Waking Up to You: Overexposed (16 page)

She was solitary, self-contained, which interested him.

And her looks simply stole his breath.

From where he sat, he had a perfect view of her profile. Her thick dark brown hair hung from a haphazard ponytail, emphasizing her high cheekbones and delicate jaw. Her face appeared soft, her skin creamy and smooth. Though her lips were parted, she didn’t appear to be smiling. He suspected she was sighing from her open mouth every once in a while, though out of unhappiness or of boredom, he couldn’t say.

Dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, she also wore a large baker’s type apron over her clothes. That made it impossible to check out her figure. But judging by the length of those legs, shrunk-wrapped in tight, faded denim, he imagined it was spectacular. With a lightweight backpack slung over one shoulder, she looked like she’d stopped off to grab a pizza on her way home from work, like everyone else in line.

Only, she was so incredibly sexy in her aloof indifference, she didn’t
look
like any other person in line.

Across from him, Mark said something, but Nick paid no attention. He continued to stare, wishing she’d turn toward him so he could make out the color of her eyes. Finally, as though she’d read his mental order, the brunette shifted, tilted her head in a delicate stretch that emphasized her slender neck and turned. Sweeping a lazy gaze across the room, she breathed a nearly audible sigh that confirmed she was bored.

Then her eyes met his...and there they stopped.

Hers were brown, as dark as his. As their stares locked, he noted the flash of heated awareness in her stare. She made no effort to look away, watching him watch her. As if she knew he’d been checking her out, she returned the favor, looking him over, from his face down, her stare lingering a little long on his shoulders, and even longer on his chest. Nick shifted in his seat, his worn jeans growing tight across his groin, where heat slid and pulsed with seam-splitting intensity.

Though he was seated and there was no way she could see her effect on him, the stranger began to smile. One corner of her mouth tilted up, revealing a tiny dimple in her cheek. But it wasn’t a cute, flirty one...nothing about this woman was cute and flirty, she was aggressive and seductive.

Needing to know her—now—he pushed his beer away and slid to the end of the bench seat without a word.

“Nick?” his brother asked, obviously startled.

“I have to meet her.”

“Who?”

Nick didn’t answer, he simply rose to his feet, never taking his eyes off the stranger.

Mark turned around.
“Her?”
his brother asked, sounding so surprised Nick wondered if marriage had made him entirely immune to the appeal of a hot, sexy stranger. “You have to
meet
her?”

Already walking away, Nick didn’t answer. Instead, he strode across the restaurant, determined to not let her get away. He had to meet the first
real
woman—not a fantasy dressed in rose petals—who’d made his heart start beating hard again since the day he’d gotten home from the war.

* * *

I
ZZIE
N
ATALE
HAD
A
SECRET
.

Well, she had
many
secrets. But the secret she was trying to disguise right now was one that would get her thrown out of the windy city for life.

She preferred New York–style pizza to Chicago deep-dish.

Shocking, but true. In the years she’d been living in New York during her dancing career, she’d fallen in love with everything there, including the food. But she’d be taking her life in her hands if she admitted it. Because, man, they took their pizza
very
seriously here. Her grandfather would turn over in his grave if he found out she’d gone to the dark—thin-crust—side. Her father, at whose request she’d made this stop at Santori’s, would disown her. And her sister, whose husband ran this place, would never speak to her again.

Hmm. That might be a blessing. Considering her sister Gloria never had mastered the art of shutting up when the occasion demanded it, Izzie felt tempted to tell her that not only did she like her crust thin, but she also preferred the Mets over the Cubbies. That would get her stoned in the street.

How am I going to get through this?

It wasn’t the first time she’d wondered that in the two months she’d been home, taking care of her family owned bakery while her father recovered from his stroke. If her friends in Manhattan could see her—covered in flour, wearing an apron, working behind a counter—they’d think she’d been kidnapped.

