Not Another New Year’s (11 page)

Except, obviously, in his own mind.

Her heart gave a painful squeeze. “That’s not the question I had.”

His fist hadn’t relaxed beneath her touch. “Oh yeah? Then what
is
your question?”

“I…I…” She was feeling a bit reckless in her determination to turn his dark mood. But how to do it?

“I was wondering about New Year’s Eve,” she suddenly said, surprising herself. “About us.”

His gaze flicked up.
Now
she had his attention. And he no longer looked angry or sad either.

Hah. Triumph filled her, making her even more rash. “Tell me, Tanner. Was it…was it really that explosive?” Heat flooded her face, and she hurried to make clear she wasn’t fishing for compliments. “You see, I have to confess. I…I had those mojitos and I can’t quite remember…”

He
was remembering something, because his eyes were alive again. Hot. Focused on her, and her alone. It occurred to Hannah that maybe, just maybe, he’d been covering his ongoing attraction for her too.

“Hannah.” His voice was low, with a hint of a hoarse note. “It was Armageddon, just like I said. Explosive.”

Oh, God.
Explosive.
Why did that single word set fire to the fuse of every one of her tinder-dry nerve endings? Her skin went hot all over and the flames seemed to suck the oxygen from her lungs. Why
couldn’t
she remember? It wasn’t fair that the memory of sexual explosion had been taken from her along with so much else.

She licked her lips, the fire inside of her making
her more reckless and rash than before. “Oh, well, um…”

His hand relaxed beneath hers and turned. His fingers slid against the inside of her own. Oh, God, she was suddenly beyond burning.

“‘Oh, well,’ what?”

He was
most
definitely in a different mood now. His gaze drifted from her face to her chest, and she followed his glance. Her position against the table had pushed her breasts even higher than already achieved by the wonder garment she was wearing beneath Desirée’s dress.

Her skin started to tingle.

“I know we said we wouldn’t, um, do that again,” she whispered, not daring to move. “But I’m thinking…” Could she do this? Could she convince her conscience that the suggestion on the tip of her tongue was just for him?

“You’re thinking what?”

“Since I don’t remember that first, um, explosion, if we did it again, it wouldn’t actually
be
again, right?” She said the words as fast as she could. “It would still just be the one time, just a little New Year’s Eve naughtiness.”

He stared at her. Any lingering thoughts of her students, school teaching, sock puppets, fled from her mind. Her proposition wasn’t meant to distract him, no kidding herself about that anymore. Looking at his golden-god features and glittering eyes, she knew it was all for her, for Hannah, for the downtrodden part of her that needed to feel like a real, desirable woman again. For the part of her
that knew this was the man who could make that happen.

His fingers tightened on her hand. His gaze dropped from her eyes to her mouth, and it started to tingle too. Her heart pounded harder, reminding her that Tanner Hart was no boy.

And that in the war between the sexes, she’d just surrendered all her weapons.

Things I Hate about New year’s:

Gym overcrowded with new members who won’t make it through March.

D
esirée discovered that even sleepy Coronado could suffer from traffic jams. She tried swallowing her impatience and waited out the delay, drumming the heel of her hand on her steering wheel in time to Patti LaBelle’s “New Attitude.” That’s what she needed, she decided, a fresh way of dealing with Troy and the always-on-his-sleeve disapproval.

She turned her wrist to check her Tiffany watch and muttered a pithy French curse as she noted the time.
Let’s get this show on the road,
she mind-ordered the backup of cars in front of her.

To night, she couldn’t be late.

She couldn’t screw up the job.

She refused to give Troy reason to toss her out on her ear.

The traffic cleared and she jumped on the accelerator, the back end of her BMW wiggling like perhaps she should do to night in her just-like-lipo jeans. Troy was a man, wasn’t he? Though he might dislike her personally, if she twitched her butt enough times, surely she could make him sweat. It would be a sweet little payback for all the times he’d made her do the same.

But was that smart? she questioned herself, pulling into the parking lot at Hart’s. Frowning, she steered her car to a far space, leaving free the convenient up-front ones for the customers. Then she slid out of the seat, her frown going to a grimace as tight denim adjusted to her new upright position.

She’d chosen to wear these pants as part of some half-thought-through Make Troy Crazy plan, but again she had to wonder.

It was obvious he already considered her an overprivileged, underscrupled, spoiled sexpot. Maybe she should keep her butt-wiggling to a minimum. Because if she could change the way he thought about her, then maybe, just maybe…

She could change the way she thought about him.

Which was often. In terms that had started her worrying she’d inherited more from her man-manic mother than long legs and a love of lipstick.

Checking her watch again, Desirée hurried to the front door of the bar. Her hand touching the cool metal, she paused, second-guessing once again. Maybe she should forget all about this. She could pack her clothes and her iPod, tuck her laptop under her arm, and be off to…where?

Despite the nomadic DNA downloaded on her paternal side, she didn’t really like moving from place to place. And she didn’t have that many places she was free to explore anyway, what with her mother flitting between Chicago and New York, and her father having staked out Europe and the Middle East.

