Steel Lust (3 page)

“Oh my God,” she breathed, not quite believing what she was
seeing.

Her front right tire had nearly come out of the wheel well
and was turned at a gruesome angle from the rest of the car.

“I believe you have a broken axle.”

She put her hands to her face. “My sister is going to kill
me.”

In her peripheral vision—because she couldn’t take her eyes
off her poor, broken car to look at him—she saw him study her for a minute.

“It’s not your fault your car broke down,” he said, his tone
mildly amused.

She shook her head and covered her freezing ears with her
hands. “She knew I wasn’t going to make it tonight. She told me I would never
get home in time if I stopped here on the way back, and I really hate it when
she’s right.”

Leo lifted her hood over her head and she looked up at him.
She’d forgotten her coat even had one. She never used the thing. But suddenly
she was warm, especially so when he put an arm around her shoulders and held
her close against his side.

“Get back in the car and turn the engine and the heat back
on.” He spoke calmly, soothing her. “I’ll make a couple of phone calls. You’ll
get back.”

Joy looked up into his gorgeous blue eyes and believed him.

It had to be some bizarre twist of fate, stroke of luck,
whatever, that caused her car to break down in the city and not after she was
already on the turnpike heading home. Jamie and Leni had sat with them while
they waited for the tow truck—Jamie’s SUV parked behind her car, hazard lights
flashing while they kept warm inside—but Leonardo knew people.

The owner of the towing company had come out to get her car
himself because Leonardo’s father was his business attorney, and then he
refused to take so much as a dime from her in payment. Leonardo had gone to
high school with the mechanic, who was not only supposed to be one of the best
in town, but he’d promised to make her car his first priority. After he got the
parts he needed on Monday, of course.

And now Leonardo was insisting on driving her to Chicago
himself since it turned out Pete had nothing more severe than a case of bad
breakfast sausage, not the flu, and didn’t need Leonardo to cover him at the
shop.

No, she decided it was one hundred percent pure blind luck
that had dropped her into the arms of what had to be the world’s last knight in
shining armor.

Joy fought the temptation to wrap herself around his broad,
wool-covered back to shield herself from the bitter cold while he fought the
lock on what she prayed to God was not his parents’ house.

“You know, you might want to consider getting a new lock.”
Her teeth chattered, causing her to stutter on the K.

A steam cloud billowed up around his head as he huffed out a
single laugh.

“This one has sentimental value.”

“Well, in case you aren’t aware, they make this new-fangled
stuff called oil.”

He stopped what he was doing to give her a bland look over
his shoulder.

“No lie,” she continued. “I hear some kinds even come in
aerosol cans with teeny, tiny little straws that fit into teeny, tiny little
spaces.”

“Thank you. I’ll look into that,” he deadpanned, turning
back.

The lock finally gave and he swung the heavy wooden door
inward.

“Sorry, the cold makes me cranky.”

“Says the woman who lives in a city even colder than mine.”
He picked up her suitcase and stepped aside to let her go in first.

The house—nestled in a neighborhood of small, gorgeous brick
homes tucked behind the row of businesses where the tattoo shop resided—did not
seem to belong to his parents. The interior was well put together and
remarkably tidy but said nothing to her about belonging to Mom and Pop.

A low, wide sectional upholstered in a deep olive drab took
up the front wall under the picture window and a majority of the corner. The
coffee table and entertainment center were finished in a dark, masculine
walnut. The top of the coffee table was strewn with books, magazines, notebooks,
pens and a lone coffee cup.

The components of an old stereo graced the shelves of the
entertainment center, with the turntable sitting next to a state-of-the-art
Bose iPod dock on top. A respectably sized flat screen television hung on the
wall above. There was a two-sided fireplace in the stone wall that separated
the living room from the dining room, and gorgeous paintings of all sizes
graced every wall she could see from where she was standing.

“You know, if you’re going to insist on driving me home yourself,
you should at least make a night of it,” Joy said, wondering—not for the first
time since it happened—if her car breaking down was some kind of ass-backward
answer from the universe to her wish that she get more time with him.

She thanked him as he took her coat and hung it on a wall
hook.

“Come to my sister’s gallery opening with me,” she said,
looking up at him because wow he was so beautiful and standing so close.

She heard rapid clicking coming from somewhere in the house
a split second before a medium-sized brown and white dog of indistinguishable
origin came bounding into the room. The mutt was so ugly it was cute. It
stopped directly in front of her and sat.

