Blazing Midsummer Nights (Harlequin Blaze) (18 page)

The bra clasped in the front, and he reached down and flicked it open with his thumb. The two sides pulled apart, freeing her lush breasts. He bent to one, kissing her again and again, all over the vulnerable flesh. Then he moved to the other, sampling her, drawing things out, building them up.

“Xander,” she groaned, reaching up and tangling her fingers in his hair.

He couldn’t resist the desperate plea in her voice, and finally moved his mouth over one puckered nipple. She arched up toward him, offering him more of her breast, and he sucked her gently, deliberately.

Her pleased cries were music in his ears. This wasn’t demanding, wasn’t frenzied. He wanted her boneless, breathless, without thought or worry. And he was willing to take all night to get her that way.

But he didn’t imagine it would take that long.

After devoting serious attention to both her breasts, he resumed his slow undressing, moving to her waistband and unbuttoning her pants. She lifted up to help him pull them off.

“There’s my favorite view in the world,” he said as he peeled off her skimpy panties to reveal the lovely, womanly place between her legs.

“You’ve certainly seen enough of it to judge,” she told him with a throaty chuckle.

“You’re just so beautiful,” he said, stroking her upper thigh, her hip, the indentation just above her pubic bone.

So beautiful. So responsive.

She was panting now, her hips thrusting up in tiny undulations as he toyed with her gingery curls. When he slipped his hand down to the folds of her sex, he found her warm and slippery, totally aroused.

“Please,” she whispered.

He gave her a little taste of the penetration he knew she needed, sliding his finger into her tight channel. She clenched around him, whimpering, and he gave her another finger, slowly making love to her with both.

Filling her was good—very good. But he wanted to bring her to even higher heights. So he stroked her carefully until he found that soft, spongy spot way up inside her and toyed with it, bringing a sharp gasp to her lips.

“Okay?”

“Do that again,” she ordered.

He did, this time dropping his thumb onto her clit, pleasuring both her pleasure points at the same time.

“Oh, yes,” she groaned.

He kept up the strokes, taking cues from her cries, letting her set the pace. She did, slow at first, then speeding up as her climax built. When it finally washed over her—sending a flush through her entire body and making her cry out—he moved away long enough to strip out of his clothes.

He was back between her parted thighs before she’d stopped moaning. And was sliding his aching cock into her before she’d even begun to fall back to earth.

“Oh, Xander,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and her legs around his hips, “you definitely know how to make a bad day into a good one.”

“Protect and serve, that’s my motto,” he said, gently thrusting into her again.

“I thought that was for cops.”

“Whatever.”

Then he couldn’t speak, couldn’t laugh, he could only feel. He was inside the body of the woman he was falling in love with, wrapped within her embrace, held as intimately as a man could be held, and didn’t want his own thoughts to interfere with the moment. He just went with it—went with the pleasure and the rightness of it.

They rocked together, slower, more gently than they’d ever gone before, exchanging long kisses and tender caresses. And, he knew, doing something more.

They’d had wild, crazy sex all week. This time, they were making love, exchanging vows and promises without ever saying a word.

He’d never felt so moved. Never been so sure of anything in his life as he was of this moment and this place and this woman.

She gasped, her eyelashes fluttering as a climax rolled over her again, brought about by the slow grind of their bodies. Xander had been drawing things out, content to wait, loving the trip and not needing to arrive at the destination. But when he felt the tight clenching of her body, it wrung the last bit of resistance right out of him. He followed her, her utter satisfaction triggering his own release.

Knowing he was about to come, Xander cupped her face in his hands, staring into her eyes, and said, “Say something so I’ll know this isn’t a dream. It feels too perfect to be real.”

She smiled, holding him even tighter as he spilled into her.

“If it’s a dream, I hope neither of us ever wakes up.”

10

M
IMI’S MOOD HAD DEFINITELY
lifted during their amazing, powerful love-making. But afterward, she couldn’t prevent that mix of sadness, rage and disappointment she’d been feeling much of the day from creeping back in and affecting her mood.

While Xander showered, she went into the kitchen and got out some stuff to make them some dinner, going over everything in her mind one more time. By the time she’d gotten to the point of making salad, she was angry enough again that she was hacking at a head of lettuce with a butcher knife.

“Whoa, there,” he said as he entered the kitchen, toweling off his hair. She lost herself for a moment, gazing at those flexing muscles of his arms. God, she would never tire of looking at this man.

“I don’t think that’s the iceberg that sunk the
Titanic,
” he added.

She got the joke but couldn’t manage much more than a tiny smile.

