by Julie Kenner
“I broke up with him. You know that. We spent the whole night analyzing how I felt, and the next day I broke up with him.”
“Because you deserved to have your feet tingle.”
“Exactly.”
“And Tony?”
She glared at him. “I’m not on a witness stand here, Shane.”
“See? That’s exactly my point.” He gestured between the two of them. “Our relationship has changed. Back then you didn’t mind discussing Chris at all. But now you’re not inclined to discuss Tony.”
“We’ve discussed Tony.”
“A bit,” he agreed. “But not the nitty-gritty.”
“That’s not a change in our relationship. That’s because I wasn’t in love with Chris. I am in love with Tony.”
“So he makes your toes tingle.”
“Yes. No.” She closed her eyes and slammed her fist into the pillow. “That’s hardly a realistic benchmark for a relationship.”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
“Dammit, Shane!”
He shrugged. “Just making conversation.”
“Then make it about something else. This subject is now officially closed.”
He shrugged. He’d been balancing the dessert plate on his lap and now he picked it up. She watched as he slid the fork through the chocolate, then brought the utensil to his mouth. His lips closed over it and he withdrew the fork, closing his eyes as he did so. El just stared, her earlier irritation forgotten as lust zinged through her body and collected between her thighs, leaving the rest of her feeling hollow, as if she needed something—or someone—to fill it.
“Sure you don’t want some?”
“What?”
He held up the plate. “Dessert? Want some?”
“Oh. Um, yeah. Sure. What the hell. I’ll take a bite.”
His smile was slow and easy. “Great.” Before she could protest, he dipped his fork in, then held it out to her. She hesitated for only a second, but that was long enough to provoke a twinkle in his eye and a “Come on, El. I don’t have cooties.”
She shot him a dirty look, then opened her mouth. The chocolate set her taste buds tingling, and when she realized how close Shane had scooted to pass her that little bite, the rest of her body followed suit.
She closed her eyes, hoping he thought she was simply enjoying the decadent treat. In fact, she was afraid to look at him, afraid he’d see the truth in her eyes.
“Good, isn’t it?” His voice was low and right there, and she knew that if she leaned forward, she could capture his mouth with a kiss.
She didn’t, of course. Instead she opened her eyes, took a deep breath and nodded. “Very good,” she said.
He was looking at her, his expression guarded as if he expected her to say more.
She cleared her throat. “This was really nice. The whole dinner thing, I mean.”
“I’m glad you liked it.” That mysterious something was still in his voice, and the expression on his face suggested that she was missing something. He had to be wondering what was up with her tonight, and she seemed completely incapable of getting her head back on straight.
It really was a good thing she hadn’t moved to New York to be an actress. She would have crashed and burned by now.
He lifted another forkful of wonderfulness to her mouth, and she took it, this time casually, without having to shut her eyes to hide decadent thoughts of Shane. Good. Nice to know she was managing to wrangle a bit of control over her own emotions.
She was sitting there feeling pretty pleased with herself when he dropped the next bomb. “So,” Shane said, leaning back casually against the armrest so that he faced her straight on, “I was flipping through the books you had on the table earlier. Pretty hot stuff.”
The books she had on the table!
The sense of self-control vanished with a puff. She knew exactly which books he was referring to. Her erotica collection. The books she’d been using to prepare for her class with Ronnie and to write her paper.
“How do you read them and keep your thoughts, you know, academic?”
“Um, what do you mean?”
He shrugged, looking at her in that way that he had, as if he could see right through her. Considering how well they knew each other, he probably could. “I figure it must be difficult to focus on the academic implications when the whole point of the words is to get you primed for…other things. Especially since I know how fascinated you are by the course material.”
Heat flooded her cheeks as mortification spread through her body. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Ella wasn’t exactly an innocent, but she’d never read erotica before taking the course. And that first week, when she’d started flipping through the pages of an anthology of stories from The Boudoir, her fingers had almost caught on fire from the heat generated by those words.
And her fingers hadn’t been the only thing to heat up. It had taken her almost an entire Saturday to read the book, primarily because she kept having to take breaks to, well, scratch the itch that the heated words had caused.
That part hadn’t been stupid. It had been decadent and fun and even now the memory made her a little hot. What had been stupid was telling Shane back then how she’d reacted to the material. But at the time it hadn’t occurred to her that she might feel just as lustful toward him. That fantasies of her best friend could make her even hotter than those carefully crafted words on the page. Or that he’d be sitting in her living room asking her to discuss those words and that she’d have to manage it without revealing how much she wanted him to scratch the itch that was starting to tingle so appealingly between her thighs.
“El?”
“Um, sorry. I was just trying to think of how to answer that. I, uh, guess it’s a question of academic interest. I mean, I’m steeled for studying, so the words aren’t playing with my head because I’m not letting them.” Or at least she was trying not to let them. Considering her little fantasy in the library, she wasn’t succeeding very well.
She took a sip of her Frangelico and tried to look as if she was still considering the question. “I suppose it’s just a question of self-control,” she finally said.
