by Andrews, Amy
Sal dithered for a moment before shaking herself out of it, suddenly annoyed. Prior to last week she wouldn’t have given his social life any thought—apart from appreciating the way he wore a pair of blue jeans and the way he always smelled so good.
Why should she care now? Considering she’d spent an inordinate amount of time keeping him at arm’s length, it wasn’t like he owed her an explanation of where he was or what his plans were for the evening. And she was damned if she was going to sit at home wondering if he’d like a cooked meal when he got in.
For fuck’s sake—when had she become little Suzy homemaker?
In fifteen minutes she’d rung a friend and arranged to meet her at a local bar they both frequented. She got herself dressed in her favorite pickup dress. It was a slinky black number that fell conservatively to just below her knee but was made of clingy jersey and buttoned all the way up the front from the hem to the vee of her modest cleavage. She threw on some eye shadow so her eyes looked all smoky and slipped into a pair of strappy silver heels to complete the outfit.
She was going out—drinking wine and trading gossip with a girlfriend.
Doyle could eat cornflakes for all she cared.
…
Sal was home by nine. It had been a relaxing couple of hours with Carlene and she was glad she’d gone out, but her friend wanted to go on to a nightclub in the city and Sal had declined. Carlene had looked at her strangely and Sal didn’t blame her. Normally she’d be up for that, for dancing the night away, getting her head lost in a heavy techno beat.
But not tonight.
“Okay. Who are you and what have you done with my friend Sal?” Carlene had asked when Sal politely declined a drink that had been sent over from a cute blond guy with dimples that could probably be seen from the moon.
He’d been exactly her type. Ready, willing, and easy to please. She’d just suddenly developed a fascination with chin clefts.
“Don’t feel like playing the game tonight,” she’d said, and she didn’t.
Doyle had helped her get over her dry spell, but he’d also ruined her appetite for random hookups. The thought of taking a guy back to her place with Doyle there…just didn’t feel right. And going back to his place didn’t, either.
Why that was, she didn’t want to examine too closely.
The low light from the range hood seemed to be the only light on in the apartment when she opened the front door. Sal’s disappointment was profound.
And the fact that it was shocked her.
What had she been hoping for? That Doyle would be up and about? In the kitchen fixing himself something to eat or sitting in the lounge in his boxers and T-shirt drinking a beer with Matilda as he watched some crappy eighties action movie he seemed to favor?
She was temporarily deflated by the emptiness of the house. Until she spied two packets of fairy floss sitting on the counter. She took the two paces to the stool and sat as she reached for one. A Post-it note was stuck to it and she pulled it off.
Thanks for today from Abi, Harry, and me :)
Sal smiled at the smiley face. In all of her efforts to keep Doyle at bay these last months, she missed how incredibly sweet the man was. Sure, she’d seen it in his gentleness with animals and their owners like Mrs. Carney and Boxer, but she’d cut him dead at any attempts he’d made to personalize that gentleness in her direction.
Which had totally been the right move. Even now, looking at his gift of fairy floss, she believed keeping him at arm’s length had been the right thing to do. In fact, she should have kept it up. That night last week was an aberration that should never have happened.
But he was right—they couldn’t put it back in the bag. She couldn’t un-know what she knew about him and his devastating mouth and his clever fingers. She couldn’t un-know that the man looked good in blue jeans or holding a kitten or comforting his distressed niece or selling fairy floss.
But she could ignore it.
The thought was depressing as hell. For someone who was intimately acquainted with depression and the way it sucked at a person’s soul, it didn’t sit well. So she did the only thing she could think besides hunting him down, taking all her clothes off, and straddling him. She opened the packet of fairy floss.
Nothing like some comfort eating to give you a hand up.
It would probably only give her a short window of gratification, but then so would sex. Sex never reached deep into her soul anymore. Not like it had with Ben. It put her to sleep, for which she was grateful, but suddenly that didn’t seem like enough.
The sweet aroma engulfed her senses, and Sal stuck her nose in the packet and sucked in a deep breath. If only food could make her come. She’d lock herself away in the apartment forever and shop online.
She tore off a chunk and shut her eyes as the spun sugar melted on her tongue and she rode the buzz from the immediate spike in her blood glucose level. It was sinfully good.
Like Doyle.
Kissing her against the door. Licking her neck. Sucking her nipple. Letting her grind herself to orgasm against him.
She opened her eyes and her pulse leapt at Doyle standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the hallway taking up all the space. His feet bare, his legs encased in blue jeans, his shoulders scarcely contained by a soft khaki T-shirt. His tan, his charcoal hair, and his dark stubble all emphasized by shadow.
She was half startled, half turned on by him being the first thing that came into focus the second she opened her eyes, and she gasped slightly, her eyes widening.
It was like she’d conjured him up.
“Good?”
She nodded. “Perfect.” But not as perfect as you.
“Harry thought you’d like them, and she wanted to give you something to thank you for today.”
Sal’s heart beat crazily in her chest, like it was fighting to get out, fighting to be heard. “She’s a sweet kid,” she said, hoping that she sounded nonchalant, like any normal person who’d comment on something cute a child had done and not a woman who had felt her baby girl kicking and kicking in a valiant effort to live even as her movements had slowed, then stopped altogether.
