“You work too much, it sounds like.”
“So I’m told. After the IPO, things will cool down.”
“Is that when you pay someone else to do all the work?”
“No, that’s when I’m fresh meat for every shareholder and analyst out there.” He shrugged. “No big deal. Eric and I got us this far. We’ll keep it going.”
“Sounds as if someone needs to remember how to play,” she said. “Do you still surf?”
“Now and again.”
“I remember in junior high, the way you’d ride to the beach with your board wheeling along behind your bike. And your hair was so blond.” She reached over to rake it back with her fingers. “I still can’t believe how dark it’s gotten.”
“That happened mostly when I hit high school.”
She leered at him. “A lot of things did. So did you keep surfing when you hit St. Joe’s?”
“Sure. It was the only way to get chicks. They were in pretty short supply at an all-boys’ private school.”
She gave him a skeptical glance. “Somehow, I don’t think you had a hard time finding a girlfriend.”
“Oh, I managed,” he allowed. “How about you?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “I managed.”
“I bet.” He caught up her hand in his. “You always had that sparkle.”
And to his delight, she blushed.
“I wasn’t kidding in Mexico when I talked about the junior-high band, you know,” he continued. “I think half the guys in there had the hots for you.”
“As hot as things got,” she added wryly. “I mean, come on, what’s the hots in junior high? ‘Oh, he’s soooo cute,’” she squealed. “‘I am like sooo totally in love.’”
“Oh, I don’t know, things can get pretty hot in junior high. They were pretty hot for us.” They were pretty damned hot now. Down, boy. To distract himself, he rose. “I’m going to check on the food.”
She followed, bringing the two empty glasses. “Well, yeah, we were hot for the time. But all we did was kiss and rub together a little. Outside of kissing, I didn’t get into the serious stuff until high school.”
“How serious?” he asked as they walked into the kitchen.
She set the margarita glasses on the counter. “Depends what year you’re talking about.”
“I don’t know, losing your virginity?”
“Seventeen,” she said. “A guy I worked with. We had a fling all summer. I was good at summer flings,” she added with an arch look.
Dom opened the oven and brought out the figs, cursing as he touched a finger to the hot pan. “I lost mine in the summer, too.”
“Anyone I know?” She brought over the plate he’d set out. There was, he thought, something immensely sexy about seeing her move around his kitchen. Something immensely sexy about seeing her in his house, period.
“No. It wasn’t around here,” he answered at her inquiring glance.
“College? Where did you go to school, anyway?”
“Berkeley, but no. Earlier. Hawaii, actually. I was on vacation.”
She flicked him a sharp glance. “I didn’t think your family ever took vacations.”
“We didn’t. My grandmother took me to Hawaii the summer before high school. One of the best weeks of my life,” he remembered, using a couple of spoons to maneuver the figs onto the dish. “I parasailed, learned how to scuba dive, went to Mauna Loa.” He cursed as he dropped one of the appetizers on the counter.
“That’s not why you remember it, though,” Delaney said, waving him away and taking over.
“There were a couple of what you might call more memorable moments. Shawna,” he remembered, shifting instead to the refrigerator to retrieve a bottle of pinot grigio he’d put in to chill. “White okay?” he asked, holding it up.
She nodded. “How did you meet?”
“Gran went to bed early, so I’d go down to the arcade.”
Delaney raised a brow. “She let you?”
He gave a wicked smile as he cut the foil off the cork. “She didn’t know. Anyway, that’s where I met Shawna, playing Asylum.”
“Your eyes met as you put your quarters down…”
“And it was lust at first sight,” he finished, winding in the cork screw. “We played until we got bored and decided to go for a walk on the beach. Fooled around some.”
“Oh, I imagine,” she said drily.
“Hey, we were on a roll. It was the same all week, we’d start in the arcade and finish on the beach. And then one night things got a little carried away. A lot carried away,” he amended, levering out the cork. “And…”
“Your big Hawaiian vacation adventure was born.”
It was impossible to think of it without at least a small smile. “It rocked my world. I guess it’s that way for women, too, nothing’s quite the same after.”
“Did you get around to a rematch?”
“Naw, she went home the next day. To Des Moines.” He filled the glasses he’d set out. “We said we’d write, but it didn’t happen.”
“Life is like that when you’re fourteen.” Delaney picked up the plate of figs. “You know,” she said as she turned to walk past him to the balcony, “we were still dating when you went on that vacation.”
“WE WERE?”
Delaney smothered a giggle as she heard the curse behind her. “Well, technically, but we were already on our separate ways…unless you were fourteen twice.” She paused. “You brought me back puka shells, remember?” She gave him a sunny smile as she stepped through the slider onto the deck. “Bus-ted.”
He opened his mouth and then shut it. “Ah, hell. I’m going to go get the wine and maybe shoot myself.”
“Don’t get blood all over the kitchen,” she advised and popped a fig in her mouth.
“All right, I’m back,” he said a moment later. “You know, I’m sure there’s some right thing to say, here, but I’m damned if I know what it is.”
She was tempted to let it linger just to watch him squirm, but she didn’t have the heart. “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “The figs are to die for, by the way.”
