Hot and Bothered (Hot in the Kitchen) (30 page)

She pretended it was exactly what she wanted. Intimacy had never appealed to her, or more accurately, she had never appealed for intimacy. That would require some measure of self-respect, some acknowledgment that she was deserving of that kind of human affection.

“Jules,” he whispered, and the way he said her name smashed her to the ground.

Tears came hot and fast. “Don’t look at me like I need to be hugged. I’m sick of people judging my situation and thinking I’m some victim that needs to be coddled. Jack, Shane, all of you. So my reading sucks, I had an unplanned pregnancy, my brother pays my rent. But I’m not some delicate flower. I’m stronger now than I’ve ever been and I don’t need a man to be my savior.”

He pulled her into his arms and it was the best, best place she had ever visited.

“
Tesoro,
I get this guy hurt you and it’s okay to be pissed off about that. It doesn’t make you a victim, it makes you a survivor. Get angry, honey. Don’t hold back.”

The anger had passed a long time ago, but the lessons she had learned remained.

“I’m past all that. I was angry at first but not now. Simon hurt me when I found out he was married, but… he also did me a favor.”

“He gave you Evan?” He rubbed her back in tight, heated circles.

“Yes,” she whispered against the rough skin at his throat. “But he also helped me realize that I’m drawn to certain types of guys who are no good for me.”

Like him.
She didn’t have to say it. The jerk of his body as he drew back told her he understood.

“Not all guys are assholes,” he bit out. “Not all guys will treat you with disrespect or break your heart without a second thought.”

“No, some may even be considerate while they do the heart-breaking. How many hearts have you broken, Tad DeLuca? All that charm and those gorgeous blue eyes, then you move on, leaving human rubble in your wake.” She tried to soften it with a winsome smile but she suspected she looked like a scarecrow. “The stories you told me made my toes curl. The Brazilian cousins, that bartender at O’Caseys, the hot air balloon. Will I just be another tawdry tale in a couple of months?”

His tone of voice echoed the horrified look on his face. “Jesus, I should never have told you anything. I thought I was cheering you up and yeah, it kind of turned me on to see your reaction. Maybe it was disrespectful to the women I’d been with but, damn it Jules, don’t compare this to what I had with anyone else because there is no comparison.”

Their friendship might have placed this in a different category but it didn’t change the fundamentals. He was the unrepentant bad boy and she was the reformed bad girl and they were supposed to screw each other out of their systems and move on. He back to anything in heels, she onto Mr. Right, Safe, and Boring.

But lately, she was seeing another side to him, or allowing herself to because it had always been there: kind, caring, her best guy, Tad. What was happening between them went above and beyond the hot and dirty playtime she had signed on for.

When he had taken her hard and fast the moment she walked through the door, he had looked at her like she mattered. The beautiful bastard was making her hope. She wanted to hurt him for that.

“I guess talking about Simon brought up some stuff I haven’t dealt with.” Crediting her upset to her shitty ex seemed best all around here. She had no more tears to shed for Simon St. James, but given a chance, she would have buckets at the ready for Tad DeLuca.

He glowered. Boy, he gave good glower.

“Don’t make me a scapegoat for what this guy did.” He backed her up against the table and wedged his hard body between her shaking thighs. With both hands, he cradled her face and delivered passionate kisses that burned through her disintegrating defenses.

“This asshole treated you like crap,
bella,
and it’s okay to be angry about that. It’s okay to rant and rail and go nuts. Punch it out. Cry it out. Screw it out. If you need to deal with this by banging me until we’re both cross-eyed, then do it, but don’t compare me to him. I know you’re strong and you can kick my ass, but that doesn’t mean you can’t lean on me, too. I’m here for you, Jules. You are my best girl. You are in my gut.”

Another kiss punctuated his declaration, more scorching than the last, melting her heart but not the tension in her fists.

