Burning Up

by Susan Andersen

  Exhaling quietly, she tossed her cone in the sink and rounded the table, not even slowing when he rose to his feet. Coming to a halt a scant foot away, she thrust her chin up at him, getting as close to in his-face as she could manage, given the disparity in their heights.

  His big shoulders blocked the moonlight filtering through the window over the sink, but enough illumination remained to make out the thick brows bunched together, the proud thrust of nose and chin and the full curve of his lower lip. A wall of heat pumped off his supersize body and, resisting the urge to lick her lips, she raised her brows at him.

  “You sure seem interested in my sex life,” she said. Her voice came out huskier than she’d intended but she refrained from clearing her throat. “Why is that, I wonder? Not getting any yourself these days?”

  Okay, probably not her brightest move to introduce that topic. ’Cause nothing like handing him the perfect opportunity to regale her with his sexual exploits—which she didn’t doubt for a second were a gazillion times more interesting than hers would ever be. Not that she cared that his experience outstripped her own.

  Really, she didn’t. Still, as much as she disliked admitting it, she did not want to hear the details of what he did with Grace.

  And to her surprised relief, he refrained from supplying them. Instead, he leaned down until his big Roman nose practically mashed her own and growled, “I warned you about playing your games with me, O’James. But you just won’t listen, will you? Because this—” his hands sketched the outline of her body, which was maybe a little closer to his than it ought to be “—looks like an offer to me.”

  She knew she was playing with fire. Her heartbeat pounded in her throat, her fingertips, her nipples and between her—well, everywhere. But although it didn’t take a genius to guess where this would lead if she didn’t throttle back on the attitude and beat feet while the getting was good, she didn’t back up so much as an inch. “Yet I’m not the one who brought up my sex life. I was minding my own business, having a civilized conversation about the fire you went out on tonight, when you started making comments about my sleepwear.”

  She could feel his gaze like a touch, minutely inspecting her tank and boy shorts. And clearly her eyes had adjusted to the shadow he cast, for she saw a muscle tic in his jaw. “What little there is of it.”

  Bent out of shape at the unfairness of his attack, she slapped her hands on his chest and shoved. Hard.

  He arched back a little from the waist, but otherwise didn’t budge.

  That made her angrier yet and she shoved again—with identical results. “It’s the middle of the damn night and I thought I’d have the kitchen to myself. Not to mention you’d see more goods at the town pool! But hey. If I’d known Prudezilla was going to be in the kitchen waiting to sit in judgment of my sleeping duds I would have swaddled myself from neck to toes.”

  “Prudezil—?” Dark brows snapping together, he towered over her, and this time it was she who leaned back. “You think I’m—?”

  “Prim. Proper. Pedantic.” She loved seeing the insulted outrage on his face. Not so much fun when the label’s on you, is it, Bub? “Pris-sy,” she added for good measure and shrugged. “What can I say, big boy? If the strait lace fits…”

  “Prissy?” His eyes went dangerous and she knew she’d gone too far. When was she going to learn to quit doing that? Hastily, she took a step back.

  But Gabe obviously had other ideas, for whipping an arm around her waist, he yanked her flush with his body and thrust his big mitt into her hair, hard fingers tangling in the strands as he scowled into her eyes. “I’ll show you prissy!” he growled.

  And stamped his mouth over hers.

  It took merely that for her to ignite—and the flash point was blinding. Or maybe that was simply her eyelids dropping like a curtain the instant his mouth claimed hers. Because, oh. God. That mouth.

  It was hot. Full-lipped yet firm. And knew exactly what it was doing. It opened over hers. Applied pressure. Rubbed. Sipped.

  Sucked.

  And when that didn’t immediately garner the reaction he was looking for, he raised his head and growled, “Open up.” Then returned to his task, concentrating on tantalizing first her upper lip, then her lower lip. Then her entire mouth. Demonstrating conclusively why she should obey his command.

  She opened up.

  A satisfied sound rumbled in his throat. Releasing his grip in her hair, he slid his hand around to cup her face. Thumb stroking fire along her cheekbone, he held her softly, almost tenderly. But his kiss was hard, his tongue stealing in to stake dominion over hers in no uncertain terms.

