Harlequin E Contemporary Romance Box Set Volume 3: Falling from the SkyMaid to LoveWhen the Lights Go DownStart Me Up

by Sarina Bowen

  Nick slid his fingers down her arm to tangle with hers and then lifted her hands to trap them against his chest, pulling her toward him. Her belly pressed against his hips, her thighs bumped into his. A flare of heat surged up from her belly until a fine flush of sweat hit her hairline. She licked her lips and inhaled, sucking the sharp citrus scent of him deep into her lungs.

  Her stomach rumbled again. When he laughed, she realized that he could hear it. She flushed again, but not in the sexy way.

  “Yeah, it’s definitely time to feed you.”

  She ignored the crowds on the sidewalk around them, the couples walking hand in hand just like them, the parents with kids they wished would settle down and stop running off, the cranky locals wishing tourists weren’t their bread and butter, all of the bodies brushing past them and the voices floating over them, to lift on the tips of her toes and run her mouth along the scratchy, unshaven plane of Nick’s cheek and back to the curve of his ear. She licked her lips and let the dampness of her lower lip drag against his skin as she mouthed a barely there kiss at the point of his sideburn. His hands, still holding hers against his muscled chest, squeezed tight for a second.

  “You’re right,” she whispered in his ear, leaning against him, her breasts pressed into his arms. “I’m so very hungry.”

  A groan vibrated through him, though she couldn’t hear it over the sidewalk chatter. She bumped her hips against his and felt him swelling hard in his jeans. She rubbed the V of her crotch against him, aiming for subtle teasing.

  She set her teeth against the soft lobe of his ear and bit. Just a little. When she sucked his lobe in between her lips, she hoped it looked as if she was telling secrets. The heat of the sun in a cloudless sky beat down on the top of her head and turned her bones to honey. “I need—” she dragged her lips back to his mouth, his breath hot on her skin “—a sandwich.”

  The puff of air from his laugh blew over her face. Nick bent down and snuffled at the side of her neck, making her squeal and then gasp when he set his teeth to her neck. She didn’t notice that he’d let go of her hands until they were at her waist, fingers tickling until she shrieked with laughter and danced away, running people off the sidewalk and not giving a damn.

  “Stop! Uncle!” She squeaked out the words between giggles as Nick stalked her. Backward jogging was not one of her many talents. “I surrender!”

  Bumping up against a forest-green mailbox that radiated heat, she brought her hands up to keep him at arms’ length.

  Which didn’t help when the guy tickling you had arms longer than yours, she discovered. She tried to fight dirty, grabbing at his waist with her own strong fingers.

  Damn the man. He wasn’t even ticklish.

  “You. Are. Trouble.” He punctuated each word with a threatening wiggle of fingers in her general direction.

  “I’m gonna pee!” She was weak from laughing by the time he took mercy on her and stopped. Slinging a heavy arm around her shoulder, he steered her down the sidewalk while she tried to recover her composure.

  “Now, you will stop it with the sexy talk,” he growled under his breath, smiling and nodding at the older couple they passed on their way into a French bakery. “If you want me to feed you, not fuck you, behave.”

  She yelped when his palm landed on her ass in a firm swat and stuck her tongue out at him while crossing her eyes.

  “Yes, yes.” He managed to keep a straight face. Barely. “I am aware that you have the restraint of a toddler. Now pick something or I’ll do it for you.”

  The handwritten menu options on the chalkboard wall behind the pastry cases were overwhelming. On days when she remembered to eat, she usually ended up with red beans and rice from the Jamaican food truck, or maybe a five-dollar footlong from Subway.

  Artisanal eleven-grain breads and honey-smoked ham, Greek-olive tapenade and buffalo mozzarella, not to mention sandwiches that went for almost fifteen dollars, were not a part of her daily routine.

  Nick pulled Izze sodas from the cooler and tried to override her selection of chips for her side dish, claiming she’d promised to try something healthy.

