Afternoon Delight (3 page)

“It's just a couple of blocks,” Sarah said.

“No problem,” Tim said. “It's a nice day.”

It was a bit odd. When was the last time he went for a walk in the spring sunshine? Not last spring, that's for sure. The seasons all blended together after a while, demarcated only by weather that made his job easier or harder.

She kept her hand firmly on the messenger bag's strap as they walked. To match her pace he made a conscious effort to slow his stride and instead watched her look around, taking in springtime in Manhattan.

The penny dropped. Her accent wasn't Jersey or Long Island or any of the boroughs, and she was looking around like a tourist as they waited dutifully for the light to change. “You're not from around here,” he said.

“Nope,” she said. “West Coast, born and raised. I'd been out of the kitchen for a while, so I jumped at the chance to give the food truck a go. You?”

“This is my neighborhood. I've never lived anywhere else,” he said, and put his hand out to stop her from walking in front of a fast-moving taxi running the red. Her shoulder curved soft and warm into his fingers and palm. She flashed him a smile, so he left his hand on her shoulder as they crossed the street, keeping her close. Doing the dance. That's what it was: a series of movements to gauge response. “What do you think of the city?”

She pursed her lips. “It's got potential,” she said. “To be honest, I haven't seen much. I've only been here a few weeks, and I've spent most of that time working eighteen hours a day to get the food truck up and running. I need to get out more.”

They reached the Citibank location. He held the door for her and stayed by her side as she filled out the deposit slip and handed over the cash with visible relief. He played with the metal chain connecting the pen to the counter while the teller ran it through the counting machine and Sarah tucked the pouch back in her bag. “Thanks again,” she said with a smile.

“No problem,” he repeated, then slid her a look from under his eyebrows as he toyed with the pen. Heat still lingered in his mouth from the habanero sauce, and the spring sun seemed to glow just under her skin. She was playful, competitive, impetuous, confident, and exactly what he needed to celebrate spring in Manhattan. “I live pretty close to here.”

“I'm glad this wasn't out of your way,” she said. She took the pen from him and slotted it into the little stand, then stroked the top of his hand with the edge of her pinkie finger.

Message received. “Want to come over?”

“So I can see your ceiling?”

He blinked. “Uh . . .”

She laughed, loudly enough to start the tellers right down the row. “Your face,” she said. “There aren't many lines I haven't heard. Yes, I'd like to come over. I'd like that very much.”

That was easy.

Six feet and at least three inches of tall, brooding blond man leaned against the counter of the Citibank and invited her over. For sex.

Sarah remembered her last long, coherent conversation with Aunt Joan, near the end of her two-year battle with ovarian cancer.
It's not long now. Promise me, promise me when I'm gone, you'll go back to the way you were. You've given up so much of your life to take care of me. It's not the kind of challenge a twenty-five-year-old woman should take on. Do something just for you.

Moving from San Francisco to New York was the first step. Opening the food truck with Trish was the second. The next thing she'd like to do, just for herself, had just invited her over for an afternoon delight.

He looked like a surfer god but without the shaggy, salt-rough hair, and, okay, he was too tall to surf more than casually. She'd dated her share of professional surfers, so she knew all about the body type. Lean, compact, skin over muscle and bone, a sense of confidence that came from challenging Mother Nature at her most powerful and winning, or at least not losing.

Tim had the same balls-to-the-wall attitude, but not over anything as frivolous as breaks. No, Tim slouched on the park bench after doing battle with death, shift after shift, and inhaled calories. Fuel. Not food, and certainly not sustenance or nourishment.

She accepted the receipt and tucked it into her bag with the deposit pouch. “Shall we?”

He held the door open for her and followed her out onto the sidewalk, then put his hand on the small of her back to guide her. He left it there, a touch she liked very, very much. It was subtle, attentive, and held the possibility of possessiveness without actually crossing that line.

They crossed Canal and turned down Orchard. Sarah looked around with interest, absorbing as much as she could. She'd grown up in San Francisco, a big city by anyone's definition, as cosmopolitan as New York or London, but nothing had prepared her for this, the density of people and restaurants, the energy rising from beneath the streets to hover in the air like the aroma of a complex, simmering sauce. Intellectually she knew it was nothing more than the subway's noise and tremors overlaid with the city's rapid pace, a collective energy created and sustained by eight million residents, but deep inside she felt drawn in to the city's tidal rhythms. Even if a Hollywood superdisaster wiped the city from the face of the Earth, the energy would remain. Millennia in the future, people would shiver and build temples on this location.

She granted the city a definite power and pace, a challenge, even. But she wasn't sure she liked New York, that she could make it home. The only way to find out, though, was to experience the sleepy side streets and busy avenues, poke around in search of family-owned restaurants and neighborhood institutions. She liked a challenge, but she wasn't a masochist. Sometimes she had to face down a challenge, and sometimes the best thing to do was to walk away and start over. So far, the jury was still out on the Big Apple.

