Harlequin Superromance January 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: Everywhere She GoesA Promise for the BabyThat Summer at the Shore

by Janice Kay Johnson

“Are you okay?” he repeated. “You were holding your stomach and I’m...” He was scared to lose her and scared to say that fact out loud.

  “I’m fine.” Her cheek curved as she smiled against the palm of his hand, and she turned to kiss the fleshy part of his thumb. “I’m a little out of breath, but I’m afraid if I lean over, I’ll get light-headed.” His worry must have shown on his face because she kissed his palm, the tip of her tongue brushing against the hollow of his hand, and said, “It’s normal for me to get breathless and light-headed at this point in my pregnancy. It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  She might be fine, but he wasn’t. The kiss she’d pressed into his hand had woken up all the atoms in his body, and all he wanted to do was take his wife back to his apartment—what should be their home—and make love to her. And he wanted her to still be there when he woke up the next morning.

  Warmth and sweat from dancing made her jasmine scent more potent. If he could figure out how to swing her over his shoulder and carry her, caveman style, to a closet, he would. He would then have to figure out how to make love to a short, pregnant woman in a janitor’s closet, the physics of which he wasn’t certain of, but was willing to try.

  “Come on.” He slid his hand around her waist and pulled her in close, letting everything about her wash over him.

  “Where are we going?”

  Somewhere I can act like the crazed, lusty man you’ve turned me into. But he didn’t say that. She’d rocked his equilibrium, and he’d gotten her pregnant. “We’re going to sit down so you can catch your breath and I can get you a fancy virgin something to drink.”

  “Oh, I love virgins,” she cooed. “Mr. Biadała was right when he said you were a keeper.”

  “A keeper?” The thought of his American history teacher and the father of his best friend from high school telling his wife to keep him made him smile. Being with Vivian made him smile, period.

  The deep carpet stopped the sharp clicking noise her short heels had made on the dance floor as she walked with him to their seats. “He also said he didn’t know why I was still living with your mom, but one of us would come to our senses soon and, even if you were being a ‘stubborn fool,’ that I should forgive you.”

  He’d like to believe he was the one who should have to forgive Vivian, not the other way around. But Mr. Biadała had always known the right answer when Karl was in high school, and he probably knew the right answer now.

  “Here.” He sat Vivian down in his chair and she sighed as soon as her butt hit the seat. “Catch your breath and I’ll be back with a Shirley Temple.”

  “Double cherry,” she called after him.

  Karl was glad he’d brought himself a glass of water because she finished her drink in three gulps, then reached for his water. “Do you need more?” he asked when she put down his glass, now empty.

  “No, but I wish I had some antacid in my purse.” She put her hand to her heart. “I’m not sure drinking all that liquid so quickly on top of all that dancing was a good idea.”

  He placed his hands on hers, grateful to be close to her when not also surrounded by his family. “There’s a drugstore not far. I can go get you some.”

  “Ah, that’s sweet.” She picked up his hands and kissed his knuckles. More tender, affectionate kisses. Not the crazed sex in the closet he was fantasizing about.

  He didn’t want to be sweet. He wanted her to come home with him. He wanted to strip off her clothes and make love to her until she didn’t think about her heartburn anymore.

  “But I think I hear the Electric Slide starting and I want to dance some more. Come on.” She slipped out of the chair, yanking on his hands. A lock of her hair was plastered across her sweaty cheek and he wasn’t able to get out of her grip long enough to brush it aside and escape for the hills.

  Topping the list of things he didn’t want to do was the Electric Slide. He set his feet. “You just said all that dancing gave you heartburn. I have Tums at my house.”

  His words halted her pulling. She cocked her head up at him, one brow raised, that lock of hair giving her two wicked smiles across her face. “I have Tums at your mom’s house and I like the Electric Slide.”

  “But I’m not at my mom’s house.” Come home with me, Vivian. I want you. Was she going to make him say the words?

  God, even the sight of her biting her lip made him crazy, which just proved how badly he needed her and how far off his center she made him.