“My dog Norma Jean.” To Norma Jean he said, “Norma Jean, say
hello.”

“I’ll be damned,” Joy whispered, laughing when Norma Jean
waved her paw twice.

“If you hold out your hand she’ll shake.”

Joy looked skeptical. “She doesn’t need to smell me to get
familiar first?”

“Oh, she’ll get to sniffing you in a minute.” He tipped his
head toward the dog in encouragement. “Give it a try.”

Joy bent at the waist and held out her hand. Sure enough,
the dog put her paw in it without hesitation. So Joy shook. “Good to meet you,
Norma Jean.”

Leo bent to scratch her ears affectionately and the spell
was instantly broken. She barked once and started sniffing Joy’s boots with a
happy kind of curiosity.

“So I’m guessing you won’t want to leave her home alone all
night so you can hang out with me in Chicago.” Which was a shame, because as
soon as she’d made the offer she’d realized she wanted him there more than
anything.

“I’m having a hard time believing a woman like you wouldn’t
already have a date,” he said, heading for the kitchen.

No point in mentioning she’d wanted to go dateless. The men
she knew were making her life far too complicated lately. And yet there she
was, inviting one to go with her at the eleventh hour anyway.

“That would be crass now, wouldn’t it? Ask you to come with
me so you can be the third wheel?” She stopped following him to look at a painting
of an exquisite nighttime forest scene—the shadows full of eerie, unseen
mysteries in contrast with the dreamy moonlight and firefly-lit clearing at the
center.

She heard a door open, then the creaking of what sounded
like a screen door.

“Would you believe I’ve been in stranger situations?” he
asked with a rueful little smile when she joined him in the kitchen.

She thought back to the way he’d been the first time they
met. “Yes I would.”

Through the window above the kitchen table she could see
Norma Jean racing around the perimeter of the yard in wide circles.

“Who painted the forest scene hanging next to the
television?”

“My mom.” He got two bottles of water out of the
refrigerator and handed her one. “She teaches high school art and a couple of
adult classes at the museum on weekends.”

“She’s very good.” She took a long drink, not realizing how
thirsty she was until she felt it cooling her all the way to her stomach.

“Thank you. She sells some, but others she can’t part with.
My moms ran out of wall space at their house, so now she’s filling up mine.”

She blinked. “Did you say moms?”

He nodded and opened the door without looking. Norma Jean
came charging back inside, her nails scraping on the ceramic tile before she
gained some traction on the carpeted dining area and went rocketing around the
end of the fireplace wall.

“Moms plural, or ‘my moms’.” She gestured with her hands the
way the kids who skated in the parking lot behind her studio did. “As in some
kind of street slang?”

When he stopped laughing he said, “Plural. I have two
mothers.”

She stepped out of the way when Norma Jean came skidding
back into the room from a different doorway, scrabbled her nails on the floor a
second time, then went shooting through the dining room again.

“Is she all right?” Joy asked.

“She does this every time she goes out in the winter.
Something about the cold makes her frisky.” He locked the door, led her to the
built-in bookcases on the back wall of the dining room and pointed to a
picture.

It was matted to hold two four-by-six photographs. In the
first, two women stood close, holding a bright-eyed baby boy between them. One
of the women was tall and regal-looking with short black hair and piercing dark
eyes. The second was smaller, the pale-blonde hair and rich blue-green eyes
she’d passed on to her son giving her the look of an ethereal wood sprite.

In the second frame the same two women, both looking only
slightly older, were posed the same way, each of them with their arms around an
older, taller Leonardo.

“My mom Linda,” he said, pointing to the dark-haired woman,
then the blonde. “My mom Andi. In case you couldn’t tell, Andi is my birth
mother. The first picture was taken when they had their first commitment
ceremony. The second was when they renewed their vows for their thirtieth
anniversary three years ago.”

Yep, that definitely made him close to ten years younger
than she was.

He leaned into her bodily as he reached across her and she
instinctively turned toward him, accidentally pressing her arm from shoulder to
elbow and her breast into his hard chest. The low-burning ember of heat that
had been warming her pussy from the moment she’d touched his chest at Lust for
Life caught on a spark and ignited.

“My father, Mark,” he went on, oblivious to the effect he
was having on her.

Joy forced herself to show him she had good manners and
looked at the family picture he was showing her. A tall redhead stood in the
center of the group, flanked by a teenaged Leonardo on one side and a woman who
looked remarkably like his birth mother on the other. Two preteen girls with
his same coloring stood in front of them.

