Power Play

by Warren, Nancy

  “You know, the room’s working fine for me. I’m kind of used to the bed now. Don’t want to bother moving.” He glanced at the girl, realizing that he had no right to keep this information from Emily, who probably would see the situation in a much different light. “I’ll let Emily know, though, so she can move.”

  The woman shook her head over the stack of towels. “Don’t bother. I already asked her. She didn’t want to move, either.”

  Jonah couldn’t keep the grin from breaking out on his face. “She didn’t, huh?”

  “Nope.” The chambermaid might be young, but she wasn’t that young. She regarded him, raising one eyebrow. “Guess you guys are getting on okay after all.”

  He tossed his keys in the air and caught them with a musical jingle. “Guess so.”

  He ran into his room—their room—and whistled in time to the percussion coming from behind the curtain. So, Emily Saunders didn’t want to change rooms, huh? That was excellent news.

  The room seemed smaller now, with the cupboard crammed full of clothes and Emily’s suitcases back from wherever they’d taken them to be fumigated. There was a stack of lingerie sitting on top of the desk, and only the most resolute act of will prevented him from snooping through them. A man could tell a lot by the kind of underwear a woman chose. He liked what he could see from the pile of silk and lace. Suspected he’d like it even more when Emily was in the stuff. Or on her way out of it.

  His own clothes were neatly piled on the bed. He picked up his good jeans and, with Emily in mind, skipped his usual T-shirt for a crisply ironed navy blue dress shirt—crisply ironed only because somebody else was wielding the iron. Grabbing his bag, he dug into the side pocket where he’d stashed some condoms, already planning ahead to how and when he’d make his move.

  He glanced over at her bed, now so neatly made you could bounce a quarter off the cover. Regardless of the alluring stack of silk on the desk, he hoped she’d wear those flannel pajamas to bed tonight. He’d pictured himself peeling them slowly off her body more times than he wanted to admit. Yep, he’d definitely wait until she was in those flannel things before he made his move.

  He dropped the bag with a thunk, his whistle dying as if somebody had strangled it.

  Didn’t matter, he realized with a sinking sensation in his gut. He wouldn’t be making any moves on Emily. Not so long as they were sharing this room.

  He’d made her a promise. The words echoed as loudly in the room as the raindrops plopping into the half-filled buckets. He had promised her that so long as they shared this room he wouldn’t hit on her.

  He must have been out of his mind.

  Bending slowly, he replaced the condoms in his bag. Unless Emily found him so irresistible she couldn’t keep her hands off him, it looked as though he’d be in for another night of frustration.

  Maybe he should simply get himself a new room and save himself the aggravation. But he knew he wouldn’t do that.

  Jonah was a glass half-full kind of guy. And so long as he and Emily were sharing a room, he could hope.

  8

  “NOT KARAOKE.” Emily groaned the words. But the rest of the girls only giggled.

  “It’s Elk Crossing on a Thursday night. What else is there to do?” Kirsten Rempel asked.

  “See a movie? Give each other manis and pedis? Practice female bonding?”

  “It’s a stagette night,” Ramona argued. “A girl has certain expectations. If she doesn’t get drunk, hit on by a male stripper and end with embarrassing photos of herself plastered on Facebook, how will she know her girlfriends love her?”

  “Right?” Kirsten added.

  “Anyhow, it’s ladies’ night at Brandy’s. The drinks are half-price until eleven.”

  Of course, Em knew they’d planned the stagette party to coincide with Thursday night at Brandy’s. She’d been to enough weddings in Elk Crossing to know every bridal tradition—even the really tacky ones—but she’d sort of hoped now they were all getting older that they might act a little more grownup. Apparently that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Not in time for this wedding, anyway.

  “At least please tell me we’re not dressing up.”

  An evil chuckle answered her. “Not us, but wait till you see what we’ve got for Leanne.”

  THE PATERS CAME OFF THE ICE slowly. The match against the Gettysburg Grandpas had been grueling. Jonah had seriously considered carding the whole team. If these guys were grandpas they were the youngest damn grandparents he’d ever seen. This was an over-thirty league and if those boys had celebrated their big 3–0 it must have been awfully recent.

