Lucy tried again. “I—”
“It’s Wrench that’s interested in Lucy, obviously,” Claudia responded in a cool voice. “And I’m just passing the info along. No need to shoot the messenger, Carlo.”
He slid a proprietary hand beneath the hair at Lucy’s nape. “You can’t blame a man for keeping his eye on the prize, Claudia.” His palm caressed the tender skin of Lucy’s neck and she locked her knees so they wouldn’t betray her by buckling again.
“So that’s the way it is? Still?” Claudia asked, one of her perfectly arched brows arching higher. “I thought maybe that had run its course.”
Lucy couldn’t stop herself from turning her head to raise her own brow in Carlo’s direction. He was playing that “I have a girlfriend” game for Claudia, and it didn’t seem right that a man who wanted to keep his distance from Lucy would use her to keep his distance from another woman. And maybe she did want to party with Wrench! Well, not really, but it wasn’t up to him to decide how the “prize” wanted to conduct her social life.
Perhaps he could read all that on her face.
“Luce…” he said softly.
She let her second brow rise. “What?”
Two of his fingers caressed the side of her neck. “Luce. I don’t…You can’t…” He huffed out a sigh, followed it up with an “oh, hell,” and then startled the breath out of her by lowering his mouth.
And kissing her in front of the huntress, the visual aids and fifty empty chairs.
They might as well have been filled with people, for all the attention she paid to them. Thoughts flew around her head.
No…
Why…
Why can’t I pull away?
She sensed Claudia drawing back, but Lucy’s eyes were closed and Carlo’s mouth was so gentle yet so hot that a quiver tickled down her spine. She never wanted it to end, no matter who was there to witness it, no matter what else was supposed to be taking place—
Her eyes popped open and she shoved him away.
“My meeting,” she said, wiping the back of her hand against her mouth. Thank God for that smudge-proof lipstick. “The volunteers should be here…”
Lucy checked her watch. Something inside her froze and her voice squeezed out in a tight whisper. “The volunteers should have been here twenty minutes ago.”
Twenty minutes ago had been the scheduled start of her all-important meeting. The harbinger of her future.
Except there was no one there to attend.
* * *
Lucy’s sudden, stricken expression yanked at Carlo’s heart. “Honey.” He moved forward to take her in his arms again, but she backed off.
Right. Okay. He wasn’t supposed to be touching her—or, good grief, kissing her—anyway. So he shoved his hands in his pockets and pretended he didn’t continue to feel the imprint of her mouth on his. Clearing his throat, he took another step back. “I’m sure they’ll be here soon.”
Lucy’s gaze darted back to her watch. “It’s 5:52, right?” she whispered, her voice strained. She shifted to give Claudia, still on the phone a few feet away, more of her back. “I don’t have the wrong time, do I?”
“Lucy—”
“Check your watch!”
He turned his wrist. “It 5:53.”
Her face paled. “That’s p.m.? I didn’t somehow get the day and night mixed up?”
He shook his head and couldn’t help but smile a little. One kiss of hers could turn his world upside-down, too.
“No smiling!” she hissed. “This isn’t funny.”
To his shock, her eyes started to fill with tears. “Lucy.” He reached for her again, remembered he shouldn’t and let his hand drop.
“I messed up. Somehow I did something wrong. The wrong day, the wrong time, the wrong directions.” She was blinking rapidly to prevent a spillover. “Oh, God, Jason and Sam are right. I am a perennial failure.”
“Lucy—”
“I always get it wrong.”
“Don’t you think you’re overreacting? The volunteers are probably delayed.”
But she wasn’t listening to a word he said. “I’ve got to think.” Her hands clapped against the sides of her head. “I’ve got to figure out a way to fix this.”
She rushed out of the conference room.
Claudia looked up from her phone call and met Carlo’s gaze. Is she okay? she mouthed.
“Perfectly fine,” Carlo assured the other woman. Make that perfectly nuts, he thought. But she was his perfectly nutty responsibility, so he headed after her. What had set her off? Had it…had it been his kiss?
Yeah, right. Though the kiss had affected him, once again obliterating all his good intentions. As he stalked down the hallway in search of Lucy, he made himself the same promise that he’d made before. And before that.
Don’t get too close.
But then there she was, huddled in her desk chair, her head in her hands. Now he discovered that it wasn’t touching her that could make him break promises. Just looking at her could get him out of his safe, metaphorical corner.
“Lucy. Honey.” He hurried forward and lifted her out of her chair to hold her against his chest. Her wavy hair tickled his chin as he tucked his head to press his cheek against hers. “It’s going to be okay. No matter what happened, we’ll find a way to fix it.”
Her body was rigid against his. She wasn’t crying, but there was the sound of sobs in her voice. “How are you going to fix me? ”
She might as well have wrapped her fists around his heart and given it a brutal twist. He gathered her closer. “Lucy. Lucy…”
Over her head, a commotion from the open door to the reception area caught his attention. His tight chest eased. He moved his mouth to her ear.
“There once was a girl with a meeting/who thought that she’d taken a beating/but her boss knew the truth/it was the traffic, forsooth/and her self-doubting should have been fleeting.”