  Hooking her fingers through his Hanes’s armhole and U-neck openings, she rose up onto her toes, applying some dominion-wannabe action of her own. The silky fan of hair over the hard plane of his chest brushed the backs of her fingers, and releasing her grip on his undershirt she wrapped her arms around his neck. Her breasts flattened against the solid wall of his chest.

  The sheer heat of him felt as though it should melt the clothes right from her body, and she made a needy sound.

  He ripped his mouth free. “Shit,” he whispered, then cocked his head and came at her from a different angle. His kisses grew hotter, deeper, wetter, driving her head back. Leaning into her, he arched her over his supporting arm. Then he suddenly removed the hand lightly grasping her face and used that arm to sweep his pie plate aside. And still kissing her, he lowered her to the table. Easing atop her, he propped himself up on one elbow to keep from crushing her.

  With a deep-throated groan, he raised his mouth from hers and pressed openmouthed, suctioning kisses down her throat. His hand lifted the hem of her tank and slid beneath.

  “Oh,” she sighed as his fingers burned a path up her diaphragm. Callused fingertips pressed the underside of her breast and she arched, wanting closer, rougher handling.

  He obliged her, smoothing his hand up to cup her breast and give it a firm squeeze. Catching her nipple between his thumb and the side of his index finger, he compressed it and tugged.

  “Oh, God, Gabriel!” Her chin tipping ceilingward, she arched until only her hips and the back of her head remained on the scarred wooden surface.

  He suddenly went very still above her. Then his mouth abruptly lifted from her neck, his hand slid out from under her tank top and he pushed back, climbing to his feet.

  Leaving her to collapse back onto the table, feeling suddenly cold and exposed. Pushing up onto her elbows, she blinked up at him. “Gabe?”

  He pulled his gaze from her tank front, his face expressionless when he met her eyes. “This never happened,” he said definitely. His eyes narrowed. “You get me?”

  She flinched, his words a sharp slap to the face.

  Then anger blazed through her. Anger at him for making her want him, then acting as if wanting her back was somehow beneath him or something to be ashamed of. Anger at herself for letting down her guard, for trusting him enough to allow things to get to this point. She might have been willing to keep quiet about such behavior from the horde of stud wannabes during her high school years. But that was ten years ago, and her tolerance was all used up.

  She raised her chin. “Do I get you? As much as I can get anyone who would start something like this only to suddenly change his mind mid…whatever. If you were a woman there’d be a name for you.” She sat up and scooted off the table.

  She looked Gabriel in the eye. “But don’t worry, Donovan. It’s not something I’m anxious to spread around, myself, and you’re dead right, bud. This never happened. And you can be damn sure it will never happen again.”

  And beating him to the punch, she turned and walked out on him before he could on her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THWACK!

  Thwack!

  Thwack-thwack-thwack!

  The report of Gabe’s nail gun echoed in the clearing surrounding his starting-to-come-together house as he framed in the mudroom addition he’d just decided he needed to add to
the back. By rights he should be working on drywall inside, as the last-minute addition to the already framed and shingled construction could easily wait. But taping and mudding took precision. And God knew with the shitload of aggression needing to be worked out of his system, he was in no mood for taking that kind of care.

  The way he felt at the moment, in fact, he’d just as soon take a sledgehammer to the drywall he’d spent the past couple of weeks screwing in place. So, yeah. He was definitely better off outdoors getting a start on the enclosed back porch. He should have included it in his plans in the first place.

  “Don’t worry, Donovan. It’s not something I’m anxious to spread around, myself.”

  Thwack!

  Thwack!

  Then his finger stilled on the trigger. Because her lips had been swollen and reddened from his kisses, her hair mussed from his hands when she’d said that.

  From the goddamn kisses and hands he should have kept to himself.

  “You’re dead right, bud. This never happened. And you can be damn sure it will never happen again.”