“What?” He stared at her.
“The figs. They’re really good.”
“Uh, I’m glad you like them,” he said, frowning.
Her mouth curved in enjoyment. “Don’t worry about the rest of it, Jake the Snake. It’s okay. We were in eighth grade. It wasn’t like it was a deep relationship. Now if a boyfriend ever did that to me today…”
The seconds stretched out and she watched him tap his fingers, shift restlessly.
“Yeah?” he finally said.
“I’d cut his balls off and feed them to the fishes,” she said pleasantly. “Speaking of which, is it time for dinner?”
The salmon was fabulous, at least once Dom relaxed and began to talk. He kept eying her knife uneasily on and off throughout the meal, though, Delaney noticed. Still, by the time they’d finished eating and were carrying their plates back in, he’d begun to breathe normally.
“Want some help cleaning up?” she offered.
“I’ll get it tomorrow,” he said.
“We never did finish the tour.” She looked at a door off the kitchen. “I assume we’ll make it upstairs sooner or later. What’s out here?”
“The garage.” He gave a sudden, quick smile. “You should see it.”
He led her down a short flight of stairs and through a door. With a snap of the switch, the fluorescent lights flickered on.
And Delaney’s mouth curved in pleasure. “Oh, Dom, it’s like your dad’s old garage.”
It felt as though she’d been transported back in time to those long-ago days of sitting in Stan’s, eating a handful of peanuts from the dime vending machine and listening to the whirr of the pneumatic drivers as the mechanics jacked cars up on the lifts.
A wooden workbench alongside one wall held a vise and one of those cases of plastic drawers that held a million different types of nuts and bolts. A hand jack was
propped against the wall, near a power grinder. From a pegboard installed above the bench dangled a bewildering array of wrenches and screwdrivers and mysterious gadgets. She saw a battered red rolling toolbox. Stan’s Garage had had three, one for each bay. She already knew what would be inside: sockets, drill bits, precision tools, whatever he’d want close at hand.
All this was only staging, though, for the car that sat in the center. It was an oversized coupe hiked up at the back, all chrome and gleaming yellow paint.
And she stared. “Is that—”
“The GTO.”
Stan Gordon and his cars. She remembered the tarp-draped row at the back of the old garage: the vintage Corvette, the 1965 Mustang, the Stutz Bearcat. And the GTO.
“‘The ultimate muscle car,’” she remembered, stroking the fender.
“His favorite line.”
There was a wistfulness in Dom’s smile that tugged at her heart.
“And he never did get around to restoring them.”
It had been the dream that Stan Gordon hadn’t had time for. Somehow, he hadn’t seemed to mind, as though the thought was just as important as the reality. Periodically, he’d pull off the tarps and describe so vividly how the finished car would look that Delaney could see it, as she sat behind the wheel.
“What happened to them?”
Dom picked up a rag and wiped at a small grease print left on the paint. “I put them in storage when he died. I didn’t know what to do with them—except that I wasn’t about to sell. Then about a year or so ago, I decided to start on this one. I figured it was time.”
“And here I thought all you did was work.”
“For some things, you make time.”
He’d view it as a memoriam to his father, she realized. However little he allowed himself a few minutes to relax, he’d find a way to do this. “You must miss him a lot,” she said gently.
“Yeah. It seems like he should be here doing it with me. When I’ve got my head under the hood, sometimes it feels like he is.” Dom gave a crooked smile. “Mostly when I get sloppy with my tools.”
It would comfort him and make the loss all the worse. Working on cars was what they’d done together. She remembered the days of arriving at the garage to find the two of them side-by-side, gray head by blond, two pairs of hands in the engine of some car or another as they fixed it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It happens. You lose people, sometimes. You go on.”
His tone was matter-of-fact. The words were too quick, though, and shadows lingered in his eyes. Delaney leaned in close to wrap her arms around him. “He’d be so proud of what you’ve done,” she whispered.
“I hope so. I just wish…I wish he was here to see it all. Not only the car, the garages. All of it. I wish I could take him out for a beer.”
She didn’t have any answer for that so she squeezed as tight as she could. A long minute went by, then he cleared his throat and moved away to the bench. “Anyway, that’s the garage. I’d take you for a spin but I’m doing some work on the suspension right now. She rides pretty rough.”
His tone was purposefully light and more than a little distant. He turned and fiddled with a boxed part.
“I’ll take a rain check.” Delaney studied him, saw the tension in his shoulders that he couldn’t quite hide. “He’d flip over this paint job,” she murmured, walking leisurely around the GTO, away from Dom, trailing her hand lightly over the trunk lid. “It looks like it must have back in the day.”
“I found the catalogs to match the old paint.”
“You know what I remember about this car?” she interrupted.
He didn’t glance up. “What?”
“It was about a week before school started. About this time of year, now that I think of it. Another heat wave, like this. Too hot to sleep, too hot to watch TV, too hot for anything.”
He turned to look at her. She gave him a slow smile, feeling her pulse beat a bit harder.
