Taste Me (29 page)

Lukas’s eyes bugged as Rafe wound his arms around Scarlett’s torso from behind, cuddling every inch of his lanky body right up against hers. She smiled up at him, placed her arms over his, and leaned her head back against his shoulder as a singer throatily implored that he wanted to see her stripped down to the bone.

Lukas looked at Jack and Flynn, chatting and flirting with the women as if there was nothing out of the ordinary going on, like his brother’s long, wavy hair wasn’t twining with Scarlett’s blazing red mane. Like Rafe wasn’t grinding against Scarlett’s ass not thirty feet away.

Lukas slammed his beer onto the bar and plowed through the crowd.

He didn’t see Jack and Flynn high-fiving behind him.

His eyes locked onto his brother’s the whole way. The son of a bitch saw him coming, and his expression was filled with challenge and an almost unholy glee. As he approached, Lukas raised a singed eyebrow and flashed his right hand with every digit extended, silently giving Rafe to the count of five to back the fuck off. He was down to one and actually had his fist clenched when Rafe finally stepped away from Scarlett with a theatrical “she’s all yours” gesture, and turned his attention to Bailey.

Scarlett kept moving to the slithering tune, eyes closed, as happy to dance by herself as with someone else. He hesitated, and then stepped behind her as Rafe had, pressing his whole body against hers, wrapping his arms around her abdomen. She halted momentarily, inhaled, then relaxed back against him.

Lukas absorbed her essence, her helpless reaction to him. To him, he reassured himself, not to his brother, who was too damn good looking for his own good.

But good Christ, he hated to dance.
Lukas felt the moving throng close in on him, so he closed his eyes and swayed, focusing on the feel of Scarlett’s soft breasts resting on his forearm.

No wonder his brother liked clubbing so much.

Scarlett squirmed, and then turned in his arms so she faced him. “Hi,” she murmured, raising her hand to stroke his shorn head. “You look much better than you did the last time I saw you.”

His senses were wide open, but he couldn’t find a whiff of anger or recrimination mixed in with the emotions swirling from her. Did she really find it so easy to forgive him? He wrapped his arms around her waist and opened his mouth to apologize. To grovel. To beg her to take him back into her life, to sing to him and only him. But before he could speak the words, she pulled his head down and kissed him.

Despite his good intentions, he dove in, all too willing to take advantage of her generosity, because she tasted like home. Yes, he’d apologize. They’d have a serious talk, but… later. Lukas tunneled his skinned-up fingers into her hair and feasted on her mouth like a king at a banquet.

They grasped and groped, swaying a bit for propriety’s sake, but no one could mistake the pheromones blooming around them. “Shit,” Lukas whispered, reluctantly dragging his lips from Scarlett’s to see Rafe, Sasha, and Bailey grinning at them from nearby.

“Never mind them. Come back here,” Scarlett said, pulling him back down to her mouth.

He drifted back into the kiss, heard her haunting voice, calling to him.
How can she sing when she’s kissing me?
Then he noticed that people around them had stilled, and were craning their heads to the three-story speaker system.

Scarlett tensed in his arms and pulled back slightly. The glorious voice continued, though he could see that her mouth was closed.
Scarlett’s new song.
Sasha had mentioned that Scarlett had been on a creative tear, but
wow.
Lukas wrapped his arms around Scarlett and rested his chin on top of her head as the extraordinary sound system pulsed.

Waves crashed. Voices emerged from deep in the mix. A man and a woman, murmuring softly to each other, barely audible, but their pleasure was unmistakable. There was Scarlett’s breathy moan. And… his face flamed.

She’d recorded them making love? He hardened to granite in a rush. He looked around the dance floor, but no one, absolutely no one, was paying attention to them. Instead, people had started to pair up, to couple, to sway to the music. Scarlett listened with her eyes closed, her face rapt as she cuddled closer to him, shifted her hips against his as the waves pulsed harder and crashed louder. Her siren’s voice twined around him, beckoned to every person in the room:

“Let me pull you down belowThrough the blue-green undertow”

The day he’d interrupted her as she worked, she’d pulled him down all right, riding him until they both exploded. He didn’t have to understand the mixing techniques she’d used, the writing skill she’d employed, to understand that her song was building to the same shattering conclusion.