  He set the nail gun down before he could hurl it across the clearing. Which made zero frigging sense. Because that what-happened-between-them-never-happening-again shit? Hell, that was a good thing. A gooood thing.

  So why did it make him feel like howling every time her edict replayed itself in his head?

  Tires crunched in the gravel drive, and Gabe rubbed the incipient headache growing between his eyes. Great. Company. That’s what was missing in this fucked-up afternoon after his sleep-deprived, fucked-up night.

  But some of the tension went out of his shoulders when he saw it was Johnny Angelini. For a minute there…

  No. Straightening, he set down the nail gun and reached for the shirt he’d tossed over a nearby sawhorse. Of course he hadn’t thought it was Macy. Having her show up on his doorstep would not only be unwelcome; it’d be pretty damn improbable. He’d seen the way she’d recoiled from his less-than-smooth handling when he’d jerked to an awareness of what he was doing—and with whom—last night. The wounded look that had flashed across her face was yet another thing that kept popping up, unbidden, to play and replay itself in his mind.

  So no, he hadn’t expected her. But he had half feared to see one of the guys from his unit. Not that he didn’t enjoy their company. But he wasn’t in the mood today for the slight gulf forever between them—a result, no doubt, of him being their boss.

  Johnny pulled his cruiser to a stop, shut it down and climbed out. “Hey,” he said with an easy smile. “Sounded like a war was being waged back here…if everyone was armed with pussy-boy twenty-twos.”

  “I beg to differ, bro—that would be my finishing gun. This one sounds more like a Remington hunting rifle.” But he had to swallow a snort. Because like he would know—he’d never been hunting in his life. Still, flinging the bull with Johnny made him feel as if he just might get through the day without doing something stupid after all, a first since watching Macy storm out of the kitchen a dozen or so hours ago.

  He was wondering which would be stupider: picking a fight with someone so he could throw just one satisfying punch or going sniffing around O’James’s door again, when Johnny broke into his internal debate.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” The deputy stared up at the scabbed-on framing. “I thought you were done with the exterior.”

  “I decided I needed a mudroom and it’s too nice to be working inside anyhow.” The rationale slipped off his tongue easy as butter from a hot knife.

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to include it in the plans to begin with?”

  “Hell, yeah, it would.” His shoulders twitched in a shrug. “But I’ve never lived in a house before. I’m learning what I need as I go along.”

  Johnny, who’d been lowering his butt onto the other sawhorse, paused mid-sitting. Then he sat the rest of the way down. “You kiddin’ me—you’ve never lived in a house? Having been raised in the same farmhouse until I was—I don’t know—twenty-two, twenty-three, I find that hard to visualize.”

  “Growing up, it was just me and my old lady and we lived in apartments, duplexes, in a trailer or two and, once, in a Quonset hut. But no houses.” He gave the equivalent of a facial shrug. “So this is all new to me.”

  The deputy scratched his lower lip with the edge of his thumbnail. “I’ve never heard you talk about your family. Your mom all you got?”

  A sour laugh escaped him. “I don’t have anyone.” Not wired to open a vein in order to satisfy someone else’s jones for blood and thinking he’d said too much, he reached for the nail gun once again.

  And yet…

  His hand came away empty, and he glanced at Johnny. “Mom was a party girl,” he heard himself say impassively. “When I was fourteen and starting to gain my current height, she decided I was cramping her style. So she turned me over to the system.”

  Johnny jerked upright. “She dumped a fourteen-year-old kid, her own son, in the—” His eyes, usually filled with humor, went hard and flat. His voice dispassionate, he said with quiet conviction, “That goddamn. Son of a fucking. Bitch.”

  “I see you’ve met my mom.” Amazingly, having his friend know the truth—that his own mother had cared more for her good times than she had for him—didn’t make Gabe feel like the loser he’d always assumed it would to have his private intel become general knowledge. Instead, Johnny’s unemotional yet unequivocal condemnation of Heather Donovan’s actions soothed something he hadn’t even realized still pinched deep in his soul.

  Swiveling to lie on his side along the length of the sawhorse, Johnny bent his elbow, propped his head in his hand and studied Gabe. “Did you at least land in a good home?”

