All Fired Up (Kate Meader) (20 page)

“Sorry,” she murmured.

“Not a problem.”

No, sir, it was not. Soft at first, his lips moved over hers, teasing, testing her limits. Sweet, so sweet. Only when she moaned did he give it his all. A full-scale assault of such heat, she found herself clutching at his shirt and wishing she could climb all over him.

Cleverly, he picked up on her desperation and pulled her astride his thick, muscular thigh but instead of easing the ache between her legs, it inflamed it. He slipped one of those big, callused hands beneath the hem of her skirt to palm her butt cheek. His other hand anchored her head back so he could feed devastating kisses along the curve of her neck. There was panting and whimpering and shaking, all on her side, of course. Mostly, he was quiet and methodical. A real professional.

“Shane,” she whispered against the velvet-rough of his cheek, needing to say something, anything. Terrified this lurch into abandon might result in her forgetting everything—her name, who she was, who she was trying to be. Her mind was like a metronome waiting to peter out. If only she could will it still and relax, let this play out and enjoy the newness of feeling alive for the first time in years.

“I know,” he said, though he couldn’t possibly know anything. She wanted him to know it all.

On the gush of a breath, she bit out, “I had anorexia.”

The words sat up, waiting for some sort of response, whether from her body or from his mouth she didn’t know. Mood-killer par excellence. She didn’t move, not voluntarily anyway. A tremor started up in her thighs, still wrapped around his strong leg. The longest seconds of her life ticked by. Perhaps he hadn’t heard her.

“And now?”

The strangeness of her position made her cells tingle in defense. Straddled over a man’s thigh, perched on a motorcycle, exposed in the alley behind her home. Good God. She made to move; he held her fast with his hand still affixed to her butt.

“How are you now?” he repeated in a low voice that tasted of night.

Physically she was fine, so she told him that truth. “I’m healthy and I eat three meals a day, most days. Sometimes I snack. And, of course, I drink to excess.”

He snorted, and the noise, so human and grounding, eased her tremble. “That you do. Is this why you don’t eat with the crew?”

She nodded. “I know it sounds narcissistic but I feel like I’m being judged all the time, so eating in groups is difficult. I like food. I just have a hard time with certain things. Social situations. My fear foods.”

His brow wrinkled. “Fear foods?”

“People like me don’t hate everything we eat. We just hate what it does to our bodies.” It felt easier to speak of herself like she was a member of some odd sect. Less personal. “Some foods are more difficult than others, like pasta. I know that sounds strange, but when I was a kid, pasta was all we ever ate. So much of it, and everyone would be stuffing their faces.”

He looked thoughtful. “Food’s important for families. It’s how they connect, show their love. Usually so they don’t have to talk to each other.”

Damn straight. “If you’re not into food in my family, it’s hard to feel like you belong. I’ve never really felt that.” It broke her heart to say it, not just because it was true, but because she couldn’t fix it. She would always feel that sense of separation from them.

“There are other ways of belonging.”

She sighed. “Not in my family. They have certain expectations.”

Marriage, children, all those things her heart keened for. It was safer to pretend she didn’t want them, to scoff at the twin yokes of marriage and parenthood. It kept the matchmakers at bay and shored up defenses battered by the sight of DeLuca scamps and the beautiful kids she volunteered with at the children’s hospital.

“But they’re such wonderful people. Surely, they understand what you’ve gone through.” With the hand not surgically attached to her butt, he rubbed the small of her back in tight heated circles. “What you’re still going through.”

Her heart beat rabbit kicks against her rib cage. “They don’t know.”

The hand on her back stilled. The overhead light cast his features in a feral light. “Why not?”

