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G
abe listened to Reggie’s footsteps approaching and wiped his sweaty palms against his slacks.

Jesus, he’d had terrorists pointing semiautomatic rifles at him and hadn’t been this nervous.

His eyes performed another quick scan of the room. In addition to the rose petals on the stairs, the living room boasted three bouquets of peonies, Reggie’s favorite flower, as Natalie informed him. And damn hard to get this time of year.

Thank God for his sister, both for obtaining the flowers and assuring him that the apartment was his for the rest of the week.

A bottle of 1992 Silver Oak Cabernet was decanting on the table. All he needed was the girl.

“Hello,” she called, and his gut twisted at the sound of her voice. “Should I just put these in the kitch—” The grocery bags slid from her fingers. An onion spilled out and rolled across the hardwood floor.

“What’s going on?” She took a small step back as he approached. “Natalie,” she whispered and whirled toward the stairs.

Gabe reached her in two strides and caught her by the arm. “Don’t go. Please don’t go.”

She froze but didn’t pull away, which he took as a good sign. He watched her gaze take in the details of the room.

“Why are you doing this?” She struggled to keep her voice flat, uninterested. “Why the big, elaborate setup?”

He closed his eyes and blew out a breath, wishing for once he was the kind of guy who could deliver a smooth line, charm his way out of trouble. “You wouldn’t talk to me, and I had to see you.” Sliding his hand down the leather sleeve of her jacket, he tangled his fingers in her icy ones.

She was shaking even harder than he was.

“So you and Natalie made up some BS about trying to impress your girlfriend?”

He risked one step closer, inhaling her spicy cinnamon scent. “It wasn’t all BS. I’ll cook you dinner for the rest of your life if you give me a second chance.” He paused, squeezing his eyes shut. “I love you, Reggie. You have to know that.”

She turned to look at him, finally, nose red and eyes glassy. “So what? I’m supposed to forgive you? You love me again, and it’s all supposed to be okay?”

“I never stopped loving you.” His voice was getting louder, but he didn’t give a shit. Spinning her around, he gripped her shoulders and stared down into her beautiful, sweet face. “That night when I saw that you called—”

“You didn’t answer your phone.”

Gabe swallowed past the lump in his throat. Those five words would haunt him forever. “I was on my way to your apartment anyway. I didn’t care if you made the whole thing up. I didn’t care if you cared more about your career than you ever would about me.”

She planted her fists on her hips and tilted her chin back. “That’s supposed to make me feel better? You believed I was a liar but were willing to forgive me.”

“That’s not what I meant. I realized you couldn’t have faked it, but even if you had, I would have forgiven you.” He pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes. He hadn’t exactly expected her to fall into his arms, but this was even harder than he’d imagined.

He jerked her into his arms, felt her shuddering against him as she fought tears. “And then when I knew he was hurting you, I wanted to die.”

Reggie wanted to push him away, and she also wanted to throw her arms around him. Instead, she clutched at the front of his shirt, burying her face against his hard chest. She was sobbing now, unable to stop.

“Why can’t I just hate you?” she wailed.

His lips trailed down her cheek, and he sniffed and swallowed hard, crying now too. He took her mouth and she tasted salty tears mixed with his unique masculine flavor.

I have to get out of here.

Avoiding him isn’t making you any happier.

What if something happens and he decides I’m not trustworthy?

What if you walk away now and you have to live the rest of your life knowing you gave up the man of your dreams?

Her lips parted under his for the first soft, tentative flick of his tongue. Nothing had ever tasted better.

She prided herself on seizing every opportunity that came her way.

She’d never forgive herself if she didn’t do the same now, didn’t take the chance. For love. For happiness. For joy.

And fifty years or so of really amazing sex.

Shrugging out of her jacket, she coiled her arms around his neck and pressed close. He groaned, a low sound of relief that rumbled through his chest and down into her core. “I love you,” she murmured between kisses, “but you’re not even close to being off the hook.”

He went wild then, fingers yanking her sweater up over her head as he pushed her back onto the couch. She didn’t let go as she toppled over, yanking him down on top of her. “I can’t make any promises this time,” he said, voice muffled as his mouth slid, open and wet, down her throat. “Later—I’ll start making it up to you later.”

