Naughty in November (Spring River Valley Book 11) (4 page)

If she’d been battling nerves on the front walk, they’d fled by the time she helped him peel off his coat.

She shed her own and kicked off her heels, ran a stocking-clad foot up his
calf and drew him down by his tie to lie with her on the voluminous white comforter that topped her bed like a layer of frosting on a cake.

“I’m all yours,” she whispered between hungry kisses as she guided his body over hers. It didn’t matter that they were still fully dressed. This was the sexiest thing ever.

Unbidden, Taylor’s hand slipped up her thigh to raise the hem of her dress. She moaned at the contact and bucked her hips. The bed responded with a very slight movement of its own, and Taylor rose up on one elbow and raised a brow.

“It’s a gel mattress. Great for the spine,” she said while working his tie loose. “It’s amazing for sex.”

She had finished with the tie and was concentrating on the third button of his shirt when he managed to croak out a response. “So you’ve…had a lot of sex…on this mattress?”

She pinned him with the hottest, coolest, sexiest, dirtiest stare he’d ever seen. “I
plan
to have a lot of sex on this bed, and if you don’t help me get your clothes off, I
will
start without you.”

Taylor wanted to laugh out loud, but he knew if he did at that moment it would come out as the
high-pitched giggle of a teenage boy about to get laid for the first time. So he held in his glee and gave her the most serious stare he could muster. “Yes, ma’am.”

Within minutes he’d stripped to his briefs. She sat on the edge of the bed, her dress unzipped and falling from her shoulders to reveal a constellation of light freckles on her skin.

Taylor made up his mind to kiss every one of them, and he was about a hundredth of the way through his task when she handed him a condom over her shoulder.

“I’ve got plenty of these,” she said. “So let’s see if we can use them all up before sunrise.”

He took the foil packet in his palm, wrapped his arm around her waist, and drew her warm body against him. “The way I feel right now, we may run out before midnight.”

So much for being a good girl.

Dani sat in the middle of her rumpled bed, watching the play of muscles across Taylor’s naked back as he bent to retrieve his shoes and belt from her bedroom floor.

God, he was delicious. She knew because she’d recently been licking him.
Mmm
. She had to curb those memories right now or the poor guy would never make it out the door.

He shrugged into his
T-shirt, and she pulled his button-down a little closer around her body. When he turned to look for the outer shirt, she bit her lower lip and shook a finger at him. “Sorry. You’re not getting this back.”

A slow smile spread across his face, and he crawled over the lower half of the bed to meet her
face-to-face. “I could take it off you.”

“You are more than welcome to try
, mister. In fact, I
insist
.” She tilted her head down so she could watch him through her lashes, desperate for him to call her thinly-veiled bluff. She had no idea how she still possessed the energy and the desire for another round of lovemaking, but she’d have gladly gone again and again and again with him.

He surged forward and kissed the tip of her nose. “We both know how that will turn out.”

Shivering in anticipation, she purred. “Oh yes, we do.”
Rusty, my ass.
He’d turned her inside out and upside down, and she’d have given anything right now to find out how many other ways he could turn her, the universe be damned.

“But it’s six
a.m. and I’ve got to get ready and get to the clinic. I’ve got to spay three cats today, and I have a German shepherd with gout who needs—”

Dani interrupted his response with a kiss, insistent but not aggressive, promising but not needy. When she pulled back, his eyes were half closed. “Fine. Leave me all alone in bed. But I’m keeping the shirt.”

“It’s got to be thirty degrees outside.”

“And you have a coat.” She couldn’t very well keep him from a gouty German shepherd
and three horny cats, but she could at least pout about his having to leave.

He sighed indulgently and executed an acrobatic
roll that landed him on the floor at the foot of the bed. “I guess I’ll manage.”

“If you want your shirt back, you know where to find it.” Reclining seductively, she glowered at him.

“Oh, I’ll be back, little lady, and we’ll see where that shirt ends up.”

“Hopefully on the floor.”

Scooping up his coat, he groaned and made a show of reluctantly dragging himself out of the room.

Dani held her breath, listening for his footsteps on the stairs and finally the sound of her front door closing. When she was certain he was gone, she sighed
. But memories of their night had her grinning knowingly soon enough, and she allowed herself a triumphant fist pump. That man was everything she’d fantasized about and more, and she had zero regrets about ignoring her doubts and plowing over her own resolve to let him set the pace.

She would have gone stark raving mad if she’d
decided to walk away or even just had to go on another date with him that didn’t end with them tangled in the sheets. Now that the awkward part was out of the way, they would be free to…what? Hold hands and neck at the movies? Sip lattes over the Sunday paper?

What had she done?

She’d wanted to cut past all the game playing and get right to the fun part, but was that really the best move?

He certainly hadn’t objected, but unlike the other men Dani had dated, she knew Taylor Croft wasn’t the type of guy who had a fling.
She didn’t need Bailey Cole to tell her he was more than that. He was solid, real, dependable, and from what she’d heard from more than one source, oddly settled. That scared her. A guy who was done finding himself would definitely want a lot more from a relationship than just the fun parts.

Maybe she should have explained her intentions a little more clearly before she’d ordered him to strip. Then again, he was all grown up and well aware that sex didn’t automatically lead to forever.

That thought caused a pang in her heart. Here she sat, wrapped in his shirt, wishing he’d come back through her bedroom door and make good on his sexy promise to divest her of it, yet she wasn’t thinking about forever. Why the hell not? If anyone was a keeper, it was Taylor.

