by Jill Shalvis
running in here.”
Lariana frowned. “You sure? Very sure?”
“Sure about what?” Shelly asked, appearing in the doorway with a smile. Her petite frame was in another pair of jeans and a long pink angora sweater that fell to her thighs. She had her hair neatly pulled back in a ponytail and a flush to her cheeks as she looked back and forth between Lariana and Breanne. “What’s up?”
“Breanne says she saw someone in her room last night,” Lariana told her. “Standing over her.”
Shelly gasped. “Really?”
“A dream,” Lariana said. “On a night like last night, we probably all dreamed badly.”
Shelly, eyes wide, nodded. “Yes.”
“I wasn’t dreaming,” Breanne said.
Lariana and Shelly exchanged a wordless look that probably meant humor the crazy guest.
“Forget it,” Breanne said with an irritated sigh.
Shelly patted her arm. “I made breakfast by getting creative with the fireplace. Cooper’s already sniffing around the dining room, waiting. Are you hungry?”
She was starving, probably from burning up half a million calories just from trying to inhale Cooper’s body a few minutes ago.
But could she face him? Another thing entirely. “I don’t have anything to wear.”
“Oh, I have plenty,” Shelly offered. “I’ll get you something.”
Everyone looked first at Shelly’s tiny frame, then at Breanne’s not-so-tiny one, no one pointing out to Shelly the difference between a size one and a size eight.
Okay, a ten, damn it.
“I’ll get you something of mine,” Lariana said with a hint of martyrdom. “I brought a small bag with me to work yesterday because of the storm.”
When she’d left, Shelly looked at Breanne. “You ended up here, huh?”
They both looked at the huge bed.
“I didn’t sleep with him,” Breanne said.
Shelly lifted a brow.
“Okay, I slept with him. But not slept with him, slept with him.”
“Does he kiss as good as he smiles?”
Better. “Look, I’m not interested in him, okay?” Trying not to be. “I gave up on men, remember?”
“Oh, don’t say that! You can’t. You inspired me, you know.” Shelly smiled. “Today is the day.”
“The day for what?”
“That I get Dante to notice me.” She twirled in a circle and laughed as she fell to the bed. “Any helpful hints?”
“You shouldn’t take advice from someone who was dumped at the altar.” Three times.
“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” Shelly said loyally. “Now, come on. Give me a pointer or two.”
Oh boy. She thought of Dante’s world-weary, old-before-his-time eyes, and then looked into Shelly’s sweet ones. “Are you sure? Because—”
“He’s the one for me.”
“Well . . .” Breanne wracked her brain for any advice she’d ever read about and had thought sounded good but hadn’t actually tried. “Maybe you should tell him how you feel. You know, go the honest route.”
“Oh, I can’t do that! He doesn’t think of me as a woman!” Then she flashed that sweet smile. “Yet.”
Breanne took in Shelly’s lovely blond hair, her brilliant green eyes, her contagious smile. And then there was that cute, nifty little body any guy would go nuts over. “He’d have to be dead not to think of you as a woman.”
Shelly blushed. “You’re the sweetest guest we’ve ever had.”
Breanne had been accused of being many things, but sweet hadn’t been one of them. “I’m just calling it like I see it.”
“You really think he’ll want me?”
Breanne crossed her fingers and hoped. “I know it.”
“Because men are complicated creatures,” Shelly warned.
“Not true. They just don’t think with the same head that we do.”
Shelly giggled.
Lariana entered again. “No kidding, men don’t think with the same head we do. You can tell a man that in order to get the best sex of his life all he has to do is pay attention to a woman and say a few nice words, and you know what he’ll hear? Blah, blah, blah, sex, blah, blah, blah.”
Breanne laughed. “So true.”
Shelly looked like she didn’t want to believe this.
Lariana held up a little black skirt and a siren-red, long-sleeved spandex top with metallic sparkles woven into the fabric. Matching high-heeled boots—twice as high as hers were—dangled from her fingers. “This is what I was going to wear on my date tonight, but I don’t think I’m going anywhere.”
Oh boy. But Breanne took the hoochie-momma clothes with a combination of acceptance and good humor because there was nothing left to do but just live through this Twilight Zone episode.
“You change,” Shelly said to Breanne. “I’ll be waiting to serve you downstairs.” She shoved Lariana out ahead of her while Breanne just stared at the outfit. “What the hell,” she muttered, and dropping the robe, pulled on Lariana’s clothes.
