Dirty Sexy Knitting (11 page)

She screamed.

He rode with her through the waves of orgasm. His mouth and his hand easing up as the ripples receded. When the last shudder died away, he lifted his head and took a breath. Then he placed a quick kiss on the tip of each nipple, her chin, her nose, then back to her mouth.

No tongue.

No heat.

No intent to move on to the next act.

“Gabe, what? . . .” she said, even as he was pulling up her bra and her top in the same efficient move he’d used to take them down. Her face felt hot with embarrassment. She wasn’t practiced at this after-the-scream thing, but she couldn’t just
take
from him, could she? “What about you?”

“That was yours, honey. Just for you.”

Her face burned hotter. Had she been too loud? Had she done something else to turn him off?

“Gabe . . .” she said, agonized. “Did I do something wrong?”

He buttoned her up almost to her chin. “No. It was me that did wrong the other night. To you.”

“What?”

“I was evening the score, Froot Loop. Us together in bed like we were—bad idea. But it happened, and I feel like a heel that I left you high and dry then.”

The words sank in. He’d said something similar earlier, and now she finally understood what he was talking about. He thought they’d had sex the other night after she’d brought him home from the Beach Shack! He’d woken in her bed and assumed . . .

Which meant he didn’t remember a thing.

Which explained why he’d been Mr. Nice Neighbor the last couple of days, handing out kisses and concern and now . . . climaxes. He’d felt guilty for sleeping with her.

The warmth on her face and kindling in her belly had nothing to do with sex or shame now. She was pissed. He thought she thought so little of herself that she’d let some drunken barfly talk her between the sheets.

And he hadn’t questioned his assumption—or questioned her. Apparently he figured that them naked-to-naked could be just that forgettable.

Oh, she was going to make it very clear that—

But wait. His mistake had gotten him out of his bat cave. It had got him eating and talking and taking an interest in something other than his ghosts and his grief.

That was good. And despite her anger there was still enough Nightingale left in her when it came to Gabe that she wasn’t ready to see that end.

So she wouldn’t correct his wrong impression that they’d slept together. Her gaze slid over to him as he straightened on the couch. His grimace made her eyes narrow, and then she noticed the bulge in his jeans. Hah. That little session they just had might not have been shared, but it had certainly gotten to him a little. Well, good.

It only strengthened her decision. She definitely wouldn’t correct his wrong impression that they’d slept together. But she
was
going to make him pay for it. And now that she knew he wasn’t as immune to her as he’d always pretended, she thought she had an idea of just what it was going to cost him.

 

 

 

Don’t look at her, Gabe told himself, staring out the passenger-side window of Cassandra’s veggie car and pretending a fascination with the light rain. Don’t breathe, because then you’ll take in her perfume. Don’t think about the sight of her incredible breasts . . . The pale globes, their nipples red and sweet and wet after he’d loved them with his mouth.

Find your detachment, buddy. Remember, she’s like a nun
. Okay, not with the image of those breasts branded into his brain. Sister, then—uh, can’t go there now either. Then friend. Yeah, Cassandra was a friend, though one he needed to keep a decided distance from—and hadn’t she asked for it herself just days ago? He couldn’t take the chance on letting his lust take over for his common sense.

She pulled into the parking lot of the medical building in Beverly Hills, and found a spot in the first row of patient spaces. “It looks like the staff will have to walk right past us to get inside,” she said, turning off the ignition. “Now we just have to sit back and wait. I was told Dr. Tucker would be in this morning.”

“Are you sure it
is
morning?” Gabe grumbled, peering out at the dim light. “Morning is when birds sing and sun shines and I’ve had at least three cups of coffee.”

Cassandra unhooked her seatbelt and kneeled on her seat to reach behind it. From the corner of his eye, he gave himself two seconds to check out her curvy behind in blue jeans. Her waist was tiny, flaring to hips and ass that were in proportion to that pair of spectacular . . .

He was not thinking of those spectaculars.