With a sigh, she dropped her head into her hands.

You’re a bad girl, Dani. A very bad girl.

* * * *

Well, that happened.

Taylor sat back in his office chair, his half-finished third cup of coffee cradled in his hands, the memory of waking up with Dani in his arms drifting through his brain.

He’d been at the clinic for two hours and had managed to do nothing more than consume coffee and entertain thoughts of the fiery redhead who’d invited him into her bed last night.

It amazed him how right the whole thing felt, how perfect. Was that just because, as Tanner never tired of reminding him, he’d lived like a cloistered monk for the last two years? Or was it because he’d just been holding out for the one woman who could make Joyce’s leaving him finally seem like it was for the best?

A knock on the open door of his office banished the enticing vision of tangled hair and pouty lips and his half-unbuttoned shirt revealing cinnamon freckles on pale skin.

Samantha leaned on the door jamb, arms folded, mouth quirked in a sardonic grin. “Must have been some ball game last night.”

“Huh?” He managed to set his coffee cup on his desk without spilling it. He’d already exceeded his caffeine limit, and now he’d have to postpone the cat spaying until this afternoon.

“The game you said you were going to last night. It must have been a whopper. I’ve been calling you on the intercom for ten minutes.”

He hadn’t heard a thing. “Sorry. I’m…I’ve been reading a journal article. Very engrossing.”

“About what?”

“What?”

“The article. What’s it about?” H
er expression told him she wasn’t really going to buy his flimsy excuses, but he had to try for appearances’ sake.

“Uh…hoof and mouth disease.”

Samantha raised a brow. “We don’t get many hoofed patients. Are you thinking of expanding the practice to include livestock?”

He squinted at her as he rose. “Yeah…uh…maybe. Can we move my surgeries around? Reschedule them until after lunch?”

“Sure, but if you have a minute, your favorite redhead is here,
without
an appointment.”

“My…?” Dani sprung to mind. What was she doing here so early? He grinned. “Send her in.”

Sam regarded him curiously. “She’s in exam room two.”

“Why?”

“Well, it looks like an infected nail bed on her back right foot.”

“Wha
— oh. Um…who are we talking about?” Very obviously not his
new
favorite redhead. 

“Sheba Grainger, the Irish
setter. You always call her your favorite redhead. Are you all right?”

“I’m perfectly fine. I just OD’d on coffee this morning, so I’m a little jittery.”

“By the looks of you, I’m not sure you had
enough
coffee. Are you sick?”

“Just the opposite.” Taylor rounded his desk and shooed Sam out of the doorway. “Tell Mrs. Grainger I’ll be right in.”

He waited until Sam had disappeared down the corridor and into exam room two. There was only one way he was going to be able to concentrate on his work today, and that was if he knew he’d be seeing Dani tonight. He debated for a second whether to text or call, and decided calling was best. It might not be the latest trend, but he was still an old-fashioned guy, plus he wanted to hear her voice.

She picked up on the first ring.

“Hey, it’s me.” Hopefully she would recognize his voice.

“Hi, me. Miss your shirt?”

“I do. Desperately. How about I come over around six tonight and get it?”

Her momentary hesitation had his mind whirling. Her response brought his errant thoughts to a dead stop. “Ah…sorry. I have plans tonight. I forgot about them. How about we
get together after rehearsal tomorrow night?”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll see you there.”

“Great. I’ll bring your shirt.”

Dani hung up, leaving Taylor staring at the phone.  Clarity hit his muddled brain like a bucket of cold water. Last night had been exactly what Dani had first proposed—just for fun—and he was a complete fool to have let himself indulge in the fantasy that it was the start of something deep or permanent.

Idiot. He shouldn’t have wanted it to be anything more than what it was. His mistake with Joyce twelve years ago had been falling too hard too fast and believing it was going to last forever. Of course, he’d been a boy then. It was long past time for him to grow up and have a modern relationship. Any man would kill for a chance with a woman like Dani, who had made it clear she wasn’t after a walk down the aisle, a house and kids, and all the burdens that came along with them, and he’d lose her damn fast if he let on that he was still looking forward to those things.

He slipped his phone into his pocket and shook himself free of the moony-eyed teenager who’d taken up residence in his frontal lobe.

If he was going to be serious about this fling with Dani, the first thing he had to remember was it was anything but serious.

On her way into Love Notes for rehearsal on Thursday night, Dani paused in the chilly evening air to contemplate what she was doing. She hated herself for turning Taylor down last night. Instead of seeing him, she’d spent the evening Skyping with her family in Florida, being careful not to mention the prospect of a new man in her life. Now she wanted nothing more than to see him again, but she had to think long and hard about how to handle this without giving him the wrong idea. The last thing she wanted was a repeat of what she’d gone through with Kyle. She’d loved him, or thought she did, but their relationship had taken off at warp speed, and after only a few months, he’d been down on one knee proposing and she’d been running hell bent in the opposite direction, terrified of not living up to his expectations of a perfect mate who cooked, cleaned, kept house and created children.

Her conversation with
Bailey the other night kept playing in her head, and the deafening echo had led her to blow him off last night. Nevertheless, tonight she was wearing his shirt again and hoping he would end up back in her bed. There had to be a way to reconcile the two parts of her currently at war—the part that wanted to pursue whatever this was with Taylor and take a chance it could lead to a place where she wasn’t terrified of going, and the part of her that saw the writing on the wall and just wanted to ignore it and have a good time until things stopped working out.