by Unknown
Of course, she wasn’t. She was looking at a spot just past his left shoulder. But close enough.
“You’re buzzing around as fast as you can so you can get dressed, get ready, and get away from me. So what’s the deal? Morning-after regrets?”
This time, she did meet his eyes. Mouth flat, fingers curled tight at her sides, she said, “All right, yes. Yes, are you happy now? Last night was a mistake. I had too much to drink and my defenses were down, otherwise you know you wouldn’t have gotten two steps inside my door.”
One dark blond brow rose. “You can’t claim you didn’t want it.”
He had her there. She’d not only wanted it, she’d begged him for it—numerous times.
“No, I can’t say that,” she admitted, her voice soft with reluctance. “I just shouldn’t have wanted it with you.”
Row 11
Well, there you had it. He’d asked, and Ronnie being Ronnie—blunt and sharp-tongued to a fault—she’d answered.
She’d wanted to get laid, just not by him.
Nothing like a good, swift kick to the peaches to wake a guy up in the morning.
“I guess that’s honest enough,” he muttered.
“I’m sorry, Dylan,” she apologized, more sincerity than he would have expected brimming in her eyes. “But you can’t think that it was anything more than sex for sex’s sake.”
“Freaking fantastic sex,” he grumbled.
“Yes. Fantastic sex,” she agreed, “but still just sex.”
She made another move to bypass him, and he shifted to the side, arms falling from his hips to let her.
Following her down the short hall to the bathroom, he said, “I wasn’t planning to ask for your hand in marriage, but after last night, I thought we could maybe start hanging out a little more. Is it such a crime to be friends with benefits, no strings attached?”
She turned to face him when she reached the bathroom. “But we’re not friends.”
At that, she closed the door behind her, shutting him out. A second later, he heard a hair dryer click on, and realized he’d been summarily dismissed.
In her dreams, he thought, and spun on his heel to return to the living room and collect the rest of his clothes. He finished zipping his pants and yanked his undershirt over his head, then sat on the sofa to pull on socks and shoes.
When the hair dryer shut off, he got up, shrugged into his shirt without bothering to button it, and stalked back to the bathroom, positioning himself outside like a sentinel. He didn’t know what she was doing in there, but it took several minutes more for the door to creak open and her to reappear.
She stopped in her tracks, startled to find him only inches in front of her. Her hair was now dry and styled, hanging all around her face and shoulders in dark brown waves, and her face was tastefully covered in a light layer of makeup.
Her appearance shouldn’t have hit him in the solar plexus with quite as much force as it did. She looked different dressed and made up than she did naked and sprawled beneath him in wild abandon, but damned if he could decide which was his favorite. Either way, she turned up the heat and made his cock throb with wanting.
“I thought you would have gone,” she said quietly, unaware of the press of a particular stretch of flesh growing behind his fly.
“We aren’t done talking.”
When she slipped past him and headed for the kitchen, he let her go, but followed right along.
“What’s left to say?”
“We may not be friends, but we make pretty good lovers,” he pointed out. “What’s wrong with that?”
Ronnie stood at the kitchen counter, digging through her purse. Then she grabbed a banana from a nearby fruit bowl and tossed it inside, on top of the handbag’s other contents.
“I don’t make a habit of sleeping with men I don’t care about, let alone ones I publicly despise. You may be used to having indiscriminate sex with all manner of friend and foe, but I’m not.”
Shrugging into her coat and throwing the strap of the purse over her shoulder, she brushed by him again, making a beeline for the front door.
She was back to being snooty and stuck-up, but instead of raising his hackles the way her attitude usually did, he found himself fighting a grin. Ronnie Chasen might be ornery and prickly for most of her waking hours, but now he knew the fire and passion that hid behind her Little Miss Priss exterior.
Since he’d entered her apartment with nothing but the clothes on his back, he had nothing to collect except his jacket before following her out. Waiting for her to lock up, he slipped his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, then walked with her down the hall.