  “Are you crazy? Homemade chips! And you want me to get, what? Spiced chickpeas?” She pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. “Are you ill? Shall I get you something? Ooh, I know what’ll make you feel better.” She ripped the tip of her straw wrapper off and blew the rest of the wrapper at him with a puff of air. “Chips. For both of us, please,” she ordered from the sandwich maker.

  Open tables were scarce in the tiny, crowded bakery. Nick tilted his head toward the door and she followed, holding the cold, sweating bottles of fruit soda—one clementine and one blueberry. Nick lifted the bags with their sandwiches and two sides of chips high in the air to avoid a stream of screaming children chasing a puppy.

  At the end of the block, he turned off onto a side street and she followed him down a sidewalk dappled in shade from overhanging maple trees, immediately cooler now that she was out of the full-bore glare of the sun. She caught up and bumped him with her hip as they waited at the far corner of the block for a car to pass. They crossed the street to a small park.

  In the middle of the hidden retreat, a fountain sat in a circle of rough flagstones, a tiered pyramid of three smooth bronze bowls rising one above the other, water spilling over the rim of each bowl in a delicate trill of cool, trickling notes. Sunlight shone down on the bronze, warming it beneath the patina of turquoise.

  Staying well out of the glare of the sun, they copped a seat beneath the dense shade of a tree with glossy dark green leaves and small hard fruit just budding. If they were here again in the fall, the ground would probably be covered with tiny rotting apples, the smell of smashed fruit thick in the air.

  When she caught herself picturing the small park with its scattered trees turning ruby- and golden-leaved in the autumn, she shook herself back to the present. Taking her sandwich from Nick, she unwrapped it and took a too-big bite. As she wrestled to chew and keep her mouth shut at the same time, she lectured herself.

  Sternly.

  Get. A. Grip.

  She ducked her head and looked at Nick. He was leaning against the skinny trunk of the tree, long legs in jeans stretched out in front of him and bare ankles crossed, having kicked off his shoes, which he’d worn without socks. The jeans had a dark wash faded strategically at the hips and around the groin. His loose white button-down was untucked, the top couple of buttons left open. The sunglasses he’d pushed on top of his head probably cost half a month’s rent.

  This is not your forever guy, girlie. Don’t go making plans for the long road. Enjoy him while you can, but don’t think for one minute that this man sees himself walking down that long road with you. For now, sure. While the show runs maybe. But not for always.

  * * *

  He wasn’t about to admit it, but the homemade potato chips were delicious.

  The view he had while eating them, sneaking chips from Maxie’s lunch after he’d finished his own, was pretty delicious, too.

  She’d dropped her sandwich on the semi-flattened crumple of brown butcher’s paper in which it had been wrapped. The muscles in her throat worked strongly as she tilted her head back to swig some of her clementine soda. Setting the bottle carefully on the uneven ground, she leaned back on straight arms and dropped her head to stare up at the speckles of robin’s-egg-blue sky peeking through the dark green canopy above them.

  Within seconds, she lifted her head and started to roll it slowly to the right and then the left. “Ouch.”

  “C’mere.” Nick beckoned and then patted his thigh. “Lay down.”

  She hadn’t managed to settle into any kind of ease with him all day, and he noticed that she kept an eye on his face as she stretched awkwardly onto the ground, using his thigh as her pillow. Maybe it was the discomfort of being out of her element, combined with some lingering resentment over what had happened that morning. Nick wanted her to relax, to close her eyes and let it all go.
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br />   He hadn’t been entirely sure what it was people did in Lake Geneva when he’d proposed the weekend trip. It was just something people in his crowd talked about doing all the time. “We spent the weekend in Lake Geneva and it was lovely, darling.” Plus, he’d wanted to get Maxie away from the city. To distract her from the stress he could see in her posture, in her gaze, particularly since there was nothing more she could do to fix anything right now.

  Taking off for a spontaneous weekend getaway was unlike him, but Nick was willing to give it a go. Because he knew at least one thing for sure.

  He wanted to enjoy this day and this woman.

  And it was even more charming than he’d imagined it, Maxie lying stretched out in the shade, eyes closed as he ran his fingers through her hair. Or tried to. Even though it had been pulled back in the car, the highway wind had tied it into knots. At the first tug of his fingers against a knot, Maxie started to sit up, reaching for her bag, but he pressed his palm to her shoulder and eased her back down.

