by Julie Miller
“Trav—”
“But those noncoms came on to you and I got my nose all out of joint and…You don’t think one of them sent you the flowers, do you?”
“Did either of them strike you as the type who could afford long-stemmed roses in a crystal vase?”
He shook his head, answering her question or still condemning his own actions, she couldn’t tell. Maybe both. “You know, what happens after a couple gets close can be just as important as the act itself.” He arched one brow. “Or so I’ve had women tell me.”
She laughed and swatted his arm. “I don’t want to hear how many women you’ve had this discussion with.”
He covered his heart with his hand. “Hey, I’m tryin’ here. Whatever I said or didn’t say, or however I screwed up, I’m sorry. You were amazing. Period. We don’t have that much time together to start with. I don’t want it to be over after just one night.” He reached across the console between them. His fingertips hovered close to her lips, but never touched her. “There’s more I want to show you.”
Tess shivered at the portent in his husky voice. At the instant frissons of anticipation he could set off with a word or a look, she cranked up the heater to pass them off as a chill from the rain. But she wasn’t any good at that sort of game, and Travis wasn’t buying it.
Still clutching the daisy in one hand, she reached up and laced her fingers with his. “I don’t want us to be over with yet, either. Last night was pretty cool. Very cool,” she amended. “Hell, it was fantastic. And I want to do it—or something like it—again. But—”
“Damn.” He squeezed her hand. “You ruined it with the but.”
“But,” she turned in her seat and insisted he listen, “I have something I need to tell you, and I’m afraid you’ll change your mind about me—about us—continuing our training sessions.”
“Not a chance.”
“You haven’t heard what I’m going to say yet.”
“Anything you don’t know I can teach you. Or we’ll learn it together.”
“It’s not that.”
“Are you worried about transmitting something?”
She blushed at that one. “No.”
“I’m not, either, but I promise we’ll be completely protected. I made a stop before I came here.”
He bought condoms? “That’s sweet.”
“Sweet again? That’s not what I’m goin’ for.”
“It’s presumptuous, then.”
“You just said you wanted to do it again.”
“But there was a but.”
“Son of a bitch, there was.” Travis pulled his hand away and retreated to a polite distance. “Is this the kind of conversation we need to do over a cup of coffee or glass of beer?”
“Just listen. Please.”
“Shoot, T-bone.”
She took a deep breath and prepared to bare her soul. “That kiss? That make-out session in college—
“Make-out session?”
“—the one you measure all other kisses by in your life?”
“What about it?” His breathing stilled and his hands came to rest on the faded denim covering his muscular thighs.
“Do you ever wish you could meet her again?”
“I thought you didn’t want to know about the other women in my life.”
“That was me, Trav.”
“What was?”
“I was the girl who tracked you down at the third bar you’d been to that night. It was me who took you home and let you crash on my couch. After Stacy left you for what’s-his-face, I thought you needed a friendly face to talk to.”
He waved aside the idea. “I wasn’t interested in talking that night. I wanted to get laid. I was looking for someone who was into me, who made me feel like I still had the juice.”
“I know. I made a bed for you on that hideous, orange-striped couch that came with the furnished apartment.”
He paused. “I remember orange stripes.”
Would he remember anything else? “I loosened your clothes and tried to cover you with a blanket so you could sleep.”
“I thought she was seducing me.” He pointed an accusing finger. “I’ve told you this story, haven’t I.”
“Never. You took my shirt off. Said you needed me, wanted to be in me.”
Travis’s eyes widened. “I wanted to bury myself inside that woman and forget all about Stacy.”
She remembered the details vividly. His hands on her breasts. His kisses. The weight of his body on hers. Everything Tess had ever felt for Travis had altered and intensified that night. “The blanket kept getting twisted between us so—”
“—I balled it up and used it for a pillow.”
“You kissed me. You said all great sex started with a kiss.”
“Shit.” He dipped his forehead into his hand, then scrubbed his fingers through his short hair, flipping water droplets onto the window and leaving bronze spikes in his wake. His eyes were unreadable when he looked at her again. “That was you? All these years and you never told me that we—”
“We didn’t.”
“We could have been…?”
“We weren’t.” They hadn’t been lovers then, and unless she could salvage her pride, they wouldn’t be lovers now. “I was trying to seduce you that night.”
“You were succeeding.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing then any more than I know now.”
“Dammit, Tess, I was drunk. I passed out. I wanted you like crazy.”
“You didn’t even know it was me that next morning. You wouldn’t even consider that it might have been me you wanted to take to bed. You sat there drinking your coffee and going on about this babe you’d nearly screwed the night before. You asked me to help you find her.”
“Ouch.”
“I tried to tell you it was me.” Temper flowed through her veins, along with shame and twelve years of thwarted desire. The daisy bit the dust as she shook her fists across the seat. “No way in hell could that sex goddess have been me. And now I’m supposed to believe that I’m irresistible?”
He caught her hands and pulled her toward him as he met her halfway. “Seduce me again.”
The bold challenge shocked her into silence.
He gentled his grip, folding her hands between his. “I saw you last night. I heard you. I tasted you. I guarantee you, I’ll never forget what you do to me.”