Buttons flew as they fought to pull his shirt off. Her bra sprang open with a flick of his fingers. And then they were skin to skin, shaking and squirming against each other, and it felt so good it brought on another rush of tears.

“I was afraid I’d never get to touch you again,” he whispered, as though reading her thoughts, bending his head to rain frantic kisses over the plump rise of her breasts. He sucked her nipple into his mouth like he would die if he didn’t taste her, touch her.

Her eyes flew open, shocked at the immediate, almost painful burst of pleasure pulsing in her groin. “Wait,” she murmured, suddenly aware that she was half naked and about to have sex on—whose couch? “Where are we?”

“Sister’s place,” he muttered around a mouthful of nipple. “Not coming home.”

His dark hair brushed against her skin, soft, tickly, contrasting the hard suction of his mouth. He released her nipple with a pop, pushing away to strip off her boots, pants, and thong.

Then he was naked, too, so turned on she could smell it coming off him in musky waves. Uttering a harsh cry, he wrapped her legs around his hips and sank hard and deep inside her.

“I love you,” he said, eyes black and fierce as he held her gaze. His big hands gripped her ass, tilting her up to take him deeper, harder, until she could feel him at the base of her spine.

I love you too
. But she couldn’t speak, clutching him to her as she rocked against him. God, she’d forgotten how good he felt inside her, huge and hard and powerful. She’d been so close to never feeling this again.

Sweat beaded and slicked their skin as he invaded her, surrounded her, overwhelmed her. She held him close and gave as good as she got.

“Tell me,” he groaned. “Tell me you love me.”

“I love you,” she gasped as her orgasm took hold.

His face tightened, strained, and he shook and jerked against her. Gripping his butt, she ground herself hard against his twitching cock, milking him hard as she came.

Later, bundled in robes, they sat at the kitchen table drinking wine and eating the dinner they’d finally prepared.

“Steak’s overdone,” Gabe grinned around a huge mouthful.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Reggie said as she speared a limp, overcooked stalk of asparagus. She raised an eyebrow and pointed her fork menacingly. “You better.”

Cooking dinner on his own was only the beginning of paying his dues, but he’d do whatever it took.

“What are you grinning about?” she laughed, her own smile stretching across the bottom half of her face.

Smiling, he pulled her off her chair and into his lap. “Damn, you make me happy, woman,” he drawled. “You have from the beginning. But I was too afraid to trust it. I’m sorry, Reggie. Sorry I didn’t trust the way I feel about you.”

“As long as you do from now on,” she warned, snuggling into his chest.

“So how long do we have?”

She tilted her chin up and gave him a puzzled look.

“Until you have to start traveling all over hell and gone to promote your book, or your show, or whatever.” He felt her stiffen defensively. “Not that I mind,” he quickly clarified.

“I don’t know. Everything’s completely up in the air.” She lifted her hand to brush her hair back and the wide sleeve of her robe slid up her arm.

Gabe winced when he caught sight of the angry red scar slashing across her pale skin. For the rest of his life he’d never be able to look at that scar without guilt.

Pressing a kiss to the still raw-looking line, he said, “I’m sure they won’t have you sidelined long.”

She shifted on his lap, the soft squirm of her ass almost making him forget what they were talking about.

She noticed, and squirmed harder. “I don’t care.” She pursed that luscious mouth. “That’s not true. I do care. I don’t want to lose my show.” Smiling up at him, she said, “But I want to have a life too. With you.” She slid her hand down and tugged at the knot of his robe. “And as many dirty weekends in Hawaii as we can squeeze in.”

Turn the page for a sizzling excerpt from
OPERATION G-SPOT,
coming soon from Aphrodisia!

“O
h my gosh, yes! Right there, Colin!”

They were doing it again, screwing like rabbits on speed.

In an attempt to shut out the sound of her brother and his girlfriend, Joyce, going at it in the neighboring bedroom, Liz Hart covered her ears and hummed into the darkness. The nonstop thump, thump, thump of a headboard slamming against a wall and the unmistakable moans and groans of hot, heavy sex refused to be blocked.