Xander went to the fridge and helped himself to a beer, then turned and leaned a hip against the counter, watching her work. “Are you ready to talk about it?”

She was, having felt like she was going to explode most of the day with the need to vent. She’d only been able to say so much to Lauren, since Mimi’s father was her boss, too, but with Xander there were no such restrictions.

So she told him, launching into a full description of what had happened that morning in her office. When she mentioned the it’s-your-fault part of the conversation, she saw Xander’s jaw start to clench. And when she got to the I’d-fire-you, he crossed his flexing arms over his broad chest and thrust his fisted hands under them, as if to hide the fact that they were shaking with anger.

“You’re too good at your job to let something like that happen,” he said, his indignation a living thing in the tiny kitchen.

“Thank you,” she murmured, her ramrod-straight posture easing a bit. His belief in her went a long way toward calming her down.

“Did Dimitri even try to come to your defense?”

She grunted.

“Douchebag.”

“He upset me, but honestly, the longer the day went on, the less I cared about his reaction and the more my father’s hurt.”

He walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. “He was having a bad day and lashed out. He may be guilty of bad managerial skills, but you know he loves you.”

She covered his hand with hers and squeezed. “I know.”

Waiting for the lettuce to dry before she could finish the salad, she went back to the fridge to get the marinated chicken they planned to throw onto the grill.

“So what happened at the meeting?”

“First, I have to back up to the hour before the meeting. It was crazy.”

She’d been opening her mouth to yell for Lauren the minute the two men had left that morning. But she hadn’t even needed to. Her assistant had been in her office—with the initialed ad proofs—before Mimi could make a sound.

“Listening at keyholes?” she’d asked the younger woman, not angry, just relieved she was so on the ball.

“Of course. Isn’t that what you pay me for?” Lauren had replied before spreading out the proofs on her desk.

She told Xander that, and about how they’d gone over everything inch by inch, confirming there had been no random penises in the Burdette Quality Foods circular.

Mimi had then gone on to examine all the communication between her staff and the printer. Lauren was smart enough to always send cybercorrespondence with a receipt request, so she could prove exactly which digital file the other company had received and when they had received it.

Armed with all the proof, Mimi had gotten on the phone with the printer. And by the time the one hour between the sneak attack in her office and the scheduled meeting had elapsed, she’d had the initially blustering printer in tears on the phone. He’d been unable to deny the evidence, and swore he’d find out who had sabotaged the ad immediately.

She was walking into the meeting with her father, alone, not needing any staff when she had evidence, when Lauren had dashed up and whispered that the printer had already called. His cartoon-drawing grandson, who worked for him, had confessed. Case closed.

An hour and some good investigative work had been enough to clear her name. She didn’t know how long it would take to get over the fact that her own father hadn’t given her the same benefit of the doubt he would give any other employee.

After she had relayed the story to Xander, he nodded, but didn’t smile and try to say everything was all right. He knew better. They’d talked enough about her job, her mixed feelings about it, her struggles with her father, for him to know this had been a blow from which it would be hard to recover.

“So what are you going to do now?” Xander asked, proving he realized that even though the mystery had been solved, and she had been absolved of all responsibility—and had received an apology from her father and Dimitri—she hadn’t finished dealing with it.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” she admitted. “I can’t just let it go. As much as I hate to fight with Dad, I’m going to have to let him know how I feel. I’ll never respect myself again if I let the fact that I want to be CEO stop me from standing up for myself when I’ve been treated so badly.”

“You’re right, you won’t.” He frowned, as if he wanted to say more, but hesitated.

“What?”

“I was just wondering if you’ve ever thought about working anywhere else.”

She nodded slowly. “Believe it or not, I’ve thought about it more than once lately.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, though it wasn’t really chilly. “I don’t hate my job. I’ve always liked the idea of trying to bring it into the twenty-first century. It’s my family legacy, mine by
right.
But I don’t know… Would I choose it if my grandfather hadn’t founded it? I just don’t know.”

He obviously heard her vehemence. “Right. And maybe your relationship with your father would be a little better if the boss/employee strain were lifted.”

“Maybe. But should I give up my career goals when I know, deep down, we would both be hurt by that? Because even if he is a sexist jerk, in the long run, I know he realizes I’d be damn good and would be the right hands in which to entrust his father’s business.”

Xander sipped his beer, nodding, looking like he was considering it but not totally convinced.

“You have to understand how badly I wanted this growing up,” she insisted. “The fact that I was born a girl, and some people thought I shouldn’t be entitled to it, only made me that much more determined to prove everyone wrong. To not only get the job, but also to be the best CEO we’ve ever had.”

