“Ew—no way. It’s a local hangout for teenage kids, probably full of discarded condoms and used needles and a dead body or two. I haven’t gone inside in years.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“You’re in the backwoods of Aberdeen. This is as good as it gets.” She nodded toward the side of the house. “Come on. I’ll show you around the back.”
If the front of the house was in disrepair, the back was even worse, with decades of undergrowth taking over what must have once been a serviceable porch. Again, the underlying appeal was there, what with the breathtaking views of the trees set against the deepening twilight sky in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree rotation. Poppy brought his notice to the ground as she pointed out a huge concrete hole in the shape of an Olympic-sized pool.
Into which she promptly dived.
Okay, she didn’t exactly dive—it was more of a jump, but Asprey was still taken aback. He got closer to the edge and peered in. It was exactly what one would expect from an empty, decaying swimming pool, cracked and dirty, with huge chunks of concrete broken off the edges. But the area had also been recently cleared of debris, and there were spatters of rust near the drain in the center, which didn’t showcase the usual collection of leaves and dead things.
Poppy shrugged out of her jacket and tossed it up onto the pool’s edge, shaking her limbs and falling into a fighter’s stance. “Welcome to the Pit. Hands up.”
Asprey laughed for a few seconds before he realized she wasn’t smiling back. Once again, he tamped down the niggling voice telling him that Graff was right about Poppy and her true motivations. He wondered if that feeling would ever go away—if he would ever be able to let go and truly trust this woman.
“You want me to get in there and fight you?” he asked warily.
“Calm down, Asprey. I’m not going to take advantage of you.” Was it his imagination, or was there a note of disappointment in her voice? “You wanted to know where I came from. Well, this is it. No ninjas. No secret brotherhood. Just a bunch of lower-class kids with too much time and aggression on their hands—and not nearly enough adult supervision. Throw in a few cage-fighting DVDs we stole from the video store in town and this is what you get. Me.”
As if on cue, the clouds overhead broke open, dumping huge splatters of rain on them both. The rust, which Asprey suspected now might actually be blood, swirled before beginning to move down the drain. He lowered himself to the pool’s shallow end, taking it all in.
“It’s gruesome. Kind of like the Colosseum at Rome.”
“A fight to the death.” She paused thoughtfully. “That’s not too far off. I broke a total of three bones in the Pit. Lost my virginity here too.”
“Not at the same time, I hope.”
She laughed. “No one would have dared. I was a fast learner.”
“So…are you some sort of mixed martial arts specialist?” he asked, not moving as the rain dripped down his face, obscuring his vision. That would explain the MMA magazine subscription—as well as his inability to stand his ground whenever she was around.
“Not even close. You’ve watched me teach yoga, seen me deep in the con—I know a few basic principles, and the rest I make up as I go.” She shrugged, but it wasn’t quite the nonchalant brush-off she was obviously going for. “I never learned how to learn. I just do things.”
Asprey wasn’t sure what came next. When he’d asked Poppy where she learned to fight, he’d expected a flippant reply about prison weight rooms, maybe a website address for a Jiu-Jitsu class somewhere in the Greater Seattle area. Not this. Not an intimate slice of her past.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle the truth. He just wasn’t prepared for it.
“Is this the point where you school me in the ways of the street?” Asprey asked, only partially kidding.
“It probably wouldn’t hurt you to have a few lessons,” she admitted, wiping some of the rain from her mouth and leaving a grin in its place. “You know, in case you need to take down a rogue woman in the middle of a necklace robbery.”
“Oh yeah?” Asprey was more amused than annoyed. He was man enough to admit that he preferred peace to combat. Graff and Winston were the fighters in the family, always grappling when they were younger, an assortment of black eyes between the two of them as they fought over things that mattered to no one but them. They could have that dubious honor all to themselves. Asprey had learned early on that it was just as effective to diffuse a tense situation with humor as it was with his fists. “What would you teach me?”