“That makes sense.” His smile broadened, and he looked so damn sexy that she grabbed a pillow and pulled it up against her just to have something to do other than gawk at him. “You must have a lot of self-control, then. Some of what I was reading put me right over the top.”
“You weren’t trying to analyze it for a term paper.”
“No,” he said with a heart-stopping grin, “I wasn’t.”
He got up and moved around the sofa, coming back with a copy of Nicolas Chorier’s Satyra Sotadica. “Like this, for example.” He opened the book and leaned in close to the candle. “‘He tells me to sit down again as I was seated before and places a chair under either foot in such a way that my legs were lifted high in the air and the gate of my garden was wide open to the assaults I was expecting.’” He closed the book, then looked at her with a tiny smile. “I’ll admit the garden-gates bit is a little over-the-top, but overall that’s pretty hot imagery.”
“Well, yes. Yes, it is.” She could tell he wanted her to say more, but her brain wasn’t quite working. She’d tried to be academic while he’d read the passage, really she had. But instead all she could think about was her sitting like that and Shane reaching out to touch her.
He was still staring, and she knew she had to say something else. “Uh,” she said, “yeah, it’s definitely charged. Um, that’s Chorier for you.”
“I just don’t know how you do it,” he said, all casual and self-assured, his arm resting on the back of the couch. “You or Ronnie, for that matter.” He leaned forward just a little, and there was a glimmer of mischief in his eyes. “Jack must be the luckiest man on earth,” he added, referring to Ronnie’s husband. “Tony, too.”
“Get your mind out of the gutter, Walker.”
His brows lifted. “The gutter? Tsk-tsk. I don’t think
what happens between two consenting adults is the gutter.”
Neither did she, but since nothing remotely related to what she read in the various bits of erotica had happened between her and Tony, she really didn’t want to go there.
“I mean, it seems to me that would be a fun way to pass the time in bed. You know, a little reading aloud. Maybe reading to each other.” He flashed a lazy smile. “Maybe even acting out a few choice scenes.”
Ella swallowed, remembering how she’d fantasized about that very thing just hours before. And not with Tony. With Shane.
“You’re right,” she said, steeling herself. “Not that Tony’s imagination needs any help, but it’s kind of fun sometimes to just go with someone else’s flow.” That was about as bold a lie as she could have concocted, but she figured it would suit her purpose.
From his expression, though, she had to wonder if she was wrong. He looked entirely too dubious. And when he said, “Tony?” in that disbelieving voice, she wondered if she’d gone too far.
She narrowed her eyes. “Yes, Tony. Why? Is that so hard to believe?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
She wanted to protest, but she couldn’t quite form the words. It was hard to believe and she knew it. “Dammit, Shane. So what? So that’s not his thing. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Nothing at all,” Shane agreed. “So long as you’re okay with it.”
“Why wouldn’t I be? It’s not like he’s celibate. We have a perfectly fine time, thank you very much.” She clenched her fists, realizing she’d spoken out of temper. “Dammit! I didn’t want to talk about this. It’s none of your business.”
“That’s just what I’m talking about,” he said, his voice soft. “Our friendship is changing, El. Five years ago—hell, even one year ago—you wouldn’t have held back.”
She closed her eyes. “I’m marrying the guy, Shane. I think I owe him the courtesy of keeping our sex life private.”
He nodded. “Yeah, okay. That’s fair. But tell me this—is that really the reason? Or are you afraid that if you talk about it—get it out in the open—that it’ll kill your fantasy that everything between the two of you is perfect.”
“It is perfect,” she growled. “And it’s time we drop this, okay?”
She expected him to argue; the man was a lawyer, after all, and he knew when to push a witness. But he nodded in agreement, and she allowed herself one quiet sigh of relief. If he had pushed, she wasn’t sure that she could have pushed back. Because the truth was, he was right. Partly, anyway.
Her sex life with Tony wasn’t perfect, but everything else about their relationship was. Marriage was about compromise, right? She could live without a wild sex life. She could. After all, she still had her fantasies.
She just needed to work hard to make sure those fantasies weren’t about Shane.
6
SCORE ONE FOR TEAM Testosterone.
Shane kept his facial expression bland and had to thank his intensive legal training. He wanted to break into a grin so wide it was painful, but he’d managed not to show a hint of emotion during the depositions of drug-smuggling scum. And he could manage to do the same here.
Phase one, he thought, had gone perfectly.
Just as in a deposition, the first step was to play good cop. Be the witness’s friend, get them to trust you, to open up. He felt a little bit of remorse for playing the game with Ella, but not too much. In this case, he thought, the end definitely justified the means. And he needed her thinking about Tony. More, he needed her thinking about the fact that Tony didn’t sizzle in the bedroom the way Ella wanted. The way Shane was sure that she sizzled.
For a moment there, he’d been a little worried that he was wrong. That he’d looked at Tony and seen the boring, staid guy that he wanted to see and that the man was different with Ella, that he had a wild side, a side that understood Ella’s penchant for adventure. But that wasn’t the case, as Ella had more or less admitted. It must, he thought, drive Tony crazy that Ella had more in common with his daring sisters than she did with him.