This could not be Izzie Natale, the former long-legged Rockette who’d had men at her fingertips. Nor could it be the Izzie who’d gone on to land a spot with one of the premiere modern dance companies in New York, short-lived though that spot may have been after her ACL injury had required major surgery seven months ago.

But it was.
She
was. And it was driving her
mad.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love her family. But oh, did she wish one of
them
could run the bakery. Because she was not happy being once again under the microscope, living in this big-geographically, but small-town-at-heart area of Little Italy.

Before she could groan about it, however, something caught her eye in the crowded pizzeria. Make that some
one
caught her eye. As she cast another bored look around, half wishing she’d see someone she’d recognize from her
other
life here in Chicago—the one nobody else knew about—she spotted
him.

A dark-haired, dark-eyed man was staring at her from across the place. Even from twenty feet away she felt the heat rolling off him. An answering sultry, hungry fire curled from the tips of her curly dark hair down to the bottoms of her feet.

God, the man was hot. Fiery hot. Global-warming hot.

His jet-black hair was cut short, spiky.
A military man.

His dark eyes matched the hair. They were deep set, heavily lashed...bedroom eyes, she’d have to say. His lean face was more rugged than handsome. The strong jaw jutted out the tiniest bit, and his unsmiling mouth was tightly set, as if intentionally trying to disguise the fullness of a pair of amazing male lips.

His shoulders were Mack-truck wide and his chest was football-field broad. And his attitude was all 100 percent Santori male.

Because Izzie knew it was Nick Santori who’d met her stare from across the room. Nick Santori who’d risen from his seat and was winding his way across the room toward her. Nick Santori who was making the earth shake a little under her feet, just as he always had when she was a teenager.

She told herself to breathe and not let him get under her skin. He sure had once...like at Gloria and Tony’s wedding, when she’d been a bridesmaid of fourteen and Nick had been a groomsman. He’d had to escort her down the aisle, and his big bad going-into-the-Marines-eighteen-year-old self hadn’t liked it. And that day was one she would
never
live down.

Somehow, though, that memory didn’t steady the floor. Nor did it cool her off as he came closer. Those dark eyes of his were locked on her face as he effortlessly cleared his way through the crowd with a look here or glance there. Everyone made way for him. The men out of respect. The women...well, the women looked like Izzie imagined she did: dumbstruck. All because of the simmering sensuality of this one sexy man.

The one she’d wanted since the first time she’d felt heat between her legs and understood what it meant.

“Hi,” he said when he finally reached her.

“Hey.” She felt almost triumphant at having achieved that note of casual aloofness. She even managed to keep slouching against the wall, probably because she needed the support. She might have learned to handle men but she’d never gotten over feeling like Izzie-the-geek around this one.

“Is there something I can do for you?”

Oh, yeah. She could think of several somethings. Starting with her getting some payback for him ignoring her when she was a chubby, lovesick kid. And ending with him naked in her bed.

But getting naked in bed with Nick Santori would involve serious complications. Her sister was married to his brother. The families were old friends. If she so much as looked at the guy with interest the neighborhood would have them married off with her popping out brown-haired Italian babies within a year.

Uh-uh. No, thanks. Not for Izzie. Sex with Nick would be delightful. But it came with
way
too many strings.

“I don’t think so,” she finally answered.

He didn’t back off. “I’m sure there’s something.”

“What, are you a waiter now?” she asked, amused at the thought of him waiting tables. Especially since that chest of his could probably double as one.

Nick had, like all the Santori kids, worked in the restaurant in high school. Just as Izzie had worked in the bakery—often eating her paycheck to sweeten her teenage angst.

But he’d been in the Marines for years. She didn’t see him slinging pizzas now that he was back in Chicago. Not after he’d been slinging Uzis or whatever those macho soldier guys carried.

“Maybe. Why don’t you tell me what you want and I’ll let you know if I can get it for you?”

Thin and cheesy New York–style pizza was the first thing that came to mind, but Izzie didn’t want to get strung up at the corner of Taylor and Racine. “I already placed my order.”