“All right, no sex, then,” he agreed amicably. Maybe too amicably, judging by the suspicious glance she slanted in his direction.
But he was confident in his abilities. The sex hadn’t been just run-of-the-mill, okay whoopee, and he was betting that the next time Ronnie got horny, she’d forget her bright-light-of-day resolve and decide that maybe another ride on the Stone Pony wouldn’t be such a bad prospect, after all.
But if she could hold out for a while, so could he.
“That’s it?” she asked. “Okay, fine, no argument now, even though you’ve been arguing with me since you woke up?”
“Yep,” he said as they stepped into the elevator and turned in the age-old habit of facing forward. “I just wanted to make it clear that I didn’t coerce you into anything last night. You might have had too much to drink at the Box, but you were right there with me. I didn’t take advantage of you, and if you’d told me to stop—which I gave you ample opportunity to do—I would have.”
“No, you didn’t take advantage of me,” she acquiesced. “Any stupidity was entirely my own.”
“Careful, sweetheart. If you keep flattering me like that, my head might get too big to fit through the door when we try to step off this elevator.”
Her brows met in a scowl and he got the distinct feeling she was resisting the urge to stick her tongue out at him, which almost made him laugh.
“So we’ll go back to our original setup,” he continued. “Sex-free knitting lessons. It won’t be nearly as interesting, but I can deal with it if you can.”
The elevator doors slid open and he stepped out of the car, taking a few strides toward the front entrance of the apartment building before he realized Ronnie wasn’t with him. Glancing back, he found her still standing inside the elevator, staring at him with a rather pale, blank look.
Retracing his steps, he asked, “What’s wrong?”
Shaking her head, she seemed to snap out of whatever daze had held her frozen. She marched past him and out the double glass doors, and he was forced to hustle to catch up to her.
Honest to God, this woman could teach classes on keeping a man on his toes. He couldn’t remember ever trailing after, sniffing after, or lolling after another woman the way he had Ronnie just this morning. And if anyone had told him he’d be acting this way without receiving a full frontal lobotomy first, he’d have laughed them off the planet.
“I think it would be better if we stopped the knitting lessons, too.”
“Why?”
They were making their way rapidly along the sidewalk to one of the apartment building’s two small parking areas. He didn’t have the heart to tell her they were heading in the wrong direction. Or maybe he was simply enjoying her snit too much, and was willing to walk a few extra yards if it meant observing the stick-up-her-butt mood awhile longer.
“Because it doesn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense before, but now that we . . .”
“Took the last train to Fucksville?” he supplied.
Her brow rose at his choice of words, even though she’d been the one yelling “All aboard!” last night.
“I think it would be better if we went back to avoiding each other as much as possible. You’re certainly capable of losing your latest challenge all on your own.”
“Oh-ho!” he chuckled. “Nice one. But with or withou
t you, I’m not going to fail.”
They’d reached the parking lot and stopped walking. Not beside any vehicle in particular, just stopped and were standing there. Dylan suspected Ronnie was trying to be inconspicuous while she scanned the lot for her car.
“Know what I think? I think you want to stop with the knitting lessons because you’re afraid you won’t be able to control yourself around me anymore. You’ll be sitting there, watching me wrap my yarn around that long metal needle, and you’ll get so hot, you’ll jump my sexy bones.”
Her head whipped around, and if eyes could be fitted with laser beams, he’d have been a crispy critter smoldering on the blacktop.
“You really are mentally unstable, do you know that?”
“Chicken.”
“I’m not a chicken. I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said, her tone growing sharper. Then she cast a disparaging glance up and down his tall frame. “And I would not be even remotely tempted to jump your bones, believe me.”
This was what he loved about Ronnie. This was the relationship he was used to, what made his blood pump harder and brought all of his competitive instincts to the fore.
“Wanna bet?” His two favorite words, and the question he knew Ronnie wouldn’t be able to resist.
