by Lisa Plumley
He only hoped that Angela wanted to go forward with him. Because as important as these items were, as much as Nate had treasured them over the years, he knew one thing for certain.
Angela was more important to him than everything else.
Rachel awakened with a sour taste in her mouth and an unswerving certainty that Jose Cuervo was not her friend, despite the many long hours they’d spent together last night.
Smacking her lips, she put her hand to her head to assess the damage. Ugh. She encountered a rat’s nest of hairsprayed hair, a spike of mascaraed eyelashes…and not a trace of the headache she’d fully expected. Hmmm. That was weird.
She did have vague memories of someone giving her glass after glass of water last night after she’d left her L.A. Christmas party…under somewhat hazy circumstances. Maybe that treatment—one Mimi swore by, she recalled—had helped.
People did say that dehydration made a hangover worse. Supposedly, it was similar to the way a pair of those hideous Crocs ruined a perfectly good outfit, or the way mascara could go from good to Tammy Faye in a single additional swipe.
Frowning, Rachel opened her eyes. Then she sat bolt upright. This was not her bedroom at her parents’ house!
This was an unfamiliar bedroom with white walls, a huge wooden bed, and bits and pieces of football memorabilia. A bedroom in which Christmas lights had been strung along the doorjambs and atop the bed. A bedroom in which an old-fashioned, very Kismet bureau stood near the closed door, sporting a lamp, a curled-edge paperback book, and a framed picture. Rachel squinted at it, trying to make out the people. They were all dark-haired, smiling, and stunning, and they looked happy.
She didn’t recognize them, at least not from here. Oh God. What had she done last night? Frantically, she searched her memory. She remembered her mom and the Crock-Pot. She remembered beach sand, hip-hop Christmas music, and candy cane margaritas. She remembered seeing Tom and Judy Wright making out at the party, looking ten years younger and a million times happier.
At the remembrance, Rachel smiled. If the Wrights’ lip-lock was anything to go by, it looked as though Rachel’s reconciliation advice—to appreciate one another, cut each other some slack, and try making wish lists for gift-giving occasions—had worked.
Yawning again, Rachel gave a languid stretch. Tom and Judy Wright. Hmmm. The Wrights. Come to think of it, the dark-haired people in the picture on the bureau had looked a lot like…
“You’re up.” A dark-haired man levered upward at the foot of the bed, then blinked sleepily at her. “Morning.”
Rachel yelped, clutching the blankets.
“That’s all the thanks I get…after last night?”
Reno. In a heartbeat, the rest of last night came flooding back to her. The drinking. The dancing. The insulting Reno’s tie. The being carried out over his shoulder.
The heartfelt—and mortifying—declarations of her true love.
She gawked at him, embarrassed from the top of her head to her Christmas-painted toenails. (She had no excuse. She’d completely caved in to the holiday spirit, even when it came to a DIY pedicure.) Still. Reno, Reno, Reno. He looked amazing in the morning, Rachel thought in a daze. Sort of rumpled and sexy and unreasonably cheerful. He might be naked right now, too…
She shook her head. “What are you doing on the floor?”
“Sleeping.” He lifted one burly bare shoulder in a shrug. “After you took the bed, and I left the sofa for my dad—”
“Tom lives here with you?”
A nod. “There wasn’t anywhere else for me to go. This was originally a three-bedroom ranch when I grew up here—”
Rachel boggled at the idea of living in the same house for so many years. She’d never experienced that kind of continuity. Except maybe with her Benefit benetint, which kept her from looking like a ghost most of the time. She loved benetint.
“—but one of the bedrooms bit the dust years ago to make way for my master bathroom, and my dad turned the other guest bedroom into a full-on workout room when he moved in.” Reno yawned, then rubbed his head. His hair stood on end. On him, the effect looked adorable. And hot. “Did you get any sleep?”
“Uhh…”
“You told me you didn’t want to go home to your parents’ house. Not in the shape you were in last night.”
“Probably a wise decision.”
“You kind of begged me actually.”