To torment herself, she looked in the mirror. Oh boy. For starters, the skirt barely covered her ass. The top nearly blinded her and plunged due south nearly to her navel, only an inch above the hemline, which exposed a strip of belly. She tugged at it, but only succeeded in exposing a nipple. Pulling the shirt back into place showed belly again. Settling for somewhere in between, she slipped into the boots and gained four inches in height. Now, that she could live with. But while Lariana would look beautifully ethnic and sensual dressed like this, Breanne felt vampy and oversexed. Not a good place to be while trapped in a house with a man who revved her engines with just a single gaze. Much as she didn’t want to admit it, she needed Cooper’s sweats back, damn it.
Hell, she needed a damn suit of armor, but the sweats would do.
She stuck her head out the bedroom door and checked to see if the coast was clear. It was. She ran/hobbled down the hall, tugging on the skirt as she did, all the way back to the bedroom she’d deserted.
No sweats.
In fact, the bed had been made, and any sign of her brief stay erased. Odd how such a small thing could defeat her, but she was considering crawling back into the bed when a heavenly scent wafted up the stairs and into her nose.
Bacon.
Coffee.
Her stomach rumbled.
Fine. She’d go—what did she care? She took the stairs in the muted light of the early morning, gripping onto the handrail for all she was worth in Lariana’s heels, hoping she didn’t make an ass of herself and fall and break her ankle.
She couldn’t afford such a thing, not when she planned to use her already-loaded Visa to get on a plane today headed for—
Where?
Aruba sounded good. “Or any island where there’s no snow,” she muttered. “And no mysterious hotties—”
Dante appeared at the base of the stairs in his usual way—without a sound, making her heart kick up into her throat. “Do you have to do that?” she asked, a hand to her chest.
“Do what?”
“Appear out of the woodwork! Walk without a peep! Show up out of midair!”
In the light of day, he still looked very much like a thug. He had a gray sweatshirt on over loose jeans riding so low on his hips she had no idea what held them up. Once again he wore a knit cap with the hood of his sweatshirt over the top of it, both nearly covering his eyes. His jaw was lean and square and smoothly shaven except for a goatee. His eyes were as dark as his hair, with no visible pupils. And he didn’t smile. “Should I wear a bell?”
She paused, having no idea if he was kidding, until she caught the slight quirk of his mouth. “So you do have a sense of humor. Shelly mentioned it but I didn’t believe her.”
“Why?”
“Well, you’re not exactly a barrel of laughs.”
“No—I mean, why would Shelly mention me having a sense of humor?”
Because she wants to jump your bones. “Maybe because
she thinks about you.”
“Thinks of me?”
Were all men so innately dense? “You know, thinks of you.”
At that he smiled, and Breanne blinked. Well, look at that . . . quite a transformation from scary punk to hunk, with those dark, dark eyes, tough body, and rugged face. She supposed if she’d been into the whole urban thing, she could see what about him might draw a woman.
If she hadn’t given up men.
She really needed to remember that. Maybe she ought to have it tattooed to the inside of her eyelids. But Shelly hadn’t given up men, and Breanne had decided to be a better person. Here came good deed number one. “At the risk of sounding like we’re in high school, do you think about Shelly as well?”
He didn’t answer.
“Okay, let’s try this,” she said, determined. “She’s the sweetest, kindest thing I’ve ever met and she has a crush on you, and if you’re at all interested, you’d better be good to her.”
He just stood there, maybe breathing, maybe not. “Hello, anyone home?”
“I don’t answer trick questions.”
“Trick questions?”
“Like when a woman asks ‘does that skirt make my butt look big?’”
She clamped a hand on her butt and tried to crane her neck to see it. “I knew it! It’s Lariana’s, and—”
“It was a rhetorical question,” he said, his lips twitching as if he were biting back another smile.
“Rhetorical question?” She stopped trying to see her own behind and looked at him, exasperated. “You know, for a man who seems to enjoy perpetuating a ghetto image, you sure don’t talk like a thug.”
He merely shrugged and began walking away.
“Right,” she muttered. “Mind my own business. Got it.” She pulled her cell phone out of her bag. Time to work on her own life. “Uh, Dante?”
He glanced back. “What, are we late for history class?”
“Ha, ha. Do you know if there’s anywhere I can get reception on this thing?”
“Out the double French doors from the library. There’s a deck there, facing west. It’s the only place in the house where cell phones sometimes work.”
Sometimes? “Point me in the right direction.” She wanted to get her messages, mostly because she wanted to know if Dean had been hit by a bus—the only explanation she’d accept with grace.
“Shelly made breakfast.”
