Crush on You

by Christie Ridgway

  “I want you to be my Man of Honor,” she blurted out.

  He straightened. “What?”

  “Jordan’s pregnant sister had to bow out of the ceremony. The doctor has her on bed rest. She was my Matron of Honor, so I need to choose someone else. And I choose you, except we’ll call you the Man of Honor, okay?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t have to wear her dress or anything like that. We’ll get you a tux.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Gee, thanks, because I don’t look good in that Pepto color your bridesmaids are wearing. But the answer’s still the same.”

  “It’s not Pepto. It’s a soft, flattering pink.” She bit her lip. “Gil, I wanted you in that role from the very first, but—”

  “But your mother wouldn’t have approved,” he finished for her. “And she won’t like it any more now.”

  Clare bit her lip again. “You know I’m letting her mostly have her way.”

  He lifted a brow. “Mostly?”

  “Okay. Nearly entirely. Almost all. But the ceremony doesn’t mean much to me and it means a whole heck of a lot to Mom.” Who could blame her? Sally Knowles had been over-the-moon about Tommy and Alessandra’s wedding and then had been robbed of both the ceremony and her son. Because of that, Clare thought it was the least she could do to let her mother direct her daughter’s event.

  “But you’re ready to buck her now?” Gil asked.

  “Yes.” Clare nodded. “On this, yes. I need you beside me on the big day. Who else will comfort me if I get a bad case of bridal nerves at the very last second? Please, Gil, forget your macho qualms and stand by the bride’s side.”

  He softened a little. “I’m always on your side.”

  Her heart leaped. “Then you’ll do it?”

  Gil’s gaze cut away and he groaned. Then he looked back at her and his big hand reached out and cupped her cheek. “Tell you what, Clare,” he said, brushing this thumb over her cheekbone. “I’ll think about it.”

  Her heart leaped again. And that weird trilling, tickling feeling was rushing over her skin. It must be a response to the near victory, she told herself. Still, she then did just what she’d been complaining Gil had been doing for months—she jumped off the bed and skittered for the doorway, putting a very healthy distance between them.

  Inside the cottage it was as hot as an August afternoon in hell, but Penn knew it had nothing to do with the moderate June temperature outdoors. It was Alessandra’s sweet little body. And his mood. It made him as mad as the devil that he was still turned on by her.

  Everything she’d told him the day before should have squelched his response. She’d dropped the little five-years-dead-fifteen-minutes-before-the-vows bombshell just as he was about to give into the urge to grab her and plunder. She’d been begging for it, right?

  Please, Penn, she’d said, her delicate frame as hot and heavy as a brand against his flesh. Please. Though somehow he’d managed to yank himself and his libido free and escape outside, she’d followed. Apologies, excuses, some silly babble about her coming on to him but not really coming on to him—none of her chatter had registered. There was only her big brown eyes and her tender-looking mouth and he’d wanted, wanted, wanted . . .

  Until she’d blurted the truth that he’d only begun to guess in the hardware store.

  Five years ago I was supposed to be married.

  Four sentences later, he’d hightailed it back to the Bennett place and holed up for the rest of the night with the big-screen TV in the oversized bedroom they’d assigned him on the second floor. This morning, though, he’d come back to the cottage because, damn it, a man had to take a stand.

  He’d promised to complete the renovation and there was Sheetrock to hang. More importantly, he refused to be hostage to his own libido and he’d figured that once her past history had a little more time to penetrate he’d be free of it. Of her.

  Except that wasn’t the case. Oh, no, as much as he’d been pretending to ignore her for hours as he nailed up the sheets of wallboard in the room that was designated as the bride’s boudoir, he’d really been calculating exactly how long her shorts were—four modest inches below the perky curve of her ass. In that time he’d also used his years of painting experience to pin down the exact shade of lipstick on her prim yet puffy bow-shaped mouth—Sweet Melon. Worst of all, not once had he avoided the sweat-inducing sight of her cleavage—revealed all the way to the little satin bow between the cups of her deep-cut bra. Another man might have informed her of the unintended display the very moment two crucial buttons had popped open on her shirt.