  Then she smiled, and the corners of her eyes crinkled, and he knew he’d both won and lost.

  “After you do the Electric Slide with me.”

  He’d won more than he’d lost, though she’d nearly made it a draw. But just because he didn’t resist as she tugged him to the dance floor didn’t mean he couldn’t protest. “I don’t know how to do the Electric Slide.”

  “Everyone knows how to do the Electric Slide.”

  “I can’t dance.” She had a smaller stride than he did and he could have easily caught up with her. But she was enjoying cajoling him and he was enjoying being cajoled.

  “I can’t, either. We’ll be the cutest couple on the dance floor.”

  The din of wedding guests and music got louder as they got closer to the dance floor. Karl dragged his feet a little more. He would do the Electric Slide with Vivian, but he’d prefer not to. Then his shoes hit the wooden floor and he thought about how he’d look, tripping over his own feet and knocking his pregnant wife to the floor.

  At the sight of thirty people crossing their legs front and back, front and back, Karl stopped. He could joke about it at the table, but he really didn’t dance. He stood on the sidelines and watched others dance while remaining aloof and impassive. Straitlaced, never in anything more casual than khakis was his M.O.

  He took a deep breath and let it out in a great puff. He hadn’t danced since he was thirteen, and that memory alone was awkward enough for him to consider abandoning Vivian. His one middle school dance...his fingers skimming the girl’s back, sliding down to the crest of her butt and then chickening out at the last minute for fear she would raise a fuss and his dad would find out. His erection and the step back he took every time she took a step forward. His certain knowledge that his deodorant—another new experience—had failed and she would be assaulted by his BO just before banging against his jutting erection.

  By the time he’d figured out how to touch a girl’s butt, control his erection and trust in his deodorant, no one expected him to dance. And he no longer had to worry about a lecture from his father on respecting women if his hand slipped from a girl’s waist to the curves of her butt. None of which helped him with his current predicament. Boy or girl, his child was getting dancing lessons.

  “Are you okay?” Vivian turned to look at him.

  “Fine.” He still didn’t take a step forward.

  Her lips twitched from side to side as she examined him. Finally, she wiped that stuck lock of hair from her cheek and said, “You don’t have to dance.” She looked over her shoulder at the dance floor. “We can just go back to your apartment.”

  Her eyes lost a bit of their luster as she said those words. Living with his mom and working at Healthy Food, Vivian had become part of the community he had grown up in, and he wanted to take her away from it—even if just for a night—because everyone knew Karl Milek didn’t dance.

  The newspapers liked to say he was a leader in Chicago’s Polish community and leadership gurus liked to say leaders become leaders by not being afraid of making asses of themselves. He closed his eyes to gather his sense of dignity, then looked his wife straight in her copper-colored eyes and smiled. “Let’s show this room how poorly the Electric Slide can be done.”

  His reward wasn’t going to be taking Vivian home with him tonight; his reward was the way her smile brightened his life. Swallowing the last of his resignation,
he followed his wife onto the dance floor, faced the wall and prepared to boogie-woogie-woogie.

  And he immediately went to the left and bumped into Vivian, who laughed with unrestrained delight. He stood in one place to watch her feet and listen to her “step, cross, step, clap” instructions and the person to his right ran into him—Mrs. Biadała, who made mother-hen clucking noises and told him how cute he looked.

  He hadn’t danced since he was thirteen and he hadn’t been cute since he was six. Past six, he’d been “an old soul” and “precocious.” Tonight was a night of firsts.

  “Back, back, back, clap.” Vivian’s amused instructions jarred some distant memory in his brain and he didn’t even have to be told to lean forward, tap his back foot and make a stupid circle with his forearm. Or hop to turn and face the other direction. Apparently, bounding about like an ass in a line with other people was as much about muscle memory as riding your bike or ice skating.

  He missed crossing his legs, but he moved to the right with the rest of the dancers and was only a millisecond or so behind them clapping. After the next hop and turn, he moved to the right and crossed his legs behind one another like he was supposed to, though he still clapped too late.

