How to Seduce a Fireman: HarperImpulse Contemporary Romance (7 page)

Shit, as if this old man could be as experienced as I am.

She plucked a piece of toilet paper off Milt’s chin. “Did you cut yourself shaving?”

“Yeah, I’ve got four electric razors tucked in a drawer somewhere that the kids got me over the years, but I like the close shave a sharp razorblade gives me.” He rubbed his gnarled fingers over his cheek. “The wife always preferred a smooth face. Said it made kissin’ nicer.”

The neighborhood dogs quieted since Cassie had stopped frantically pounding the instrument’s keys as if she were typing a letter to Santa.

She leaned against Milt’s bony shoulder. “I’m going to marry this young whipper-snapper. I don’t care how much facial hair he’s got.”

Milt narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips while he petted Killer. “Don’t look like the marrying type to me.”

Quinn folded his arms and widened his stance. “That’s because I’m
not
the marrying type. I’m more the one-night stand type.” This whole conversation was totally bizarre. He glared at Cassie. Thanks to her shenanigans, he’d have to repack everything.

“Oh, you can make book on this, Milt. Hot lips here is mine. His ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower.” Cassie sucked a bucketful of air and blew four sour notes at one time.

Quinn jammed his index fingers into his ears and cursed.

Milt farted, jerking his hearing aid out of his ear.

And Killer pissed on Milt’s shirt.

“Dammit, Cassie!” Quinn reached to snatch the saxophone from her grasp; she swung it out of his range and laughed. What he wouldn’t give to lay her over his knees and paddle her ass. “Look, that horn belonged to my late Uncle Matisse. He used to play in jazz clubs in New Orleans. It’s all I have left of him. Now give it here.”

Although Quinn Matisse was not a blood relative, he had been someone very important in his life. Uncle Mat taught him how to throw a ball, to fish and toss rocks in a stream to make the most circular ripples. In short, the smiling man spent time with young Quinn until a bullet ended the musician’s life.

“You know Matisse is a nice name. We’ll name our first child in his honor. Matisse if it’s a boy or Mattie if it’s a girl.” She placed the brass instrument in his outstretched hand. “I think it’s time we take this conversation upstairs, don’t you?” She smiled so sweetly it looked pure evil.

“First, you repack my belongings.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “When all my things are safely locked away, we’ll talk.”

Milt flapped his urine-soaked shirttail away from his body. His dog stood at his sandaled feet, his tail tucked between legs. “Go on inside, Quinn. Killer and me will pack up your stuff. Looks like you and Cassie have some things to work out.” Milt shot a worried glance at Quinn’s motorcycle. “Don’t know if I want to move your Harley though.”

“Don’t worry about the bike. If you’ll just cram my clothes and trophies in boxes and secure them away in the trailer, I’d appreciate it. I think the bike and grill will be safe enough sitting where they are for a few minutes.” His gaze swept to the feminine pain in his ass standing next to him. “I’d like to say it won’t take long to pound some sense into her head, but any woman who would dye a swath of her hair stoplight red can’t be too bright.”

“Hey!” She poked a finger in his side.

“Your hair was perfect before, peanut.” He smirked at Milt. “See, that’s the difference between men and women. Men don’t diddle with their appearance. They know perfection when they see it. Am I right, Milt?”

The old guy extracted a small black comb from his back pocket and skimmed it over the seven grey hairs plastered to his scalp with some kind of hair goop. Nodding, he slipped the comb into place again. “That’s exactly what I used to tell Louisa.” He crossed himself. “God bless her soul.” He hiked up his baggy khaki pants with the insides of his elbows tucked against his belt. “A man does
not
mess with perfection.” He hip-wiggled a couple foxtrot steps and passed some gas as he hummed some ancient tune.

Cassie’s jaw dropped and her gaze ricocheted from Milt to Quinn. “Let’s state the facts correctly, shall we?” She planted her hands on her narrow hips and swayed her shoulders one at a time for some kind of goofy feminine emphasis. “Women like change. We have no fear of experimentation the way you men do.”

“Fear?” Was she calling him a coward?

“When was the last time you tried a new kind of food? Or a micro-brew beer?” She spun toward Milt. “When was the last time you wore navy blue pants? Every time I see you, you’re wearing khakis.” Turning her harangue back on Quinn, she pointed to his comfy Nikes. “You need new sneakers. You’ve been wearing those raggedy things for the three years I’ve known you.”