“You could,” he said softly.

She warmed at the compliment, knowing he had not one iota of firsthand knowledge of what she was like at work, and was basing his assessment totally on his faith in her. Something few people had ever done for her in her life.

“I have a million plans,” she said. Plans that she’d never revealed to anyone. “Our expansion into the northeast, adding a farmer’s market and dining areas, becoming more of a center for the community in small towns that don’t have many social outlets.”

“Sounds great.”

It did. And she could make it happen.

But not if she was always treated like the daughter-who-would-someday-screw-up. She already had to work harder than any other executive on staff, and got half the credit and twice as much blame. She didn’t know what else she had to do to prove her point. Screwups like today sure weren’t going to help.

“Do you think your father would ever let you do any of it?”

And there was the rub. Because the truth was, no, she didn’t. So if she wanted to make those ideas become reality, she’d have to wait until he retired and she took over. Which could take another decade. Could she really stand another decade like this?

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe if I left, proved myself elsewhere, and then came back in a few years.”

“Maybe,” he insisted, putting down his beer and walking over to take her in his arms. “Just keep all the possibilities in the back of your mind, would you? There’s not much you couldn’t do if you set your mind to it, Mimi.”

She lifted her eyes to study his handsome, serious face, seeing his sincerity. Seeing his absolute, unwavering faith in her.

What an amazing, remarkable gift she’d been given, so suddenly, so unexpectedly. He had come out of nowhere—or, at least, her closet—and was already the best thing that had ever happened to her.

“I will,” she said with a smile, so warmed by his reassurance that she could barely remember how badly she’d felt earlier today. “Now, ready to go out back? I hear voices and suspect the grill’s already been fired up.”

“We never did have that community barbecue to welcome Helen and her kid.”

“No, we didn’t.”

Mimi had seen the other woman and the little boy a few times this week, actually sitting down and having a glass of sweet tea with Helen on the back porch one night when Xander had to work. She liked Anna and Obi-Wan’s daughter. A lot. And she couldn’t help wondering if, now that Helen appeared to be “over” her traumatic divorce, perhaps she might be looking at reheating things with Dimitri. His name had come up only briefly. Neither woman had asked, or answered, any personal questions, though Helen—well, everyone in the house—knew Mimi and Xander were already involved. So she had to wonder if Helen had been thinking along those lines.

As for what Dimitri thought about his ex having moved to Athens, she didn’t know. They hadn’t had a personal conversation since he’d left her place last weekend, and she wasn’t feeling very charitably toward him right now so she doubted they would anytime soon.

“Let’s go,” she said, pushing the big bowl of salad into his hands.

Since they had containers of food and drink, they didn’t go through the closet, but rather left her apartment and went out through the community part of the house. When they exited the back door, they nearly bumped into Helen, who stood nearby, her hands clenched together in front of her. Her son stood at her side, and his mouth was hanging open and his eyes almost comically wide.

Mimi immediately turned and looked in the same direction, toward the garage. Anna stood there. Judging by her frown, the arms crossed over her chest, and the impatiently tapping foot, she wasn’t happy.

A few feet away stood Obi-Wan, whose jaw was stuck out in a belligerent pose. He was holding a plastic baseball bat, which she’d last seen in Tuck’s hands. He appeared to be trying to get around Anna, who was blocking him with her body, and ordering him to stop being such a fool.

Shifting her gaze again, she realized what Anna was trying to keep Obi-Wan from reaching. Or, rather
who
she was trying to keep him from reaching.

A short guy wearing an old-fashioned suit stood behind Anna, trying to hide or disappear. That wasn’t the strange part, though.

The donkey head he was wearing was what took the situation from the typically unusual kind of thing that went on around here to a whole new level of bizarro.

“I said, put that thing away,” Anna snapped. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“You can’t parade your boyfriend around in my own backyard and expect me not to do anything about it,” Obi-Wan said, swinging the plastic bat menacingly. It was about the most passionate she’d ever seen the man, whose Zen attitude usually rivaled Buddha’s. “I’ll bop you right between those long ears if you don’t stay away from my wife, you no-talent ham!”

Ahh. This was the actor, the one Anna was supposedly having the affair with. He wasn’t much to look at. At least, not from the neck down, being scrawny and pale, with liver-spotted hands that shook as he grabbed Anna’s shoulders and used her as a human shield.

She glared at him over her shoulder and shook the hands off, obviously none too pleased with him, either. “You knock it off or I’ll let him get you. I can’t believe you spread those awful lies about me—about us!”