“Are you saying I can’t get through an evening in your presence without introducing sex to the mix?” Her eyes had narrowed, her mouth thinned into a stiff line.
It took all of his strength not to grin at her response. “That’s what I’m saying. And the only way to prove me wrong is to continue with the private knitting lessons.”
He lowered his voice to a near whisper and leaned close enough for his breath to stir her glossy brown hair. “The two of us, all alone in your apartment. My irresistible sex appeal. It will be too much for you to handle. You’ll fold like an origami swan.”
She pulled back, glaring at him, a dusting of pink tingeing her high cheekbones. “You’re a jackass, Stone,” she told him tartly. “And I hate to bruise your ego, but you’re not the least bit irresistible. You’re undoubtedly resistible. So come on over. I’ll teach you to knit and manage to keep my clothes on the whole time.”
Now he did grin like an idiot. “We’ll see. In the meantime, I have some bad news for you.”
“What now?” she asked, sounding exhausted already at only ten in the morning.
“Your car isn’t here. It’s still at The Penalty Box. If you want to get to work anytime soon, I’ll have to drive you—either to the Sentinel offices or the Box, it’s up to you.”
“You’re both traitors,” Ronnie told her friends, her needles clacking together angrily. The madder she was, the faster she knit, and right now she was about twenty degrees past thoroughly pissed off.
The three of them were seated in the living room of Charlotte’s hundred-year-old farmhouse. Grace and Jenna were perched on an ancient red brocade and mahogany settee, faded and frayed with wear. Ronnie sat away from them in a mismatched hunter-green, wing-back armchair. She was in no mood to sit shoulder-to-shoulder and be all buddy-buddy with the other two, not when they’d proven themselves to be the least trustworthy friends on the planet.
She’d been in no mood for a knitting session at all, really, but when she’d called Grace to read her the riot act, her friend had informed her that they were all needed at Charlotte’s house to knit like the wind and fill an order for twenty dishcloths that had been placed through the older woman’s craft booth.
Normally, Ronnie would have been happy to help. Normally, knitting relaxed her. But today she felt brittle enough to snap, and she was actually afraid that if she didn’t get her temper under control, she might very well break the size seven metal needles clutched between her fingers.
“Oh, what are you complaining about?” Grace retorted. “You should be thanking us for providing you with the opportunity to have a dozen orgasms in the same night. My God, do you know how amazing that is? Even Zack has never accomplished that, and he’s like the Energizer Bunny in the sack. That man just goes and goes and goes.”
The slightly glassy-eyed expression on Grace’s face and the breathy sigh that passed her lips did nothing to dispel Ronnie’s annoyance. After all, she was having her skull pounded into the headboard on a nightly basis by a man she loved and was engaged to marry, whereas Ronnie now had to live with the knowledge that she’d repeatedly boinked her worst enemy.
She wondered how long it would take him to throw that up in her face. To brag about it with his friends, to try to humiliate her or use it against her. If he hadn’t already.
It was enough to make a girl want to gouge her eyes out with a nice, sharp stick . . . or a nice, sharp knitting needle.
A noise from the kitchen reminded Ronnie that Charlotte was just a room away, and she made sure her voice was low enough not to be overheard when she responded.
“How many orgasms I had is irrelevant. I shouldn’t have had any, because you should have protected me from him. You should have driven me home instead of turning me over to him like some virgin sacrifice.”
Grace snorted. “Oh, honey, you’re no virgin.”
“Shut up,” Ronnie snapped. “You threw me to the wolves. Or in this case, wolf.”
“My, what big teeth you have,” Grace teased, her eyes bright with amusement. “My, what big hands you have. My, what a big dick you have. Bring that bad boy over here and take me like you mean it!”
At her side, Jenna laughed, then lifted her half-knitted, sun-yellow dishcloth in front of her face when Ronnie shot her a nasty glance. But while Jenna might have been the quietest of the three, she was by no means meek.
“So how big was it?” she asked, her green eyes sparkling mischievously, her needles only half hiding a devilish grin.
