had distributed each holiday season. Yep, that eleven-by-eleven-inch photograph of the Citizen’s Insurance float at the Rose Bowl Parade had provided a much-needed visual punch.

  However, there were many, many more ocular knockouts at the concert promoter’s office, only one of which was the receptionist. She wore chartreuse leggings under a floating skirt and a matching blouse, and when she looked up from the phones that were set on a clear Lucite desktop there was a tiny sapphire stud in her nose and the two piercings below her left eyebrow showed off matching jewelry.

  “May I—” she started, but then Claudia strode around a corner.

  Today, the older woman was dressed in another eye-catching outfit. No animal print this time, but a canary-yellow pants outfit accented with print scarf in Picasso colors.

  Carlo pushed Lucy forward with a gentle hand at the small of her back. “You remember Lucy.”

  As they briefly shook hands, Claudia’s eyes ran over her, making Lucy feel dowdy in her gray pinstripes, even though she knew her mother had spent a hefty chunk for it as her post-college graduation “interview” suit. Her palms dampened and she rubbed them together. Great, already her confidence was eroding.

  As Claudia gestured them down a hallway painted in more vibrant shades, she slanted Lucy another glance. “Who did you last work for, a mortician?”

  A startled laugh escaped Lucy’s mouth and she tried hard to swallow it back down, even as she felt her cheeks burn. “As a matter of fact, my older brother once set me up with a job interview at a mortuary.” The mortician, thank God, hadn’t found her right for the job. “But most places dress a little more corporate than here.”

  Still, she was beginning to wonder if her family didn’t have a point. Maybe Lucy wasn’t right for anything.

  It made her steps heavy as she followed Claudia’s subtle wave of Chanel No. 5 down the hall. With Carlo at her back, Lucy took a quick peek into an office where a young man in dreadlocks was chattering away on a headset. In another, a woman in jeans and a baby tee was shaking her shoulders to something she was listening to through bagel-size headphones.

  Claudia glanced over shoulder. “My brother wanted me to be his medical transcriptionist,” she said. “And my first husband wanted me to be a double-D cup.”

  As Lucy digested these interesting tidbits, the older woman paused by an alcove that contained a small refrigerator, a coffeemaker and an espresso machine. “Luckily, the o
ne who got their wish was me.”

  Without waiting for a response or even asking what they’d like, Claudia reached inside the fridge to hand over slender containers of bottled water. Then she continued heading down the hall.

  Lucy slowed so that Carlo came up beside her. “What about her second husband?” she whispered to him.

  “Don’t ask,” he whispered back.

  “I heard that.” In front of a closed door, Claudia stopped again. “It’s no secret. My second husband had me arrested for picking up his dry cleaning and then holding it hostage after I kicked the SOB out.”

  “Oh.” Lucy felt her eyes widen. She shouldn’t have asked. So far Lucy and her dowdy suit were only racking up negative points. “I’m, uh, sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Claudia’s beringed right hand whisked the sentiment away. “Because then I took him to the cleaners in the divorce. Now I have all this.”

  And with that, she swung open the closed door to reveal a conference room decorated in plum tones that held a long table, plush chairs and a small group of middle-aged parent-types who looked a bit overwhelmed by their splashy surroundings. They rose to their feet, and from the way their gazes fixed on Claudia, it looked as if they’d heard every one of her words and weren’t sure whether they should run screaming or just plain run.

  As if seeking solace, their heads turned toward Carlo, but his dark looks and unsmiling cop face were better suited for intimidation. Their tension seemed to increase until their gazes shifted again and found Lucy.

  She almost laughed. Lucy Goosey had never alarmed anyone. Without thinking, she moved forward with a big smile, hoping to put the parents at ease.

  “Hi,” she said, holding out her hand to each one. “I’m Lucy Sutton and I’m so glad we could meet. I’ll be coordinating your volunteer efforts at the Street Beat festival.”

  The group arranged themselves around the conference table. Claudia, naturally, took the head position, and the parents wore those nervous expressions again. Maybe the concert promoter sensed the situation, because she quickly turned over the discussion to Carlo, who passed it off to his “assistant.”