In practical terms, that left Desirée with the western half of the United States, which meant she might as well stay here. In Coronado and with her new employment, for the first time since college graduation two and a half years before, at least she had a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Okay, so that reason took her back to Troy again, but she pushed the worry out of her mind and pulled the door open.

Music was already blasting from the speakers hung throughout the large space. A heavy-on-electric-guitar, light-on-melody rock screech had a guy behind the bar head-banging the oxygen around him. Troy was at the far end of the room, his back to her as he lifted chairs off the tabletops and positioned them onto the floor without any visible effort.

Thanks to her occasional surf-stalking, she could easily imagine the bunch and pull of every muscle underneath his faded T-shirt. He was six-five, and she had no idea how many pounds it required to create such a broad and rippled physique. As usual, she couldn’t tear her gaze away—and she didn’t want to. Instead she let it run over him, warm and liquidy like she was starting to feel inside, moving from his shaved head to his feet and then back up again, absorbing each detail from the heels of his
work boots, to his long calves, to his tight butt, to his wide shoulders.

Without warning, he turned, catching her, and she gave a little start, ashamed of her stare.

But why should she be? It was only nature, she told herself, swallowing hard. Nature’s insidious yet undeniable influence.

It was pure biology and not her fault that she’d been wired at the cellular level to feel a physical attraction to a man who looked prepared to protect her and her offspring. As a matter of fact, it was no different from the gimme-gimme desire she felt looking at a particularly scrumptious pair of stilettos. Nature had set up that hankering too. Obviously, if you were ready to slide your feet into a pair of five-inch patent leather high heels, you weren’t worrying about the tribe from down the valley sending out their warriors to rape and pillage you and yours.

As she walked toward him, her pulse beating like a wild thing at her throat, she told herself it was exactly the same way she felt walking into the Neiman Marcus shoe department.

He had dark gold eyebrows and blue eyes, so she figured he was a blond like his brother, but his hairstyle—or lack thereof, rather—suited him.
Here I am,
his shaved head announced.
This is what I am. Nothing soft. Hard to the bone.

A couple feet away from him, she stopped. “Reporting for duty, sir,” she said, lifting her hand in a crisp salute.

He grunted.

Desirée’s arm dropped. See, that just went to prove she didn’t have any kind of dangerous attachment to
him beyond the biology thing. How could she fall for a man who grunted?

All that over-the-top, tough-guy stuff was not for her. Plenty of her boarding schoolmates had harbored sheikh fantasies, but she knew secondhand—as a child her mother had refused to allow her to set foot in her father’s country, and apparently he didn’t care enough about his daughter meeting his family to insist—what a culture clash and soul smother a macho man would be in real life.

From the beginning she’d decided she didn’t want some swashbuckling warrior who would die before acknowledging a softer side. So her ideal mate had always been cut from different cloth. A poet, an artist, a teacher.

Someone tender and sensitive who could be counted upon to hold her heart in the soft cage of his gentle hands forever.

Troy pulled a pair of squishy pieces of neon foam out of his ears and frowned up at the speakers before turning that same expression on Desirée. “What did you say?”

Her hand snapped up again. “Reporting for duty, sir.”

“Your salute sucks.” He shoved the earplugs in the front pocket of his jeans and then reached over with his callused hand to adjust the cant of her fingers, his touch hard and impersonal.

Yet she felt it in some
very
personal places. She dropped her arm again and rubbed her palm on her thigh, ignoring the fluttering in her belly.

Troy’s gaze followed the movement, lingering on her jeans for a moment before trailing upward again.
Her knit camisole had ridden high on her belly, but her skin was still covered by her gauzy overblouse. Still, when he stared at the large amber drop that was hanging from a long gold chain and bumping against her belly button, the jewel seemed to heat up, almost burning her skin.

Just when she thought she’d have to grab it to put out the fire, he turned away. “Get the rest of the chairs to the floor,” he ground out, then marched off.

He left her alone for the first couple of hours as she tried making herself useful, unsure what her exact job description might be. But he must have been keeping a pretty close watch on her, because when this one skinny yucktard in saggy jeans and a beanie caught her bending over and thought it was an invitation for him to slide his hand over her rear cheek and then down along the inside of her thigh—well, she’d never seen a big man move so fast. The skinny yucktard moved pretty quick too. One moment he was standing there grinning like a twelve-year-old, the next he was sailing through the front door like a grown man getting his ass kicked.

Desirée fluttered her eyelashes at Troy and clasped her hands together over her heart. “My hero,” she cooed.

He shook his head, eyeing her with something that bordered on distaste. “My mistake.”

After that incident, Troy took to barking orders at her.

“Bus that four-top in the corner.” She figured out that “bus” meant clear and wipe a table. “Four-top” referred to how many people said table could seat.

“Tell the bartender to pull another couple of drafts
for the pair playing Stripes and Solids.” Two beers on tap for the man and woman at one of the pool tables.