She flipped around, and settled back behind the steering wheel, a cardboard carrier in her lap. She had a colorful knitted hat perched on her head with tassels on its two upstanding corners, making her look like a jaunty, sexy milkmaid. “Here,” she said, handing over a cardboard cup. “Thirty-two ounces of mood enhancement.”

Hesitating, he eyed the beverage with a frown. “Froot Loop, that’s not the sick seaweed stuff you usually drink, is it?”

“It’s one hundred percent caffeinated, he-man java, Gabe,” she replied. “Black and ugly, just like you seem to be feeling today.”

Though he maintained his scowl, inside he perked up. This was the way things usually were between them. He baited, she poked, they both used the activity to maintain a safe space between them. He took the coffee from her and raised it to his lips.

“Thank you for coming with me, by the way,” she said, her voice low. “Thank you very much.” Her slender hand landed high on his thigh and squeezed.

He jumped, and his fingers curved around the cup matched the movement of hers. Hot coffee burped out of the small drinking hole, scalding his fingers. “Damn!”

“Ouch,” she said, commiserating. She grabbed up a napkin from the cardboard carrier, and when he transferred the coffee to his other hand, she tended to the burned one herself. She dried it with the paper square, then inspected his skin.

He tried pulling away. “I’m fine.”

She held on. “Let me make sure.”

Gritting his teeth, he kept still for her ministrations, though the feel of her warm breath against his wrist might as well have been her tongue. The sensation tickled up the smooth inside flesh of his arm.

Then she brought his hand to her mouth and kissed his fingers.

“What?” He yanked his hand from her grasp. “What do you think you’re doing?” With a panicked shift, he slammed his back against the passenger door to gain some extra inches from her body, her breath, her soft mouth. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Kissing it to make it better,” she said, pulling her own paper cup from the container as if she didn’t notice his alarmed posture. “Didn’t anyone ever do that for you? Didn’t you ever kiss Maddie’s little hurts?”

Maddie.

Inside him, everything went quiet.

When was the last time someone had said her name aloud? Who would speak it to him? Her mother was dead, too. And he supposed Lynn’s parents would find it too painful to call him up and talk about her. Maddie’s other grandparents—his own mother and father—had given up on him before he’d left San Francisco for Malibu. Perhaps they’d not given up on him, precisely, but they’d stopped trying to get him to answer his doorbell or his telephone or their e-mails.

“Maddie . . .” He tried the name out. When was the last time he’d said it aloud himself? Probably when he’d had to make those horrible, terrible, can’t-think-about-them-without-wanting-to-get-drunk calls to Maddie’s two sets of grandparents.

“Your daughter,” Cassandra confirmed, as if he could have forgotten. “I thought I saw a picture of her in your wallet the other night. Would you show it to me?”

The other night . . . His spine pressed painfully into the door’s handle. He still had an infuriating hole in his memory bank about that other night . . . and he remembered much too much about another night, that night on her couch, when Cassandra had almost bewitched him into losing his cool. He’d wanted so much to sink inside that heat he’d felt between her thighs.

“Gabe?” She was looking over her cup at him with those bluer-than-blue eyes, the ones that could send out a spell with just a flutter of her lashes. “The photo?”

Like always, her magic worked, and he found himself slipping his coffee into a plastic holder hanging from the dash and then reaching into his right front pocket. His wallet fell open to the picture of Lynn and Maddie. He quickly flipped the clear sleeve, unwilling to meet the eyes of his dead wife, which he always avoided in case the smiling gaze had turned accusing. From behind it, he pulled another photo free. This one was of him and Maddie. She’d been . . . three? He carried her piggyback and she had her chin propped on his shoulder as she mugged for the camera.

Offering it to Cassandra, he had the sudden urge to hide it away, but she already had her mitts on it, and he found himself letting go.

As she studied it, he felt the weight of his daughter pressing onto his back, much heavier than it had been that day, her legs digging into his ribs, her hands in a strangle-hold around his neck. He couldn’t swallow. He couldn’t breathe.

“You both look happy.” Cassandra looked up. “Very happy.”