  Penn hadn’t. Because . . . well, wouldn’t the fact he’d noticed make her uncomfortable?

  See. He’d been thinking of Alessandra’s feelings. Yeah, that was it.

  The sound of her footsteps interrupted his thoughts. He glanced over his shoulder to see her awkwardly wrangling another four foot by eight foot rectangle of Sheetrock in his direction. With a curse, he punished the head of the nail he was setting with a final blow from his hammer, then racked the tool in his belt and strode over to yank the panel away from Alessandra.

  “I’ll get those myself,” he bit out. This close he could see the fine tendrils of damp curls around her hairline. The heat seemed to twist her hair tightly, and it released a subtle wave of her perfume, too. The scent went to his head and was almost as dizzying as the view of her breasts heaving in and out with her labored breaths.

  “I can do it,” she said. “They’re not heavy, just awkward.”

  “You’ll break a nail,” he replied unkindly. “And I don’t have time to mop up your waterworks over that.”

  Her jaw dropped. She even had cute teeth, small and white, and it pissed him off yet again to notice that. He wanted to run his tongue over them, to feel them bite into his chest, to experience the scratch of their edges when she—

  “Hello!” a man’s voice called from the front room, followed by the rap of knuckles against wood. “Allie? You in here? It’s Mark and Mike about those benches you ordered.”

  She shot Penn a narrow-eyed look and then spun away from him.

  Good riddance, he thought, moving to prop the piece of Sheetrock on the far wall. Then he remembered the open shirt barely covering her, which would allow “Mark and Mike” to ogle all that Penn should have pointed out.

  He rushed for the doorway leading to the other room, dismayed to see that Mark and Mike were a couple of young dudes in their twenties and that she still hadn’t discovered those unfastened buttons. The three people were all gathered close, and she had her knee propped on a box as she studied a sketch of some sort. Her pose lowered her chest and laid out her bounty practically right in the faces of the young men who . . . weren’t looking.

  Wearing serious, respectful expressions, they were focused entirely on the paper in her hand. One of the guys made a couple of notations in a tattered, palm-sized notebook with a stubby pencil. Penn recognized the pencil, the frayed notebook, the kind of men. He’d dealt with carpenters like these for years. Hardworking guys who perpetually had sawdust stuck to their forearms, who drank beer when they knocked off for the day, and who would never miss a chance to take an appreciative eyefull of a beautiful woman. But he’d seen carpenters look at a length of oak with more sexual interest than these two were directing toward Alessandra.

  Puzzled, Penn stayed where he was, watching as the trio straightened.

  She handed the sketch back to the taller man. “Looks great, Mark.” There was a moment’s pause, then she caught the young guy’s eye. “But I was wondering . . . do you think you could deliver them three days earlier than we originally discussed?”

  “Allie, um . . .” Mark seemed mesmerized for a moment. “Um . . . Maybe . . .” Then he shook himself like a wet dog and deliberately redirected his gaze. “No. I don’t think . . .”

  “Please, Mark,” she said softly.

  “But Allie . . .”

  She put her hand on his arm and his gaze slowly came
back to hers. “Please.”

  Penn flashed back to the day he’d first met her. The laborers speaking together in Spanish. Everyone knows not to look her in the eyes.

  Mark’s buddy Mike made a little whining sound as the other carpenter nodded like a marionette.

  “Thank you!” Obviously delighted, Alessandra grabbed one carpenter and then the other, bussing each on the cheek.

  Instead of enjoying the burst of affection—and finding some way to prolong it like any normal, red-blooded male—Penn saw that the two couldn’t get away from her fast enough.

  “As soon as the cottage is complete,” she called to their retreating backs, “I’ll make you each a batch of cookies!”

  Penn came up behind her as the men drove off. “Kisses and cookies,” he said. “But they’re still running from you like you’re spreading cooties.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Seriously. Do you have mono or something?”