  Contrasted with the youth and vigor of the youngest grandpas in history, his team had seemed old and slow. But, as he’d reminded his team when they groaned their way off the ice between periods, with age comes wisdom. They’d pulled every bit of wisdom and a lot of determination out of their old bones, and sheer strategy had led to a tie game.

  Now they were going into sudden death overtime. He tried to ignore the throbbing in his thigh. His roommate had worked some kind of magic with her massage hands, and he was trying to keep up with the exercises she’d given him, but she’d warned him he needed to rest the pulled muscle. He could rest it next week, when he was home.

  He sucked back water and wiped the sweat off his face, then before he knew it they were back on the ice.

  His opponent won the puck during the face-off. But as he turned to decide where to send it, Jonah scooped it away and flipped the puck to Sadhu who passed it right away down the line to Kevin Lus, their leading scorer.

  Kev skated clean and true, hit hard and the puck sailed right by the astonished goalie. They’d won the game in less than two minutes of overtime.

  Jonah’s leg was throbbing, but he wasn’t in the mood to run back to the hotel room and ice the thing again. For one thing, he knew his enticing roomie was out at a stagette party, so he’d be all alone. Somehow the hotel room with the leaking roof wasn’t as much fun when he was flying solo.

  After a volley of good-natured and mostly rude comments shouted back and forth, the winners and losers decided to hit the town together. They showered and changed to their street clothes. Jonah concentrated on not limping.

  “Where should we go?” Sadhu asked.

  No one had a clue. The Bar None where they’d spent the previous night was voted down. The draft beer was bad and nobody felt like billiards again.

  “Kev should decide. He scored the winning goal.”

  “Hey, there’s the guy who drives the Zamboni. Let’s ask him.”

  Kevin and Sadhu, two of the only single guys on the team, conferred with the Zamboni driver and returned with huge smiles on their faces. “Excellent news, gentlemen. Tonight is ladies’ night at Brandy’s.” Sadhu ran one hand through his thick and lustrous black hair. “You know what that means.”

  They all groaned. But Sadhu only grinned.

  “More action for the Indian Stallion.”

  “Define ladies’ night,” Mitch said.

  Kevin wasn’t as much of a looker as Sadhu but he was an enthusiastic partier and rarely went home alone. “Drinks are half-price for the ladies tonight.” He rubbed his hands together. “Picture this. A bunch of drunk, horny women. Because there’re always male strippers on ladies’ night, right? We come in, the new guys from out of town. Fresh meat.” He chuckled. “Paradise.”

  “If there’re male strippers, I’m out of there,” complained Clark Rasmussen, one of the geezers. “Jonah?”

  Since he was team captain, they usually deferred to his opinion.

  Ladies’ night, huh? In a town this size? Where else would a bunch of girls take a bride for her stagette?

  “The strippers will be gone before they let the guys in. Brandy’s sounds like a good idea to me.”

  Kev slapped him on the back and the two teams headed over to Brandy’s, which turned out to be a standard cocktail lounge place that had last been updated around 1972. As they paid the six dollar cover
charge, Jonah could hear the beat of the music. In fact he could feel it through the soles of his boots. Normally he’d turn tail and run, but he couldn’t shake the idea that a bunch of girls having a stagette might end up at ladies’ night. In a town this size? Unless they’d organized something in somebody’s house, where else were they going to go?

  So, he trod down stairs carpeted in purple and red checks and entered a cavernous dimly lit space. Tables were scattered and while the crowd was predominantly female, and a quick glance showed that a bunch of them had taken full advantage of those half-price drinks, the guys were starting to show up.

  The hockey players scattered and the married guys found a table in the corner where Jonah knew they’d have a pitcher or two of beer delivered within five minutes. The eager single ones were busy scouting out the action. Jonah preferred to take his time before rushing into anything. He backed up and trod up a couple of stairs until he had a bird’s-eye view of the place.

