Authors: Erin Nicholas
She snorted. “You’ve never been sorry about anything having to do with me in your life. What plan?”
“The plan to get Luke out here, hundreds of miles from home, feeling sorry for you, coming to your rescue.”
“You think I somehow messed my transmission up on purpose?”
“Can’t say that the thought didn’t occur to me.”
She stood and turned to face him, her eyes glinting with her temper. “All I would have had to do was call Luke and ask him to come. I wouldn’t even have had to pop the hood.”
He scowled at her. She was right and he hated that she knew it and was so in his face with it.
“Let’s go already.”
“Okay, okay…” She continued muttering something under her breath he couldn’t hear and decided that was likely for the best.
She looked at him expectantly.
“What?” he finally asked.
“I need to get dressed.”
Automatically his eyes slid over her body. It was hidden under the sheet but he felt his heart speed up.
“You always sleep nude?” That would be a redeeming quality at least.
“I was hot and sweaty when I got here. I showered and rinsed my bra and panties out and laid them out to dry. If you must know.”
She pointed in the direction of the air conditioning vent. It was directly over the chair she’d obviously drug into place so she could hang her underwear over the two wooden arms.
Lavender.
Her panties and bra were lavender.
And tiny.
She wasn’t a big girl by any stretch, but these things were clearly more for show than support.
“Nice,” he commented dryly.
“So glad you like them.” For Marc, Sabrina and sarcasm went hand in hand.
“Put them on already and let’s go.”
She had the sheet wrapped under her arms sarong-style. “Do you mind?”
“Not a bit.”
“You want to step outside?” she asked, looking pointedly at the door.
“No I don’t. As you pointed out, it’s hot out there. I’m starting to cool off now. You don’t want to be in the same room with me,
you
step outside.”
Her gaze flickered to the bathroom door. That would make sense. She should go in there and change. But, as expected based on history, she wasn’t going to let him get away with the last word.
“Fine.”
She tucked the sheet in more firmly between her breasts, turned her back and snagged the bra from the arm of the chair where it hung.
Marc took a seat in the chair by the window, facing the room. That should drive her nuts. He would ignore his own traitorous reaction to the whole thing. It was simple—he was a guy and she was a nearly naked woman in a hotel room. Some reaction should be expected. In fact, if he
hadn’t
reacted he’d be concerned.
He watched her stick her arms through the straps of the bra and pull the cups into position, then reach behind to fasten the hooks.
Beautiful, pretty, cute, sexy—they were all different terms he used to described women. If he had to choose one for Sabrina he’d definitely go with sexy. But beautiful too. Not drop-dead-gorgeous. She didn’t turn
every
head when she walked in a room. There were men who would not, maybe, find her attractive. Guys who liked curvy blondes, for example. Or who were firmly in the redhead camp. Guys who liked major curves also wouldn’t find her slim, toned build tempting.
Unfortunately, Marc wasn’t one of those guys.
Which annoyed the bejeezus out of him. It had always annoyed the bejeezus out of him.
It seemed that one way or another Sabrina Cassidy was destined to raise his blood pressure. A lot of the time—
most
of the time—she was pissing him off. And most of those times she was doing it on purpose. But he could walk in a room where she was and feel his heart race even before he saw her. He anticipated seeing her. He always searched her out. He used to try to tell himself that it was because he was instantly expecting her to do something to make him mad and it was better to keep an eye on one’s enemies. But he hadn’t believed that even from the first moment.
He didn’t like her. He didn’t trust her. Yet his body wanted hers.
The damnedest thing was he was attracted in spite of trying to fight it. For years. He’d never fought it like this with another woman. Only one other woman had been off-limits in his mind and it was because she was the younger sister of a friend.
The thing that really put Sabrina on Marc’s do-not-go-there list was the fact that he found her to be the most frustrating person in the entire world. If he said the sky was blue, she would argue it was purple, just to annoy him. He’d once complimented her outfit. She’d asked if his mother knew he was gay. He’d offered to help her study for a calculus test once and she’d asked if everyone else on the planet had been wiped out by a nuclear disaster—because that was the only way she would even think about spending more than ten minutes with him in one stretch.