“It was the kind of night to be outside, trying to find a breeze, trying to find…” Her gaze met his. “Something.” She had his attention now, Delaney knew it for sure. But she just kept walking, taking her time, touching the cool silkiness of the paint beneath her fingertips. “So I sneaked out to meet you. Do you remember that?”
“Uh-huh.” He stared at her across the roof of the car and she felt it surely as a touch.
“We went to the garage and hopped over the fence.” She took slow step after slow step, conscious of her body as she’d never been before. “And we sneaked under the tarp.”
“Yes.” Dom’s voice was low, husky. He never moved, only watched her, his muscles tight now with a different kind of tension.
“It was like a cave. Hot and dark. We rolled down the windows.” She walked around the front of the hood, feeling the whisper of her skirt against her thighs as she moved. “I remember ‘Enjoy the Silence’ playing on the radio.” And she boosted herself up onto the front fender.
He did move, then, stepping forward like an automaton, eyes dark, unwavering on hers.
And she saw the flare of need. “God, I loved to kiss you back then,” she whispered as he moved in between her thighs. “And you started touching me, sliding your hands up my legs. I’d put on a skirt that night.”
“I remember.” He traced his fingers over her collarbones, down to the neckline of her dress.
Delaney shivered. “It felt so good. And I was scared to death because I’d never gone that far before, with you or with anyone. And then you’d opened up my bra and you were putting your hands on my breasts,” she said, sliding his palms up over her.
“I remember,” he groaned.
“And it made me want something. I didn’t know what, not then.” She licked his lips. “Then I reached down and my hand brushed against you. It was the first time I’d ever felt a hard cock. Even through your shorts I could feel it and it was the strangest feeling, shocking and really hot at the same time. And your hands were squeezing my breasts…It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. I was all mixed up, wanting…something, and scared, too.” Arousal pulsed through her, making her breath come fast.
“You got out of the car,” he murmured, against her throat. “I almost couldn’t keep up with you on the way home, you walked so fast.”
“I wasn’t ready,” she told him. She reached up and caught one of his hands, bringing it down to slide between her thighs to where she was wet and aching. “I’m ready now,” she whispered. And her mouth closed over his.
The heat billowed up as though flames had sprung up around them. Combustion, incineration. Conflagration. It was impossible that lip against lip could do this, impossible that it wasn’t something more than the mind-bending friction of his mouth. And oh, he could do things to her with that mouth, delirious things, wicked things, even as his fingers worked against the hard little nub of her clit until she was gasping with it.
But he didn’t stay there. He moved his hands to stroke her thighs, then pressed her back down on the hood so that he could bend over her and taste. She could feel him working to free the buttons at the front of her dress, feel the warmth of his lips trailing down the exposed skin as she tangled her fingers in his hair. And he unsnapped her bra so that he could access more.
When the liquid warmth of his tongue touched her nipples, Delaney gasped. The ache between her thighs intensified.
“Do you know how much I wanted to do this that night?” he muttered, pressing her into the hood so that she could feel his mouth, the weight of his body.
And his cock, pressing hard between her thighs.
His teeth scraped over her nipples and she cried out. “It was all I could think about after that, having my mouth on you. You’d be walking by in something short and tight, completely oblivious. I had a permanent hard-on.”
“There’s a cure for that,” she said breathlessly.
“Don’t I know it,” he muttered.
The fluorescent lights made his face look sha
dowed, almost fierce as he leaned over her. His fingers, slick and clever, slipped between her thighs to find her again, making her gasp.
Desire whipped through her. It was a good thing they hadn’t gone any further that long-ago night. It was a good thing because the girl she was would never have known how to handle the sensations that were rocketing through her. But now, all she wanted was more.
“I want you,” she whispered. “Now.”
There was the growl of a zipper, the crackle of plastic. Overhead, the fluorescent lights made a faint hum as though they approved of the scene.
Dom looked down at her and tried not to lose it entirely. Her scent wound around him. Desire pulsed through his veins, thick and hot and desperate. He brought himself out, heavy and so hard he was trembling with it, so hard that he was afraid even that much of a touch would send him over.
“Come on, Jake the Snake,” Delaney crooned. “I want you inside me.”
Then he sank himself home, so quickly and so deeply that it dragged a sharp cry from her. And he hesitated and would have stopped but she clutched his hands. “Now,” she demanded.
It shredded away his last iota of control and he began to stroke, listening to her panting moans, feeling the fresh arousal wash over him with every slide. And he fought the primal part of him that demanded he move faster, harder, get to the orgasm that he knew was waiting, because the man wanted to stretch it out as long as he could.
He caught up Delaney’s ankles in his hands and parted her legs, the better to watch the two of them, connected, to see himself pumping in and out of her. As she lay back, her dress unbuttoned, her eyes avid, lips swollen from his, she looked so gorgeous and hot and aroused as she caressed her own breasts that he teetered on the edge of climax.
“Come on, Jake, come on,” she muttered, her fingers sliding down between her thighs to touch herself.
He moved her legs so that her ankles draped over his shoulders, bent to lay his hands on her breasts, never slackening his motion. And he watched her tense, watched the flush move up and over her body as she cried out with her climax, shuddering, clenching around him.
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