She poked a fingernail through a hole in his beloved Puddle of Mudd t-shirt. Using some of his college expense money to buy a concert ticket to go hear them with a group of Harvard freshmen had been one of the highlights of his life. How great to be out from under the condemning, watchful eye of his father.

“And this faded, tattered rag belongs in the trash bin!” One swift tug and the hole grew from the circumference of a dime to fist-size. “See? It’s like tissue paper!”

Quinn couldn’t believe she’d torn his favorite shirt. Hell, the thing was barely ten years old. His gaze slowly swept from his ravaged, quality rock and roll wear to her green eyes, snapping with righteous indignation.

“Women also like variation in our sexual positions while, according to ninety percent of my female customers, their men do it the same way over and over.”

Something in him snapped. Control? Anger? The need to shut her up? Who the fuck knew? “You mouthy little brat.” He coiled his fingers around her bicep and charged them toward the building’s entrance. “Milt, we’re going to be a while.” He yanked the aqua door open so hard it banged against the front of the yellow stucco structure as he hauled her ass up the steps.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Cassie jogged to keep up with Quinn’s furious movements.

“I’m warning you. Shut. The hell. Up. I’ve had enough of your nonsense. We are
not
getting married. We are
not
having children. And I’m about to show you more ways to have sex than your stupid-ass, gossipy customers ever dreamed of.” He pushed his apartment door open and shoved her inside before kicking it shut. “You have an evil heart, Cassie Wolford. You may look like an angel, but deep inside you are one hellacious monster.”

He pivoted to turn the lock and when he looked at her again, she grabbed the hem of the yellow cotton top she wore, jerked it over her head and tossed it aside. One flip-flop flew over his shoulder and he ducked. Furball, who’d come out to greet her, scampered for the kitchen and the safety of the empty cabinets. A flick of her other ankle and the second flip-flop landed on top of his boxed microwave.

Cassie’s thumbs tucked into the elastic of her navy capris.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Getting naked so we can have sex.” She shimmied out of the capris and twirled them on her index finger. “You’re falling behind, big guy.” Her head dipped in his direction. “Come on. Show me some skin.” She reached behind her to unhook her bra and stopped after it hit the floor. “Wait, you want me to undress you, don’t you? Cool. I can handle that.”

What the fuck?
His cock voiced the same sentiment, throbbing the words in a sensual Morse code as the traitorous appendage filled with blood and lengthened. He shook his head. “No. Now Cassie, we are not doing this.” He focused on that silly swath of red hair because if his eyes devoured her firm naked breasts one more time, he was a goner.

Hell, this was why he’d resigned from a job he loved and was leaving a life he totally enjoyed. Getting into a physical relationship with her was wrong on so many levels. She was seven years younger than he was and his best friend’s baby sister. And he was emotionally damaged by Renata’s betrayal of his team, his heart and his manhood. He had nothing good to offer Cassie. Nothing but raw physicality.

“If we have sex, there will be no emotion to it. Just two adults seeking release. Hell, if all you need is a good climax or two, I’m game. Just don’t expect me to cuddle you afterwards or wax poetically about how grand it was. Because that’s not how I operate.”

His little Pollyanna ran on emotion. Maybe his crude remarks would be enough to cool her mood.

She stalked toward him, her tongue moistening the evil grin stretching across her full lips. “Oh, but we
are
doing this. You said so just a minute ago when you dragged me up the steps. And you always do what you say.” She lifted a shoulder. “Besides, I could go for a good release right about now.” She fisted his t-shirt and ripped it from neckband to hem. Leaning in, she rubbed her breasts across his chest, her erect nipples tearing apart any self-control he frantically held onto.

Sweat beaded on his forehead. Dear God, he would die.

Her tongue circled his areola and his cock hardened more—if that were possible. She bit his nipple before taking it into her mouth and sucking it. Her fingertips fondled the ring in his other nipple and tugged the piercing, sending the combined shocks of pain and pleasure he so enjoyed to his nerve endings. His hands fisted in her hair. Another tug on his nipple ring and he groaned.
Sweet mother of God.
He’d gone to nirvana with the girl of his dreams.

While her frantic kisses covered his body, her busy hands traveled to his jeans to pull the button through the denim and unzip his fly. His cock sprung free, and she dropped to her knees.

“Oh, hot lips, I love a man who goes commando.”

Jealous rage rudely snatched him from his state of bliss, and he jerked her head back. “How many damn men have you seen who go commando?” His voice was harsh, his breathing ragged. “How many, Cassie?”