  A stage was set up front and center with some speakers and other equipment, but nothing much was happening. A lone DJ type was bent over, fiddling. If male strippers formed part of ladies’ night, seemed like they were long gone.

  His gaze skimmed the crowd. Some of the women were young and single, obviously on the lookout for some action, and some of the groups appeared to be married women, maybe young moms enjoying a night out away from the responsibilities of home.

  And one group was a mixture of young and old, married and not, doing a lot of giggling. In the center of the crowd was an attractive young woman wearing a plastic tiara with a wad of white tulle attached to it, a pink feather boa around her neck, black miniskirt and fishnet stockings. To complete this demure outfit, somebody had attached a ridiculously overstuffed leopard-skin bra to the outside of her clothing. At a wild guess he thought she might be the bride-to-be. Then his gaze moved on and he forgot all about the gal in the tiara.

  Emily. There was something about her that caught his attention. Even among a crowd of tipsy, giggling party girls she came across as a class act. When her clothes had come from the local discount store she’d worn them as though Marc Jacobs had personally dressed her in clothing he’d designed with her in mind. But in her own clothes, she was stunning. Her dress was red. Sexy, seductive red that skimmed her body the way his hands longed to. Long, delicious legs ended in high-heeled strappy red sandals.

  As he watched her she moved, shifting from where she’d been standing to go talk to the bride. And as she did he realized it wasn’t the clothes at all that made her stand out. It was her. The shape of her and the way she moved. Like she and her body liked each other and got along.

  He stepped down and started to cross the floor to where she was when a commotion erupted behind him. “There they are!”

  And about six seriously inebriated young guys blew past him and headed to where he’d last seen Emily.

  He followed at his leisure. Heard a pretend horrified shriek. “This is a stagette, dude! What are you doing here?”

  “It’s also my stag. There’s nowhere else to go in this town on a Thursday night.” He watched a drunk young man dragging a plastic ball and chain take the tiara’d young woman in his arms and plant a sloppy wet one on her while copping a feel of her tissue-stuffed bra. “Let’s join up.”

  Jonah was thinking he’d head back to where the married hockey players were sitting, leave Emily be, when one of the stag crowd, older than the rest of the gang, with thinning hair, put a clumsy arm around her. His meaty paw no doubt leaving sweat marks on her red dress.

  Jonah was shocked at the visceral punch of annoyance spurting through him. The woman was merely sharing his room in a platonic fashion because of an unfortunate insect situation, and yet he felt as possessive as though they were having amazing sex every night in that room, as if she was his and anybody fool enough to put an arm around her better be prepared to step out in the back alley and swallow his own teeth.

  He quickly realized that part of his surge was a protective instinct. Her facial and body language couldn’t have been more clear. She didn’t want this clown mauling her.

  Which was perfect because Jonah didn’t want that clown mauling her, either.

  He straightened, rubbed his thigh quickly so he wouldn’t limp and stepped forward. Emily was pulling away from the beefy guy who was either too drunk or too clueless to realize she didn’t want his arm around her. Third Cousin Buddy, he presumed. Well, she’d used him as an excuse on the phone, she was now going to have the opportunity to use him as an excuse to ditch Buddy. In the flesh.

  As he approached, he watched Emily tug, with no noticeable effect. She said, “Excuse me,” and finally, with an exaggerated sigh, yanked herself free.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” Jonah said loudly. “Sorry I’m late.”

  As Emily caught sight of him her face broke out into a huge smile of relief. Anyone watching would think she was in love with him for sure. “Jonah. Am I happy to see you.”

  She wasn’t drunk, not even tipsy, but she’d had a drink or two. Her dark eyes sparkled and her arms came up as naturally as if she greeted him with a hug every time she saw him. It was the simplest thing in the world to pull this sexy woman in red against his chest and accept the invitation offered by her raised face.

  He kissed her luscious lips and found them full and soft and tasting faintly of some fruity girl drink. A Cosmopolitan, maybe.