She didn’t think she succeeded. That kind of thing always came out sounding forced no matter how genuinely she felt it.
“Ha!” Doyle laughed. “She’s a complete drama queen, but we love her.”
Sal’s heart squeezed in her chest and she pulled off another chunk of fairy floss to push back the pain. Her tongue flooded with sweetness and it hit her system a couple of seconds later.
The grief receded.
“Seriously though, thank you,” he said. “What you did for Harry today was incredibly nice. Above and beyond. It didn’t look like it was very easy for you, but you made a little girl very happy.”
Easy? He had no idea. “I’m glad,” she said, silently begging him to change the damn subject already.
“You look nice.”
Nice? Okay, it was a subject change, but the compliment was as sweet as the sugar pushing her closer and closer to a diabetic coma. Men usually told her she looked sexy, gorgeous, hot. And she did. She looked damned hot. She was wearing a dress with a thousand fascinating buttons and silver stilettos that screamed “fuck me.”
Nice was never how they described her.
Nice should have been an insult. She should have demanded a retraction. But Sal felt absurdly like crying.
And sure as God made little green apples, she was leaving that the hell alone.
“You want this bag?” she asked, offering the other because crying was not an option.
He pushed off the doorframe and approached slowly, rounding the counter and pulling out the barstool to sit. They were in similar positions as they’d been that night, but he was farther away. Deliberately, she suspected.
He picked up the bag and opened it, shoving his nose into it just as she’d done, and she smiled. But when he pulled off a section and popped it in his mouth, a rush of heat swamped her pelvis with a
wild, wanton beat. She wanted him with a fierce surge of desire difficult to ignore, and she knew she couldn’t go on like this—wanting him.
Craving him.
She’d done that for too long after Ben had died—wanting her dead husband, craving him—and could speak to every one of its useless attributes. She’d learned to take since then. To go after what she wanted.
And she wanted Doyle. There was no point trying to deny it any further.
Maybe if they just got this crazy-stupid attraction out of their systems it would be enough to satisfy her?
Sal’s pulse sped up a little at the thought.
She pulled off some more of her own floss and smiled at him as she slid it between her lips, gratified to see the flare of his nostrils. “This is good,” she said.
“Not as good as the stuff you made.”
“But of course,” she murmured, her eyes roaming over his shoulders. “I infused mine with a secret ingredient.”
He chuckled. “Oh yeah, what’s that?”
“Sweat,” she said. Drenched with desire. Every bag of fairy floss they’d sold had a sprinkle of lust in it.
There were going to be a lot of babies born nine months from now. Who needed to visit a witch doctor for some tiger penis when they could just head to the school fair and pick up a bag of fairy floss from the horny pet show judge?
Oh Jesus. She was going to be responsible for a mini-population explosion. They’d probably send scientists to try to figure out why…
She finished off her bag, then glanced at his longingly. He laughed as he pulled off a piece and handed it to her. “You have a real sweet tooth, don’t you?”
“Yep,” Sal said, taking it and shoving it straight into her mouth. Her teeth ached from the overwhelming sweetness, but everything else buzzed. “You sound surprised.”
“Sweet isn’t something I associate with you.”
Sal knew sweet wasn’t something anybody associated with her. But she felt like yanking his chain a little. “You don’t think I can be sweet?” she asked, fashioning her features into their most crestfallen.
He chuckled, obviously not fooled by her act. “I’m sure you can be. To other people.”
“Oh, poor Doyle,” she murmured. “You want me to show you some sugar?”
His hand stopped halfway between the packet and his mouth. His gaze dropped to the top button straining slightly at her cleavage and his throat bobbed. “What’d you have in mind?” he asked, returning wary eyes to her face.
A split second was all it took for Sal to make up her mind to go for it. Ignoring him, keeping him at a distance, hadn’t worked—it was time to change tactics.
Okay, screwing Doyle wasn’t a sound decision. But not screwing him wasn’t an option, either. She hadn’t experienced such an intense longing in a long time, and some part of her knew, deep down, that it wasn’t going away just because she didn’t want it.
She was going to burn for him until she had him.
Might as well get it over and done with.
And afterward, when they were both purged of this insane need, they’d have to negotiate a way to handle the fallout. But if they didn’t do this now, there’d be fallout anyway—two people couldn’t live and work together with such intense physical attraction without something giving.
She hadn’t expected it. She didn’t want it.
But for damn sure she was done ignoring it.
Sal stood, uncertain what she had in mind, just knowing she had to do something. “I thought I might…”
Doyle tensed, sitting higher on the stool. Her heels had given her a height advantage, placing her breasts at his eye level, and he didn’t seem to be able to take his eyes off them.
Sal suddenly knew exactly what she had in mind.
She reached for the first button and popped it. “Show you my tits,” she said, popping the next one.
“Oh Jesus,” he whispered, his gaze glued to her fingers as she popped the third and the open edges started to flop down and reveal the edging of her black-and-red satin-and-lace bra.
“This enough sugar?” she asked as she undid the fourth.