“Uhh…begged you to bring me here?” At his nod, Rachel felt a spurt of hope. She lifted the blankets and peeked at herself, then was disappointed to find herself still wearing last night’s red dress. “But we didn’t…?”
She gestured from him to her, the possibilities of what might have happened between them running rampant in her head.
Without even meaning to, Rachel imagined Reno carrying her down onto his ridiculously comfortable bed, covering her with his big, rugged body, making her shudder and clutch him as he let his hands roam all over her, from her hair to her breasts and beyond, lavishing her with the most crazy-making strokes possible, both of them hot and writhing and moaning, the bedsprings creaking as they learned every inch of each other’s skin, the room vibrating with their gasps and cries, the two of them getting wild and slick and sweaty, coming together to—
“No, we didn’t. I’m not that kind of guy.”
Reno propped his arms on the bed and regarded her. His broad bare shoulders led to a wide bare chest, muscular and covered with exactly the right amount of manly dark hair. All the rest of him was hidden, but that didn’t stop Rachel from wondering about what might be down there.
Seriously. Did he sleep naked or what?
“And I don’t think,” Reno went on, oblivious to her vivid imagination, “that you’re that kind of girl either.”
Oh come on. “How do you know? You haven’t even tried me.”
He smiled. “I know a little about you by now.”
“Oh yeah?” Rachel jerked up her chin, eyeing him. “Well, maybe you’re missing out. Maybe I’m the wildest woman this side of the Rockies. Maybe I’ve got moves you’ve never even heard of yet, moves that would blow your mind.”
Reno’s smile broadened. “Any woman with moves that wild wouldn’t care what her parents thought when she came home drunk from her own Christmas party.”
Damn it. He had her there. Despite her renowned audacity, Rachel did have her limits. She refused to hurt anyone.
“Yeah? Well…” She wheeled her arm around, trying to come up with a rebuttal that would really floor him. “Any man who has time to string ten thousand Christmas lights on his house—”
“It’s forty-seven thousand at last count.”
“—obviously doesn’t have anything better to do with his nights.” She waggled her eyebrows, making her meaning plain.
“Except win the holiday lights competition. And I am going to win.” From the foot of the bed, Reno gave her a speculative look. “Besides, I don’t believe in wasting time with anything less than the real thing. If I don’t really like a woman, I don’t sleep with her just to up my scoring average.”
Rachel scoffed. “And you claim you’re a jock.”
His eyes flashed. “I’m more jock than you can handle.”
His words made that revealing tingle return to her middle, swamping her with giddiness. True love, true love, true love, her heartbeat seemed to pound out, even as she looked at a cocksure Reno and told herself that falling for him was impossible. She hadn’t even been back in Kismet that long. She’d barely known him when she’d lived here before.
Although there was an undeniable connection between them…
Well, that was probably just sexual attraction, right?
“I,” he went on, his expression daring her to disagree, “am just plain more man than you can handle.”
Well. That simply wasn’t true.
Rachel gazed straight at him. “Wanna bet?”
When Nate drove up to Angela’s house, the whole place looked small and snug, wrappe
d up tight against the snow blowing up to the windows. When he got out of his Chevette though, he noticed that one of the storm windows was cracked. The icicle-covered eaves needed repainting. One of the house numbers on the front door had peeled off, leaving a ghostly number five etched in its place on the frosty wood beside the holiday wreath.
How could he have failed to notice all that stuff?
Fighting an urge to grab a tool belt, a paintbrush, and a glue gun all at the same time, Nate readjusted his burden—his nest egg box—then stomped up the sidewalk, exactly the way he’d done at least a thousand times before. Probably more often. He glimpsed the light from the TV flickering, heard the familiar strains of Kayla’s favorite cartoons, then knocked on the door.
After which he turned around and headed back to his car.
Swiveled and charged back toward the porch.
Panicked and bolted for the curb.
Stopped in sheer confusion, clutching his box and breathing heavily. What was the matter with him? It wasn’t as if—
“Nate?” Angela cracked open the door and peeked out. She opened the door wider. “What are you doing? Come on in.”