“This is Auntie Stepmom Corrine and my sisters Elaine and
Hilary, who are actually teenagers now.” He pointed to a third picture of the
girls in formal dresses, as though they were on their way to a school dance.
“Lainie is sixteen and Hil’s going to be fourteen next week.”

“I take it Auntie Stepmom is your mother’s sister.” She
looked up and his perfectly shaped and incredibly tempting mouth was right
there at eye level.

“It sounds complicated, but we’re actually one of the more
normal families I know.”

She realized she was staring when his smile faltered
slightly. She looked up and into his blue-green eyes and found they’d gone
dark.

“I was the result of a you-don’t-know-’til-you-try
experiment between my mother and father, who met and became very good friends
in college.” His manner of speech had become distracted. “Mom wasn’t sold on
the whole men thing, but they got me out of it, so it wasn’t a total waste of
their time.”

“Thank goodness for that,” she said, and her stomach flipped
when he smiled big.

Joy wasn’t proud of herself for thinking it, but for a very
brief moment she was tempted to beg off the gallery opening and ask him to show
her to his bedroom.

“We should probably hit the road if we’re going to get you
back in time,” he told her as if he’d read her mind, breaking the spell.

She remembered to breathe.

“You’ll come with me?” She pressed a hand to her stomach.
“You can stay the night at my place, drive home tomorrow morning.”

Or spend the weekend fucking.

His eyes scanned her face. What was he looking for? Did he
expect her to flinch at her own impropriety or take back her offer in a show of
false modesty?

She stood her ground and waited for him to answer.

“Give me a minute to pack a bag and call someone to sit with
Norma Jean.”

She nodded. “Of course.”

How long had it been since a man had this kind of effect on
her? She felt nervous as a naïve teenager who’d just gotten her first real
crush on the hot guy at school. Only it had been years since she’d been naïve
about anything and Leo was far from a boy.

The night was really looking up. Throwing him into the
madness that was her family might not be fair after everything he’d done for
her in the past couple of hours, but she would make it up to him once she got
him back to her place later that night. And as much as she was looking forward
to celebrating her sister’s big night, she couldn’t deny she was looking
forward to getting Leonardo alone just a little bit more.

Joy browsed the books on his shelves—mostly poetry and
philosophy she’d never gotten into herself—and the vast record collection that
took up an entire half of the floor-to-ceiling shelves. When Norma Jean trotted
up to her side, she crouched down and gave her a good scratch behind her ears.

“You keep that up and she’ll want to go home with you,” he
said, setting a large duffel bag on the dining table as he came back into the
room.

“I highly doubt that.” Joy stood and the dog wandered into the
kitchen. “Did you find someone to check in on her?”

“Agnes was already going to come over and let her out while
I was taking you home. I sweetened the pot and convinced her to stay the
night.”

Interesting. “How sweet does the pot need to be?”

He took out his wallet and put a couple of twenties on the
table. “I told her I’d leave her pizza money and she could have friends over as
long as no one sleeps in my bed.”

“And doesn’t completely clean out the liquor cabinet?”

He gave her a half-smile. “Yeah, I don’t have one of those
anymore.”

“Oh.” She blanched, instantly recognizing her misstep. “You
don’t drink.”

“Not for a little more than a year now.” He picked up his
bag. “Ready?”

They bundled up and she followed him to the garage, him
carrying both of their bags, and stopped dead in the doorway, mouth hanging
open.

“Wait a minute, you’re telling me you own a car like this
and you walk to work?”

When she’d heard him say he walked to work every day, she
assumed the reason he’d given about living so close was just an excuse to not
have to drive a bad car. Or a cover-up for the fact that maybe he had no car at
all. She was not expecting him to own a brand-new, gleaming black Jeep
Wrangler.

He opened the rear door. “As you saw, the shop is three
blocks from here.”

“Still, if I had one of these beauties I’d never walk
anywhere again.”

He gave her a half-cocked smirk. “You probably wouldn’t be
stranded in Toledo with a broken wheel axle either.”

She narrowed her eyes playfully. “Is that a foreign-car
joke?” She stepped into the garage and marched around the back of the Jeep.
“Are you making fun of my poor broken Honda?” she asked, poking a finger into
his chest. “I’ll have you know that car has lasted me a good, long time with
zero trouble before today.”