He hesitated a moment, just at the top of her breast, where the skin was exquisitely sensitive. She sensed he was giving her a chance to call it off, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Her pride was involved. The game had turned into a battle of wills, and she needed to win. If anyone stopped, it would have to be him.
A gasp burned in her throat as he dipped lower, into the warmth between her breasts, into her cleavage. You bastard, she thought. This was outrageous! Her heart raced wildly, and her breasts strained against her bra. And yet she didn’t move a muscle. Or try to stop him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she said, barely getting the words out.
She could feel the heat of his stare even through his dark glasses. His nostrils flared slightly as he slipped his hand inside her blouse and cupped her breast.
“This,” he said. “How do you like it?”
Her skin flamed with shock and embarrassment. How did she like it? She wanted to break every one of his miserable fingers! She averted her eyes, unwilling to let him see her rising fury. He wanted her to react to him. If she moved or even blinked, he would win.
He wasn’t going to win, by God! She was. That had become her mission in the past ten seconds. No man was going to make her feel like a whimpering failure again.
Her concentration was so intensely focused on his hand that she could feel him searing her flesh through the silk of her bra. Her nipples became painfully engorged, her skin hypersensitive. She could feel every detail of his hand, the roughened texture of his palm, the heartbeat in his fingertips. It was throbbing everywhere, in her breasts, in her throat, in the uncontrollable quiver of her lower lip.
He ran his thumb over the tautness of her nipple. “For a private dancer,” he said softly, “you’re quick to arouse.”
Excitement clenched painfully in Bev’s stomach and streamed down her thighs, weakening her legs until she could hardly stand. Her whole body was a quivering mass of nerves. Look at what he was doing to her! Damn him to hell, she thought, anger flaring. She ought to bring up her knee and make a choirboy out of him.
The emotions colliding inside Bev made her act on a dangerous impulse. She didn’t bring up her knee, but she did do something that matched him move for move. She lifted the hand that was frozen at her side and placed it squarely on the button fly of his jeans.
His breath caught, and the sound gave Bev intense satisfaction. She pressed harder, and a thrill rolled up her arm that was as hot as hellfire.
“You’re pretty quick to arouse yourself,” she said.
He hissed one raw word through his teeth and grimaced in disbelief. “Wh-what the hell are you doing?”
Her fingers curved over the shape of him. “This,” she answered. Her heart pounded like crazy as she stared him straight in the Ray Bans. “How do you like it?”
“Lady, if you don’t get your hand off my pants, you’re going to find out how much I like it in about ten seconds.”
He wasn’t bluffing. All hell was breaking loose beneath the brass buttons of his jeans. But even if he’d been built like a bull elephant and buck naked, Bev wouldn’t have removed her hand at that moment.
“Lady, hands off!”
“I will if you will,” she countered breathlessly.
The released each other simultaneously and stepped back.
Bev was panting like a winded sprinter. He was breathing hard too, but he had a faint smile on his face that was as intrigued as it was bemused.
“Let’s dance,” he ordered under his breath.
“No thanks.”
He gripped her arm firmly and drew her with him onto the dance floor. “That wasn’t an invitation,” he said, stopping just long enough to pump some quarters into the jukebox before he took her into his arms. “I don’t want the whole damn bar to see the condition I’m in.”
Bev wanted nothing more to do with his condition, but she was as limp as a newborn kitten at that moment, and much too weak to object. She was exhausted just thinking about the way she’d groped a man she didn’t know.
The music started, a country-western song about cheatin’ husbands and cheatin’ hearts, and Bev fully expected to be dragged into a hammerlock of an embrace and to be plastered up against his body. He’d given her no reason to think he wasn’t the kind of man who danced with his hands all over a woman.
Instead, he held her at a respectable distance, just close enough for camouflage. At first Bev was more confused than relieved. Adrenaline was still coursing through her, and her imagination was conjuring up enough steamy images for an adult video. She was wildly overstimulated, and prepared for just about anything but a display of good manners.