“When it first started, I was ashamed. I knew it was wrong to starve myself but it was like a drug. A perfection drug. It was easy to lie and say I’d eaten over at a friend’s, and once I got to college it was like every other girl had some weird food habit she was trying to hide. Secrecy has been my normal for so long. I’ve been working to achieve a new normal over the last couple of years, but it’s also been a tough time for my family. My mom battled cancer, the restaurant almost failed. What’s going on with me would just add to their worry. I don’t want them giving me strange looks every time I pick up a fork or go to a bathroom.”

“So you’ve told no one?” he ground out, his incredulity evident.

Other than a therapist in New York, which didn’t really count because she was paying her to listen. She suspected one other person knew, but they had never discussed it. “No one.”

Confessing to Shane was so liberating but her reasons were less benign than it might look on the surface. He had just told her how important food was to him and she had told him that it was important to her in another way. A con in the relationship column and now that he knew the truth, she could move forward in the knowledge that this was a nonstarter. Every word out of her mouth propelled them closer to good-bye, more swiftly and decisively than any legal document could ever do. A man who made his living in the kitchen couldn’t possibly be interested in a woman who was the absolute negation of everything he stood for.

Silence reigned. Friendly, effusive Shane had finally met his match but then men hated when women had weird hang-ups. Oddly, she had expected he would be sweet and distantly kind about it, not quiet and intense.

“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” she asked after the pause had stretched to breaking point.

“Me? Sure, I’m the master of secrets.” The words sounded jaded on his lips—he wasn’t talking about their clandestine marriage. The pain on his face when he held Evan last night and when he talked about his father flashed through her. She suspected he kept a lot of things in and that maybe, like her, he had no one to confide in. His family was gone; he was a stranger in a strange town. Line-dancing classes could take you only so far.

“Thanks,” she said, slipping off his thigh. She tried to hold onto the delicious moment of friction between her legs before the chill set in. A little parting gift to keep her warm later. Now that she had placed a pall over the proceedings, they could get back to studious ignoring of each other. She dug her nails into her palms to stave off the tears she could feel thickening her throat.

He let her stand but his large palm still molded a possessive splay on her butt cheek. Can you say
awkward
? The dim yellow glow of the security lighting accented the planes and contours of his face and illuminated a blazing expression in his eyes.

“I once went out with a girl whose father made a point of cleaning his gun whenever I showed up to take her on a date.”

Bewilderment made her blink.
Say what now?

“I’d be sitting with him in the living room and I’d ask ‘How’re ya doin’, Mr. O’Connor?’ and he’d give me a cold nod and then go back to shining up his rifle like it was his…well, you know what I mean.”

She nodded, not having the slightest idea what he meant.

He breathed one of those satisfied sighs that accompanies a pleasant memory. “She dumped me a month later because I forgot her birthday but not before I’d spent several nights on her old man’s porch showing her a good time. She’d bite my hand to stop from screaming when she came. Once she drew blood. While Mr. O’Connor waited up for her in the living room with that clean-as-a-whistle rifle across his lap.”

“Shane, what—”

“Nice try, gorgeous, but I don’t scare so easily. This is happening.”

A shockwave barreled through her. Shane Doyle just flat out refused to conform to her expectations. From the first moment, he had been ten steps ahead of her with a clairvoyance that bordered on ridic.

“You mean you still want to do this?”

“Get that beautiful arse of yours upstairs now or I’m going to fuck you over the back of the bike.”

Well.

She recovered her composure enough to ask, “And that’d be a problem because?” She was quite proud of the businesslike tone in her voice.

An eyebrow scooted up as he climbed off the machine. Plucking the dropped helmet from the ground, he tucked a hand under her elbow and steered her to the street. “We’ve already been interrupted once before in public and I’m not risking a repeat. This isn’t going to be fast, Cara. It’s going to be long and slow and very, very hot.”

Lord, that was about the sexiest thing she’d ever heard. It also scared the bejesus out of her.

As he practically carried her through the front door of their building and up the stairs, she had to remind herself not to get carried away. That was probably a downright impossibility at this point, but she needed to retain some sliver of a grip. She halted outside her door, and he bumped into her, or rather his big old erection did. Hello, sailor.