He smiled slightly. “I wasn’t just talking about pizza.”

God, was that...it
was.
There was a flirtatious twinkle in those blackish-brown eyes of his. He’d been throwing some subtle innuendo at her and it had gone clear over her head.

“Oh” was all she could manage.

Cake flour must have clogged her femme-fatale genes in the past two months. It was the only way someone with her experience with men could have missed his double meaning.

“Want to sit while you wait for your order?” he asked, gesturing toward a few chairs in the waiting area.

“No, thanks.” She fell silent. If she opened her mouth again, she might do something stupid like throw out a dumb,
“Wow, what I wouldn’t have given for you to look at me like that when I was a teenager”
line, which she so didn’t want to do.

She zipped her lips. She’d be Izzie the uninterested mute. Which was better than Izzie the lovesick mutant.

“How about at a table?”

“At a table...what?”

He smiled again, that sexy, self-confident smile that had probably had woman on five continents dropping their panties within sixty seconds of meeting him. “We can sit at a table while you wait for your order.”

God, she was an idiot. “No, I’m fine here, thank you.”

She had to give herself a break for being so slow. After all, Nick Santori had been scrambling her brains since she was ten—right around the time her sister Gloria had started dating his brother Tony. And though he’d always had a way with females, he’d never looked twice at
her
that way.

Especially not since Gloria and Tony’s wedding. The one where she’d tripped on her ugly puce gown—which hugged her tubby hips and butt—while they were dancing the obligatory wedding-party waltz. She, the kid who’d been in dance lessons since the age of three, had tripped.

Maybe it wasn’t so shocking. She’d been worried about what he’d think of her sweaty palms. She’d been
terrified
that her makeup was smearing off her face and revealing that she’d had the mother of all breakouts that morning.

Nervous plus terrified times the pitter-patter of her heart and the achy tingle in her small breasts from where they brushed against the lapels of Nick’s tux had left her dizzy. So dizzy she’d stepped off the edge of the slightly raised dance floor and crashed both of them onto a table full of cookies and pastries made especially by her parents for the wedding.

It hadn’t been pretty.

Colorful candy-covered almonds had flown in all directions. Her butt had landed on a platter of cream puffs, her elbows in two stacks of pizelles. Her dress had flown up to her waist to reveal the panty girdle she’d worn in an effort to hide her after-school-cookie-binging bulge.

The icing on the five-tiered Italian cream wedding cake—which she’d
somehow
managed to not destroy—had been Nick. He’d gotten tangled up in her dress, and had landed on top of her, sprawled across her chest.

And right between her legs.

It was the first—and last—time she’d figured Nick Santori would be between her legs, which both broke her heart and fueled some intense fantasies throughout her high-school years. Shocked by the unexpectedness and the
pleasure
of it, she’d been slow to part those legs and let him up. Slow enough for the moment to go from embarrassingly long to indecently shocking.

She’d thought her mother was going to kill her afterward.

But that wasn’t all. Because Izzie had the luck of someone who broke mirrors for a living, the incident had also been the money shot of the whole day. The videographer caught the whole thing on film, creating a masterpiece that would taunt her throughout eternity.

She’d been a laughingstock. Everyone in the crowd had whooped and clapped and teased her about it for months afterward. She might as well have worn a banner proclaiming herself “Lovesick pubescent girl who crushed the cookies and dry humped the groomsman at the Santori-Natale wedding.”

“I haven’t seen you in here before,” he said, finally breaking the silence that had fallen between them.

“I come here a couple of times a week,” she replied.

He shrugged. “I’ve been gone a long time.”

“In the military.”

“Right. Things have definitely changed around here in the past twelve years.”

“Maybe in some ways,” she said. Then she glanced around and saw a minimum of five people she knew—all watching intently as she talked to Nick. Frowning, she muttered, “In some ways it’s still the same small-town hell it always was.”

She surprised a laugh out of him. “I somehow think we have a lot in common.”