Her head turned so their gazes met. “Traffic, forsooth?”
He couldn’t help himself from grinning. “I’m out of practice, okay? But it’s a limerick, and I never claimed to be good at them.” Putting his hands on her shoulders, he turned her in the direction of the reception area. “Put your meeting face on, woman, because your volunteers await.”
He could have left it at that. Certainly the way her face had brightened had alleviated his immediate worries. And he should have left it at that, he knew it, but Carlo was a detective after all, and unanswered questions tended to nag at him until he figured them out.
Lucy’s behavior today was going to nag at him until he figured her out.
So, ninety minutes later, after they ushered the last of the volunteers from the offices, as well as a satisfied Claudia Cox, he handed Lucy her purse, turned off the office lights, then told her, firmly, that they were going out to dinner to celebrate.
He assumed she was dazed by the swing of emotions from failure to success because she was silent as he led her to his car and then to a nearby restaurant. She didn’t seem to wake from her meeting afterglow until she’d had a couple of swallows of the martini he’d ordered for her.
Then she blinked, coughed a little and looked around her with the air of someone who’d been somewhere else until that moment. They were seated in an intimate booth, but Carlo had made sure to sit across from her and had angled his long legs so that they wouldn’t brush Lucy’s.
“Whoa. Wow.” Now she peered at the drink and then took another sip. “Nice.”
He bit back his smile. Knowing Lucy’s habits after the weeks she’d been working for him, he had an idea that she’d gone lunchless again, which meant that martini was going straight from her stomach to her head.
“Have some bread sticks,” he suggested.
She ignored him for a nibble at her alcohol-soaked olive. “It went well, don’t you think?”
“Told you.”
She waved that away with her plastic spear and then dumped it back in her drink before downing another sw
allow. “Don’t be smug.”
“That would be Claudia,” he replied. “I can’t say what’s going on with her, but I think she has something up her sleeve. Every time she looks at you she gets this speculative gleam in her eye.”
“Probably calculating how many calories I’ll cost her when she gobbles me down,” Lucy muttered.
He laughed. “Now you understand why I passed you off as my girlfriend that first night.”
Her gaze sharpened as she lifted the martini once again toward her mouth. “Okay, I get that. But what was that kiss about tonight? I thought—”
“I get to ask the questions,” he interjected, because he’d be damned if he had an answer. “And my first one is why you immediately assumed when the volunteers didn’t show that you’d done something wrong?”
She drained the rest of her martini and then their food arrived. Carlo was glad that she looked at her swordfish with some interest, then gave even more to her wineglass once the waiter filled it from the bottle Carlo had ordered.
Lucy was likely to get tipsy.
But that might get him the answers he wanted—and thus the distance from her he needed—that much quicker.
“Luce,” he said as she set her wine down. “What happened back there?”
Her gaze slid away from him. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He topped off her glass and edged it closer to her hand. Okay, he was a bad man, but he’d rustle up some aspirin for her later. “You said Jason and Sam were right. That you’re a failure.”
A flush crawled up her neck, turning her face a pretty yet embarrassed pink. “Carlo…”
“I got to thinking about brunch after you said that. That morning when your thirtysomething-going-on-thirteen-years-old brothers were razzing you about copying pictures of your naked—”
“I’ve never done any such thing!” She had her glass in hand again and chugged more of her wine.
“I know. And when they mentioned it, I mostly dismissed it as some run-of-the-mill older-sibling teasing, but now I’m thinking there’s more to the story.”
She mumbled something into her glass.
“What?”
“I can’t keep a job,” she muttered, then drained her wine and looked up at him, her gaze defiant. “The first day I was at McMillan & Milano you said you heard I’d had some ‘trouble’ in Phoenix before coming back to San Diego. It wasn’t man trouble like you guessed. It was trouble finding employment that…that I found satisfying.”
She said that last as if it was a dirty, dark secret. “So, you didn’t like a job,” he responded. “So what? I’m not getting it.”
Lucy cut her swordfish into bites, not one which made its way to her mouth. “I didn’t like any of them. Over the past three years, I worked for a law firm, an elementary school district and at the corporate offices of a large health insurance company.”
“Doing what?”
“I was an accountant, you know that. Numbers, columns, reports. Details. And I’m good with details.”
There was a challenge in that last statement, too, as if she had to convince herself, as well as him. “I know you’re good with details, Luce. I have no complaints on that score. None at all.”
“Neither did any of my other employers.” She was lifting her wineglass again. “But they didn’t feel like the right fits. So I left each position hoping the next one would be better.”
Her mouth turned down. “But maybe none of them worked out because what I brought to those different jobs each and every time was me. ”
“Lucy.” The dejection on her face would have cracked granite, and Carlo discovered with surprise that his heart wasn’t nearly that hard. “Lucy, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you.”
She was already shaking her head. “Suttons don’t flounder. Suttons immediately find their launch pad and then rocket toward success.”
“Jason and Sam—”
“Don’t forget perfect Elise.”
“You’re not Elise—”
“Ya think?” Slumping against the back of her seat, Lucy closed her eyes. “Really, did you have to remind me?”