Liz uncovered her ears and let free a moan of her own, this one all about misery.

Karma had a real fucking funny sense of humor. The last year she’d gotten her daily laugh by sharing every screaming, quaking detail of her sex life with Colin. He had a major hang-up when it came to hearing about his little sister’s exploits. Liz might understand that if she were actually little, or rather young.

She was twenty-four, old enough to be knocked up a half dozen times and divorced just as many. She didn’t have kids, a husband—ex, or otherwise—or even a potential lover. And that was the reason karma was so funny.

For all she teased Colin by bragging about her many sexual conquests, 95 percent of what she told him was make-believe. 95 percent of what she told him was a lie. 95 percent of the time she didn’t care. Listening to the ceaseless heavy panting and encroaching sounds of orgasm, the residual five percent reared its head. And damnit was it ugly. Make that jealous.

Just once Liz wanted to move past the fear she carried her mother’s promiscuous genes, which made the woman put physical pleasure before anything else, including her daughter, and enjoy sex for the gratifying experience it should be. Just once she wanted to be the bold, sexually confident woman she pretended at. Just once she wanted to be the one screaming, moaning, and soaking the bed with a bona fide orgasm and not one she faked in order to end yet another unsatisfying encounter.

As if on cue, Joyce’s emphatic cry rang out from the next room. “Ooh…don’t st-op. I’m going to…come!”

Rolling her eyes, Liz sat up in bed and switched on the nightstand lamp. She couldn’t handle playing the part of eavesdropping voyeur a second longer. Since it was after one
A
.
M
., she couldn’t pick up the phone and call someone either. Not that there was anyone she would call on this particular matter. Imagine the response she would get if she phoned Diane, her friend and co-waitress, and whined she was envious of Joyce’s orgasm because Liz had never had one of her own. Like almost everyone else, Diane knew her as the flamboyant, brash-acting, sex maniac she impersonated to avoid the psychoanalysis (a.k.a. bullshit) that would accompany the truth.

The phone wasn’t an option for venting her orgasm envy. Thank God for the Internet.

Six weeks ago, following what should have been an assured climax with a man reputed for his bedroom skills—a night that once again ended orgasm-less—Liz had become desperate and searched for support online. It turned out that she wasn’t the only healthy, twenty-something woman whose mind overruled her body’s desire. There were at least two other women who suffered similar ailments.

Fiona lived states away in Michigan, but was still in the same time zone. The headstrong lawyer would either be asleep or have her legs wrapped around her latest attempt at orgasm. In Seattle, Kristi was three hours behind Atlanta time. The sex toy designer could be home…and more likely testing out her latest pleasure gadget.

Unlike Liz, neither Fiona nor Kristi had a problem getting off with the aid of battery-operated plastic. It was when a man entered the equation that their G-spots performed a disappearing act. Liz clearly had no G-spot, period. She’d tried over a dozen of Kristi’s guaranteed-to-get-you-off products and not one managed to do the job.

Sighing, Liz climbed from bed and pulled a T-shirt over her nude body. She ran a hand through her straight, cropped black hair as she padded barefoot to the desk in the corner of her bedroom, fired up her laptop, and connected to the Internet.

A fresh series of moans came from the bedroom next door, and she grimaced.

Oh, gawd. Not again.

A year ago, she’d moved into her brother’s place to keep him from feeling alone following his messy divorce from Satan in a deceptively sugary sweet package. Now that Colin had Joyce—a genuinely sugary sweet package—in his life and, subsequently, someone to share his large house with, Liz seriously needed to think about getting back into a place of her own. Until then…
Please let Kristi be online.

Opening up the instant messenger program, she logged into
Operation G-Spot
, the group the women had created for private chats, and buzzed Kristi.

Liz: Tell me you’re there.

Kristi: No can do. I’m in the South Pacific, bare-assed and bent over a lounge chair, while the local orgasm gods fight over who gets to tongue me to climax next.

Liz: As long as you’re fantasizing, mind if I join you on that chair? Sure as hell would be better than being here. Yet again, I have the pleasure of falling asleep to the sounds of huffing and puffing and my brother getting his rocks off.

