Attitude (8 page)

"And that's me?" He gave her a thoughtful look. "Something you've decided by just looking at me?"

His words echoed. He was reminding her of what she'd said when he'd tried to throw her out of his office during their first meeting. "Can you deny it? Are you in the market for a double ring ceremony?"

He laughed. "Not this week."

"There you go." She shrugged a padded shoulder. "You've proved my point. You came to my house for sex. You're coming on to me now—for sex. And when you get what you want you'll leave."

"I usually stay for coffee."

"Very funny."

He studied her a long moment. "Burned, Cameron? Some guy leave scorch marks on his way out?"

More than one.
And for a second the pain and embarrassment of it stalled her thoughts. "You could say that," she muttered.

"That's tough." He ran his finger along the shell of her ear, tugged lightly on her lobe, and nodded. "But maybe you had the wrong idea going in. Maybe you should have left some marks of your own." He touched her jaw. "And maybe you should stop leading with your heart and just have some fun."

She didn't want to admit she'd tried that, and it hadn't worked. "I can't. And I won't."

"I see."

"Good. Then you'll back off." She stood, keen to escape those magician fingers of his currently turning her gray matter into gruel.

Cal stood, too, and faced her. "I don't think the two year thing will work."

"Says who?" They were perilously close. So close she plainly saw the one imperfection in his soap-star handsome face, a half circle scar just under his jaw. It was forgotten when he lifted her chin and forced her to meet his gaze.

"Says me."

He kissed her, brushed his lips over hers with the deftness of a consummate artist. "Ever make out in a movie theater, Cameron?" he whispered against her mouth.

Her breath quivered in her throat, her heart raced, then pounded an irregular jungle rhythm against her ribs. She told herself to pull away, but she wasn't listening. She tried to stiffen in his embrace, but her muscles, soft as butter and melting fast, refused to comply. He had the mouth of a kissing god. She was in the arms of a man who knew what he was doing and how to do it. She was toast.

He deepened the kiss, took her mouth completely. His tongue licked her lower lip as if it were candy, then slipped inside to mate with hers in hot plunging strokes. With the first stroke, she was wet and wanting, with the second she nestled closer to the hard ridge between his thighs. When he lifted his head to smile down at her, his eyes dark and heavy, every neuron, cell, and nerve in her body was waving white flags of surrender. If he stopped holding her, she'd have crumpled to the floor, a thoroughly kissed rag doll to whom two years had just become an eternity.

He shifted his mouth to her throat, her ear, took her lobe in his teeth, tugged, while his warmed breath murmured into her ear.

Ginger slid her hands over the taut muscles in his back, paused at the ridge of belt encircling his lean waist—with no memory of how her hands had arrived at this danger zone in the first place. She was burning. Her face was flushed, and her neck where he kissed and suckled was flame hot.

And she was so close. Close enough to glide her hand between them, cup the impressive weight that lay thick and pulsing behind his zipper. Breathless, she looked up at him. He bucked into her hand and cursed. When he opened his eyes, he settled them on her with grim purpose. "This place is okay for an appetizer but—"

A blast of rap music signaled the end of the movie and the beginning of the credits.

Ginger, as if emerging from the shadowy depths of an enchanted forest into noon sun on a desert, stepped out of his arms. Wordless, she stared at him.

His expression was determined; his voice when he spoke was gruff. "Tonight, Cameron. I'm coming over tonight. Try to wear something... accommodating."

* * *

At nine o'clock, sitting like a stump in her darkened living room, Ginger heard Cal's knock on her door. Her body jerked, and she swallowed until her throat hurt.

Promises, especially ones you make to yourself, don't go down easy.

She been through her closet, and a storm of decision making, too many times to count since she'd left Cal. Would she sleep with Cal or wouldn't she? Red satin tank top or tweed pants? Ten minutes ago, for the third time, she'd armored herself in baggy beige wool slacks—that scratched like rioting fire ants—and a muddy brown turtleneck a size too big that threatened either strangulation or heat exhaustion. She'd chosen them in an I-won't phase.