He stopped at the door of a building with fire escapes climbing by the front windows, unlocked a dented metal door up two steps from the sidewalk, and held it open. She pulled her cell phone from one of the bag's pockets and texted Trish as she followed Tim up a narrow stairwell lit by fluorescent lights.

Close up for me tonight and I'll handle open for you tomorrow, k?

Trish's reply arrived immediately.
Sure, but can you find your way home?

Walk, bus, train, cab, I'll be fine.

Where are you?

Tim unlocked a door marked
3B
with dulled brass script and pushed it open. Through the doorway Sarah saw sunlight spilling onto hardwood floors and a pin-neat living room with an honest-to-God Murphy bed folded up.

“No way,” she said.

He peered into his own apartment as if surprised by her response. “What?”

“That's a Murphy bed.” A modern one, in which the frame folded down from the wall between the arms of a firm sofa, but a Murphy bed nonetheless. Upon closer inspection, the underside of the bed held a blown-up map of Lower Manhattan, with street addresses neatly penciled in, block by block. Across from the bed was a table that folded down from the wall. Both were neatly stowed. In fact, not a single item was out of place in the apartment, a tidiness Sarah appreciated, given that it was
tiny
. A kitchenette lined the wall by the door, fridge, cooktop, and microwave crammed into the only counter space available. She doubted he cooked here much. But the light was spectacular, the west-facing windows unobstructed by other buildings.

“Yeah.”

“That's so cool.”

Sarah's phone buzzed.
Are you with the big EMT?!

Sarah chose not to answer that question. Instead, she stepped into the apartment, tucked her phone in her bag, and hoisted it over her head.

“How does it work?”

He walked over and pulled the antique door knocker to release the bed. It dropped to the floor, neatly made with hospital corners. “Voilà.”

She looked at Tim, then at the bed. “How on earth do you fit on that thing?”

Rather than answering, he stretched out on his back on the bed. The pose was so purposefully
Playgirl
-cheesy, right down to the faux heated look through his lashes, Sarah burst out laughing.

She put one knee on the bed between his sprawled legs and crawled toward him. “The only thing that saves you from being completely and utterly ridiculous,” she said as she hiked up her skirt and straddle his hips, “is that you belong to some superhuman race of gorgeous men.”

The tips of his ears turned pink. “Whatever,” he said.

“You can't possibly be humble about it,” she said, and kissed the edge of his ear. “You're like some kind of Viking god.” She breathed into the whorled curve.

“You're thinking about this way more than I do.”

“Cut me some slack. I just met you. But I like you even more now. Dead sexy, and the worst pickup lines ever.”

“You're insane,” he said, but he shivered as he said it.

“I made soup twice a week for a year,” she said, and licked the lobe. “My sanity has always been in question.”

Still sprawled on his elbows, he didn't move, just held up her weight and met her gaze unflinchingly. “Here's the challenge, darlin'. I bet you can't knock me flat on my back.”

She smiled at him. Physically he outmatched her in every way: taller and, based on his broad shoulders straining at his uniform shirt and the muscles tensed in his forearms under the cuffs of his waffle-weave undershirt, far stronger than she. But good sex was just as much about the mental as the physical, and in that department, she had the edge. She was going to knock him on his proverbial ass, or at least off his elbows, onto his back. She was going to make him want it, maybe even beg for it.

Some of her determination must have showed on her face, because his eyes widened ever so slightly.

“Game on,” she said. “Winner chooses the forfeit. If I win, I choose what you lose. If you win, you choose what I lose.”

“You're pretty trusting,” he said. “I already told you I'm a terrible winner.”

“I'm Pollyanna incarnate,” she said. “And I'm not going to lose.”

She sat back and studied him. She wasn't a performing seal; she didn't have a bag of tricks gathered from the pages of a women's magazine guaranteed to drive a man wild. But, perhaps without thinking about it, he'd given up the most primitive desire a man had. Every man she'd ever slept with got really, really grabby when he was turned on. Hair and hips, mostly. He had strong abs, but if he wanted to touch her at all, he'd have to lie back.

Practicalities first. One couldn't cook in an untidy kitchen. She pushed herself off the bed and went to her knees on the floor to unlace his boots. His eyelids drooped as he watched her, and hell yes, he was hot. She used the familiar motions of unlacing the boots to occupy her hands and let her mind drift. It was the same thing she did when she was constructing or modifying a recipe: using a stored body of knowledge and letting her creative brain do its thing. Some people would look for weaknesses in a competitor and try to exploit them. She came at a challenge another way: What desires could she heighten? What does he like, want?

Maybe she should just ask. She looked at him as she worked his first boot off his foot.