Kristi: Colin’s having another sex marathon overnighter?

Liz: Yes! And I’m sooo jealous.

Kristi: Ditto. Have you considered Fi’s advice to give the sure thing another try? You said he had you wet before your brother walked in on the two of you.

Liz: Pull-eaze tell me you’re joking. Dusty had me wet for a few seconds, but he couldn’t finish the job. Besides, as I’ve told you a gazillion times, the guy’s a conceited asshole. If he were the last man alive, I wouldn’t spread my legs for him again.

Kristi: Mmm…maybe I should come to Atlanta and give him a try. Way you described him a few weeks ago, he sounds deserving of that conceit—totally dee-lish and hung like an elephant. Not that I have a prob with a teeny weenie, but a big one on a man who knows how to use it sounds damned promising.

Liz: Yeah, promising in a ‘never going to accomplish the impossible’ sort of way. Hey, I gotta go. I just remembered I’m working the breakfast shift. TTYL.

Kristi: Bye, GLGS.

Liz snorted at the acronym as she closed the messenger program out. She didn’t need “good luck getting some.” She needed good luck getting off. And not with Dusty either.

Damn Kristi for bringing up Colin’s longtime friend, Dusty Marr. The woman could generally be counted on for encouragement and a bad joke or two, just enough to improve Liz’s mood. Tonight Kristi hadn’t improved her mood a bit, but forced her to lie about working the breakfast shift so she could end the conversation about a guy she would just as soon dropped off the planet.

On top of having a cock that even Liz had to admit was impressive, Dusty was tall, built, blond, and, a month and a half ago, had managed the improbable. Unlike any man or machine before him, his smooth moves had vanquished Liz’s fear of turning into her mother long enough to have her wet and eager to fuck. Before they could move past oral gratification, Colin had come home, found them getting nasty on the living room floor, and burst the hedonistic bubble. After taking things to her bedroom, Liz had tried to clear her mind and get back into the heat of the moment to no avail.

And she couldn’t be happier for that.

She’d decided to sleep with Dusty because his reputation claimed him a sure thing. The moment she’d stopped thinking with her pheromones, she remembered that he was a lot more than a sure thing. He was an arrogant, shallow dickhead who put sex above all else, screwing a different woman every night of the week without care for whom his actions might hurt. In other words, he was the male equivalent of her mother.

She wasn’t doing Dusty again. No way. No how. No matter if thinking of his talented tongue pushing into her nether lips had her sex shockingly moist.

Suppressing the urge to rub her hand between her tingling thighs, Liz stood and returned to the bed. She tugged the T-shirt over her head to reveal tented nipples. Her wetness and the aroused state of her nipples were side effects of the rain-cooled, September night air snaking in the slightly ajar bedroom window. The cold could make a person wet. Tonight it could, because she refused to believe thoughts of Dusty and his sexual prowess were behind her stimulated body.

“What do you say I rub your balls for luck?”

Dusty Marr halted the slide of his pool stick mid-draw to quirk an appreciative eyebrow at the leggy blonde reclining against the pool table. Decked out in a snug black cat suit with a daringly scoop-necked bodice and matching stilettos, the carnal tilt of her smile and the heat in her emerald eyes told him exactly which balls she had in mind. Not the ones on the table, but those stirring to life along with his dick.

He hadn’t had sex in weeks, since the night Liz Hart, his best friend’s younger sister, had shocked the hell out of him by challenging him to a game of pool where oral sex was the stake. A decade his junior, he’d first met her as a loudmouth sixteen-year-old. Jail bait personified, she’d already been endowed with all the right assets to have his testosterone spiking, as well as an overt loathing of him that said he would never get his hands on her. Despite the fact that her dislike of him remained intact, eight years later he’d gotten his hands, and his mouth, on her. Her moans of pleasure said she’d loved every minute of it, too. That is, right up until the moment she’d started trembling with the first signs of climax, only to stop short, tell him he sucked in the sack and ordered him out of her brother’s house.