  It was supposed to be a little friendly kiss, a signal to Buddy that she was taken, but then she made a crazy little sound in the back of her throat, a cross between a sigh and a purr, and the scent of her surrounded him and her body fit against his as if they were side-by-side puzzle pieces. Fuzzily, he wondered if maybe she’d had more to drink than he realized and whether he should do the gentlemanly thing and pull away, then her hair swung softly against the skin of his arms, he felt her body press to his and suddenly the little friendly kiss turned deep.

  And hot.

  And intense.

  Everything faded, the noise, the people, the banging beat of the music, and he felt as though there was nothing in the world but the two of them. The kiss deepened, she wound herself tighter against him, his hand reached up to touch her hair, his skin got hotter, her skin got hotter.

  “Where have you been hiding him?” a loud female voice asked, slurring the words slightly, and suddenly the world came crashing back.

  He pulled slowly away, looked into her eyes and saw they were big and amazed. She’d been as stunned by the kiss as he had. “Wow,” she whispered.

  He could pull away, but he couldn’t seem to let her go completely. He kept an arm around her waist, enjoying the feel of her, the long, lean muscles of her back shifting as she breathed.

  “What’s going on?” demanded the fellow who couldn’t keep his meaty paws to himself, the man he was certain was Cousin Buddy.

  “Everybody, this is Jonah,” Emily managed. She gave an embarrassed giggle. Then she blushed slightly, avoiding his eyes. “My boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend?” Buddy stared at him as though it were impossible. “But your aunt and uncle, your parents, all told me you were single.”

  “I was kind of keeping my relationship quiet.” She shrugged and he felt the bunch and stretch all the way down her back. “You know how the family can be.”

  Jonah might dress in Levi’s because that’s the brand of jeans he’d always worn and he liked the fit and could not see one single reason why he should advertise some designer’s name on his butt and pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege, but he’d also been trained to recognize a lot of brands. It was part of his work as a detective. So, in the few seconds he’d been in the vicinity, he’d cataloged and priced pretty much everything Cousin Buddy was flaunting. The wafer-thin gold watch was more exclusive and a lot pricier than a Rolex. His jeans, artfully faded and distressed, had cost him more hundreds of dollars than anything made out of denim should. His loafers were Italian, probably handmade, and his shirt was from Paris. His eyeglas
ses, which announced Dolce & Gabbana, weren’t knockoffs.

  The guy must make a damn good living straightening teeth. Jonah could think of a lot more useful things the man could do with all his money, like fund the overnight shelter for homeless kids in Portland that was near to closing its doors because of funding constraints, instead of plastering his fortune all over his back.

  Not that it was Buddy’s fault he was a clotheshorse, but it annoyed Jonah on principle to see money wasted on designer clothes that could be put to much better use.

  The instant dislike he felt for Cousin Buddy was obviously reciprocated. The pale blue eyes traveled up and down, calculating the value of his wardrobe probably as accurately as Jonah had tabulated his.

  Once the dentist had finished his mental tally his nostrils widened in disgust and a contemptuous expression settled over his features. “What exactly do you do, Jonah?” This was said in a “lord of the manor speaking to a peasant” tone that pissed Jonah off. He tightened his arm around Emily. Gave back the same belligerent stare.

  “I’m a cop.”

  The lordly attitude disappeared as though it had never appeared. The pale eyes widened and the dentist’s whole body stiffened, mouth pulling down at the edges. “How interesting.”

  He stuck a fake hearty grin on his face and backed away. “Have a good evening, you two.”

  And suddenly he was gone.

  Now what was that about? Some people had a phobia about police officers, but Buddy had acted more guilty than anything. Jonah suspected a drawerful of unpaid parking tickets.

  At least he’d got the guy to back off. Whatever the reason.

  Emily rested her head on his shoulder.

  “My knight in shining armor,” she cooed softly. “Let me buy you a drink.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  She shook her head. “I owe you. I’ve been drinking your beer in the room.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” He glanced around; everybody seemed to be drinking mixed drinks, but he’d long ago stopped trying to fit in with the crowd, if he ever had. “I’ll have a beer.”