He glanced back at her face. “You are a witch.”
She smiled as the fifth button met the same fate as the previous four. “You want me to stop?”
His dark, hungry gaze returned to the slight swell of her breasts like he wanted to devour them. “I should tell you to stop. I should walk away. Go to my room.”
Sal undid the sixth. “What would you do in your room?” she asked, her voice husky. “Would you touch yourself and think of me?”
“Yes,” he rumbled, and it was so low and gravelly and so damn sure, muscles deep inside Sal squeezed tight. How many times had she touched herself and thought of him since that night?
The seventh button fell by the wayside.
“Have you done that before?”
“Yes.”
Another quick-fire response, another gratifying squeeze, another button gone. “I’d like to see that,” she murmured, her voice thick in her throat. And she would. She’d love to watch him pleasuring himself—while he was thinking about her.
Her dress was wide open now to just below the wire of her bra cups, and Doyle’s gaze was roving over every inch of flesh, taking in her fully exposed bra.
“More,” he said.
Sal’s fingers trembled at the husky demand, popping the next button. He was seizing control and she was letting him.
“You know that thing I said before about you looking nice?”
“Yes,” she said, another button undone.
“I was just being polite.”
Sal fingers stilled. “You don’t think I look nice?”
He shook his head. “There is nothing nice about you, Sal. You look fucking amazing. Hot and sexy and delicious and I’ve been fantasizing about eating fairy floss off you all damn day, and I want to lay you out on this kitchen counter and do just that.”
Sal sucked in a breath as Doyle’s low, suggestive rumble traveled to every cell in her body, charging them with lust and producing a flurry of erotic images. She glanced at the half-eaten packet of fairy floss and thanked her lucky stars she wasn’t a diabetic.
She swallowed. “Okay.”
He stood, looming over her. “Get on the counter.”
Sal didn’t need to be asked twice, taking a step until she was backed up against it, placing her palms on the flat surface behind her, her fingers curling around the rolled edge. She boosted herself up, her breast bounce obvious through the gape of her dress.
He stood right in front of her, the light from the range hood playing across the planes of his face and glittering in the sudden obsidian of his eyes. He lifted his hand and Sal held her breath as he fingered the edge of the jersey and a few of the smooth black buttons as his gaze fanned over her bra. Her nipples tightened and pushed against the fabric.
It was pure erotic torture.
“Was this dress very expensive?” he asked after he’d stared her nipples into full arousal.
Sal nodded. “Hideously expensive.”
“In that case I apologize in advance,” he said as he tossed the packet of fairy floss on the counter, then raised that hand to her dress. In a flash he grasped both gaping edges of the fabric and ripped them apart.
Little black buttons flew in all directions, clattering on the tile floor and pinging off kitchen cupboards, the sink, the fridge.
Sal gaped, a little horrified, a lot turned on as she sat before him in nothing but a few scraps of lace and satin. “Doyle.”
“I’ll buy you a new one,” he growled as his eyes roved greedily over her near nakedness, sweeping from her breasts to her belly to her thighs and zeroing in on her matching red-and-black underwear. Some women may have covered themselves, but Sal wanted Doyle to look at her very, very badly.
Wanted him to touch her even more.
“Fuck, you’re gorgeous,” he murmured. “Lie back.”
The low rumble of hi
s request stroked along nerves lying low and deep in her belly. Sal didn’t even think of not doing as he’d asked—she lay back, her torn dress falling down uselessly at her sides, her legs dangling over the edge.
She shivered as he slid his hands onto her knees, the soft brush of his touch rippling up her legs and tingling between her legs. He eased them apart and stepped between them, the inside of her thighs bracketing the outside of his, the rough burr of denim turning the tingle to a burn.
His eyes raked her body again from her breasts all the way down to the damp scrap of satin at the juncture of her thighs. He stroked his index finger down her middle from her belly button to where black lace stopped him from going any further.
Sal gasped at the contact and arched her back. The muscle fibers beneath his finger shuddered in response, undulating in lazy time to his unhurried caress. Back and forth, back and forth, cranking up the tightness in her belly, causing a warm gush between her legs.
He glanced up at her. “What happened here?”
Chapter Ten
Sal, her eyes practically rolled back in her head and already half out of her mind, realized he was talking about her scar. Once upon a time the question would have freaked her out, but she was so used to it now she could deliver her lie without flinching.
“Car accident. Years ago,” she said huskily.
Which was the truth. Just not the whole truth. As with all lies, it helped to ground it in an element of reality.
She shifted her pelvis restlessly as his finger continued to feather up and down the faded white line. He frowned as if trying to figure out just how exactly a car accident would cause such a scar. “Did you get thrown out?”
“Lots of internal bleeding. Steering wheel.”
Also true. Gut-wrenchingly, heartbreakingly true. And she did not want to go there now.
“No seat belt?”
“Doyle.” Way to kill a mood.
He looked up from where his fingers were still stroking her as she groped for the bag of fairy floss somewhere to the side. She found it and thrust it at his chest. “Are you seriously going to use your mouth for talking? Because I can think of about a dozen other uses for it right at this moment.”