“What do they call this? Afternoon delight?” Working away at the laces of his other boot, she didn't expect an answer and didn't get one beyond a slight curve of his lips that made his blond beard glitter in the sunlight. “It feels naughty, having sex during the day. Everyone else is busy, working, running errands, but we're here. It's a secret in the sunshine.”

“We ran our errands. We went to the bank. We've earned this.”

That worked for her. A treat for both of them, earned after a long day's work, no strings, no complications, easy and fun and just a bit competitive. She tugged off the boot, rested her hands in her lap, and let a little bit of her determination to win show in her eyes. Caught up in the moment, she crawled back up the length of his incredible body until her mouth rested by his ear again. “I like taking what I've earned,” she said.

Still braced on his elbows, he turned his head. She didn't move, just let his stubble rasp across her mouth until the bristly blond scruff ended and his lips began. Slightly parted, they were close enough that smell and taste happened at the same time, the scent of spicy sauce making her mouth water as much as the promise of his tongue sliding against hers. For a moment she paused, felt anticipation flicker to life in her nipples and clit as his breath caressed her lips. She loved this moment almost more than any other during sex, the threshold moment when she knew what was coming would be so good, but the tension of waiting was almost as good.

Then anticipation tipped over into desire. She touched the tip of her tongue to his lower lip, slid it back and forth just inside his mouth. Straddling his hips as she was, there was no mistaking the erection pulsing to life between her legs, separated from her body by the thin cotton of her panties and his rough cotton cargo pants. Eyes still closed, she focused on the slow glide of her tongue and the answering pulse in his shaft. Reluctantly, she eased down against his torso, but kept her upper body braced on her hands. Like this her breasts brushed his chest with every inhale, rasping cotton against her increasingly sensitive nipples.

“Come here,” he murmured.

She drew back enough to look into his eyes. “I can't get much closer without taking things a little faster than I'd like.”

One corner of his mouth quirked up. His eyes were heavy-lidded, the irises a darker blue with arousal, and the flush on his ears had spread to his cheekbones. “Sure you can,” he said, and his voice swirled dark and rich into the sunlight.

“You're awfully bossy,” she said.

“You're not the only one paying attention.”

She laughed, because it was all so delightful: the sunshine, the heat, the man sprawled out before her, the challenge. She cupped the back of his head with one hand and pressed the other to the side of his face. The position pressed her body to his from breasts to knees, contact in all the right places, with the additional bonus delight of her bare thighs against his cargo pants. His shoulders and arms were rock-steady, not a hint of a tremor in the muscles.

Determined not to rush this, she brushed her open lips over his stubble from the corner of his mouth to the place where his jaw hinged, absorbing the texture and scent of a man who'd worked with his body all day. She delicately licked at the scruff, then again at the boundary line of beard and soft, sensitive skin by his ear, taking her time. He'd bet her he was strong enough to hold up under her, so she rested her weight on his chest, her soft belly against his, her sex pressed firmly against his erection, but she just let those sensory awarenesses settle in his brain.
All the things that make me female pressed against all the things that make you male, but we're not going to do anything about it. Not yet. I'm going to inhale the scent of your hair, your neck, the hidden hollow behind your earlobe, because it pleases me.

His head tilted to allow her better access. In reward, she scraped her teeth over the exposed tendon, all the way down to his shirt collar. His cock, nestled between her thighs, pulsed as she made her way around to the notch at the base of his throat, then back up into the deliciously rough texture of his beard, over his chin, to his lips.

Still holding his face, she kissed him, licking into his mouth, opening him in a lazy, thorough process, running her fingers through his hair, scratching gently at his scalp in between kisses. When she drew back, red flags of color darkened his cheekbones.

“So good,” she murmured.

This time his smile didn't crook quite so far. Pleased by this response, she sat back on his thighs and started unbuttoning his uniform shirt. She left it tucked into his pants but spread it open, revealing the waffle-weave undershirt stretched taut across his chest and abdomen. With her head tilted ever so slightly, she trailed her fingers from his chin, over his throat, down the center of his chest, stopping at his belt buckle. Again and again, studying a thing of beauty awaiting her pleasure, making no bones about how much she liked the power.

“I'll take it off,” he said, and pushed up on one hand.

“No need,” she said calmly. Imperiously. Meeting his gaze.

No need at all. She pushed the undershirt up just enough to expose his nipples, then bent forward and licked one until the taut nub hardened for her. Then she closed her teeth around it.

His head dropped back, and a long, low groan rumbled from his throat. She hummed, just to let him know she'd taken note of his response, then sat back again to unbuckle his belt. The leather was dark with age and use, a practical thing, probably regulation to wear one. Unlike several of her belts, a single line marked the only place it was ever fastened, but based on the total absence of fat under his skin, he didn't struggle with his weight.