“It would just be a one-off,” she said, turning to face him.

“If you say so,” he said cockily, though her brain heard,
Yeah, that’s gonna happen
, and her foolish heart cheered that he already wanted to sleep with her again.

Stop. It.

“And you can’t stay overnight.”

He gave a self-assured eyebrow lift. “Good thing I don’t have far to go.”

“It’s just that with our situation—”

He applied his lips directly to the situation, namely the sensitive juncture of shoulder and neck. It felt like heaven. “Which situation would that be? The coworker situation? The neighbor situation? Or the marital situation?”

They had an awful lot of situations and that was before they factored in the I-once-looked-like-a-
Les-Misérables
-waif situation. It was nice of him not to mention it.

“We can be adults about this,” she responded in a very adult tone, worried she was talking herself out of this before they’d even started.

“Yes, we can.” He sucked gently on her earlobe, so tender, yet so erotic. “Very adult. Neighborly, too.”

She felt a lusty giggle coming on. Never in her life had she acted so girly around a guy. Never in her life had she been so acutely aware of what it felt like to be a woman.

“We’re just being good neighbors,” she murmured.

“Just borrowing some sugar.” He grasped her hips and pivoted her so she faced her door. “Now get inside before I make a fool of myself, woman.”

She twisted back to the tune of his heavy sigh, thrilled at what a good sport he was being about it all. Only one more thing would make it perfect.

“Aren’t you forgetting something, Riverdance?”

The dimple went nuts. “Don’t worry, I’ve got condoms.”

“No, not that.” Turning back to the door, she threw her flirtiest glance over her shoulder. “The hat, Shane. Get the hat.”

Chapter 10

Cara had never seen a man move so fast as the next thirty seconds blurred through her mind. That was all it took for Shane to grab his hat, throw her over his shoulder like a sack of Idahos, and growl, “Bedroom.”

So hot. Not nice.

Now, in her white-walled bedroom, she lay on her Jonathan Adler duvet while Shane kneeled over her, exploring the hollow of her throat with torturous skill. And he was…slowing down. Way down.

Anxiety blazed through her. A little flirty banter in the hallway and she had thought,
Hey, girl, you’ve got this,
but now the flutters in her stomach were emerging victorious. Lying beneath six feet of unabashed masculinity should have narrowed her world to just the two of them, but it felt like her crazy confession was the third person in the room.

Why couldn’t he just take her quickly and get it over with? Push up her skirt, which admittedly wouldn’t have far to go (hooray for straddle mode), and ease the ache? Her deep, dark secret, the thing that made her a freak—Shane hadn’t batted an eyelid. He was supposed to run for the hills, not sit there astride that hunk of hot metal staring at her like she’d just told him Cheerios were her favorite cereal. No dramatics, no offers to throw her a pity party. He just wanted her. Slow and hot.

“Cara, you okay?”

She blinked and refocused on the deep swirls of those chocolate-drop eyes.

“Fi-fine. I’m fine. It’s just…it’s been a while for me and I don’t want to disappoint you.”

He chuckled. “Seeing as how you’ve got me so hot I’m about to come in my pants, I think you should be the one worried about being disappointed.”

Funny, that, but she couldn’t make her mouth curve up. Damn, she used to know how to smile.

He leaned up and rested his weight on the bed beside her. “Would I be right in thinking you have some issues with how you look naked?”

She nodded the head that felt too heavy for her neck.

“I could probably tell you how absolutely fucking perfect I think you are, but you wouldn’t believe me, would you?”

She nodded again, shocked at his pinpoint sensitivity. Anorectics never believed what anyone—friends, therapists, lovers—told them about their bodies. She had talked to counselors, consumed message boards, devoured books. She was smart enough to know her inadequacy was entirely self-perceived, but it couldn’t stop her from constructing her own truths.