“Okay.”
“She’s hoping everyone comes.”
“Ah,” she said smugly. “So you’re not immune to her, after all.”
His eyes narrowed. “It’s my job to tell you about breakfast.”
“Uh-huh.” That this big, edgy, dangerous-looking man did care about Shelly’s feelings made her take a good, long second look at him. And a third. In fact, something deep inside her niggled, something that said, See? Maybe not all men are bad. She squelched it. “Where’s the library?”
He sighed. “That hallway there, third door on the right.”
Grateful for the daylight, dull as it was, she moved along the beautiful hardwood floor past the curved staircase, past the great room, counting doors until she came to a large room with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books. In awe, she stepped in. There were overstuffed chairs and ottomans, bigger, cushier sofas, and beneath the huge windows, beautiful benches filled with pillows. A book-lover’s delight. She was most definitely a book lover. She moved close to a shelf—all the Dickens classics. Another held Shakespeare. Yet another had five full rows of contemporary and historical romances by some of her favorite authors.
She could spend all week in this room and never regret spending her honeymoon alone. She picked up a personal favorite, an old historical classic. When she’d been thirteen she’d sneaked it home from the library, reading every dog-eared page beneath her blankets with a flashlight. The story had blistered her sheets.
“Breanne.”
With a startled squeak, the book went flying out of her fingers. She turned around and faced the one man whose voice could make her quiver, make her ache.
Cooper looked at her from the bluest, sexiest eyes she’d ever seen. “Dante said you were around, talking to yourself about mysterious hotties. You did mean me, right?”
She rolled her eyes, but his had locked on her body. “Wow,” he said huskily. “More honeymoon attire?”
“No. I borrowed some clothes.”
“Hmmm.” Wearing worn cargo jeans and a long-sleeved Henley the exact color of his eyes, he picked up the book she’d sent flying and looked at the cover—a nearly naked man, pulling a dress off a nearly naked woman. “Oh, goody,” he said. “A bedtime story. You can read it out loud to me tonight.”
“We are not sharing a bed tonight.”
“Feel free to skip straight to the good spots.” He opened the book to somewhere in the middle. “Right here, for example.” He cleared his throat and read out loud: “‘Elizabeth tingled at the thought of putting her mouth to his throbbing manhood.’” He lifted his head, sending her a lopsided grin. “Hey, I have a throbbing manhood.”
Breanne crossed her arms over her chest, refusing to admit she felt his smile from her roots to her toes, and in every single erogenous zone between, of which she apparently had more than she remembered, damn him. “Get out.”
“Sorry, Princess, there’s nowhere to go. Come eat breakfast with me.”
“Why? So you can turn that into something dirty as well?”
His grin went positively wicked. “You think sex is dirty?”
“Go. Away.”
Of course, he didn’t budge.
“You know what?” she asked, tossing up her hands. “Never mind. I’ll go.”
“You can run, but you can’t hide.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means we’re still stuck, baby. Snowed in. With no cable services and nothing to do except—”
“Don’t say it.”
“Okay. I’ll just think it.”
She sent him daggers, refusing to allow him to see how much his thoughts were affecting her. “I’m going outside to make a call on my cell.” Whirling away from him, she stepped to the French doors. Beyond them was a view that, under any other circumstances, would have made her sigh with pleasure. Surrounded by awe-inspiring, majestic peaks, they were nestled in a valley that lay under a glistening blanket. The snow was still falling in dinnerplate-sized flakes, coating everything in sight.
It boggled her mind.
Determined to check her messages, she bravely opened the doors and was immediately assaulted by the cold. Protected by a small covered deck, she stood a foot from where the snow came down in thick, blurry lines, falling eerily without a sound, piling into drifts. If she took a step off the deck she’d have sunk, vanishing from view.
Behind her she let the door shut so she wouldn’t have to hear Cooper moving around the library. God only knew what the Neanderthal would find in there to read. She didn’t care. Shivering, she kept her eyes locked on her phone display as she turned it on and waited with bated breath.
Two bars! And then the familiar beep, beep, beep, signaling that she had messages. Quickly she accessed them and laughed weakly when she heard “You have thirty-seven messages.” A bunch were from her parents and siblings, and all were in a similar vein along the lines of “Where the hell are you?” There were more from friends, wondering if she was okay. The answer was a big, resounding no.
And then came Dean’s voice, unusually subdued, and sounding as if he was in a vacuum. “Hi, Breanne—I realize you probably hate me by now.”
“Give me a reason not to,” she muttered.