  “C’mon. Let me play.” He threaded his fingers through her hair, slowly teasing the strands apart and then smoothing them to the side as they unknotted.

  Tension seemed to slip out of Maxie’s entire body as he played with her hair and Nick wondered if he was seeing her truly relax for the first time since they’d met. When he reached across her face to tuck her hair behind her ear, she blinked up at him, as if waking from an unintentional nap.

  Nick dropped his hand to rest on her clavicle, his thumb stroking that delicate bone. She grabbed his wrist and lifted his arm.

  “I haven’t thought about the show for,” she looked at the watch on his wrist, “almost two whole hours now.” She pulled his hand down until it rested on her belly and he felt her muscles tighten under his palm. “Thanks for that.”

  He rubbed a small circle on her stomach and looked away from her face. Some things were easier to admit when you weren’t looking in a person’s eyes.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute. This was one of the things he liked best about her: he could always tell when she was thinking about what she was going to say next because she wanted to get it right.

  “Me neither. I was pretty pissed at you,” she admitted at last.

  He looked down at her, a brief grin flashing across his mouth.

  “I could tell.” Then he stopped smiling as he felt his way past the conversational landmines that always peppered their work conversations. He wondered if she’d knock his hand away if he pushed her again about the potential risk to the show. “You know I have to think about how this stuff affects my mother.” He didn’t add that he’d thought talking through every last detail would relieve some of her stress, too.

  He already knew that Maxie wasn’t a big fan of that kind of micromanaging.

  What little he’d said about their argument had already sucked some of the languor from her limbs. But after a moment, she inhaled deeply, belly rising under his palm, and then exhaled, as if forcing herself to let the tension go. She grabbed at his hand, lacing their fingers together before bringing the tangle of hands to her lips. Pressing a soft kiss to their overlapping thumbs, she sighed and closed her eyes. Then she brought their hands back down to rest on her belly once more before opening her eyes and looking up at him.

  “I know. But you need to know that grilling me across the breakfast table when I don’t have any pants on is gonna piss me off every time.” He opened his mouth to say something, but Maxie shook her head. She wasn’t finished yet. “You want to talk business, we can talk business. But it seemed like you were trying to make me feel less than you. Next time, tell me to put some pants on first. Then I can go toe-to-toe with you.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, then arched a brow.

  She laughed. “Yes. It’s your turn now.”

  He smiled and the startled pleasure on her face made his heartbeat stutter. There was no denying how much he wanted this woman. He slid his hand from between hers to rub circles on her stomach again, fingers catching the edge of her T-shirt at her waist.

  “Fair enough. Next time I say, ‘Go get your pants,’ you’ll know what’s coming.” He brought his left hand to her brow, feathering fingertips along her hairline, pushing her hair off her face. “I’m sorry I made you feel like that. Because you’re not less than anyone.” Her eyes were almost black in the shade. He could have stared at her face, with its lightning fast reflection of her ever-changing moods, forever. For all her need to control, she was freer with herself than anyone he’d ever known. “Jesus, Maxie. You’re more than anyone I’ve ever known.”

  Her cheeks pinked and she pressed her lips together, but she couldn’t hide her struggle not to grin.

  “Damn straight.”

  Nick smiled. He squeezed the hand in her hair and gave her head a gentle shake. They looked at each other, pleased at the lessening of tension and the return of playfulness.

  “So, are we done being pissed?” he asked.

  Maxie paused again, as if peering deep into all her own personal, neurotic nooks and crannies, checking to see if she was still holding on to any lingering resentment. She must have liked what she found, because she smiled up at him and said, “Yes.”

  “Good.” She closed her eyes as he leaned down and pressed his lips lightly against her right eyelid and then her left. Her eyes stayed loosely shut, face relaxed as if he was the sun shining down on her, warming her skin.

  “Then you won’t mind if I do this.”

  She smiled as he switched from idly stroking her stomach to moving with purpose, her abs tightening. His pants grew tight as his dick hardened, but he ignored this discomfort, focusing on teasing, arousing, pleasing.