Tess was shivering again, likely the adrenaline working its way through her system. She squirmed in her seat, watching the rain streak down the window beyond his shoulder. Finally, she found courage to look him in the eye. “Is that a dare?”
“Does it need to be?”
Her puff of laughter almost dissolved into a sob. She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and smiled through it. “I’m talking about a gap in self-confidence here.”
“And I’m saying there’s no reason for it.”
He pulled his keys from his pocket, slid one off the ring and pressed it into the palm of her hand. A house key.
“Dad will be gone all night, and I’ll be in that big house by myself. Alone. Waiting. I’m stone cold sober, too, if that means anything to you.” He curled her fingers around the key and leaned over the console. His moist breath warmed her ear with a whispered caress. “Seduce me tonight. I guarantee it will be memorable. For both of us.”
“I can’t. What if I suck at it?”
He pulled away and opened the car door. His face creased with a classic Travis McCormick smile. “I know you won’t.”
She grabbed his arm to stop him from leaving. “How? How do I know you’re not just saying that to spare the feelings of an old friend?”
Rain blew into the car and splashed her face. His jacket and jeans were getting soaked. Travis moved closer to drier territory, stopping just short of touching her lips with his. “Because you’re good ol’ reliable Tess Bartlett. And you haven’t let me down yet.”
Then his mouth closed over hers. His kiss was a reward, an apolog
y, a demand. But it was done and he was gone before she could decide which message she should respond to.
TRAVIS WAITED AT his bedroom window, his sodden jeans dripping on the carpet, watching for the light to go on in Tess’s room.
Just to know she was okay, he rationalized.
Because he’d been an ass twelve years ago and hadn’t been able to connect “Tess” and “sex goddess” in his hungover brain, she couldn’t quite believe that his attraction to her now was the real thing. Hell. He couldn’t believe how badly he wanted her to take him up on his challenge.
She didn’t need lessons from him on how to get a man’s attention and drive him crazy. She didn’t need lessons from any man. Tess just needed a chance to strut her stuff. She needed a man to see her for the delectable treasure she was.
And he wasn’t about to let anybody else volunteer for that mission.
He’d seen her safely home. Half hoped she’d walk straight to his front door instead of up the steps to her mother’s house. But she’d unlocked the door and disappeared inside her dark, sleeping childhood home without even a wave goodbye. Travis had been left standing in the rain, with the wind pasting his wet clothes to his skin.
He thought of his dad—said a prayer that he was dry, his stomach was full, and that he’d remembered to take enough of his pills for the morning. He thought of Clarksie and his S.O. 6 unit—how they’d be wrapping up their assignment and prepping for the flight home in less than two weeks.
He thought of a twenty-one-year-old woman who’d rescued him from himself and nearly taken him to heaven—and her thirty-three-year-old counterpart, an unwitting siren who rescued him from his own driving needs and haunting fears, and had the power to take him well beyond heaven.
There.
The light went on in the second floor window, creating a beacon of creamy white curtains that called to him through the rain-shrouded night. The sense of relief that washed over him, knowing Tess was safe, was quickly replaced by a spark of anticipation that caught inside him, gradually speeding his pulse. He could see an indistinct silhouette moving on the other side of that curtain. Was Tess undressing? Bundling up in something warm? Pacing off the length of her room and calling him every well-earned name in the book?
Travis toed off his squishy deck shoes and kicked them into the bathroom where he’d shed his wet jacket. His socks joined the pile before he returned to the window to keep vigil until the light in Tess’s room went dark. It was a most fitting sort of punishment for a man who’d caused her doubt about her sexual talents, he supposed. To want a thing so much and be denied it was painful. He knew. Because he wanted the woman behind the curtain, but he was quickly learning that the real thing—the real woman—was far more addictive to his body, far more necessary to his sense of well-being than any fantasy.
He had her halfway naked inside his head when the phone rang.
An instant alertness snuffed out the lust coursing through him. It could be news of his father. Maybe he’d found a clearer means to make contact. Travis read the number displayed and smiled. The burst of adrenaline quickly receded and a familiar heat licked through his veins, reigniting his desire.
Tess.
He punched the talk button. “Hey.”
“I forgot to say goodnight.” Her quiet voice sounded as if she were in the darkened room with him.
“Goodnight, T-bone.”
She cleared her throat. The silhouette behind the curtain moved. “Could you call me Tess tonight? Or honey or darlin’ or whatever?”
“Okay, Whatever,” he teased.
“Travis.”
I want you. He heard the seductive subtext in that one-word reprimand, and his breath caught in his chest.
He forced himself to exhale, then breathe in again, evenly, slowly. To control the rapid thumping of his heart.
She was doing it.
She was seducing him.
The Action Man tried to play it cool, but Travis Harold McCormick of the USMC had never wanted a thing as badly as he wanted this. Not even S.O. 6. But he had to put his own needs on simmer and let this night be about Tess and what she needed. He swallowed past the lump of desire in his throat.
“Tess.” He gave her name as dark and sensuous a spin as he could. I want you. He encouraged her to continue. “You’ve got the ball.”