  “See,” Vivian said over her clap, “I knew you were a regular Gene Kelly.”

  What the hell. He was already dancing. He could say stupidly romantic things to his wife. “I’d prefer to be Fred Astaire and call you Ginger.”

  A bead of sweat on his neck dripped from his collar to his hairline when he leaned forward to rotate his arm. When he reversed course to stand up and hop to his left, the sweat dribbled back down between his shoulder blades. He should have taken his suit jacket off—or at least loosened his tie—before attempting this hoedown.

  “I can do anything you can do—backward and in high heels,” she said with a laugh.

  His cockiness caught up with him. Mrs. Biadała didn’t look nearly so amused this time as he tripped over his own feet and stumbled into her. “Better me than your wife,” she said. He supposed she was right, given Vivian’s pregnancy, but Vivian would’ve laughed, and he might even have laughed with her.

  He got back on track when they had to step back and his clap was perfectly timed with the rest of the dancers. By the time the music stopped, Karl had figured the dance out and was no longer making a fool of himself. A wasted lesson, because he never planned on dancing the Electric Slide ever again.

  “That was the worst four minutes of my life,” he said as he tucked Vivian under his arm and steered her toward the door before she heard another song she wanted to dance to. He snatched her purse from her chair when they walked past their table, not willing to slow down. Whatever song the deejay had put on next was obviously another line dance, as the instigators of such tomfoolery and their victims were lined up in rows again.

  Vivian turned her face up to him, impish, sweaty and beautiful. “I hate to break it to you, but you only danced for three minutes. Was it really so bad?”

  Her warm, soft body fit perfectly against his and he leaned down to innocently kiss the top of her head while thinking of how slowly he would peel off her clothes once they got back to his apartment. And how she’d smile at him, but it would be a slow, private smile with melting heat in her eyes. “No. I’d do it again.” He stooped a bit so he could kiss the top of her ear and whisper, “But if you tell anyone that—especially my sisters—I’ll deny it until I have no breath left in my body.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THEY HAD DRIVEN to the wedding separately, so Karl had to wait—aroused and cold as the sweat from dancing evaporated off his body—in the parking garage for Vivian to drive into her spot. He didn’t want to risk her changing her mind between the wedding and the apartment; if he could have towed her car behind his, he would have.

  God, she looked hot getting out of her car, her face glowing with perspiration and an annoyed scowl on her face as she pulled strands of her hair out of her pink lipstick. “I swear, every light was red by the time I got to it. Do you have some secret machine in your car to change lights to green when you pass by, like they say cops do?”

  Then she smiled at him and held out her hand, and he didn’t care how long he’d been waiting in the parking garage, so long as she was near him. “Does it increase my chances of getting lucky tonight if I say yes?”

  If a yes means you’ll move back in with me, I’ll invent such a device and have it installed on any car you might possibly drive.

  “You’re already getting lucky tonight.” She pressed a soft kiss onto his lips, her perfume overwhelming the stale air and exhaust, and her presence drowning out the cares of the world. Then she walked away from him toward the elevator, their fingers still entwined, tugging him behind her.

  Determined to make good use of a slow elevator ride up to his apartment, Karl swept Vivian’s hair off her neck and kissed the knobs of her spine until the lace of her dress impeded his progress. Undeterred, he kissed his way around her neckline to lick salt off her neck. She tasted better than any meal, and the soft murmurs she made sounded better than any opera.

  Her dexterous fingers danced down his chest, unbuttoning his coat and slipping under his suit jacket to his belt buckle. She slipped her hand under his waistband and it was all of his janitor’s-closet fantasies come true, complete with the physics problem of Vivian not being nearly tall enough. Even with her in heels, he couldn’t quite position himself so that he could keep kissing her and she could keep her magical fingers tickling his balls. Karl settled for nibbling on the top of her ear while she panted into his neck.