  “I’m perfectly healthy,” she answered, followed by a big breath that proved just how healthy she was.

  Penn didn’t try to hide the direction of his gaze this time.

  Her glance followed his, and she bleated, her fingers immediately doing up the disobedient buttons, including one more for good measure.

  “You’re a dog,” she fumed.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, shrugging. “But what I want to know is why those two men were like a pair of neutered tabbies.”

  Her cheeks turned pink. “I never understand a word you’re saying.” She made to move past him.

  He caught her shoulder. Big mistake. His grip on the fabric popped her buttons again. More dangerous, he felt her under his hand. The delicate framework of her bones, the sudden rush of heat to her skin, the shiver that quivered through her body at his touch.

  His breath caught in his chest as that subtle shudder seemed to roll through his palm, across his arm, and down his own body. Desire crashed into him, washed over him, burned through his veins to race like fire in his blood. She did this to him, the goddamned Nun of Napa.

  That he still couldn’t prevent it really ticked him off. And something else had him raging, too.

  “They never even look at you, do they?” he asked, his voice harsh.

  She trembled but didn’t move away, as if trapped by his hand. She didn’t answer.

  He tightened his hold. “Tell me what you haven’t,” he heard himself say, even though there was no reason to know the details. “Make me understand why people around here treat you like this. They’re afraid to meet your eyes. They’re afraid to glance at your tits.”

  She gasped in offense.

  “Well, hell, Alessandra. They’re damn good tits and you’re the one laying them out there.”

  Her glance fell to her cleavage once again and then she jerked her shoulder from him as she buttoned up a second time.

  Penn shook his head. “This just doesn’t make sense. Something’s not right here.”

  Her gaze jumped to him and there was fire in her eyes. “I hate the expression on your face,” she said, and he could tell her mad mood matched his. “It’s like you’re trying to punch holes in my story. Do you want me to track down Tommy’s obituary that ran in the paper? I have it somewhere.”

  Yeah, she probably did, along with a pressed flower from her wedding bouquet and the rings they’d never exchanged. For some reason that thought only spiked his ire. Beautiful Alessandra Baci, languishing after what couldn’t be. Yearning for a touch from ghostly hands.

  “Well?” She slammed her arms across her chest, popping the top buttons yet again. “Why are you so suspicious of me?”

  He didn’t have every answer to that himself. Shaking his head again, he slid his hands in his pockets, determined to keep them to himself from now on. “Maybe it’s my job. The first season of the show we had to revamp the participant application six times to get it right. Now it’s fourteen pages developed by a unit of lawyers. A regiment of PIs then go about verifying every fact. The schemers we’ve seen—”

  “I’m not a schemer!”

  “You’re something,” he muttered. “What that is, I just don’t know. Except it’s weird as hell how they treat you like you’re made of glass.”

  “That’s because—” She broke off. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  He thought he did, remembering the old guys in the hardware store. His fingers tightened into fists. “You’re still Tommy’s girl, is that it?”

  “Look, I don’t owe you any explan—”

  “Give me one anyway.”

  She rolled those big brown eyes, but then her gaze met his. “It’s just that . . . that we were always a couple. We were high school sweethearts when Tommy was diagnosed his senior year. We danced at his prom with him in a wheelchair and me on his lap. Then four years passed and everyone believed he’d beaten it—he had beaten it—but the drugs that helped him had damaged his heart. It gave out on the way to our wedding. So just as he’ll always be the one who died too young, then, yeah, I’ll always be Tommy’s girl.”

  “Christ,” he ground out, not the least bit satisfied by her answer. “You’re a woman—”

  “Widow,” she corrected, then frowned. “Well, almost a widow.”

  Worse than a widow, Penn decided. A baby almost-bride who might as well be buried beside the hometown boy who’d died too young to make good. People looked at her and saw tragedy instead of a living, breathing person. Hence the acquiescence to her every request, the tremors at her every tear.