Lord knew it drove Shane crazy. And if she weren’t blinded by the bright light of Tony’s entire family, Shane firmly believed it would drive Ella crazy, too.
His plan, in a nutshell, was to dim that light so that Ella could see more clearly the faults of the relationship she was in. And hopefully she’d also see that she already had a perfect relationship with Shane just waiting to be raised to the next level.
He glanced over at his briefcase, still sitting on the floor near the kitchen. Time to pull out the papers inside. Time to move on to Phase two.
“I brought some stuff for you,” he said.
She squinted at him, clearly not trusting him. Smart girl. “What kind of stuff?”
He held up his hands, a universal indicator of surrender. “Come on, El. Chill out. You said to shift gears. I’m shifting.”
“Fine. Okay.” She relaxed. A little, anyway. “What kind of stuff?” Same question, but this time it was asked without the tinge of suspicion.
“I was thinking about the paper you’re working on.”
“Shane. I thought you were dropping it.”
This time he was the one aiming the sharp glance her direction. “I did. I’m talking about academia, El. Or are you going to prove my first point—that it’s hard to separate the two, academia and intimacy?”
She wanted to argue. He could see her struggle, then saw when calm won out. “Fine, fine. Whatever. So tell me what you were thinking about.”
“Remember when you said you were considering comparing historical erotica with the modern stuff?”
“Yeah. I’m still thinking about it. The topic’s decent, even if it is a little broad. Why?”
He shrugged. “I just thought I’d help you out a bit. On the modern end.”
“So…what? You went looking for samples of erotica for me?”
“Found some, too. Had to slog through a lot of stuff, but I remembered some of the historical pieces that you mentioned before and I tried to find ones that tracked. It took a while, but I think I found a couple of good pieces for you.” Not entirely true. He hadn’t really had the time to research modern erotica. And he’d wanted the particular pieces to be written a certain way. Because, in truth, he wasn’t interested in her project, he was interested in his.
So he’d written the pieces himself…with Ella in mind. That had made for an interesting few evenings, that was for sure, and he felt himself get hard yet again as he remembered the fantasies that had accompanied putting the words to paper.
Now she was grinning at him, her eyes dancing mischievously. “Things a bit slow with the law?”
“Just doing my duty for a friend. I’m sure if I needed help, you’d jump in and pick a jury for me.”
“Would the jurors be romping around naked?”
“Probably not,” he said. “But considering some of the panels I’ve had to voir dire, I think that having them clothed may be for the best.”
“Was there naked romping in what you researched for me?”
“Maybe just a touch.” He tried to keep his voice serious, but he was having a hard time of it.
“Hmm. Sounds to me like you got the better end of the helping-a-friend-in-need deal. Well, all right, then. Let’s see what you got for me.”
He drew in a breath, partly charged, partly nervous. This was it—the line in the sand. Now, he thought, the plan really started. And he hoped to hell it worked.
ELLA FROWNED AT THE SHEETS of paper he handed her. She’d expected a book, not what looked like straight text, formatted more or less like your typical term paper. “What is this?”
“I, um, found it on the Internet,” Shane said with a shrug. “I couldn’t get the Web page to print right, so I had my secretary type it up. I figured, you know, if you thought it was helpful, I’d give you the URLs. Later. They’re at my office. On my desk. Somewhere.”
She had to smile. Shane was never fl
ustered, but he seemed a bit unsettled about this. “Internet porn,” she joked. “And getting Sheila involved. My, my. What is the world coming to?”
That seemed to snap him out of it. “One, it’s not porn, it’s erotica. I believe you’re the one who has described the difference to me often enough. And two, Sheila thought it was a hell of a lot more interesting than transcribing my last set of notes with regard to personal jurisdiction and the RICO statutes.”
“Okay. Sorry. No more teasing. I know how much you have to do before you move. I really appreciate you taking the time to do some research for me.” That was true. What she didn’t appreciate was that his actions now had her imagination running overtime. Shane, his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up as he searched the Internet for erotica. His thoughts drifting to her. His fingers drifting to—
No.
She rubbed her palms over her face. Exhaustion and too much alcohol were a potent mix, especially when she was in close quarters with such a potent man.
“El?”
“I’m fine. Just tired. Getting punchy.”
“What better state of mind to read erotica?” he said, and she could practically hear the smile. “Check out the one on top. It reminded me of that Victorian piece you showed me a few months ago about the artist who seduced his model. Remember?”
She swallowed. Oh, yeah. She remembered. That piece had triggered a particularly vivid fantasy involving a camera and very little clothing. With Tony behind the camera, of course. At least, that’s the way she’d played it when she’d described it to Shane.
“So read it and tell me if you think you can work it into your paper.”
“Why are you so interested in my term paper?”
“If you’d read the pages of research I’ve been working on lately, you wouldn’t have to ask that question.”
“You’re the one who wanted to go to law school,” she said with a grin. “Of course, if television imitates life, you’re having wild liaisons with the paralegals, secretaries and other attorneys in the elevators and in the conference rooms.”
“So true,” he said. “And now you know the extent of my sacrifice when I took time out to do this research for you.” He pointed to the paper. “Read.”