“Check on the state of the alpha whiskey in the women’s head.” Neither the twenty-something dude behind the bar or the two thirtyish cocktail servers wandering the floor could decipher “alpha whiskey,” though they all knew the women’s head was the women’s restroom.

Stymied, she decided that rather than giving Troy cause to criticize her by missing the point of the command, she should return to the source. And she found him in the narrow hallway that led to the office. His back to her, he was in a comfortable pose, one shoulder propped against the wall. She thought perhaps he was half napping.

“Troy?”

He turned, and she saw he wore a warm, lazy smile on his face. Then he shifted and she saw who he’d been smiling at: a little dainty ballerina of a woman, with feathery blond hair and her own kittenish smile.

She looked kind of familiar, but that didn’t stop Desirée from wanting to drop a scorpion in the ballerina’s tiny shoe. Both her tiny shoes.

The urge shocked her. She was supposed to be cooling this thing she had for Troy. She was not supposed to let it reduce her to these primitive impulses.

Still, in the old days in her father’s country, enemies were covered with sweet syrup and staked out near ant hills. Narrowing her eyes, she imagined Dainty Chick drenched in Mrs. Butterworth’s.

Troy started forward. “What’s got your ire up, Dez? Is someone bothering you again?”

“I could handle it if they were,” she said, still thinking evil ant thoughts. “I didn’t need your help then.” She flicked her gaze toward the other woman. “But I need it now, that is, unless you’re too
busy
to answer a question.”

He frowned. “What is it?”

She thought he sounded impatient, so she walked past him to stick out her hand toward Little Miss. Okay, so the other woman made her feel about ten feet tall and as graceful as a giraffe, but she needed to know her name so she’d know who and where to send that candy box filled with tarantulas if she didn’t get over this annoying jealousy. “I’m Desirée. And if I were you I wouldn’t get too chummy with Neanderthal Marine here. I let him into my bed because he looks like a macho stud, but he’s just a big dumb dud.”

Dainty Ballerina stared up at her, an—amused?—light in her eyes. “I believe we’ve met once before. I’m Bailey Sullivan,” she said. “And always glad to be kept up-to-date on which men are lacking in, uh, prowess.”

Desirée glanced over her shoulder to see how Troy was taking all this, when the woman’s name—and familiarity—finally sank in. “Oh.” Her head whipped back. “Bailey. Finn’s Bailey. We met in the parking lot one night a few weeks ago?”

She smiled. “That’s right.”

Embarrassment flushed over Desirée’s body. Between her shoulder blades, she could feel Troy’s stare.
She supposed he might be a little mad about the dud thing.

Damn, what was wrong with her?

She backed up so she wouldn’t have to face him. “Nice to meet you again. Sorry to interrupt. I was just needing to know—” Her backside bumped a pair of iron thighs and she froze, still not turning. “—what alpha whiskey refers to?”

Bailey’s eyebrows rose. She shrugged. “Haven’t a clue.”

Two massive hands landed on her shoulders. They gave a not quite gentle squeeze. “Toilet paper, princess.”

“Right. Groovy. Okay.” She twisted away from his touch and scurried back down the hall, though she wasn’t moving quick enough to miss this final exchange.

Bailey, with laughter in her voice: “I think she likes you,
dud.
”

Though of course she didn’t care, Desirée held her breath so she wouldn’t miss his response.

Troy, with no expression whatsoever: grunted.

Natch.

Her shift was scheduled to end at midnight. Though the bar was open until one
A.M.
, the crowd had thinned considerably by the time both hands of the clock pointed straight up. The cocktail servers had gone home a few minutes before, leaving Troy and the bartender to handle the customers’ orders for the next hour.

Her feet hurt, her hair felt gummy with perspiration around the edges, her hands were cramping from
gripping the round plastic trays and wiping with the red bar rags. As predicted, her manicure was demolished.

Gathering up her purse from the break room, she looked around for the boss. Heaven forbid he get the wrong idea and think that she’d left a minute too early.

He wasn’t behind the bar, around the tables, or in the side room that hadn’t been opened that night. She finally found him in the office, behind the desk, his attention focused on a laptop computer placed on top.

Loud rock music was drifting in from the bar, so he could be excused for having missed her approach. Desirée leaned against the doorjamb and just looked at him again. Golden grit sanded the edges of his jaw, and his stubby lashes shielded the blue of his eyes. At this time of night he looked harder, tougher, than ever, and for the hundredth time she told herself it was simple biology that made her so susceptible to him.

He, on the other hand, would never be susceptible to anyone or anything.

“Troy?” she said. When he didn’t answer, she raised her voice.
“Troy?”

Still absorbed in what ever was on the screen, the man didn’t move one hard, well-developed muscle. Desirée raised her fist. In the bar, someone turned the music up even louder, and she pounded on the door to get his attention. Once.

In a blink he fell to the ground behind his desk.

She gasped. Had she somehow killed him? Did
heart attacks go that fast? Breathless, she leaped into the room to see him poke his head over the desk.

He was scowling at her as he rose to his feet and removed his earplugs again. “Christ Almighty. I thought a bomb had gone off in here.”