Narrowing her eyes, Ronnie refused to answer, so Grace answered for her.
“Big enough that she was walking funny when she arrived.”
Charlotte appeared then to hearty laughter and a fair share of oooohs and whoo-hoos from two-thirds of the room’s occupants. The other third was completely una-mused.
The older woman set a tray bearing teacups, a teapot, milk, sugar, and lemon wedges on the low coffee table in front of the settee before tugging at the hem of her brightly flowered polyester blouse and taking a seat directly across from Ronnie. Her big beehive poof of hair was as orange as ever, her lipstick thick and bubblegum pink even at eight o’clock at night.
“What’s so funny?” she wanted to know, leaning forward to pour tea into the delicate china cups.
“Ronnie’s mad at us for dumping her on Dylan Stone last night,” Jenna supplied. “She had a little too much to drink, and Dylan offered to drive her home.”
“That was awfully nice of him,” Charlotte said, passing Jenna one of the cups, then lifting the milk, sugar, and lemon to silently question which she might like to add to her tea.
“That’s what we thought,” Jenna agreed.
“Once they got there, though,” Grace said, “they spent the night doing the wild thing.”
Charlotte’s thin, brown, stenciled-on brows—which were a startling contrast to her Lucille Ball, carrot-red ’do—drew up in confusion. “What’s the wild thing?”
The three younger women exchanged glances before Grace said, “They slept together.”
“Well, they didn’t exactly sleep. At least not much,” Jenna teased.
“They went at it like a couple of horny howler monkeys.”
Ronnie cast a dirty look in Grace’s direction. “Thanks for the vivid imagery.”
“You’re welcome,” Grace beamed.
“My goodness,” Charlotte said. “A lot certainly has happened in a short amount of time. I’m so glad you girls came over so I didn’t have to wait until next week’s meeting to hear about it.”
“Yeah, none of us want to wait a whole week to hear the juicy details,” Grace added sweetly. “So come on, Ronnie, spill. Was Dylan as sexy-hot naked as you’d expect given how good he loo
ks in a pair of jeans?”
Ronnie cocked a brow at her too-curious friend. “What are you doing checking out how another man fills out his Levi’s? Wouldn’t Zack be annoyed if he found out?”
Given her current state of mind, Ronnie would be only too happy to rat out Grace to her fiancé. It would serve Grace right for getting her into this mess in the first place, and at the very least, it would draw the woman’s attention away from Ronnie’s fucked-up relationship with Dylan and onto her own.
Granted, Grace and Zack’s relationship seemed to be functional and normal and healthy, and would probably last forever. Damn them.
“Zack knows that I occasionally check out other men’s butts and packages. The same way he checks out other women’s boobs. We may not be able to order, but we can still look at the menu,” she said, voice cheeky, nose pointed slightly in the air.
It was all Ronnie could do not to stick her tongue out at her impertinent friend.
“Come on,” Jenna wheedled. “We’ve all been dying of curiosity where Dylan is concerned. Zack and Gage are no mystery; Grace and I have been involved with them, so we’ve discussed them ad nauseam over the years. You and Dylan were the only unattached members of our little group, but now that you’ve hooked up, we want the scoop.”
“You can’t tell me you tried to picture Dylan naked,” Ronnie challenged, astonished by the very thought. She wouldn’t have expected something so impish of her friend. Especially when, for the majority of the time Jenna had known Dylan, she’d been a semi-happily married woman.
Without a hint of self-consciousness, Jenna replied, “Of course. Didn’t you?”
Strangling on her own breath, Ronnie found herself unable to answer. Because the truth was, she had pictured him naked. Many, many, many, many, many, many times since she’d first met him.
She wasn’t proud of it, but she’d certainly done it, and she suspected every warm-blooded American woman who’d ever come within ten yards of him had, too.
Now, though, she didn’t have to use her imagination or fantasize the perfect physique beneath those soft, worn jeans and comfortable buttondown shirts. She knew.