Pheromones saturated the dance floor. Lukas noticed more than one man adjusting the front of his pants, saw dancers with their tongues buried down each other’s throats.

Rafe backed away from Bailey with a dazed look on his face.

But the song continued. Scarlett had added a final, wistful verse:

“I know you’ll pull me down belowTo the blue-green undertow…To the blue-green undertow”

The yearning. The trust. The love, passion, and commitment. All of it pulsed into him, everything he wanted, and nothing he ever thought he could have. Lukas pressed his forehead to hers, wrapping his arms around her like he would absorb her into his skin if he could. Useless words wrestled for supremacy in his head, but all he could say was, “I’m so sorry.”

Her soft, forgiving kiss, her unmistakable mandarin champagne response, made his head swim.

He took a deep breath and boldly crashed his ship into the cliffs. “Sing to me, Scarlett. For the rest of our lives.”

“Be careful what you ask for,” Scarlett whispered with a smile that rivaled the aurora. “You just might receive it.”

He brought his lips to hers. The kiss was a benediction, a promise. But when her soft pink tongue touched his, he groaned and let his join in, tangle and dance.

“Can you two get a room?” Sasha complained, bumping Lukas with her shoulder as she walked by. “This is a respectable place of business.”

Lukas looked at the dancers who all but copulated in the shadows. It was business as usual at Underbelly.

Scarlett tugged on his hand, leading him off the dance floor. “I have a room, right upstairs.” She wrapped her arm around his waist as they walked to the penthouse elevator. “Did you notice that my bedroom has a skylight? Maybe we’ll see the aurora tonight. Or a shooting star.”

Lukas eyed Scarlett. “You know that shooting stars are just space debris burning up as it hits the atmosphere, right?”

“You’re such a hopeless romantic.”

Their eyes met and locked. “So, you want to see stars?” Lukas murmured. “I’ll show you stars.”

He lowered his head as the elevator doors closed, and showed her the moon, the stars. The universe.

“Desire (Come and Get It)”—Gene Loves Jezebel

“Maneater”—Nelly Furtado

“Line Up”—Elastica

“Sex (I’m a…)”—Berlin

“Ice Cream”—New Young Pony Club

“Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love”—Van Halen

“Erotic City”—Berlin

“Blue Monday”—Orgy

“I Never Came”—Queens of the Stone Age

“Fingers”—Pink

“I Touch Myself”—Divinyls

“Too Drunk To Fuck”—Nouvelle Vague

“Stripped”—Depeche Mode

“Perfect Strangers”—INXS

“All Day Long I Dream About Sex”—JC Chasez

“Are You Happy Now?”—Michelle Branch

“Do Ya Wanna Touch Me”—Joan Jett

“Lovestoned”—Justin Timberlake

“This Is Love”—PJ Harvey

“Future Love Paradise”—Seal

“Such Reveries”—Duncan Sheik

“One Part Be My Lover”—Bonnie Raitt

“Maybe Tomorrow”—Stereophonics

“Home”—Zero 7

While writing a novel is a solitary endeavor, producing a book is a massive undertaking which cannot be accomplished without the support and expertise of countless others.

Many thanks to my eagle-eyed critique partner Brenda Whiteside, for asking just the right questions and zapping extraneous words dead. Thanks to my agent Cherry Weiner, who helped seal the deal, and to my editor Deb Werksman and all the people at Sourcebooks, whose skill and talent turned this long-held dream into a reality. To my Midwest Fiction Writer chapter mates and my blogmates at The Ruby Slippered Sisterhood, thanks for your friendship, wise counsel, and for always having my back. Let’s keep those red heels clicking.

Last but definitely not least, countless thanks to Mark—for holding down the fort, for herding the cats, and for the gift of time.

Tamara Hogan
loathes cold and snow, but nonetheless lives near Minneapolis with her partner Mark and two thoroughly spoiled cats. When she’s not working as a quality and process engineer for a global networking company, she enjoys writing edgy love stories with a sci-fi twist. A voracious reader with an unapologetic television addiction, Tamara is forever on the lookout for the perfect black boots.

In 2009,
Taste Me
(previously titled
Underbelly
) won the Daphne du Maurier Award for Mystery and Suspense and was nominated for the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious Golden Heart® award.