They weren’t really dancing, just swaying slowly in time to the music, and she found herself wanting to look up at him, to search his scarred, darkly handsome face and ask him a million questions. Why was a man who terrorized headwaiters, a man who groped strange women and behaved as if life’s rules had been written for him to break, suddenly treating her as though this were their first date?
She didn’t ask the questions, however. She didn’t even look at him. Her head was still swimming with excitement, and she was afraid of what he might see in her eyes.
“I’m curious,” he said, his voice made even huskier by the faintest suggestion of masculine laughter. “Do you like it? Dancing, I mean.”
She started to nod, then realized he meant private dancing. “That depends ...”
“On what?”
“On who I’m dancing with.”
She heard his slow intake of air and wondered if she had her answer to his change in attitude. Was he still aroused too? And maybe a little shaken by the force of it? The thought sparked a shower of sensations that strained Bev’s already overworked nerves.
“I like this song,” she commented, unable to clear the telltale throatiness from her voice. The ice had long ago melted into a warm slush on the barroom floor.
“I like dancing to this song,” he said. “With you.”
His leg brushed hers and the accidental contact sent a shock wave of expectation through Bev’s entire body.
Suddenly she was aware of his hand at the slope of her spine, of its heat and subtle guiding pressure. Her senses heightened with every brush of their bodies. She inhaled deeply, trying to clear her head, and breathed in his scent, rich with aged leather and the tangy, yeasty fragrance of beer.
There was an undeniable thrill in being close to such a man, even if she was loathe to admit it. A woman—his woman—would never know what to expect.
Bev was also aware of the music that throbbed from the jukebox, romantic and a little sad. She was a sucker for sad love songs. They plucked at her heartstrings and forced her to acknowledge the sweetness that was missing from her life. The ordeal of her five-year marriage had eroded her confidence and chipped away at her sense of identity, until sometimes she wondered if she would ever feel like a whole woman again.
And yet now, with the melancholy ballad swirling around them, Bev could feel the faint yearnings of womanhood stirring. She’d almost forgotten what it was like to be in a man’s arms. It surprised her that the need to be close, to be touched by a man, was still there, still strong. She certainly didn’t want to be manhandled again, but for some crazy reason she did want to be held. She wanted to feel a man’s strength and sheltering warmth. Just for a moment.
She squeezed his hand without realizing she was doing it.
The answering pressure she felt startled her.
Their dancing slowed to a stop, although Bev’s heart began to race. He held her without moving, as though he were waiting for something. “Why won’t you look at me?” he asked.
Bev looked up instantly, knowing that any hesitation would put her at a disadvantage. She saw her own reflection in his dark glasses and felt hopelessly exposed. Could he see the fear lurking in her eyes? Could he see the fascination? Did he know that she was hypnotically drawn to what he represented? Thrills. Reckless thrills.
He knew. He could see it all, the fear, the erotic flashes of excitement. She was a woman primed for a night of dangerous love. She wanted that lacy blouse taken off her, even if she didn’t know it herself. He wasn’t sure what attracted him more, her obvious inexperience, or her need to disprove it. But he was attracted. Then again, maybe it was her eyes that had him hooked. A man could climb into those eyes and never find his way out. A man could forget he’d sworn off women like her.
He smiled and curved his hand to her hip, his fingers drifting over the sudden tension in her buttock. “I don’t know who you are,” he said, “or why you’re here, but I want to dance with you again. Now, privately.”
Two
“PRIVATELY?” bev said. “I guess you mean—”
He nodded slowly.
There was no doubt what he meant. So why was she nodding and smiling weakly when she should have been racking her brain for excuses? She felt as though she’d just hit a wall of sensuality head-on—and she wasn’t handling the collision any better than Elayne Greenaway had.