He supposed that was where it came from. He didn’t like her because it had been clear since the day he moved into the neighborhood in fifth grade that she didn’t like him.
Of course, it also had a lot to do with the fact that she screwed over Luke Hamilton, the nicest guy on the planet, repeatedly.
She glanced over her shoulder as she pulled the bra straps into place.
He yawned.
He’d rather die than let her know that she’d created some of the fastest and most painful hard-ons he’d ever had. And today was no exception.
She rolled her eyes and reached for her panties. Somehow she managed to step into them without losing the sheet. It was huge on her, wrapped around more than once, so there was no glimpsing skin as she moved. Until she had the panties in place underneath.
Then she let the sheet drop.
He was glad he was sitting down.
Over the years he’d seen her in a swimming suit, short sundresses and once even in a wet T-shirt, but that was years ago…and he’d quickly distracted himself.
Now she was fully filled out, a woman, and there wasn’t a frickin’ thing in that hotel room—or county for that matter—that could distract him from the sight of her.
She was thinner than he remembered, but she was still soft in all the right places. Her skin was pale and smooth. Like rich cream. He could practically imagine the texture on his tongue.
She had never been big on the great outdoors and the lack of freckles, tan lines or wrinkles suggested that was still true.
There was however a…
“Nice tat.” Right on the dimple above her right butt cheek.
She looked over her shoulder. “I lived with a tattoo artist in training who needed to practice.”
He raised an eyebrow. That tattoo was a traffic sign—a yellow diamond shape that said
Proceed with Caution
. He couldn’t help the smile. “Not a lot of practice. That’s pretty small. But I do like the sentiment.”
She turned and smiled. “We thought it was funny.”
Marc felt a kick in his gut that had nothing to do with the fact she was standing in her underwear. He’d seen her smile a lot over the years but rarely directly at him.
She tugged down the left edge of her panties, revealing another small picture right on her hip bone. “I wouldn’t let him do anything huge so I let him do more than one.”
Marc’s brain seemed unable to process the tattoo—and its location—her words and breathing at the same time. He cleared his throat and shifted in the chair. “He?”
She nodded.
“I thought you said you lived with this person.”
“Right.” She peered at him, her thumb still hooked under the top edge of her panties. “Stephen. He lived there for about six months. I met him through his sister who bartended with me.”
“I didn’t ask for your whole life history,” Marc said, sounding more irritated than he should feel. Who gave a rat’s ass who she’d lived with and for how long? She could have had six male roommates and been sleeping with all of them. At the same time. He didn’t care.
“Right,” she said after a pause.
Marc looked closer at the tattoo on her hip. The Tasmanian Devil. “Appropriate,” he murmured.
She shifted her weight, stuck that hip out and put a hand on it. “Taz is appropriate?”
“Cute at first, but a terror if you get too close. Destruction of everything in his path. All of that.”
She regarded him quietly, her eyes narrowed. “You think I’m cute?”
That was what she picked out. She didn’t seem shocked he thought she was a terror or offended about the implication she caused destruction. The one kind-of-not-really compliment was what she focused on.
And cute was not the word. Sexy as sin. Able to heat his blood within ten seconds. “From a distance.”
“Hmm.”
“Any others?”
Not that she could reveal a whole lot more skin, but he was very curious now.
She lifted her right foot. Around the ankle was a something in a script font. He leaned closer. “One Moment?” he read. “What’s that?”
“A reminder.”
She put her foot down and he tried not to notice how small and delicate it was, how great the purple sparkly nail polish looked—he never noticed or had an opinion on stuff like that—or how his eyes wanted to follow the arch to the heel and then up the back of the curve of her calf and then continue on up to the curve of…
“A reminder of what?” he forced himself to ask.
“How one single moment can change your whole life,” she said softly.