She cocked her head and studied him. Asprey did his best not to move or breathe or otherwise mar her appreciation of what she saw. The rain was doing wonders for her—her sports-bra top clung even tighter to her breasts, the outline of her nipples too taut and conspicuous to ignore. Even her yoga pants seemed to grip tighter, clinging to the curve of her hips as though they might slide off if they let go for a second.
Vanity compelled him to hope he stood up just as well to her scrutiny, though he doubted such a thing was possible.
“You have unnaturally long limbs,” she finally said.
That wasn’t exactly the approval he’d been going for. “Thank you?”
She laughed and dropped into a fighter’s stance, legs spread with one in front of the other and hands in fists at chin level. “That’s a good thing—it means you can use reach to your advantage. If you do it right, reach can be better than strength.”
“Are you saying I don’t have any strength?” he asked playfully, mimicking her movements.
“I saw you showing off at yoga today. Don’t worry. I’m appropriately in awe of your physique.”
“That’s better. Now what?”
“A sweep kick. You’ll like that one—it’s showy. Turn on your front foot so that you face your opponent, and then drop like this.” She twisted her body around and fell into a squat, bringing one hand down to stabilize her body, the other reaching under her right leg.
He knew Poppy was flexible—the yoga class had pretty much confirmed that suspicion and provided him with enough fuel to fantasize for a lifetime. But the way she bent and twisted now? She was practically a contortionist, all bendy and open limbs. Despite the rain, Asprey’s mouth went dry.
“Then put all your weight on your right leg, push the left one out and pivot.” She demonstrated the move, her leg sweeping a wide arc before she rose effortlessly to her feet again and bounced back into fighting stance. “See? It’s easy. Try it.”
He did, and, as promised, the move was fairly simple, though it felt a bit like break dancing. He wore his regular clothes, so he didn’t sweep nearly as fast as she did, and his hand slipped on the wet concrete once or twice, but it wasn’t all that different from a squatting yoga position, except that his goal was to maim.
“You’re a natural,” she said, watching him. He expected her to be smiling, but her face had taken on an intent look, and she licked her lips as he stretched his arms up, preparing to do it again.
He paused, lowering his arms with infinite slowness, sucking in a sharp breath when her eyes shot down to the line where stomach met the waistband of his jeans. He knew that look. He felt it down to his cock.
“We should do a defense technique too,” she said, her voice coming as if from the end of a long a tunnel. “So you can throw off your attacker long enough to flee.”
“That’s what you think of me?” Asprey asked, his own voice raspy and low. “My only hope of survival against you is to run away?”
In retrospect, Asprey should have been prepared for it. They stood, after all, just a few feet from each other in a rain-slicked pit that had probably seen its share of loose teeth and looser morals. But the strangely confiding atmosphere of the moment caught him off guard, and Poppy had his feet out from under him before he had a chance to do more than notice a blur of movement as she closed the gap between them.
He hit the ground with a thud, his back flat, his lungs sucked free of air. There was probably pain involved, but all he not
iced was the sudden lack of everything. He lost focus and the ability to breathe, the sensation of both the cold and the wet. All that remained was a supremely freeing sense of nothing.
“See?” Poppy’s face appeared above him. Sensation came roaring back then, primarily because she straddled him, her hands pinning his arms to the ground, her thighs clamped on either side of his body. “You don’t have a chance of escape now.”
A small part of him—the proud, manful part—wanted to show her just how wrong she was. Even though he wasn’t a fighter by nature and she seemed trained to kill, he wasn’t weak. He’d been in this position enough times in his life to know that he could flip her expertly beneath him, take all the strength of her and reduce it to a feminine pliancy.
Not because he was a man and she was a woman, but because he began to suspect that her toughness was a kind of protection. Some women hid behind outrageous flirtation or a succession of crappy boyfriends. Others, like Tiffany, immersed themselves in an alternate universe made up of complex layers of code. Poppy’s cover seemed rooted in this strange, archaic place, where past battles had to do with a lot more than the outcome of a single fight.