  “I was in a couple that probably would’ve been pretty decent if I hadn’t been too enraged to let anyone close enough to help me. I got in so many fights between fourteen and sixteen that I finally landed in the Creighton Boys’ Home, which was basically an institution for incorrigibles.”

  “Damn, dude.”

  He laughed. “It actually turned out to be the best place for me. I met a counselor there who helped me with my anger-management issues.”

  His friend raised an eyebrow. “I have a hard time picturing you with those.”

  “Oh, trust me. I was one angry kid.” And he needed to pull himself out of this current wrath-on he had going and shape up fast, because damned if he intended to go back to those out-of-control days. Not to the fury or the joyless fucking.

  Okay, he had a feeling he would’ve gotten a helluva lot of joy out of fucking Macy, but—

  No. Dammit, everything was all screwed up—and all because he couldn’t keep his hands, his mouth, off of her. He’d had such a great thing going with Grace, had felt so mellow and easy with her, and—

  Shit. He was going to have to break things off with Grace. That was the last thing he wanted, but a man didn’t string a woman along when he was spending half his time jonesing for someone else. Not that he didn’t plan to quit doing that, pronto. But he couldn’t ignore the fact that even before Macy had come along, he hadn’t felt more than a random, easily ignored urge to take matters with Grace to the next level. So yeah, it wasn’t fair to either of them—and he needed to break it off.

  He tried to put aside the matter of how the hell he was going to do that as he shot the breeze with Johnny. But the instant his friend climbed back in his cruiser to get back to his rounds, his mind returned to the problem.

  Maybe Grace wouldn’t be surprised. He hadn’t made much effort to push the sexual envelope with her, and she was sweet and gentle and probably didn’t care all that much about sex anyway.

  Still. He’d never given her an indication that there was even a problem, so it was going to hit her out of the blue. He hated the thought of hurting her—or, oh, crap—maybe even breaking her heart.

  Thwack! Thwack! Thwack-thwack-thwack!

  Jesus, women were a lot of work.

  “MEN ARE ONE BIG, f
reaking mystery,” Grace said over the clack of pool balls at the Red Dog three nights later.

  Looking up from digging through her purse for her lipstick to see Ty’s teacher owlishly regarding her, Janna and Shannon, Macy sternly admonished herself not to jump all over the other woman’s remark. This stupid craving she had for Gabriel had to stop. It was so damn unhealthy—not to mention disloyal. She didn’t need to know every little word he’d said to Grace, whose—jeez—friend she was supposed to be.

  Locating the tube by feel, she pulled it out and rolled up the lipstick as she agreed with quiet fervor, “I’ll drink to that, sister.”

  Grace pitched her voice to be heard over k.d. lang’s full-throated lament purling out of the jukebox. “I don’t get guys at all half the time.” Then she pointed her glass of house white at Macy. “And before you all tell me my language in that last sentence was neither specific nor concrete for someone who purports to be a teacher, let me just say, I know.”

  Shannon scratched her red curls. “It wasn’t?” she asked at the same time Janna said, “Oh, yeah, that was the first thing I was going to mention.”

  Macy simply looked at the brunette, noting the loose smile and slight befuddlement in her eyes. “How many wines have you had there, Gracie?”

  “Two and a half.”

  “Cheap drunk, huh?”

  Grace nodded amicably. “Yes, I am. I guess I should probably switch to Perrier.” She blinked at the neon beer signs that provided most of the illumination in the dim, low-ceiling building. “Do you s’pose they even have Perrier here?”

  Shannon nodded. “Since they dropped their tavern status and became a bar, they have just about everything.”

  “Okay, good.” Setting down her wineglass, Grace planted her chin in her hand and regarded Macy. “I want to be you when I grow up.”

  Macy smiled, tickled. She could honestly say no one had ever said that to her before. “You do?”

  “Yes. You’re no Barbie doll. If Mattel made you, you’d be a kick-ass action figure. Now me—” She rolled her eyes and Macy reached out to keep her resulting wobble from tipping her off the side of her chair.