Authors: Hailey North
“What better place to take a cooking lesson? It’ll get you ready for next week.”
She closed her eyes and Hunter kissed her on both lowered lids. They quivered under the touch of his lips and she said, “I’m ready for you. Now. Here.” She placed her hands on his belt.
He almost ripped his own clothing off and took her on the spot.
But that, he concluded, would lack finesse. And Daffy wasn’t a woman to be wooed once and won for life. No, Daffy needed special handling.
And he, Hunter James, wanted to be that man. Today, tomorrow, and the day after that.
“An appetizer,” Hunter explained, glancing around Daffy’s shoulder to the counter behind her and satisfying himself he had plenty of room clear for what he had in mind, explained, “may also be called a canapé, or crudités, or an hors d’oeuvre.” With each term, he kissed his way down her neck, closer to her breasts.
Her eyes opened and she said, “I know all the words, I just don’t know how to make them.”
“The idea of an appetizer,” Hunter went on without pausing, except to slip her dress off one shoulder and tug the wispy lace of her bra free to expose one breast to his full and very appreciative view, “is to whet one’s appetite for the main course.”
He kissed the very tip of her aroused nipple. She wriggled against him and murmured, “Maybe we should skip the cooking lesson and find that bedroom with the lock on it.”
He stepped back, raking her with his eyes, fixating on that one breast.
At first she squirmed, but as he continued to stare, she played along, leaning against the counter in a languid pose, her head tipped to give him a maximum view. “Like what you see, oh, Master Chef?” She asked the question in a sultry voice, then giggled.
“Oh, yeah,” he said and, moving forward, took her breast in his mouth. He suckled, he kissed circles around her nipple, he flicked his tongue across the pebbled flesh.
Daffy moaned and laughed and arched her back, urging him on. He knew she was wet and wanting him. He could have taken her standing right there in the kitchen. Instead, he stopped, abruptly, and lifted his head.
“Now that, my apprentice, is how one whips up an appetizer.”
She stared at him, her eyes glazed with desire, her mouth a round pout of surprise. “Don’t stop. Not now.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “I’m on fire. I’m consumed.” She glanced down where her one breast was exposed. “The rest of me wants you, too.”
“Well, there is more than one variety of appetizer.” Hunter wasn’t sure how long he could play this game. His arousal was threatening to bust through the front of his pants. All of him wanted her, too, but perhaps he could hold out for a few more delicious minutes.
With a gentle hand, he put her bra back into place and pulled her dress back onto her shoulders. She was looking pretty disappointed, obviously assuming he really was going to stop. Just then he lifted her by the waist and set her on the counter, hiking up her skirt before her fanny touched the counter.
“Hunter!” She gasped his name. This time he’d shocked her.
He grinned and placed her right arm to the side, then her left. Tugging her slightly forward, he bent his head between her thighs.
She clutched the top of his head and said, “This seems awfully . . .”
Her voice dwindled as he palmed her damp panties, then flicked his tongue in an echoing touch. “I knew you’d be wet,” he said, pushing aside the silky fabric and tasting her.
“Oh, my goodness gracious,” Daffy said in one long breath. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.” And she couldn’t. But she didn’t stop him. Instead, she lifted her hips to meet his greedy, seeking, all-too-knowing tongue.
“I’ll never be able to take a real cooking lesson here,” she said in her last moment of sanity before she gave herself over completely to reveling in Hunter’s hot kisses.
He spread her legs even more widely apart and Daffy had never been so exposed and so open. She might be fully dressed, but to Hunter, she was transparent, her soul and heart and mind accessible, vulnerable. He was spinning crazy circles of heated desire through her body with every magical move of his tongue and lips. He was murmuring, too, words Daffy wasn’t sure she understood.
But as she quit trying to think and arched her back and cried out, he caught her close and, through the shimmering beauty of the sweet release, she thought she heard him say, “My appetizer. My main course. My dessert. Mine. All mine.”
H
e took her there, in Thelma’s cheery yellow kitchen. Simply yanked out a condom from his back pocket, unzipped, and without a word, holding her half off the counter, dove into her still pulsing body.