  He slid his hands past the hem of her shirt and back up underneath, her bare skin warm beneath his fingers. Maxie’s breath hitched. The smell of cool earth, damp from the last summer rain, was perceptible under her spicy warm scent. Nick’s fingers traced the low-rise waist of her jeans, stopping for a moment to toy with the button closure, making her hold her breath, before moving on to sweep over the bump of her hipbone.

  He wondered how much self-control it was taking her to hold still as he stroked her. She strangled a moan when he brushed his hand over her breast on his way up to frame her throat in a gentle grip. On his way back down, he stopped to unbutton her shirt halfway down to her navel and her hand moved to stop him.

  “Shh. No one’s around.” He kept his voice low, brushing a hand over her face, soothing her until she settled again, eyes still closed. The cooler air slipping over her newly exposed skin gave her goose bumps until he slipped his hand into the open V of her shirt and warmed her. Her deep inhale pressed her breast up into his palm. He slid his fingers between her bra and bare skin, cupping her breast, dragging his thumb back and forth over her nipple until she twisted her shoulders against the ground and arched her back, pushing her head into his thigh. The soft sounds she was making traveled straight to his dick, a tingling bolt of want and need that he felt in the fingertips brushing the tiny hairs and softness of her skin.

  They ought to go back to the hotel, he knew, but he wanted to stay there, smelling crushed grass and damp earth and Maxie, sunlight flickering through the shifting shade of the tree above them. He wondered if she felt a little edgy and turned on by the public display like he did. If her reaction was any indication, she was. He liked that she trusted him enough not to protest as his hands stroked her breasts, pinching her nipples gently until she threw her arms over her head and clasped her own fingers, as if to keep herself from grabbing his wrists, his hands. She was breathing hard, nearly vibrating under his touch.

  “God, how do you do that?” The words tore out of her throat as she shifted again and hissed when he scraped the blunt edges of his fingernails down her ribs. Four faint pink lines stretched from just under her breast to the waistband of her jeans. Her shirt was completely unbuttoned now, still draped over her chest.

>   “Do what?” He barely paid attention to his own words as he pushed against her hip, rocking her a little before stroking back to the other side of her waist. He slid the tips of his fingers under the waistband of her jeans.

  “Ahhh.” She lost her battle to stay silent. Each exhale was a release of tension and a vocalization of how sensitized her body was to his touch. When she inhaled again, her stomach pulled away from the front of her jeans. “Make me feel. So much.”

  With a soft laugh, he slid his hand right in the gap, skimming his fingers over the front of her panties to cup her between her legs. She’d soaked through her underwear, the thin lace wet under his fingertips. She pulled her knees up and braced the flats of her feet on the ground, spreading her thighs a little to give his hand room. Her raised knees blocked any view of what he was doing to her in this tiny, empty park in a quiet neighborhood and he was more than happy to take advantage of that fact.

  “Easy now.” He pressed against her, barely able to wiggle his fingers in the tight press of her jeans against her crotch. He squeezed one finger under the edge of her panties and slid it through her wet heat.

  Which was when Maxie apparently decided that it was time for some turnabout.

  She turned her head and rubbed her cheek against his thigh, warming the denim against his skin. Sliding up his leg, she moved higher until she was breathing right up against the hard length of him, her breath damp and hot, and he groaned at the surge of pleasure, letting his hand fall hard against the top of her head. She opened her mouth and gently bit the thick ridge in his jeans.

  “Fuuuuck.” The middle of the curse dragged slowly out of his throat. He tugged at her hair until she tilted her head back and looked up at him with a grin, her shirt hanging open and his hand still in her pants.

  He pulled her farther away from his crotch while she laughed and made a grab for him with one hand.

  “Stop. Now.” He bent down and attacked her mouth. Pulling his hand out of her pants to clasp her jaw, he held her in place as he opened her lips with his tongue and plunged into her mouth. Lifting her head off his thigh, she licked into the hot wet heat of his mouth and slid a hand up the back of his neck, pulling him closer to her.