“Why would I want to escape this?” Asprey asked, meaning it. The rain sluiced down Poppy’s face, dripping over her upper body, which had to be freezing. Her nipples, outlined and erect, seemed to agree with him. “I already told you my safe word—and I’m nowhere close to needing it yet. I trust you, Poppy.”
She leaned in, her lower half pressing more firmly into his groin as her lips came perilously close to his own. Asprey bit back a groan. “You shouldn’t,” she murmured. Her eyes searched his, but he didn’t know what they were looking for. “I’m strong, Asprey, in more ways than you realize. You and your family might have tons of disposable cash, and I might stand in your debt right now, but in a fight—fair or otherwise—I’ll always come out ahead. You need to know that.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?”
“It’s both.”
A drop of rainwater collected on her lower lip, and it fell to Asprey’s waiting mouth, tasting of the sky. For one long, tense moment, neither one of them moved or breathed, the whole world suspended until an overhead rumble of thunder signaled a kind of starting bell.
Their lips met then, in a furious kiss that Asprey seemed unable to control. There was no finesse about it, no sign of the gentle seduction he normally enjoyed when kissing a woman. She released none of the strength of her grip on his arms as his tongue swept into her mouth, and she ground her hips into his even harder when he refused to reduce any of the urgency.
Poppy might have him pinned to the ground, and the kiss was hers to initiate or break off as she chose, but Asprey yielded nothing.
The kiss continued with that kind of strength much longer than Asprey thought possible, none of the passion spent as she eventually let up her hold on his biceps. The freedom meant he could wind his arms around her body, pull her so close she almost completely protected him from the heavy drops of rain. One hand made its way to the back of her head, forcing her to stay close—to stay his.
The thunder once again rumbled its timeless warning. And once again, they both heeded its call. The abruptness with which they separated was almost painful, leaving him feeling oddly bereft. Still, she remained on top of him, looking down as if waiting for him to respond.
“So,” he said, unable to resist the pleading look in her eyes. They begged him to make this normal, to make this okay. “Lost your virginity here, eh?”
It was the right thing to say. With the same strangled laugh that only he seemed able to elicit, she swatted playfully at his head, which he covered with his hands. She swung her leg over him and helped him to his feet. They were both drenched from head to toe, clothes and hair slicked to the skin. “Don’t get any funny ideas. It wasn’t my most glamorous moment.”
“The first time is always unglamorous,” Asprey protested, glad they were back to normal footing. Well, normal-ish. There was no way to undo a kiss like that. “It’s one of the cardinal rules.”
“You think so?” Poppy leaped nimbly up the side of the pit, watching with a smirk as he struggled to do the same. He got up, but not nimbly, the edges slippery in the rain. “Where did you lose yours?”
“Not too much of a departure from this, actually. It was at a pool house with Mrs. Garrison, my friend Peter’s mom. We spent the whole summer doing cannonballs into a pool about the size of this one, Mrs. Garrison watching from her chaise lounge in this tiny gold-and-black bikini.” He paused. “Do you know, I don’t even remember her first name? She was always Mrs. Garrison. Before, after…during.”
“That’s disgusting on so many levels.”
“You’re freezing.” He scooped up their jackets, but they were logged with water and cold to the touch. With a glance at the decrepit house, he said, “Do we brave it?”
She shook her head firmly and looked at the house with a kind of loathing that made Asprey long to take her in his arms. “No. Absolutely not. I’d rather die a long and painful death of pneumonia than ever set foot inside there again.”
The path leading back to the motorcycle was slippery and muddied, and more than once, Poppy reached out to grab Asprey’s arm to keep from falling flat on her face. He was happy to be her support—if only for the brief moments of weakness she allowed herself.
“I’m not sure we can ride very far,” he said doubtfully, surveying the road as they approached. “If we don’t slide off into the wooded abyss, we run the risk of turning into human popsicles after about five minutes with this weather and these jackets.”
Poppy frowned as she followed the line of the road, one side leading back to the semi-civilization of Aberdeen, the other going farther up into the wilderness, where bears and hypothermia awaited.
“When I was a kid, there was a bed-and-breakfast about two miles up the road. The lady who ran the place used to call the cops on us at least three times a week.”