If he’d been in his right mind, he would at least have made tracks for the bedroom. But Daffy drove him from sanity, whipped him to frenzied desire the likes of which he’d never known.
And he was a pretty randy guy.
When he exploded, it was a damn good thing she was clinging to his shoulders. Staggering slightly, Hunter lowered her feet to the floor. Her panties tangled around her ankles, her once pristine dress crumpled above her waist.
Neither one of them said a word.
Reaching for his shorts, Hunter pulled them up his legs and yanked off a paper towel to disguise the used condom, all the while wondering what she must think of him. So much for finesse. More like a graduate of the cave-man school.
Moving almost in slow motion, Daffy rearranged her clothing. Her lips curved into that dreamy smile he loved to see. Then she leaned on tiptoes and kissed him, a gentle blending of her lips with his that told him he had nothing to fear.
He clasped her to him, held her long enough to feel her heart beating against his chest, and then said, “We’d better skeedaddle.”
“That’s a funny word,” she said, not moving.
“It’s Jamesian for if we don’t want to be caught red-handed, we’d better blow this joint.”
She laughed, this time the blush far from faint. “We are outrageous.”
But she didn’t sound at all offended.
Hunter reached under the sink, found a bottle of cleaning spray, grabbed another paper towel began swabbing the counter.
Daffy watched, an amused expression on her face, as he shined the surface where he’d pounded into her as if his life depended on it. Nah, he argued back while he made one more go-round with the paper towel, just horny, that was all. Any guy would be after all that breast teasing and oral sex. It didn’t mean she had any hold on him.
“I like being your appetizer,” Daffy said, pulling out the wastebasket for him. “And your main course . . .”
He tossed the towels into the trash, removed the plastic bag, and replaced it with another. No point in leaving the condom in the house, no matter how open-minded and realistic Thelma was. Hunter paused, trash bag in his hand, a funny thought in his mind. Hell, she’d set them up by asking him to defrost the roast! Maybe it was better for Daffy not to realize that, given how shy she’d been prior to their visit to the shop, worrying that his mother would think they’d dallied at the house to, well, to dally.
“What’s wrong?” Daffy studied his face and Hunter thought for a silly moment that he’d spoken his thoughts aloud.
He started to keep his musings to himself, but realized he didn’t want to. With Daffy, he wanted to share everything. “Come out the back door,” he said, “and I’ll tell you on our way to the car.”
“Is someone after us?”
Hunter smiled. “In a small town, you never know who might be knocking on your door.” Once outside, he tossed the garbage sack into the garbage can. “But being pursued is the least of my concerns.” Man, he managed to sound unconcerned, which, considering he figured Lucy was hot on their heels, was a pretty cool accomplishment.
“Oh?” Daffy wasn’t buying it. Not at all.
“Actually,” Hunter said, opening the door of the Jeep for Daffy, “what I was wondering was what you and my mom talked about.”
Daffy climbed into her seat and Hunter dashed around to the driver’s side. As he slid behind the wheel, Daffy raised one hand, her fingers spread wide. “One,” she said, a grin peeking out around her full, kissable mouth, “whether I was wealthy. Two, whether I’d inherited my money or earned it the old-fashioned way. Three, how I had earned my money, and four, did I know that every female in Ponchatoula over twelve and under ninety is out to snare you.”
“You two talk fast.”
Daffy’s grin blossomed. “She talked. I listened.”
“That happens a lot with Thelma.”
Hunter zipped around the corner to head back to the interstate. As he made the turn, he caught sight of Lucy’s car. He said a silent prayer to the god of lovers that she hadn’t knocked on the door while he and Daffy had been lost to the world in Thelma’s kitchen. As generous as Thelma was, and as fond as she was of Lucy, she just might have given Lucy a key to the house at some point in the past.
And Lucy, Hunter knew, would have no hesitation in using it. She might have cried and pouted after confessing to having written that ridiculous letter to that quack love doctor and then agreed not to carry the torch for him, but Hunter wasn’t convinced she wouldn’t keep trying.
And even though he knew she didn’t have a snowball’s chance in a Louisiana summer of winning his heart, he would never want to hurt her the way finding him in flagrante delicto with Daffy would hurt her.