She was looking at the tattoo with a thoughtful, almost sad, expression. Taking a deep breath seemed tough. He wasn’t used to Sabrina being soft. He’d seen her cry on Luke’s shoulder, but that was all part of her master plan to not let Luke have anything more important in his life than her. As far as Marc had ever experienced, she was tough, spunky, independent with a mouth on her that wouldn’t stop—even when she knew better.
He’d rather fight with her, or tease her, than see her vulnerable. That didn’t fit the woman he knew.
“Did he do piercings too?” He noticed the glint of the stud in her belly button. Purple again.
“Yep.”
“Others?” he asked looking at the gem in the middle of her flat abdomen.
She lifted her hair away from her left ear. Five different studs marched from the earlobe up the curve.
“That’s it?”
“There’s only so many places you can pierce.” The challenging glint was back in her eye and he felt instantly comfortable. Their truth-or-dare relationship was what he knew best. “You want to search for the rest?”
“Kind of.”
The flicker of surprise was obvious before she hid it. “Really?” Her tone implied she didn’t believe him.
“Hey, I’m a human male.”
“Meaning?”
Was she searching for something or just playing along? He’d love to know. “Meaning that I don’t have to like you to want to see you naked.”
She watched him as if trying to gauge how serious he was. Or wasn’t. “Ah,” was all she said in the end.
Marc ran his gaze over her from head to toe. “I can’t believe the stripper job didn’t turn out.”
“Thanks.”
Of course she took that as a compliment too.
She reached for the rest of her clothes lying on the chair. His attention hadn’t made it past the bra and panties.
“My roommate was always trying to get me on stage. But I only bartended there.”
“The tattoo artist wanted you to strip?” Nice guy. Just a friend his ass.
“No, Jenny. My roommate before Stephen. She was a stripper at the club.”
“You lived with a stripper?”
“Yep. She made a ton of money.”
Sabrina would have too, he had no doubt.
“How many roommates have you had?”
She pulled her denim shorts up—wincing slightly he noticed—and seemed to be counting in her head as she buttoned them. “Eleven,” she finally told him.
He felt his eyes widen. “I know you’re hard to get along with but, wow, eleven roommates in four years?”
She shrugged. “We got along great. They needed a temporary stop. The lease was in my name so they could live there and leave without a penalty.”
“You had an extra bedroom you rented or what?”
“A pull-out couch.” She grinned. “But they weren’t paying rent, so couldn’t be too picky.”
“You let them all live there for free?” Marc shook his head. She had been a business major in college, for God’s sake. “That’s not a great way to make extra money.”
“They helped pay for groceries and for the phone minutes they used, stuff like that. But I was already paying the rent with or without them. I was doing them a favor.”
“Eleven people came, slept on your couch for several months at a time and didn’t pay you a dime?”
“They taught me stuff, introduced me to people, took me places. It was a trade-off. A good one.” She pulled a tiny tank top over her bra.
She still looked sexy enough to…
“What did they teach you?” he asked, forcing his mind on safer topics.
“Lots of stuff. I learned to fiddle.”
“Fiddle.”
“Yeah, you know…country music? Fiddle. Oh, and I can speak French.”
“Very practical.”
“It is if you’re going to travel in France.”
“Are you going to travel in France?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Maybe some day.”
“There’s a big call for fiddlers in France?”
“I’ve fiddled on stage six or seven times. In the US,” she informed him. “For money, if you want to know. The band I played with got paid for those gigs. And Tanya—my roommate who taught me—even gave me one of her old fiddles when she moved out.”
“How nice.”
“And I can read tarot cards.”
“Another very handy skill,” he drawled.
“And Zumba. I’m a great Zumba dancer.”
“Zumba?” he asked. “You learn that at the strip club?”
She shook her head and began moving her hips, rolling her pelvis and moving her arms to some rhythm he couldn’t hear. He was entranced.
Holy crap.
She could have made money doing that fully clothed. He’d pay big for her to keep going. Without clothes it would be downright dangerous.
She stopped a moment later and smiled. “Zumba.”
Fully distracted, he shifted forward and rested his arms on his thighs. “Did you learn anything useful? Can you cook? Fix a leaky pipe? Change a tire?”