Wearing only her nightgown—Angela was the ruffled flannel type, which should have been hideous but was actually kind of mysterious and sexy—she beckoned him closer. Frozen in place, Nate gawked at his box, then shifted his gaze to her.
“Is he still here?” he demanded.
“He? He who?”
Nate twisted his old KHS class ring, unable to rein in his nervousness. “Booger Billy Pendelton.”
The schoolmarmish look she gave him made Nate feel ashamed for even suggesting such a thing. Despite her admitted horniness problem, Angela was not the kind of woman to host an X-rated sleepover while her daughter was in the house. He knew that.
That’s why he’d already telephoned Judy Wright and brought her in on his plan before coming over this morning.
“Actually, I’ve got Billy Pendelton, Patrick Goodger, and Zion Jones in there. You’re interrupting our ménage à trois.”
Nate jerked up his head. Sometime while he’d been thinking, Angela had stuck her feet in her snow boots, thrown on a coat, and come outside to stand with him on the snowy sidewalk. Probably because she didn’t want to be accused of shacking up while her daughter was within earshot. Now Angela quirked her mouth at him in that adorable smile of hers, waiting patiently.
No woman ought to look that good in snow boots with the hem of a ruffled granny gown sticking out from beneath her parka. Somehow, Nate thought that Angela did. He also thought that he’d like to snuggle up to her in that gown. Maybe slip his hands underneath it. Maybe make her smile wider. He sighed at her.
“That’s a ménage à quatre. Four people. Ménage à quatre.”
Angela wrinkled her brow. “Actually, that’s not what I expected you to take away from that statement.”
“Well, that’s too bad. Because I’m learning French online,” Nate heard himself babble. “Someday I want to go to cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. I want to study Art de Vivre. That means the art of living. It would be awesome.”
He clamped his mouth shut, appalled to have revealed so much. He’d had no intention of laying himself totally bare.
Not without another ham-and-cheese sandwich at least.
“Wow. Teaching home ec has really had an effect on you.”
“It’s not that. It’s you.” Nate grasped his box harder. Beneath his gloves’ brown leather, his palms felt shaky and sweaty. “Every time I cook something for you, you look so happy…I just want to be the best in the world at it.”
“At cooking? Aww, Nate.” Angela touched his arm, smiling up at him. “I think you could really succeed at that. You should—”
“Not at cooking. At making you happy. I want to be the best in the whole world at making you happy, Angela.”
She stilled. Her eyes widened.
Uh-oh. Nate thought he might keel over—just do a face plant in the snow beside the plastic Santa and reindeer display.
While he concentrated on not visibly hyperventilating—or running away like the reformed geek he secretly was—Angela searched his face. Her smile gradually faded, sort of like the green leaves on the old plastic Christmas garland she’d strung along her porch railing. She looked as if…as if she were trying to puzzle him out, and that wasn’t the plan at all.
Nate’s heart thudded, faster and faster. This was not the scenario he’d planned while he’d been scarfing down sandwiches last night. In his imagination, Angela had run into his arms. In his imagination, she’d known exactly what he’d meant about making her happy (and he’d been a whole lot more eloquent, too, with no babbling about French classes and cooking school). In his imagination, they’d shared the same freak harmony they always had, and things had been perfect between them.
In reality…
In reality, his feet were cold because he’d worn skimpy socks—not having had any clean thick ones on hand for this mission. In reality, his heart clenched with the same dork uncertainty he’d always known. In reality…Angela frowned at him. Oh geez. What if he’d completely ruined everything?
Chapter Twenty-Six
The next thing Rachel knew, Reno was climbing up onto the mattress, leaving her scrambling mindlessly toward the relative safety of the headboard and pillows, wondering when, exactly, she’d finally bitten off more than she could chew.
Oh yeah. With that last dare.
Realizing as much, Rachel threw off the blankets and struck her most provocative seated pose. It wasn’t her style to cower under the covers. There was more than one way to win a dare, and she meant to make sure she succeeded this time. Somehow, winning with Reno felt more important than ever.