At the mention of a bed and food, Asprey felt the full effects of their current state of exposure. It was cold and wet and only growing more so by the second. “You think it’s still there?”
Poppy wrapped her arms around her midsection, hands rubbing her exposed forearms. “I think it’s worth a shot.”
He tossed her the jacket and helmet. “Then suck it up and hold on tight.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Are you here for the Chaucer-Jones wedding?” The woman at the counter looked over the top of her glasses at them, one eyebrow raised in disbelief. She had the worn, kindly look of a grandmother, but Poppy recognized her and knew she was nothing of the sort. Well, she was probably a grandmother, but not a kindly one. More than once, she’d tramped through the forest toward the Pit with a shotgun, shouting statistics about how likely the police would be to believe she’d mistaken a juvenile delinquent for a black bear.
Poppy squirmed in her too-wet, too-revealing clothes. “No. We just need a room. Two rooms,” she hastily amended, refusing to look at Asprey. She’d already made the mistake of following him into the B&B. There wasn’t a dry patch of him left. Even though he wore his signature layers of preppy clothing, it wasn’t difficult to make out each twitch of muscle under his clothes, his dark jeans heavy enough to hang a bit lower on his hips than they normally did. When he’d leaned in to help her off the motorcycle, she could actually see the line of his tan, where golden skin met the chalky whiteness of an ass whose rounded deliciousness she couldn’t stop imagining between her teeth.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to think beyond the body to the meaning below the surface. People in Seattle did not have tans. Asprey Charles, the thieving playboy son of a renowned art appraiser, probably got his sun-kissed glow from jet-setting around the globe on someone else’s dime.
That tan line drew more than boundaries in the skin—it separated worlds.
“Unless you’re with the wedding party, you’re out of luck.” The woman—Norma, she remembered
now—tapped at her keyboard, though Poppy was pretty sure she gleefully pushed random letters. “They’ve booked through the weekend. Such a nice young couple.” She stared harder at Poppy, who quickly turned her head to avoid recognition, though she was a far cry from the gangly semi-Goth teen she’d once been. “He’s a doctor, and she works in interior design. Isn’t that lovely?”
Poppy opened her mouth to voice her opinions on interior design as a profession, which in her eyes was almost as bad as being a con artist, but Asprey placed a hand on the small of her back to nudge her out of the way.
She sucked in a sharp breath. What was it with him and that spot? He had to be doing it on purpose—had to be willfully sapping her of her resolve to keep him at an arm’s length. Remember the rules, Poppy. Never get involved.
“I can’t tell you how much we’d appreciate it if you could find a place to squeeze us in.” Asprey clicked easily into smooth-talker mode even with his soaking wet, muddied clothes and their leather jackets hanging over one arm. Poppy might have been amused if she wasn’t so freaking distracted by his hand. “I know we look like drowned rats, but we got caught on our motorcycle tour of the coast, and could really use some shelter from the storm.”
Norma sniffed loudly. “And if we weren’t hosting a wedding this weekend, I’m sure I’d be delighted to accommodate you. You understand. Dr. Chaucer and Miss Jones have requested a private party.”
“Oh, we’ll keep things private, I promise.” Out of the corner of her eye, Poppy saw Asprey wink. What was it with that man and winking? “Surely you have a bat-room hiding around here somewhere. I’d be happy to pay for the privilege of using it.”
“Bat-room?” Norma’s look of disdain only deepened.
Asprey let go of Poppy then, freeing her from the naughty-doe-in-the-headlights position she’d been stuck in. He leaned on the counter, a lock of his dark hair falling into his eye. He couldn’t have oozed sex appeal any harder if he tried.
“It’s not as strange as it sounds,” he said, flashing his signature smile—the one plastered on a hundred Internet photos. “A friend and I once rode our motorcycles up through Glacier National Park—it’s an incredible trip if you ever get the chance—and we got caught in a storm just like this one. The only place to stay was this big, old hotel with no vacancies left.”
Confidence Tricks Page 16
