The Last First Kiss (Harlequin Special Edition)

by Ferrarella, Marie

  Because she had a very uneasy feeling that she might fall over and pass out if she didn’t get in more than a trickle of oxygen, Kara drew in a deep breath as covertly as possible. It helped.

  A little.

  Stealing a look at Dave to see if he was the least bit rattled, she felt the bitter bite of disappointment. And then she thought she saw a bead of sweat at his temple. Unless the man had suddenly come down with a fever—and even that could act in her favor—the bead of sweat meant that she had gotten to him.

  It seemed only fair since he had gotten to her. Big-time. Not that she was ever, ever going to admit that to him. Not even under penalty of death, she tacked on silently.

  If she did, she knew it would lead to her undoing because the man would take to crowing about it and he would be utterly insufferable. Even more than he was right now, Kara added.

  And then he completely blew her away by asking, “Want to test-drive another one, in case the first kiss was just a fluke?”

  He asked the question with no more emotion than if he were inquiring how she liked her eggs.

  What she didn’t realize was that he was trying his very best to sound as nonchalant as possible. In reality, he was anything but. So much so that he doubted if he was actually fooling her.

  She saw the uneasiness in his eyes. That trumped anything he had to say. It was at that moment that she knew she’d gotten to him.

  Lifting her face up to his, a grin played along her lips as another, stronger dose of anticipation—this time fueled by knowledge—raced through her.

  “I was always game for anything,” Kara reminded him, her eyes dancing.

  That she was, he recalled. But he hadn’t been, especially not back then. He’d played it safe.

  He didn’t want to play it safe now.

  Dave slipped his arms around her and drew her to him ever so carefully. “I remember,” he replied, his voice low, his mind already trying to figure out how to survive the turbulent ride looming ahead.

  Part of him was fervently hoping that the impact of that first kiss was, for some unknown reason, all in his imagination.

  Part of him was hoping it hadn’t been.

  Back away. Now! something in his head screamed, and maybe he would have, except for the fact that the smile on her lips was daring him. Silently issuing a challenge.

  God help him, he could never walk away from one of her challenges, even when he knew it was going to turn out badly for him. It was as if he was determined to prove something. Back then it was that he was at least as manly as she was, if not more. Now it was…

  It was…

  Hell, he didn’t know what it was or why he was doing this, only that he had to.

  He had no choice.

  It wasn’t a mistake, wasn’t a temporary foray into insanity, Kara thought as the impact of his mouth on hers hit her with the force of an exploding grenade. The next moment, she was lamenting the very same thing she’d just been glorying in. Because a tiny drop of common sense had returned and found her.

  Why, of all the times she’d been in this situation, anticipating a first kiss and being so sadly disappointed moments later when there was no magic, did she have to feel it now?

  Why this man of all men, for heaven’s sake?

  Maybe because secretly, I always had a crush on him. Maybe, all this time, I’ve known that was the case and tucked it away in my heart.

  Or maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.

  And the next moment, she didn’t know anything—except that this kiss was even better than the first one. That was something she would have said was utterly impossible—if she weren’t in the midst of experiencing it right now.

  Every fiber of her being was melting into a puddle at his feet.

  “Hey, you two, get a room!”

  The glib comment, coming out of nowhere and followed by a chuckle, made Kara’s heart slam against her rib cage as she all but leaped away from Dave.

  She was behaving like some inexperienced adolescent who was guilty of misconduct. Behaving like someone she didn’t know.

  A lot of that going around, Kara thought, upbraiding herself.

  She was extremely annoyed, though more with herself than with Dave. But he wasn’t blameless in this, she thought, upset.

  As her mental fog began to clear, Kara found herself looking up into the face of one of the party guests—a friend of Ryan’s father. If it wasn’t bad enough that he’d stumbled upon them in this compromising situation, the man was a priest to boot.

  Despite the situation—or maybe because of it—there was a genial expression on the man’s face.

  “Just so you know,” he told them, claiming the last car, located at the end of the block, “I’m available for impromptu weddings.” He punctuated his offer with a broad wink.

  “We’ll keep that in mind,” Dave replied a little stiffly.

  Now that was the Dave she remembered and knew, Kara thought. The one who acted as if he had a pointy stick strategically positioned where the sun didn’t shine. Not the one who brought her blood up past the boiling point without even trying.

  Forcing a smile to her lips, Kara tried to look relaxed.

  “Nice to have met you, Father,” she said, referring to earlier at the party, hoping to get the focus off the present and the fact that he had found them hermetically sealed to one another.

  “Same here,” he told her, taking her hand in both of his and shaking it. There was a definite twinkle in his eyes, visible even in the limited light. “I look forward to seeing you again,” he added, then his eyes shifted to include Dave. “Both of you.”

  Dave had no choice but to nod. After all, the priest had just stumbled across them bringing new meaning to the term kissing.

  “See you around, Father Jack,” Dave said, hoping to urge the man along his way.