The tip of her pink tongue touched the head of his pecker and swirled around it once. Her emerald gaze remained locked on his and the corners of her mouth lifted. “Guess.” Her hand wrapped around his cock, stroking him from balls to crown while her tongue circled the head.

His aroused nerve endings warred with his male ego. She was his angel.
His, dammit.
How many men had there been before him? Did it matter? He’d certainly had more than his fair share of women. Okay, so he wouldn’t be her first, but he damn sure would be the one she remembered. The one she measured all others against from this point forward.

But, dear God, she sure as hell knew how to give fantastic head. Shivers skied down his spine and his balls ached for release. All the while she tortured him with licking and sucking designed to send any man to the edge of sexual madness.

“Enough.” Quinn bent and scooped her into his arms. “Let’s move this to the bed.” He kicked the bedroom door shut behind them. The last thing he needed was Furball watching and pouncing.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and bit his earlobe. “How many?”

“How many what?” He laid her on his rumpled sheets and toed off his sneakers before removing his tattered shirt.

“How many positions are we going to do? Four? Six?” She burrowed into his pillow and bedclothes, her face flushed with excitement and her eyes shadowed with something. Was it fear? Surely not.

He shucked his jeans, opened the drawer of his nightstand and grabbed a fistful of condoms, shaking them at her. “Guess.”

Her eyes widened for a beat. “What do you do? Buy them by the box?”

The bed dipped when he pressed his knee into the mattress, spreading her legs so he could settle between her hips. Her question seemed a little naïve, but then maybe her other lovers were the type to tuck a singular rubber in their wallets. Damn fools.

Visions of young, horny guys stretched over her, in her, forming the double-backed beast, twisted into an unfamiliar bitter rage of jealous possessiveness. He wanted to kill every male who had ever touched her—and he knew more than fifty ways to do the deed.

“Quinn, what happened to your closet door?”

“Temper tantrum.”
I was mentally killing the bastard who dared threaten you.

A smile brightened her features and orneriness twinkled in her green eyes. “I’m glad I never have temper tantrums.”

He laughed. “Me, too, angel.” Kissing a trail from her temple to her ear, he struggled for control. He had no right to such emotions. Once he left the boundaries of Clearwater, he’d lose contact with her. His life would be sterile again, cold and damn lonely. But for now, with her arms draped around his neck, her breasts against his pecs and the backs of her calves restlessly moving over his, she belonged to him.

“How many?” He bit her neck and she gasped. “How many lovers have you had?” His male ego had put forth the question before his mind had a chance to censor it.

“We’re not doing this, Quinn. I’m not telling you how many men I’ve had and I sure as hell don’t want to know how many women you’ve been with.” She kissed his jaw and nuzzled closer. “Let’s just enjoy the moment.”

His lips feathered kisses down her neck and met the delicate gold chain. Pleasure rippled through him. “You’re wearing my necklace.”

“I’ll wear it forever. Thank you. It means more to me than you can ever imagine. It’s the most beautiful necklace I’ve ever seen.”

Her sentiments touched him deeper than he wanted to acknowledge. “Another guy will replace it with something better.’

She made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat. “I can’t imagine who. Not when my heart will always belong to you.” Her sweet lips made contact and his mouth opened to touch her tongue with his. For several seconds, as the kiss deepened, the world faded. There was no botched mission, no dead comrades, no Renata with her devious feminine ruses—only his sweet angel. And in her arms, he was pure again. He was worthy.

Be honest with yourself, man.

He wrapped his hands around her head and pressed his forehead to hers. “Are you going to be okay with this? I never took you for a one-time only type of woman. I’m leaving, Cassie. This is sex. Nothing more. Sex between friends.”

Tears pooled, and she blinked rapidly as if she were willing them away. “I don’t want you to leave. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. I don’t understand why…”

He kissed her with just the barest joining of lips. “I feel the same about you, but sometimes…” Sometimes what? How could he possibly explain to her why he had to leave when, right now, with her naked beneath him, his thinking made zero motherfucking-sense?

****

Cassie waited for Quinn to finish his sentence. His forehead was furrowed as if he were deep in thought; he shook his head a couple of times and forced out a ragged sigh, saying nothing. Something had him in turmoil. Should she ask?

Hillary, her steady Friday shampoo and style, always insisted the best time to worm information out of a man was after sex. Which was why Cassie was where she was, damn near naked, lying beneath a totally naked and aroused Quinn Gallagher. Once they did the deed, she planned on getting some answers, like why he was suddenly intent on leaving Clearwater.