Hunter pressed the accelerator and surged onto Interstate 55, a fist grabbing his gut.
Daffy had hurt someone in exactly that way.
On purpose.
Had she changed from the girl who had engineered that injury to Aloysius?
“You’ve gone off in a thinking trance,” Daffy said, bringing him gently back to his surroundings, to her warm and comforting presence next to him in the car.
She placed a soft hand on his thigh. “May I join you?” Her tone was wistful, not complaining. She sat half turned toward him, completely opposite to her distant and nervous body language during the drive up. Her eyes were shining, and she watched him with what smacked awfully close to adoration.
Forget Aloysius.
Daffy had changed, matured from the hurt child she’d been. He squeezed her hand. Thinking of what Thelma had said about her not breaking his heart, he said, “I hope you take Thelma’s advice.”
Daffy lifted her other hand and sketched a circle on his chest. “Don’t worry,” she said. “This is one heart I am not going to wound.”
Her lashes lowered and her head dropped to the back of her headrest. And just like that, exactly as she’d warned him she always did in a car if she let herself relax, she fell asleep.
Hunter drove toward New Orleans, his hand over hers, his heart at her mercies.
Four days and half a lifetime later, Daffy sat in front of her dressing table fiddling with a silver bobby pin, unsure whether to wear it or leave it out of her hair. No matter which decision she made, she could hear her mother’s voice commenting on its unsuitability.
She wished Hunter were there. He’d place one gentle hand over the pin, read her mind, smile reassuringly, toss it back on the table, take her in his arms, and kiss away any worries about the forthcoming dinner party in honor of her mother’s birthday.
Daffy faced the mirror, picturing Hunter, his body close and warm and so very male, standing so that his body brushed hers.
She blinked and focused and tried, but all she saw in the mirror was her own face, blue eyes too serious, wide mouth perhaps a trifle discontented on this evening, skin clear as always, hair swirling just below her chin. On the outside, Daffodil Landry was the same woman she’d been, oh, say a month ago.
On the inside, now
that
was the kicker.
The past four days, she and Hunter had been inseparable. He’d gone to several of the charity events and social functions she covered for the paper; she’d accompanied him one day to his suite of offices, where fellow and sister designers created the next generation of software legerdemain.
And Daffy had broken one of her firmest rules: she’d let him sleep over, not once but twice.
If the two of them hadn’t been lying arm in arm yesterday morning, flushed from sweet good-morning sex, Hunter wouldn’t have been there when Jonni called to remind her about the birthday party. And if he hadn’t been there, Daffy wouldn’t have invited him.
But the invitation had slipped out and he’d accepted.
Daffy placed the silver pin in her hair and studied the effect.
Too childish.
She eased it from her hair, then lowered both it and her head to the dressing table. Closing her eyes, she tried to alleviate the tension in her shoulders, tried to deny her mother the power to turn her into such a wreck.
Her mother always had this effect on her.
Nothing was ever right for Marianne Livaudais Landry. As she’d been known to say more than once, she might have married a Landry, but she’d always be a Livaudais. And everyone in New Orleans who knew what was what understood that statement.
Daffy had warned Hunter the evening might well be rocky. One never knew with Marianne. She might be charming or she might be waspish; always with a smile on her lips but never in her heart.
At her dressing table, lost in her thoughts, Daffy was surprised to feel the kinks in her shoulders beginning to soften. Strong hands kneaded the hurt, freeing her body of the wounding pain.
“Mmm,” she murmured, wondering when she’d fallen asleep and begun to dream of Hunter.
The sweet treatment moved up her neck, parting her hair. Warm lips kissed the top of her head.
Daffy’s eyes opened abruptly.
She lifted her head.
“I didn’t conjure you,” she said, gazing at Hunter’s reflection in the mirror.
The head gave a gentle shake.
Daffy turned and threw her arms around him. She didn’t care, for that moment, just how needy she appeared. “I thought you were meeting us at the restaurant.”
He smoothed her hair. “I finished earlier than I expected.”
She lifted her head. “Hey, how did you get in?” She might have broken the rule about no sleep-overs, but she sure hadn’t given him a key.