Now she understood what Mrs. Greenaway wanted with him. He was the kind of man who made a woman drunk with expectation. Erotic expectation. Everything about him, the leather jacket, the Ray Bans, even the scar that rode his jaw, spoke of smoldering encounters in the dark. Sexually speaking, he was a trapeze act without a net, far too great a risk for the Bev Brewsters of the world.
“Upstairs,” he said softly. “You and me, Lace.”
“Lace?”
He flicked the lacework on the collar of her blouse. All pretense of social dancing vanished as he encircled her waist and drew her against him, letting his hands glide toward her fanny. Bev gasped as she came into contact with his jeans again. Time had not improved his condition.
“Can I have a raincheck?” she said.
He stared into her eyes, a hot, penetrating stare. Or at least that was what she imagined. His glasses concealed everything but her own anxious expression.
“I have another appointment this afternoon,” she explained hastily. “How about later tonight? Nine o’clock?”
“Hold it. Let me get this straight. You want to meet me here later? At nine?”
“Yes ... that’s a wonderful idea,” she said as though he’d thought of it. “I could block out an entire hour. Or two, if you’d like more.”
“I’d not only like more”—his hands urged her closer, until she could feel every solid inch of the bulge he was trying to hide—“I’d like it now.”
Panic danced in the pit of Bev’s stomach. She had no chance against him physically, and there was no use calling for help. The hooligans hanging around were more disreputable than he was. Bev could see only one way out of the situation—give him what he wanted.
“Right now?” She pulled free of him to check her watch. “Very well.” The quick smile she produced said it was all in a day’s work, simply a matter of scheduling. “I’ve got seventeen and a half minutes. Will that be enough time?”
He frowned, the picture of wounded machismo. He was a man who’d just been grievously underestimated. “Seventeen minutes? I’d just be getting started.”
It was the reaction Bev had been counting on. She nodded sympathetically. “Oh, of course, how silly of me. Then why don’t we meet at nine, as I suggested? We’ll have plenty of time, all night if you want.”
He gazed down at her a moment longer, and then released her, a sexy grin surfacing. “You’re good.”
Bev felt another tug of excitement, which she assiduously ignored. She wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but she wasn’t crazy enough to start asking questions. She was free, and she was leaving.
“Nine, then?” With a breezy nod she backed off the dance floor, feeling a flash of regret as she turned away from his rampantly sensual smile and his glowing sunglasses. She consoled herself with the fact that she would never forget him standing there in all his roughneck glory, his arms folded, his hip cocked as he watched her make her escape.
By the time Bev reached her car, she was smiling too, and not only because she’d pulled off a brilliant getaway. Was it possible that the very ordinary Bev Brewster, recycling queen of the Valley, had actually had a sexy brute of a man eating out of her hand! In her mind he wasn’t Elayne Greenaway’s roughneck anymore, he was hers.
She pulled out into traffic, oblivious to the honks and threats of a passing cabbie. She was too jubilant to worry about defensive driving, or even to let herself dwell on the obvious: that he had let her go without even an argument. That it had all been far too easy.
Bev hadn’t lied about the appointment. She simply hadn’t mentioned that it was with her father, Harve Brewster, the private investigator of choice in exclusive Beverly Hills. The family agency, Brewster’s, was four generations old. Bev’s great-great-grandfather had opened the original one-man office on Wilshire at the turn of the century. It had taken every cent he could scrape together, and from those humble beginnings a tradition of unwavering competence and dependability had been built.
The agency had fallen on hard times recently, but it didn’t make Bev any less proud of what the Brewsters had achieved, especially her father. At fifty-seven, Harve hadn’t lost any of his uncanny ability to read between the lines of a tough case and to sense even the most minor perturbations in the logical order of things. Unfortunately, Bev hadn’t inherited her father’s analytical genius, but she was good with people, even Harve admitted that. She had a keen intuition going for her and a promising instinct for discerning hidden motives. A “BS detector,” her father called it.