Despite the recent hiatus, Dusty was no stranger to sex. He loved every aspect of it—from the feel of a woman’s soft curves and the breathy gasps and sighs of her coming undone to the knowledge it was the one thing in life he was truly good at and no one he’d ever slept with could believe otherwise.

No one but Liz.

He wasn’t about to let his ego or his dick suffer from the accusations of one questionably sane woman.

Dusty signaled to his pool opponent to continue without him. With a wicked smile, he turned to the blonde. He opened his mouth to tell her she was welcome to rub far more than his balls; the slender woman with olive skin and closely cropped ebony hair sitting at the bar fifty feet away stopped him from saying a word.

The place was fairly dark and equally smoky. Still, there was no mistaking her identity. Liz. Shit.

What was she doing here?

Outside of that night several weeks ago, she never came to his bar. Not only was
Dusty’s Backroom
located in a small town nearly a half hour from her Atlanta home, it was a country bar. Liz was as rock and roll as a person could get.

Stranger than her presence, was her attire. She was a jeans and T-shirt kind of gal, a woman who didn’t bother with makeup and didn’t need to. Only, tonight she had bothered with makeup, and the jeans and T-shirt were nowhere to be found. A dress the same electric blue shade as her eyes molded to her curves, managing to cover her from throat to elbow to knee and somehow still look sinful as hell, maybe because he remembered exactly how she looked out of that dress. Tall, toned, and slippery when wet.

His cock hardened further, pressing against the fly of his jeans. She hadn’t climaxed for him, but that she’d been dripping wet right up until she’d ended things was no exaggeration.

“Dusty?” a husky feminine voice questioned.

He turned back, realizing it was the blonde who’d spoken. Had they slept together, or how did she know his name?

Movement from the corner of his eye had him looking back at Liz. His gut tightened. She had company. Dusty knew those who frequented his bar. Between his gauzy pink shirt and painted nails, which lent serious question to his sexuality, and spiked black with blond-streaked hair, the guy didn’t look like a local, or someone Liz’s brother would approve of. For Colin’s sake, he would get rid of the jerk.

“Give me a few minutes,” he told the blonde. “I need to take care of something.” For an instant she looked agitated, but then her smile returned. Leaning in so that her plentiful tits couldn’t help but press against him, she rubbed her knuckles along his whiskered cheek. “As I recall, you’re well worth the wait.”

Obviously they had slept together, Dusty thought as he started toward the bar. That the blonde was not only back for more, but willing to wait for him without asking why proved how inaccurate Liz was in calling him a bad lover. If there was a bad lover between them, it was she…and so it seemed her frilly new friend was trying to find out firsthand.

In a move as old as dirt, the guy slid his arm around her shoulders, then coasted his hand down her side to caress the outer swell of a breast. The hand continued to rub, inching slowly inward. Disgust swept through Dusty, mirroring the look in Liz’s eyes. He expected her temper to take flight and for her to punch the unsuspecting schmuck. She didn’t move a muscle, but plastered on a smile an idiot could tell was fake.

She might be okay with getting felt up by a creep in front of dozens of prying eyes, but Colin sure as hell wouldn’t approve. For her brother, Dusty would save her ass.

Reaching her, he took her free hand and tugged her from the barstool, dislodging the other man’s arm. She was a tall woman, inches beneath his six-foot-one frame. In three-inch spiked heels, her mouth was nearly even with his. She must have done some thickening trick with her ruby red lipstick because, as he pulled her into his side, he noticed her lips were plumper than ever. Plump and glistening, they brought to mind the way her mouth had looked wrapped around his dick.

The woman might be a nutcase, to kick him out the way she had, but he remembered now that she wasn’t bad at sex. At least the oral variety. Those full, gifted lips gave head like no other before her.

He rubbed his thump in the valley of her palm. “Elizabeth.” Dressed the way she was, her full, more feminine name sounded appropriate. “I was wondering when you’d get here.”

The feigned smile left her lips and icy blue eyes bored into his. She yanked at her hand. “What the fuck do you want, Marr?”

Dusty smirked. Now there was the Liz he knew. He let free her hand to give her ass a gentle swat. “Such a bitchy tease. You know what that does to me, babe.”