Oh, hell. Carlo couldn’t even stand the thought of being a tabletop away from her. In a quick move, he scooted out from his side of the booth and tucked in next to her. She didn’t seem to notice. “Lucy…” The back of his fingers stroked the silky skin of her cheek.
Her eyes opened, so wide. So blue. “What if nobody ever wants me?” she whispered.
“Sweetheart—”
There was a vulnerable little slur to her words as she spoke over him. The alcohol had apparently made its way upstream. “Don’ tell, but I’m not sendin’ out résumés.” She spoke as if her tongue had thickened. “I’m ’voiding the want ads. The A ’s in partcler. A is for Accounting, y’know that?”
“Yeah. I know that.” He drew his fingers over her cheek again. “But maybe you’re right to avoid accounting, Luce. Maybe what was wrong with those jobs wasn’t you, but you with accounting.”
She was shaking her head, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t listening to him. “I’m accountant. I’m an accountant. That means I do number stuff. Details.”
“Yeah…”
She jabbed herself in the chest with her thumb. “Good with details. I’m good with details.”
“Yes. Yes, you are.”
Her gaze narrowed. “You mean that?”
“I do, Lucy.”
“Nice. Sooo nice.” She sighed, then her head dropped to his shoulder. “You wan’ me, don’t you, Carlo? Tell me you wan’ me.”
His arm went around her shoulders and he dropped a kiss on the top of her fragrant hair. Oh, hell. “God help me, Lucy, I do. Yes, I do want you.”
CHAPTER TEN
Outside the restaurant, as Carlo guided Lucy to his car, he decided against driving her to Elise and John’s in her tipsy state. She’d had coffee, but still there remained a little wobble in her walk. Another cup of caffeine was needed, he told himself, and a place to drink it that was more comfortable and less public than the restaurant.
He suggested, she agreed, the car sped to his home.
Still, it surprised the hell out of him to find he was actually parked in his garage and that he was taking her by the hand and helping her out of the Lexus.
This wasn’t a thinking man’s move.
But the truth was, he wasn’t ready to be apart from her just yet. He’d made up the coffee excuse when he was really acting on a whim instead of analyzing the life out of it instead.
When was the last time he’d done that?
When was the last time he’d felt so alive?
You want me, don’t you, Carlo?
Those whispered words had acted like a defibrillator, restarting something inside him that had been deathly quiet for the past six years.
The living room felt chilled, so he bent to light the logs set in the fireplace. As they caught, he turned to Lucy, who stood in the center of the room, her arms at her sides, her big blue eyes trained on his face.
Now she didn’t look drunk.
Not the tiniest bit tipsy.
You want me, don’t you, Carlo?
She held her hand out to him, as if once again she’d seen inside him and heard his thoughts. She kept on doing that, didn’t she?
That new living thing in his chest gave a strong jerk. That hand, those slim fingers, were an undeniable invitation. He wanted her; she wanted him. “Lucy…you’re sure?”
“Aren’t you, Mr. Milano?”
But this was no game, not this time, when the reflection of the flames was licking warmly at her skin just as he intended to. He opened his mouth to tell her, to make clear—what? His brain couldn’t come up with a response.
He wasn’t thinking again.
God, how he liked that.
His feet ate up the space between them. Then she was in his arms, the fabric of her dress cool against his palms, the body underneath it warm and pliable and so willing to press against him.
He felt a tremor run through her and he shuddered in response. “Lucy,” he whispered, running his mouth from her temple to her jaw. “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.” Her head dipped like a flower on a stem so that he could explore the fragrant, smooth flesh of her neck.
He chased goose bumps to the vee over her breasts and felt her heart thudding against his mouth. His body was urging him on and he followed its impulses again, letting his hands roam over her back, her thighs, then up to cover her breasts. Beneath thin silk, her nipples tightened to points that he had to take into his mouth.
Her body arched as he did just that. He ran his tongue over fabric, wetting it, shaping her, then sucking hard, harder, because gentle wasn’t alive enough for the man who now held Lucy. His thumb rubbed wet silk as he moved to the other breast and he reveled in the sweet sound of the breathy moans she made as he played with her.
Still, it wasn’t enough.
His fingers found the zipper at her back and he drew it down, the sound an erotic hiss that was a counterpoint to their rough, matching breaths. The dress fell to the carpet with a plop, but he couldn’t hear it, he couldn’t hear anything but the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of his blood as it galloped through him.
“Lucy,” he breathed. Lucy, in a see-through bra, tiny panties, filmy stockings held up at the thighs by lace and a prayer. The high-heeled pumps on her feet only made the picture sexier.
More like a punch to the gut.
“You’re so damn beautiful.”
Another tremor ran through her body and he saw her sway. He took her in his arms and then bowed to impulse again and took her down to the carpet in front of the fireplace.
In the reflection of the fire, her skin glowed like the sunshine he’d called her. “You’re still dressed,” she whispered, her voice husky and low, a tantalizing stroke down his spine.
He shrugged out of his jacket and yanked off his tie, tossing them both away. Then, still in his shirtsleeves and slacks, he made a place for himself between her thighs. “Gotta keep something between us.”
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