“I think your housekeeper likes me,” he said, grinning slightly and lifting her up from the dressing-table bench so that she nestled full-length against his body. “Now if only your parents do.”
Wrapping her arms around his neck, she said, “What’s not to like?”
Hunter returned her hug and then guided her back to the seat. Sensing his mood had sobered, Daffy watched his reflection in the mirror as he rested his hands on her shoulders.
“Seriously, Daffy,” he said, “don’t your parents expect you to socialize with a certain type?”
“Don’t you mean pedigree?” Daffy leapt up and faced Hunter. “You’re the one who’s worried about who you are and who you’re not. You’re the one carrying that baggage, Hunter.”
“Hey,” he said, backing away a step, “no need to attack.”
“And I didn’t mean to.” Daffy’s outburst had surprised her. She gave him a little smile. “Just trying to get my point across.”
“It’s a sore spot,” he said, “but maybe I do make too much of it.”
Daffy picked up the silver barrette she’d been fiddling with earlier. “A lot of people judge me by my supposedly wild reputation without ever seeking to get to know who I am.
You
haven’t done that, Hunter, which leads me to suspect it’s not my family’s supposed social prejudice you fear, but your own insecurity that’s bothering you.” There, she’d said it. Glancing up from the barrette, she checked for his reaction.
Surprisingly, he was smiling. He lowered his body to the dressing-table bench. “Have I ever told you that you remind me of Thelma?”
“What?” Daffy dropped the hairpin on the dressing table.
“Wise, witty, and perceptive.” He flashed her a grin. “And you both give right-on lectures.”
“Thank you. I think.”
He drew her onto his lap and put one arm around her. “I almost didn’t go into business with Aloysius because I didn’t see how the fatherless kid from Ponchatoula could handle breathing the same air as the rich city guy.”
“It would have been easier to run away than to face your insecurities, wouldn’t it?” Daffy asked, smoothing her hand over his hair.
“Yep.”
“I bet Thelma kicked your butt at the very idea.”
Hunter laughed. “Exactly.” He ruffled her hair and gave her a hug.
They sat there, silent for a long moment.
“I run away,” Daffy said softly.
Hunter stroked the back of her neck. “How?”
“From my fear that I’ll cheat the same way my mother did.” There, saying it out loud was a relief. “Instead of facing the issue, I create chaos and drive men off to spare them the pain I fear I’ll inflict—the way my mom hurt my dad. And that’s crazy.”
“Not crazy. Simply protective,” Hunter said. “Have you ever talked with your parents about what happened?”
“Are you kidding?” Daffy’s shoulders tensed as she responded, the very idea making her nervous. “Ask my mother why she did what she did? I couldn’t!”
Hunter kept stroking her neck. “Sometimes it helps to clear the air. I remember the day I ran home from grade school and yelled at my mom for not giving me a dad.”
“You did that?” Daffy searched his expression but saw only love, no residual hurt. “You and Thelma seem so easygoing with each other.”
He nodded. “But if I’d let all that worry and anger build up and fester inside me without letting it out, we’d never have gotten to that state.”
She looked at him in awe. “And just how old were you when you figured all this out?”
He laughed. “I was eight going on forty, but you know good and well it was Thelma who had the smarts to let me be angry. And eventually, I realized she was there for me, no matter what, and having a mom who did that was better than a dad who ran away.”
“You’re fortunate to have such a wonderful mother,” Daffy said somewhat wistfully.
“I know,” Hunter said. “And she gave me an example I plan to follow. When I marry, I’ll be there for my family—solid, forever, the way my mom was for me. Even when I’m afraid of my father’s bad blood, I hold on to that ideal.”
Still on his lap, cuddled in his embrace, Daffy glanced shyly at Hunter. The woman Hunter married would be lucky indeed. She sighed, wishing for a future she could almost, but not quite, picture. “I need to accept that running away isn’t the answer.”
Lifting her as he stood, Hunter set her on her feet and kissed her gently on the mouth. “I think you’re already learning that lesson, Daffy.”
Daffy hugged him and he tightened his hold. His mouth against her throat, he murmured, “What time is dinner?”