  His mind registered the slowing of the elevator, but he didn’t do anything other than mumble a protest when Vivian pulled her hand out of his pants and smoothed the front of his suit. He wasn’t aware of anything other than the brush of her hair against his nose until the elevator beeped and opened onto the lobby of his building. Vivian gave a sly smile before turning them both so that she stood in front of him, facing the group of women getting on the elevator.

  Karl stood with his pants undone, his erection pressing against Vivian, unwilling to take his hands off her belly long enough to zip up his pants. Instead, he twirled the tie of her dress around his fingers and willed the giggling women to get off the elevator before his floor. One of the women looked at him, raised her brow and pressed the number for the floor directly under his.

  Hours seemed to pass between the beeps of the elevator at each and every floor. Each echoed through his head, made worse by the smell of jasmine he now associated with Vivian in his bed and the pressure of her body against his.

  Beep. And those women kept giggling.

  Beep. The fingers that had only recently been down his pants tangled with his, the silk ribbon of her dress rough as it trickled first through her fingers and then through his.

  Beep. Vivian shifted their interlocking hands like she was innocently scratching her neck, only her movement meant the back of his hand skimmed up against her breasts and, as the vixen delicately scratched her neck, his hand cupped her breast before falling back to her stomach. He leaned his head against the cool mirrored back of the elevator, fighting a groan, his only consolation that her games aroused her, too, if the slight tuck of her ass against him was any indication.

  After an interminable ride the elevator finally began to slow and they all halted—Karl, Vivian and those interfering women—until the elevator doors opened. Instead of gushing out of the elevators the same way they had poured in, the women sauntered through the doors, one by one. The last one to leave, the same woman who had pressed the button for this floor, had to bang the elevator doors to keep them from shutting on her. Instead of taking the shutting doors as a sign that she should hurry, she turned back and looked Karl and Vivian up and down. Then she winked. “I actually live two floors up, but it seemed cruel to make you walk past us in that state.”r />
  The doors shut on the sound of uproarious female laughter, and he was so desperate to be in his apartment that he didn’t care.

  Vivian’s ass shook when she giggled, and Karl tightened his hold on her. “Don’t,” he ground out, “move.”

  The ride between the two floors left him with just enough time to bunch up the stiff skirts of her dress and slip his hand across the softness of her skin and the silkiness of her underwear. By the time the elevator beeped for the last time, they were both panting heavily enough to fog the glass walls they were leaning against. As soon as the doors opened, he gave Vivian a gentle push and hurried after her. The cool, dry air breezing through his open fly only heightened his desire to bury himself in Vivian’s damp heat.

  When they got to his apartment door, Vivian leaned against the wood and slipped her hand back under his waistband as he tried to unlock the door. He concentrated on the lock so he didn’t come in his pants. The third time he readjusted his aim and the metal of the key clicked against the metal of the doorknob. She tightened her grip on his cock and said, “I hope you’ve got better aim inside, cowboy.”

  Karl couldn’t decide if he should bang his head against the door in frustration or groan with pleasure, so he settled for laughing. “Three months ago I was just sober enough to remember you saying almost the exact same thing.”

  “At the time, I assumed tequila caused your lack of aim, but now I know you were just horny.”

  The key finally slipped into the hole and the lock clicked open. Before he turned the knob to open the door, he leaned down to whisper in her ear, “We both know my aim improves the fewer clothes you’re wearing.”

  “Apparently your aim was spot-on,” she said with a raised brow and a gesture to her stomach. But before the mood could become too overwhelmed with the magnitude of how Vivian’s pregnancy had changed both their lives, Karl turned the knob and they tumbled through the doorway.

  Once inside the sanctuary of his apartment, Vivian didn’t hesitate. Her coat came off first, spilling onto the floor. Then she turned to face him and slowly, tortuously untied that ribbon around her waist. The ribbon rasped as the silk slipped against itself and the knot was undone. Blood pounded in his ears as he focused on that one ribbon, knowing her dress wouldn’t magically fall off her when it was untied, but he could still hope.