She wanted to thump the living daylights out of something, but not because of Simon and the hurt she felt then, but because the sweet, funny, sexy guy in her arms had shown her how perfect it could be. She had owned her choices and come up with a plan to ensure she never made mistakes like that again. And then she met Tad. Dreamed about him. Acted on her greedy fantasy and now she was back to where she had come from. Wishing for things she couldn’t have.

“Punish me, Jules. Get it all out,” he urged between sucks on her lower lip and hot, open-mouthed kisses along her jawline. He ground his erection into the concave softness of her sex, ripping a heartfelt moan from her throat. Rough-hewn fingers delved below the waistband of her sweats and traced a well-worn path to her center. Oh, she planned to punish him thoroughly; not for the sins of her ex, but for the cardinal sin of making her fall for him.

Making women drop at his feet was part of Tad’s skill set, but really it was his
kill set
. He had murdered whatever miniscule chance she’d had of surviving this affair between friends. She didn’t want to feel this way. She had tried to be careful but her heart had been half-engaged going in and she was already playing from behind.

She had only gone and fallen arse-over-tit in love with her friend. What a disaster.

He rubbed his blunt fingers against her blooming sex and caught her moan in his mouth.

“You’re so ready for me. Like you’ve been waiting for me.”

All her life,
she wanted to say. All her life, she’d been waiting for a man like this. She wished… no, she couldn’t make wishes for things to have gone differently. Bloody pointless.

But.

Checking out would have been the clever thing to do, but no one had ever called her clever. Besides, she had checked out of her life too many times already. So she told him how hot he made her, how good he felt inside her. She told him to touch her there, to take her harder. She told him everything she could to avoid telling him the one thing she couldn’t. She loved a man who could never be hers but she was going to enjoy this precious time if it broke her heart to do it. Another one of those great decisions she was owning.

Only when she had screamed to his satisfaction and come so many times that she almost passed out did she let her mind go back to that forbidden wish. Not that he could be hers for the future, but that he had been hers in the past.

She wished he was Evan’s father.

Chapter Sixteen

Do not talk, kiss me.
—Italian proverb Surveying Vivi’s, Tad tried to take pleasure in the close to ninety percent capacity, but he couldn’t get there. Not when it was impossible to shuck what Jules had told him from his mind. The message had been as clear as the stemware racked above his head. Tad didn’t make the grade. Adequate for a fling, but not good enough for something real.

If ever there was a time he wished they had not started as friends, it was now. She knew all his faults and flaws. How he had blown through women without a backward glance and now, that knowledge between them was back to bite his ass with a vengeance.

He had thought he was doing her a favor by telling her about his conquests and making her laugh when she was down, but really he was trying to do himself a solid. Sharing all that stuff put her in the friend zone because no decent woman would want a serious shot with a guy like that. It kept her at arms’ length. Damned them before they even had a chance.

Every Italian insult he could think of wasn’t enough to describe how stupid he was.

Nor how lost he felt.

Usually, he’d be bored with a woman and the by-now pedestrian sex, ready to move on to something new and shiny. Boredom didn’t even enter the equation with Jules, not when there was so much more of her to explore. He wished he meant the freckle on her shoulder and the heart-shaped birthmark on her hip. Or the sound she made when his tongue stroked her ear and she got really, really excited. But that was just the sparkly top level. He would need a lifetime to map her body and a hundred more to figure out what made her tick.

His skin prickled with the need to take action. Before he could second-guess that impulse, he shot off a text, handed the reins to Kennedy, and did the five-minute quick step over to O’Casey’s.

Shane saluted him with a long neck beer as he came in. “Pulling me away from my girl this late? Better be good, DeLuca.”

“It’s only 10 p.m., old man.”

Conor wasn’t on tonight but Shannon, his favorite buxom redhead bartender, slid him a Goose Island IPA, a healthy dose of her cleavage, and a dirty wink. They’d had a brief fling about eighteen months back and he might have mentioned some of the spicier details to Jules over baked ziti at Casa DeLuca.