Cal knocked again and she headed down the hall.

She saw him through the glass in the door. His collar was up against the wind, and his hair, catching her porch light, shone as the gusts from the ocean blew strands of it over his forehead. He combed it roughly with his fingers but kept his gaze fixed to hers. Waiting.

She thought longingly of the red satin, took a breath and opened the door.
God, he was so beautiful.

He made no move to come in, and his voice was dark and soft when he said, "If you don't stop chewing that lip of yours, you're going to draw blood." He lifted her chin, looked into her eyes. "Ease up, sweetheart."

Now, a lot of men had called her sweetheart, but no one said it like Cal. Somehow he managed to soak the word in honey and promises. Somehow he made the word sound endearing—for the first time.

Somehow he made it sound... sincere.

She couldn't respond of course, because whatever faculties were left after her "sweetheart" analysis weren't enough to spell her own name, let alone plot her next move.

Cal bent his head, brushed his lips over hers in a kiss that would take first place for brevity in the
Guinness Book of World Records.
Two seconds, tops. He stepped back and gave her uniform a long look. "I came because I said I would. Have I made a mistake? Do you want me to go?"

Aghast at the idea, she couldn't answer.

Apparently he took her silence for agreement. He nodded. "Fair enough. See you... tomorrow."

He turned to leave. "Coffee," she blurted. "You can come in for coffee, can't you?"

"It's not coffee I want, Ginger. I figured you knew that."

"You don't want coffee?" Stupid response number four thousand nine hundred and eighty-six.

"If I come in and we have that 'coffee'"—he smiled, and her heart stopped mid-beat—"I'll be angling for dessert over the first cup."

"Like sweet things, do you?" She started to breathe, and she started to want. Badly.

He leaned down and kissed her on the tip of her nose, her cheek, then that shivery spot just under her ear. "Definitely," he murmured there. "And I know exactly where to find enough sugar for both of us."

Ginger trembled, and her stomach did the most fluid and wonderful cartwheel. Finally the definitive answer she wanted.
Yes!
She grasped the front of his jacket, pulled him inside, and closed the door with her foot. "As it happens I'm right out of coffee. Not a bean in the place."

"Thank God." He pulled her into his arms. She watched his face as it moved nearer to hers, saw his eyes grow serious and dark in the timeless moment before their mouths joined, hot and uncontrolled. Her last semi-rational thought was a jumbled idea about leaping and a net would appear.

Please,
she added, fading further into his kiss, the easy seduction of his tongue...
make it a very, very big net.

He kissed her thoroughly, didn't hide either his need or his impatience. Their tongues met and their tastes and breath mingled. The sharp clean smell of his woodsy aftershave enveloped her, weakened her. It drifted up her nose like a sexual incense, transparent and volatile. She slid her hands up the front of his leather jacket to the back of his neck, ran her fingers through his thick silken hair, breezy and clean from a recent shampoo. A woman was a goner when a man smelled as good as he looked.

With Cal's mouth on hers, Ginger's heart pounded up and into her ears. She pressed herself to him, flush and needy.

But close wasn't close enough. She pressed harder into the heated length of him, knew there was open hunger in her eyes when she lifted her misty gaze to his intense one. Every feminine sinew and nerve in her body strained and spiked, fired by anticipation, the seductive promise inherent in Cal's hardened masculinity.

Cal pulled back, his eyes black in the dim light of the entrance lit only by a nightlight near the door. He took her face in his hands. "You do have a bedroom, don't you?"

"Huh?"

"A bedroom." He touched her lips with his tongue, kissed her again, and whispered roughly, "One of those places where a woman takes a man when she wants to have her way with him."

Ginger forced herself to blink, got lost in visions of exactly what way it would be, couldn't speak. He pulled her against him and kissed her again, then moved back. "I'm dying here, Ginger."