“Show me what you’ve got, tough guy.” Shimmying in place, she crooked her finger. “I’m waiting to be impressed.”
Reno laughed. “You are? Prepare to be dazzled then.”
It was too late. She already was dazzled. Her racing heart and flushed skin told her that. Just looking at him crawling on all fours across the mattress toward her, wearing tight boxer briefs (one question answered; she approved) and an expression of pure challenge made Rachel’s breath catch in her throat.
Of all the people she’d have expected to understand her, Reno Wright was last on the list. But with a single smile, he threatened to expose her aura of bravado for the sham it was.
That should have been reason enough to avoid him.
Instead it was all the more reason she couldn’t.
“There’s no reason you’d be the one man who can handle me,” she shot back, striving for control as the mattress dipped. The warmth from Reno’s skin reached her just milliseconds before the man himself did. “You don’t know me. I’m pretty hard to handle. I’m demanding and bossy and unreasonably suspicious—”
“Like I said, I know you a little by now.”
Wrapping his palm around her ankle, Reno gave a tug.
Squealing, Rachel found herself dragged flat on her back with her dress hiked up, sandwiched between tough, hard Reno and his soft flannel sheets. At the sudden impact, her breath whooshed from her lungs. All her thoughts fled as he gave her a wolfish smile.
Determinedly, she rallied. “—and I like sex,” she boasted unsteadily. “I like sex a lot. Which is probably why I’ve stuck with so many unlikely guys in the past. So unless you’re ready—”
“I like sex, too.” Reno kissed her lightly on the lips, so lightly that she automatically levered upward, wanting more. “With you, I know I’m going to love it. So are you.”
“—to listen to me being totally honest about what I think—”
“Shh.” Settling himself above her on his elbows, Reno brought his hand to her jaw. He pinned their gazes together, his expression bold and blunt. “I’m not afraid of a little honesty.”
Oh boy. This was too much. Way too much. Somehow she’d broken through whatever distance he’d been keeping between them since they’d met—
a distance she’d sometimes thought she’d only imagined. Now Reno meant to bridge that gap. For good.
Caught between her own yearning for him and a nervousness unlike anything she’d ever encountered during her tenure as red-carpet queen of L.A., Rachel resorted to warning him away.
“Demanding,” she reminded him. “You forgot demanding.”
His knowing look was more terrifying than any self-absorbed celebrity tantrum ever could have been. So was her reaction to it. Inexplicably, she wanted more. More of him. More of this.
“You don’t scare me.” He gave her another kiss, this one a little longer but (frustratingly) not any deeper. “I know you.”
“Well, a lot of people think they know me,” she blathered. “They’ve seen a profile in People magazine, or they’ve watched me do an interview on Entertainment Tonight, and it gives them a false sense of intimacy. But the truth is—”
“This feels pretty real to me.” Reno’s hand descended to her shoulder, then swept lower. With a wholly masculine sound of appreciation, he closed his calloused palm over her breast. “It feels intimate, too. Mmmm. You feel really, really good.”
“Umm…” Rachel gulped, quivering in his grasp. All she wanted to do was arch herself into his hands, rub herself against him, make sure he knew how incredible this felt. Her nipples peaked, confirming that fact without a sound, but at the same time, it seemed direly important that she make herself understood. That she shield Reno from any misunderstandings.
“I won’t be around Kismet for long,” she warned—the last of her last-ditch efforts to protect him. Her. Both of them. “That means this can only be sex between us. That’s it. Okay?”
At Nate’s words, a surge of excitement rushed through Angela. Just breathe, she told herself. Don’t blow it now.
Not now, after she’d tried so hard to play it cool, explore her options, and dangle, whenever possible, all potential male competition in front of her (mostly platonic) pal, Nate.
The funny thing was, he was the one who’d clued her in to the strategy she’d been using successfully for weeks now.
Playing hard to get, huh? Good going, Nate had advised her once. Now Patrick will be twice as eager to go out with you.