Happy.
Very happy
, said his neighbor who had never had a father to carry her like that, Gabe realized. Cassandra had never grinned for the camera from behind her daddy’s back. At the thought, he could breathe again, the strangling weight he’d felt vanishing, leaving only a lingering ache in his throat. He glanced at the photo and felt his lips curve. “Yeah. That day we were very happy.”

Cassandra continued to study it. “Maddie. Madelyn . . . what?”

“Madelyn Rosemary.”

His neighbor snickered. “Gabe. You named your daughter after something green. Who would have thunk it?”

He was obliged to frown at her. “We named her after my
mother
.”

“Still green.”

“What’s your middle name?” he asked. “No, wait. Let me guess. Thyme. Tofu. Bamboo Shoots. Wheat Grass.”

She laughed and tossed her hair over her shoulder. The fragrance of her shampoo infused the air, but it was too late for him to shut down his lungs. It invaded his chest, his nose, his head. He grabbed up his coffee.

“No middle name,” she said, with a little shrug. “Maybe because there’s no paternal grandmother, either.”

He swallowed down the renewed ache in his throat with a slug from his cup of coffee. “Cassandra’s a mouthful,” he mumbled, staring out the window again.

“You should know,” she murmured.

His head jerked toward her. Had she just said what he thought she’d said? Did she mean to make the three words a sexy little innuendo? He couldn’t tell, because she was looking out the window, too, and it might just be the brighter morning light putting that pink cast on her cheeks.

And shit, it didn’t matter what she’d said, because it was in his head: her fragrant, hot skin, the taste of her kisses, her berried nipples, the way she moaned when he rubbed the sweet spot between her thighs. His cock stiffened as his blood chugged hot and steadily southward.

Damn woman. She took away his ability to think.

And she didn’t even seem to realize it. “I wonder,” she mused, her gaze still on the view outside the windshield. “If we shouldn’t have done this differently.”

“Huh?” he grunted. “Differently how?”

“I don’t know.” She gave a tiny shrug. “Surely we could have put our heads together and come up with something about me a plastic surgeon would want to get his hands on.”

Get his hands on? Gabe’s cock jumped, thinking of his hands on her, of their heads together, of those wet, hot kisses they’d shared and how easy it had been to get her off with his mouth and with his touch. Christ, he probably could have given her an orgasm just by sucking on her nipples.

And didn’t he just want to try.

His hand reached out, tangling in the ends of her hair. He made a fist, about to yank her close for just such a test.

Only to realize they were in a public place.

And this was Cassandra, who didn’t deserve to be his experiment . . . or his anything else.

In an abrupt move, he shoved open the passenger door. “I need some air,” he said, and slid out of the car. Air, space, distance, common sense. He forced himself to think of Lynn’s face instead of Cassandra’s. Lynn, the very reason Cassandra was not for him.

The light rain was more mist now and it felt good against his too-hot skin. He loitered on the sidewalk leading into the building, taking in deep breaths and thinking of innocuous stuff like the sticker on the front bumper of the car:

 

CHICKS WITH STICKS
♥
MALIBU & EWE

He considered what it would be like to spend time taking bumps out of noses and removing ill-conceived tattoos as cars pulled into the lot and people—obviously staff—juggled briefcases and purses and Starbucks cups as they headed for the front doors. Some were in business attire, some wore scrubs, a few white-coated doctors, their names embroidered in dark blue against the cotton, all strode past him. Preoccupied with their prework thoughts, no one gave him a second glance.

Then around a corner came two young men. He wouldn’t have given
them
a second glance except that they were such a contrast in appearance. There was a lean guy with dreadlocks wearing Levi’s, flip-flops, and a long-sleeved T-shirt emblazoned with “Responsible Recycling, Inc.,” talking in vehement tones to his opposite. The slightly older man had a business haircut, silk tie, expensive loafers, and a doctor’s coat.

A doctor’s coat that read DR. PATRICK TUCKER.

Through the rain-splattered windshield, he shot a look at Cassandra. She was sitting straight in her seat, clutching her cup as if it was a teddy bear and she was here for a tetanus shot. No way could this thirtyish dude be her dad, but she was on edge all the same. And the last name . . . had Cassandra called the wrong clinic?