  “I can only hope.” Father Jack chuckled as he got into his vehicle and then closed the door.

  The moment mercifully interrupted, Dave did his best to view it as a last-minute reprieve. With that in mind, he shoved the incident behind him and out of sight.

  “C’mon,” he said to Kara gruffly, “I’ll take you home.”

  Home.

  Kara nodded, deciding it was best if she didn’t speak just yet. Everything inside of her was still trembling, and she wanted to wait until it calmed down a little before trying to form words that made sense.

  Because right now, she was feeling anything but sensible.

  If she had been, she wouldn’t have been hoping that by taking her “home” Dave had meant he intended to continue what had been so suddenly interrupted.

  Because she wanted to make love with him.

  She upbraided herself again. What the hell was wrong with her, anyway? This was Dave. Dave, who had been as squeamish as she had been reckless and brave, handling the slimy critters he wouldn’t pick up and then finding ways to torture him with them.

  Kara stared straight ahead into the night, concentrating on getting herself under control. Beside her, she heard Dave put his key into the ignition and assumed they would be on their way in a moment.

  The moment came and went, but they didn’t.

  She looked at him. His profile was rigid. Now what? “Something wrong?” she asked.

  Dave didn’t answer her. Instead, he turned his key again—and received the same exact results.

  Nothing.

  She heard him let out a long, deep, frustrated sigh. She waited for the obligatory curse words, but there were none. Impressed, she watched him in silence.

  He gave starting the car a third try, this time with his foot on the accelerator, pressing down hard. A horrible sound pierced the night air, but his attempt made no difference. The vehicle
wasn’t moving and had slipped into silence.

  Her first thought was that Dave had run out of gas, and she glanced at the dashboard just in case. But the gauge claimed that there was over three-quarters of a tank still available.

  Dave saw where she was looking and said with barely reined-in irritation, “No, I didn’t forget to put gas in.”

  “Never hurts to check,” she told him cheerfully. She unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Nowhere, apparently,” she commented, frowning at the front of his sports car. “Pop the hood.” Her instruction was accompanied by a hand gesture aimed upward.

  She was nothing if not animated, Dave thought. But instead of doing as she said, he started to get out of the car. Maybe he could help.

  “No.” The single word snapped out of her mouth, sounding far too much like an order to please him. “Stay inside the car,” she told him. “I need you to pop the hood and then turn the key for me.”

  Dave bristled. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, he thought, annoyed not so much with her as with his own lack of expertise when it came to things with engines and tires. He was the guy, damn it. He was supposed to be the one standing out there, issuing orders to her as he tried to diagnose what was wrong with the damn car. Their relationship was too new to be behaving like this.

  He bit off a couple of words, swallowing them instead. When it came to cars, he had never had either the time or the interest to learn what it was that made them tick.

  Or not tick.

  “Pop the hood,” she instructed again, looking at him expectantly. When he didn’t comply, she came back to the driver’s side and peered into the car. “What’s the matter? Why aren’t you popping the hood like I told you to?”

  He would, if he knew where the hood release was. The fact that he didn’t just served to make him feel even more inept. Ordinarily his lack of experience in these matters didn’t bother him, but it did this time. Because this was Kara.

  “Um…”

  Kara realized what the problem was. She moved closer to the driver’s side, opened the door and leaned in to feel around the area beneath and to the left of the steering wheel. Per force she had to brush up against his leg. When she made contact, she flashed him a grin.

  “I’m not getting fresh,” she told him innocently. “Your knee’s in the same area as the hood release.” Feeling around for the lever as Dave tried to shift his knee away from her, she finally located it. “Ah, here it is,” she declared with triumph.

  She pulled the lever, then returned to the front of the car, where she lifted and secured the hood.

  “Okay,” she called out. “Turn the key for me. Please.”

  He did, and this time he thought he heard what sounded like a slight cough coming from his engine. Praying that it had caught, Dave began to pump the pedal, giving the engine what he thought it needed: more gas.

  “Stop!” Kara cried. “You’ll flood the engine.” Peering around the side of the car, she asked him, “Do you have a flashlight in the glove compartment? I think I know the problem. If I’m right, we can be on the road in about fifteen minutes.”

  “Sounds good to me,” he said, his voice somewhat wooden. The moment was long gone. Just as well. He opened up his glove compartment and took out a small, sleek flashlight. Shifting, he leaned over in his seat and offered it to Kara.

  “Okay, let’s see if I can get us rolling,” she murmured, getting down to business.

  He knew he should be relieved, for a number of reasons, that they’d be parting ways soon.

  But he wasn’t.

  Chapter Eight

  “Where did you learn how to fix cars?”

  Dave’s question surprised her as it broke the silence that had filled the interior of his car. She had all but given up hope that he’d utter a single word before dropping her off at her apartment, and she’d be damned if she was going to be the first one to say anything. It wasn’t her fault that she knew how to fix cars and he didn’t. It wasn’t in her nature to play the helpless female when she wasn’t any such thing.