She grabbed his hand. "This way." She towed him down the hall and into her bedroom—to the big awkward moment, the unavoidable segue between the heat of kisses and the turning down of cool sheets for the purpose of hot sex.

Cal shrugged out of his jacket, tossed it on a chair. She saw him roll his head, as if to ease tight muscles.

Instead of throwing her on the bed and himself with her, he looked around. She followed his gaze, saw again the riot of green, blue, and gold—the wild mix of prints that made up her bed. Cal was suddenly anything but wild.

"Nice," he said and nodded toward the glowing nightlight on her dresser. "You sleep with a light on?"

"Only when I have sex," she said, determined to ruffle Mr. Cool's male feathers.

His face held sin and mischief, and his smile was slow. "Which hasn't been too often of late, I understand." He closed the distance between them. Ginger kept her hands behind her and gripped the doorknob as if it were all that stood between her and an eighty-foot wave. The smell of him clawed her, his clean scent mingling with the lavender potpourri she kept on her dresser.

He gripped her shoulders. "Have you ever made love in that bed?"

Ginger was caught off guard by the question. "No," she said, and frowned, for the first time wondering why she'd never brought anyone home. She could have, but she never did.

He lifted her chin with his knuckles. "Ever fucked in that bed?"

A breathy gasp escaped her mouth, and it was a second or two before she got the word out. "No."

"Good." His gaze went from her face to her hair, and he ran his index finger along her hairline, down and across her cheek, then kissed her. "That makes this a first," he murmured, and kissed her again. A kiss with butterfly wings and dark wishes.

"First what?" she asked. "Lovemaking or fuck?"

He gave her a direct gaze. "If we're lucky... both." His eyes, rich with desire, settled on her face. He tilted his head to watch when he asked, "You have a preference?"

Ginger's breath grew quiet in her throat. She released her viselike grip on the doorknob, brought her hands around and rested her palms on his chest. His white shirt was cotton soft, under it his muscles were warm, straight, and firm. "No." She slid a hand to his heart, felt its deep thud under her palm. "I just want"—the words
honest potential
came to mind. She replaced them with, "Sex... good sex. No. Make that great sex."
Defined as a series of flame-out, body-numbing orgasms that will make me shift in my chair when I'm ninety.
Add to that she'd be okay with the outside chance of something other than hello-that-was-great-sex-good-bye. Her life so far. In the same instant she reminded herself, Cal was just another handsome face, a fabled womanizer. She would not allow herself expectations. Other than fun.

He tilted his head, and the lazy confident look he gave her made her elbows sweat. "It's been a while for me, too. Truth is, I've been living like a goddamn monk for months now."

"And this is what? An apology in advance for bad sex?"

He laughed. "Nope. Just preparing you for my first rush of enthusiasm."

Ginger ran her hands over his chest. "I've got more than a little of that myself."

He picked her up with the ease of an Olympic weightlifting medalist and carried her to the bed. "You know there was a second or two when you first walked into my office that I thought you might be shy." He placed her in the middle of the bed, stepped back, and started unbuttoning his shirt.

Ginger got to her knees and replaced his fingers with her own. "I am." She undid the final button. "Until I make up my mind what I want." She rested her hands on his taut, narrow waist and looked up at him. "And I've decided"—she tugged his shirt from his jeans and undid his belt—"I want you."

She pressed a hand against the bulge in his jeans, boldly traced it with a finger, then looked up at him. "You're hard," she stroked him again. "And big."
Very big. Maybe those rumors in the tabloids were true.
Lucky girl, she was going to find out.

"I get by."

She smiled up at him. "I bet you do." She unzipped him and caressed him through his briefs: marble, long, thick, perfectly carved. "And you should know"—she ran her finger from his base to his tip—"that my swearing off sex for two years doesn't mean I don't like it. I do. A lot. And this"—she parted his unzipped jeans, leaned forward, and kissed his cotton-shrouded erection—"is the stuff of my dreams."