“Three different men flirted with me tonight.”
Ouch. Strike one to the old ego. Other men should not enter the conversation when he was this primed for a woman. “Really? Am I supposed to be okay with that?”
“You should be proud of your star pupil.”
He looked through the rain and the night and saw her silhouette framed behind the curtain at her window. “I am. But you’re my pupil.”
“One of them said he was looking for you. He’s a friend of yours from the Corps. I forgot to tell you that earlier.”
“What’s his name?”
“I got busy and didn’t get a chance to find out.”
“I’m not interested in him right now, anyway.” From his lookout point, he could make out that her position mirrored his own. The fence and houses and rain-soaked night shrouded her window to the world while offering him a private view of her room. Open the curtains, he silently urged. “Is that all you wanted to tell me?”
“Thank you for listening to me tonight. I’ve always been embarrassed that I wasn’t special enough to notice.”
“Don’t believe it.” Her silhouette moved. His hungry gaze darted to the glimpse of her fingers slipping between the curtains, like a batter spotting the pitch and taking aim.
“You know we’ve never been able to resist each other’s dares.”
“Open the curtains, Tess.”
He held his breath, licked his parched lips, then damn near got a hard-on the instant the curtains opened and he saw her standing there. She’d moved a lamp close to the window, spotlighting her and leaving her room in darkness behind her. The ball cap was gone. Her damp hair hung loose about her shoulders, kinking into curls and clinging to her cheeks. The jersey she wore was soaked, too, and fit her trim curves like a second skin. Her lips moved against her phone.
“Travis.”
“Tess.”
He pulled his bed stand closer to the window and turned on the lamp so she could see him just as clearly. Just like when they were kids. Only there was nothing innocent about the signals they traded tonight.
“It’s hot,” she murmured, her voice a seductive pitch that stroked against his groin.
Too damn hot despite the chill of wet clothes sticking to his skin. Travis reached for the hem of his T-shirt. He peeled it off over his head and tossed it aside. Cool air hit damp skin, but his temperature seemed to keep rising.
He put the phone back to his ear. “It’s hot here, too.”
He thought he detected a slight nod. Then she set her phone on the corner of her bed and came back to the window to slowly, deliberately, unhook the buttons of her jersey, one by one. Travis watched in rapt fascination. When she reached the last button, well below her waist, his dick jerked as if she’d touched him there.
His own chest heaved in a stuttered breath as she slid the jersey off her shoulders. Her breasts thrust toward him, nearly touching the glass. He reached out and splayed his fingers against the cool, hard pane of his own window.
At first he thought it was a sudden chill, or maybe second thoughts, when she hugged her arms around her waist, hiding that smooth expanse of skin. “Tess, don’t stop.”
But she didn’t have her phone, and she wasn’t.
“Damn, woman.”
She pulled her arms up beneath her breasts, lifting them, squeezing them together. Her plain white bra gleamed against her skin, highlighting each swell and curve, and if he used his imagination, each straining nipple.
Leaning forward, she pressed her breasts against the glass and Travis’s fingertips dug into the window with frustrated need. She dragged them in circles, finger-painting with each tit. His
pelvis tilted in response.
When he’d dared her to seduce him, he’d thought it would be in person. But this was as innovative and compelling a turn-on as anything he’d experienced before. And his body was heating and tingling and rising to attention as if she were doing those things to him and not the glass.
“Tess.” He whispered into the phone, knowing she couldn’t hear. “Tess.”
But she sensed his message, or felt the same electric current linking them across the night that he did. She retrieved her phone, and when she came back to the window, the bra was gone.
“How am I doing?” The soft question sparked an answer deep inside him.
“You’re beautiful.” She pressed her dusky nipples against the window. When she gasped into the phone, he felt the shock of hot skin meeting cold glass right along with her. “Touch yourself.”
This was better than any fantasy his feverish dreams could conjure.
She slipped her free hand between herself and the glass, sliding the nipple into the crook of two fingers, squeezing, rolling, lifting, plucking. “Like this?”
Travis licked his lips, imagining his tongue there. Imagining the silky texture of her skin against his lips, the citrusy smell of her essence filling his nose. “Yeah.” He heard the hoarse rasp that was his own need, begging for fulfillment.
She’d seen his tongue. She lifted her fingers to her own mouth and licked them, sucked them, moistened them with the same thoroughness as she had used when she’d sucked his cock last night.
“Yeah.” He could barely make a sound. His knees were trembling, his hips were clenching, and he was rubbing himself against the window sill. He breathed in a moment of sanity and stepped back from the window. “You’re killing me over here.”
The witch smiled against the phone. “That’s good, right?”
He couldn’t answer. She twirled her wet fingers around her nipple. He heard her gasp again, saw her stomach jerk as she gave herself pleasure. She was panting hard—in rhythm with his own shallow breaths—by the time she’d unzipped her shorts and dropped them to the floor.
Tess was an erotic goddess, touching here, wetting her fingers and touching there. Travis unsnapped his jeans and was gently loosening himself from behind his zipper when she reached inside her panties and touched herself. Her eyes closed, her lips parted, her throat hummed an incoherent song of rapture.