  “So you can talk.” Kara shifted in her seat to look at him. “I thought that maybe you’d suddenly been struck mute. To answer your question,” she continued, “my dad was a car enthusiast. He loved taking engines apart, restoring old cars. He was never happier than when he was fixing some kind of engine problem, getting it to run more efficiently,” she recalled fondly.

  It seemed like a million years ago now. Neil Calhoun had been gone for thirteen years, succumbing to the disease that had ravaged him the summer she turned seventeen. She still missed him like crazy. Especially whenever she tinkered with a car.

  “When my dad wasn’t at work, he was in the garage, working on a car. I wanted to spend time with him, so I pretended to be interested in cars.” Her mouth curved. “After a while, I didn’t have to pretend.”

  Dave wondered if she was aware of the irony of what she’d just said—that she’d gone through the motions of a pretense until it no longer was a pretense.

  Not wanting to get embroiled in a potential argument—he knew when he was outmatched—he decided not to bring it up. Instead, he focused on Kara’s initial glib comment regarding his silence.

  “I wasn’t struck mute,” Dave informed her grudgingly. “It’s just that…” His voice trailed off as he realized that there was no ego-saving way to finish his sentence.

  “Having me fix the car when you didn’t have a clue what was wrong made you feel less than a man?” Kara supplied.

  Dave was prepared to go one round with her, expecting some sarcastic comment about his manhood or lack thereof, but again, just like with the kiss and with Gary at the free clinic, she surprised him. This time by not trying to humiliate him the way she would have done when they were kids. Reluctantly, he nodded.

  “It shouldn’t have,” she said. He continued waiting for the punch line. There wasn’t any. “Lots of guys don’t know their way around a car. And everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. Yours is fixing people. Me, I can generally figure out what’s wrong with a car. In the grand scheme of things, yours is the more important skill.”

  For a second, he was tempted to ask to see some identification. This was not the Kara Calhoun he’d known. That one would have filleted him with her razor-sharp tongue before he could even think of a way to defend himself.

  Still not completely at ease, Dave did begin to relax just a little more. Enough to ask, “What’s your weakness?”

  The question caught her off guard. Kara blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “You just said that everyone’s got a weakness,” he reminded her. She had succeeded in arousing his curiosity. “So what’s yours?”

  “I should have said everybody but me.” She could feel him waiting for her to give a real answer. After a moment, she shrugged. Still looking out through the front windshield, she said, “I can’t cook.”

  “I can.” It would have been difficult, growing up in an Italian home, not picking up a few pointers. His mother, perhaps because he was an only child and she had no daughter to share things with, had made sure he knew all the basics when it came to finding his way around the kitchen.

  She heard him laugh shortly to himself. “What?”

  “Nothing.” But then he went on to say, “It’s just that I’d say we complement each other.”

  “Not without some severe arm twisting,” Kara countered. But her mouth was soft as she said it, giving way to a smile at the end.

  He spared her a look just as he made a right turn and approached her apartment complex. She’d changed, he thought. She had never smiled like that when she was younger. It was a warm, inviting smile. Made a man let his guard down.

  “
Maybe not so severe,” he commented.

  She wanted to deny his assumption, but she couldn’t manage to do it. Lost for a retort, she fell back on another shrug.

  “Anyway,” she began, shifting topics, “I think we pulled off the first leg of our plan pretty well. Both your mother and mine looked as if they bought into our fledgling romance.”

  For a moment back there, under the streetlamp, so had he. The power of suggestion was a dangerous, scary thing, Dave thought.

  “First leg,” he repeated, turning his car into her complex. He headed for guest parking. Kara really had put a lot of planning into this, he thought. “Are we talking about a two-legged creature, a four-legged one, an octopus or a centipede?”

  Knowing it was going to take more than just one more shot, she went with the second choice. “The four-legged kind,” she said.

  Okay, he supposed that sounded reasonable. He’d been worried that she’d want to go on with this charade for several months. “And the second leg is?”

  “Just letting our mothers see us out and about.” They were going to have to be noticeable, but not obvious, which was tricky. Too obvious and her mother would definitely see through the plan, ruining everything. Not obvious enough and what was the point? “I’ll see about coming up with a list of places and activities where one or both of the dynamic duo would be sure to see us.”

  “‘Dynamic duo’?” he repeated, confused. “What do Batman and Robin have to do with all this?”

  “Nothing.” She saw the confusion on his face. Kara sighed. “I forgot how literal you could be.”

  How the hell else was he supposed to take her comment? “And I forgot how you hardly ever made any sense.”

  “To you,” she emphasized. “Nobody else ever has trouble getting my meaning.”

  He highly doubted that. “Do you visit an alternate universe often?”

  “A joke.” Kara splayed her hand across her chest, as if to press back a heart attack brought on by shock. “Wow, maybe there is hope for you yet,” she said with an easy smile. “And for the record, the dynamic duo in this case refers to—”