After all, Hillary had been right about the jealousy thing. “Mention the possibility of other men and the guy will go all possessive on you,” or so Hillary claimed as she doled out advice on how to snare and keep a man. As for how to give oral, Cassie had absorbed the graphic lesson Eva Mae, her Saturday morning regular, demonstrated using a bottle of conditioner as a cock prop.

Ninety percent of what Cassie knew about sex, she’d learned from her customers. And, as a virgin waiting three years for the man she loved to come on to her, she had no qualms about asking questions. So, here she was, beneath the man she adored, armed with second-hand knowledge, waiting for him to take her virginity and hoping she didn’t make a complete fool of herself in the process.

For if he laughed at her inexperience, she didn’t think she’d ever recover.

“Raise your arms over your head, angel.” Quinn wrapped his large hand around both of her wrists and held them in place even as he shifted off her onto his side. The warm fingertips of his other hand trailed down the side of her face. “You are so beautiful, even with that patch of red hair I dislike. What color was it the other week? Silver?”

“Yes. Something sparkly for New Year’s Eve.” She almost told him she’d dye her hair any color he wanted if he’d stay, but she’d not do that for any man. Even him. If he couldn’t accept her as she was, as much as it would destroy her, they really had no chance for a future. Hadn’t both of her brothers preached the importance of respect and acceptance between a man and a woman?

Quinn’s fingertips moved down her neck and slowly, almost reverently, continued over her collarbone, his gaze intent on where he was touching. “Your skin is so soft.” He leaned in, his nose brushing across her neck and chest, inhaling deeply. “And your perpetual smell of peaches and cream is so embedded in my male psyche. God, I love it.” The sweeping trace of his fingertips on her breasts was so light she quivered and arched into his hand.

“Like that, do you?” He leaned over her and covered the mounds of her breasts with feather-light kisses, moving ever closer to her nipples. His woodsy cologne and male musk smelled like her heart’s home, for this hunky man was indeed her heart and had been since she laid eyes on him at her eighteenth birthday party.

So often in the past, she’d watched his sensual lips while he talked or laughed, and fanaticized about the sensations his mouth would evoke when it drew one of her nipples inside to suck. In mere seconds, she’d find out. Her toes curled in anticipation.

His tongue circled her beaded nipple before he claimed it.

The pull of his mouth spiraled an arrow of need directly to her core and wetness pooled between the folds.
Oh. My. God. More. I need more.

“Quinn!” She squirmed and trembled as he sucked harder. A deep throbbing she’d never experienced threatened to toss her over some precipice.

He stopped and gazed at her. “You really like it when I do that.” His fabulous lips upturned at the corners. “Can you climax when a man does this to you? Hmm?” His mouth sought her other breast and she was swept once more into a miasma of novel sensations.

“Let go of my hands. I need to touch you.” She tugged against the hold he had on her.

He released her wrists, his eyes darkened with what she hoped was passion. Slipping his arm under her shoulders and turning her slightly toward him, their legs tangled even as his hand slid down her back where he slipped his fingers under the elastic of her thong. “I want this off. I plan on biting and kissing every inch of your beautiful body.” He squeezed one of her ass cheeks. “When you go back to your other lovers, you’re going to find them lacking. Because no man will ever love you the way I do.” He bit the tender flesh where her neck joined her shoulder and she trembled. “No one, baby.”

He enveloped her in his arms and kissed her as if he had all the time in the world to break her heart, which was what he was doing—loving her and breaking her heart at the same time.

The man was hell-bent on leaving and this was his goodbye. If his crass remarks to her at the station yesterday were hurtful, they held little power compared to this excruciating sweetly sensual parting.

Her chest constricted, trapping her breath in a body too aching to operate in a normal pattern. It was as if her heartbeat morphed from
lub-dub…lub-dub
to
Quinn’s leaving…Quinn’s
leaving
. Tears burned the back of her throat, and she fought to keep her mind on his kiss.

Passionate, yet painful.

Tender, yet torturous.

Seducing, yet sad.

Finally, he released her lips and kissed a slow journey down her torso. To hide her tears, she laid her arm across her eyes and sighed, hoping he’d take her action as someone lost in the moment, instead of a woman falling apart and dying in his arms.

Focus, dammit. You will never have this again. You will never feel his lips and hands on you if he leaves. And he’s right, every other man will pale in comparison.