  She took a step closer to him, bringing her scent that much nearer. He sucked it in, and his head spun. But his vision was clear enough to make out the thrumming beat of the pulse in her throat, and he knew his nearness affected her, too.

  He saw her face flush and her pupils dilate, but she challenged him all the same, silly woman. “Satisfied now?” she asked.

  Silly, silly woman. “Not even close,” he answered, knowing as he did that he was no longer going to keep his hands to himself. He couldn’t, not with that scent in his head and this clamoring need to show baby bride that she wasn’t as cold as that corpse in her past.

  As he bent his head closer to her lips, he slid his palm inside that half-opened shirt that had made him crazy all the long, damn day.

  5

  Alessandra saw the kiss coming. She had all the time in the world to leap away from Penn or to push at his chest and shove him back. But her feet seemed rooted to the scarred floor and it was only at the last second that she arched her spine, avoiding his mouth.

  The movement pushed her chest toward his descending palm.

  His callused fingers slid right between the gaping edges of her cotton blouse, to glide under the cup of her bra. Maybe he only meant to cop a quick feel over her clothes—or at least give her the scare that he was trying for one—but she’d provided him with intimate, naked contact. In instant response, her nipple tightened to a painful bud, her breasts swelled, and goose bumps broke out like prickly heat over the rest of her skin.

  He was infecting her again, and she was helpless against the virus rushing through her system. It paralyzed her.

  Him, too, perhaps, because they just stared at each other, as if they were complete strangers surprised to find themselves bedmates in the quarantine ward.

  “W-what are you doing?” she whispered.

  His gaze dropped from her face to his hand, half-hidden by her clothes. She saw the long muscle in his arm flex. Yes. Good. He was going to pull away.

  Instead, his fingertips drew toward each other, each one taking a short path until they met around her stiff nipple. The back of her neck burned, and even her watery knees couldn’t put out the fire, it was just that hot. “Penn,” she managed to choke out, but she didn’t think he heard her.

  He appeared fascinated with his hand, or maybe it was the budded center of her breast because he tested it with a tiny squeeze, his face going hard as she twitched in helpless, pleasured reaction. “You
like that,” he said, his voice husky. His gaze flicked to hers. “Admit it. You like me touching you.”

  “Don’t.” Not don’t, she thought. No. She should say that, right? No was on the tip of her tongue, it was echoing in her head, but then that inner voice amended the word. Yes, yes, yes, it moaned instead as he tightened his fingers in a second gentle pinch.

  She couldn’t breathe. Her nipple was throbbing now, matching the pulse at her throat and the second one thrumming between her legs. It was soft there, aching, and it had been so long since she’d felt sensual pain—and it was so wrong to feel it now, with Penn Bennett, a man she didn’t like—that her brain couldn’t prescribe a plan of action.

  “I . . .” Her voice drifted off as he applied more delicate pressure. A shudder raced down her spine.

  “Alessandra, admit you like me touching you.”

  “Penn,” she said, protesting his familiarity, his expertise, the confidence in his damn demand. Her fingers closed around his wrist. She was going to remove his hand, show him the door, kick his disturbing presence out of the cottage and out of her life.

  But instead she hung on as he caressed her again. This time she voiced her moan, a soft and needy sound that brought a small smile to his face.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about, sweetheart. You and I, we could . . . we should . . .”

  But he didn’t finish the thought. His head came up and his eyes narrowed. Something over her shoulder caught his attention and within another short breath his hand was gone and her shirt was buttoned up to her chin.

  She hated her disappointment. No, damn it. She hated him.

  Righteous indignation returning, she shoved at his chest. “You’re never touching me again,” she said.

  He looked at her with pity. “Keep telling yourself that, baby.”

  “I mean it!”

  His head was shaking back and forth. “We—”

  “Will never be alone together after this,” she spit out, furious with herself as much as she was furious at him. “You might like to play these kinds of games—” She broke off as he laid a finger over his mouth.