While Tad took a slug of his beer, Shane strummed the bar impatiently. Tad took another long draught. The TV above his head showed the Blackhawks getting their asses handed to them by the Red Wings. He felt their pain.

“Unless you start talking soon, I’m going to have to regale you with tales of how hot the sex is with your very pregnant cousin.”

“I’ve been having a thing with Jules,” Tad said.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Shane shrugged. “No secrets in this family, man.”

“So Jack knows?” Not that Tad particularly cared, but he’d like to be prepared.

Shane’s mouth twisted in a grimace. “You’re still pretty, so that would be a no.”

Christ, he wanted to tear this Simon St. James fucker a new one. The ridiculous name said it all. Some arrogant, candy-assed Brit with a Big Ben-sized sense of entitlement, not unlike another Limey he knew. What guy dumps the woman who was carrying his child and then calls up out of the blue looking to slot himself into his kid’s life?

Revealing that this douche had been in touch didn’t seem wise. They would deal with that later, but he’d give the bare bones for context.

“She opened up to me today about Evan’s father.”

Shane sat up straighter, his curiosity piqued. Jules’s tight-lipped behavior over the identity of her baby’s daddy had caused a fair amount of speculation.

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

“Except she’s decided to use it as a representative example of why men can’t be trusted. Or more to the point, Italian guys who have a habit of bedding women and moving on quicker than you can say, ‘Your ass looks great on the way out my front door.’ ”

“You’ve said that to some chick, haven’t you?”

“Maybe, but that’s not the point.” He wasn’t sure what the point was, actually. Looking at the beer as though it could provide answers, he pondered today’s take home.

He still had his friend in his life.

Could he live with that even if he wanted so much more?

“You two have been skirting each other like snapping alligators for ages now. You finally get together and the minute it gets hard, you throw up your hands and walk? Never took you for a quitter, Tad.”

Quitting was where he excelled. Long ago, he had figured out the prescription for a hassle-free, numbed up life.
Take two blondes, a bottle of bourbon, and call me in the morning.
He had nothing to offer Jules but the port of his body through what he suspected was going to be a tough time now that her ex had reared his no-goodnik head.

And that would have to be enough for now because she had the right of it. She saw deep into his soul and knew exactly what she’d find there.

A gaping void.

* * *

During the five-minute drive to Jack’s house for Sunday brunch, Evan continued the tantrum he had started at an ungodly 4 a.m. Teething rings were useless. Rubbing his gums made him antsy. No doubt he was picking up on her weird mood. She hadn’t talked to Tad since she left his house yesterday afternoon. Oddly, she had felt closer to him—cooking together, sharing her sad sack story, the off-the-charts sex—yet there had been a tectonic shift. In telling Tad about Simon’s legacy of heartbreak, including the pattern he had set for her fragile heart, a timer had been set. Full acknowledgment that their fling had an expiration date.

They had known it would come, but the pain in her chest at the thought of it had been unexpected. Going back to what they had before would be a hard road but it was necessary. Today at Jack and Lili’s, they could practice being friends again, and take a step in the right direction. Onward and upward.

“Come on, Demon. Time to be brave.”

Her little soldier pushed out his bottom lip in a pout that accessorized wonderfully with his red, puffy eyes. Gently, she stroked his tear-ravaged cheek and buried her nose in his shock of blond hair.

“I love you, Evan,” she whispered. “You’re going to help me get through these next few months. You’re going to mend my heart.”

Evan sighed and then launched into a fit when she unhooked him from the car seat. It took her ten minutes to get him out of the car because he had lost his dino-giraffe and was inconsolable until she extracted it from under the front seat. Between that and wrangling the bag of necessities she carried around with her constantly, it took a while to register the voice coming from the backyard at Jack’s house. A shiver coursed through her body, like someone had danced across her grave.