As far back as she could remember, Bev had been fascinated by the intricacies of detective work, but Harve had always been reluctant to let her get involved. He wasn’t blind to her abilities, he was simply overprotective. She was his only daughter, and she’d never been able to convince him that she could handle the rigors of the business.
Then, just a year ago, the dominoes had begun to fall. Bev’s mother had died after a lingering illness, and even though both Bev and Harve had seen it coming, they were rocked by the loss. More recently, two of Brewster’s top investigators had defected to form their own agency. And just a month ago Harve had had his heart attack.
Sadly, it was the heart attack that had forced Harve’s hand. He had no choice but to let Bev help out at Brewster’s. Either that or lose the agency. Now he was convalescing from a triple bypass, stuck in a hospital bed, and ornery as hell. As Bev sat in his private room, giving him a rundown of the day’s events, her triumphant escape from the roughneck began to fade under Harve’s merciless scrutiny.
“Interesting,” Harve snorted as Bev finished her story. He had just tweaked a long, runaway strand from one of the heavy eyebrows that matched his graying hair, and he was pretending to examine the culprit. “And what did you say this guy’s name was?”
“I didn’t say ... actually, I didn’t get his name.”
“Didn’t get his name? What about his license plate number?”
“I didn’t get that either.” Bev’s voice slid into a monotone as she began to realize that she’d fluffed a golden opportunity. She didn’t know a damn thing about the roughneck, she admitted to herself, not even his eye color!
“Address, phone number, credit cards?”
“Uh ... no.”
“Well, what did you get for your trouble, B.J. ? Except a handful?”
Bev blushed hotly. In her excitement she’d told Harve the whole story, detail upon detail. It was a tactical mistake. Her father hadn’t disapproved of the way she’d “handled” the roughneck. On the contrary, it had given him a good chuckle—and a chance to poke some holes in her procedure.
“I know where he hangs out,” she said defensively. “I can go back, ask questions.”
“I don’t think you want to do that.” Harve gentled his gruff voice a little. “He might take you up on that raincheck. Be a fool if he didn’t.”
Bev let out a tight sigh. “Okay, I admit it,” she said, unable t
o hide the defeat that softened her voice. “I blew it. Like the horn of Gabriel, I blew it.”
She dropped back in her chair, and then mentally kicked herself for being such a pill. It was just that she’d wanted so badly to please him, apparently even more than she realized. In the car on the way over, she’d imagined his pride, his smile of approval as she recounted her trial by fire. Instead, he was telling her that she’d messed up royally, and it hurt.
“Don’t worry, kid. You’ve been in the drawer too long, that’s all. Once you’ve had your nose to the grindstone for a while, you’ll sharpen up like a dull knife.”
Bev made no attempt to hide her confusion. “What are you saying? That you want me to stay on the case?”
“I’m saying that once you get a couple more surveillance cases under your belt, you’ll be up to speed. You’re quick on your feet and you’ve got me for a coach.” He favored her with a bearish grin. “Hell, you’ve probably picked up everything you need to know by listening to me all these years.”
Bev could hardly believe what she was hearing. What he was doing sounded too much like a magnanimous, fatherly gesture. She knew how concerned he’d been about her since her divorce. He was always tweaking her about how reclusive she’d become. “You shouldn’t be burying yourself in that house, B.J.,” he was fond of telling her. “Shelve those notepads of yours and get out once in a while, spark your interest in life again. You remember, life? Man-woman stuff.”
She was fond of telling him that her interest in man-woman stuff didn’t need sparking, it needed emergency road service. She wasn’t interested.
“I must be getting old.” Harve’s gravelly voice drew Bev out of her thoughts. “I can remember my first case like it was yesterday,” he said as she glanced up.
His nostalgic smile made her heart tighten. He wasn’t old. He was in his prime, too vital a man to be confined to a hospital bed. “Your first case? I’ll bet you aced it, right?”
Private Dancer Page 2
