All Grown Up

Amourisa Press and Kit Tunstall reserve all
rights to ALL GROWN UP. This work may not be shared or reproduced
in any fashion without permission of the publisher and/or author.
Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely
coincidental. All characters are over the age of 18.

© Kit Tunstall, 2011

Smashwords Edition

Blake feels coerced to take out his best
friend’s sister while she’s in town. He remembers her as a chubby,
awkward teenager with a crush on him. When Erin shows up at his
door, he’s blown away. She’s all grown up now and a lush, curvy
beauty. He’s never gone for Rubenesque women before, but he wants
her desperately. To his consternation, Erin doesn’t seem to like
him at all. He needs to figure out if he’s too bad-boy for the good
girl, or if her apparent dislike hides something else—like a mutual
desire she’s fighting to control, due to her own self-esteem issues
and a refusal to be another one of Blake’s conquests.

Blake took a quick look around his living
room, making sure he’d tidied up well enough not to appear like a
total slob. His house still looked like a bachelor’s pad, but
wouldn’t send anyone screaming from his home. It probably didn’t
matter anyway. It was unlikely Erin would actually come in.

As if thinking her name had summoned her, his
doorbell rang. Bach barked and growled, running to the door like a
steak salesperson waited on the other side. The dumb chocolate lab
did that every time he heard the doorbell. “Knock it off, Bach,”
said Blake with a gruff edge to his tone. The dog immediately fell
silent, looking down at the floor with contrition.

To ease the reprimand, he rubbed Bach’s head
as he passed him. “Sorry, boy.” He didn’t mean to be grumpy, and it
sure wasn’t his dog’s fault he’d let his best friend convince him
to take his little sister out for a meal while she was in the city
for an interview. He hadn’t seen Ethan’s sister in at least eight
years, not since the Christmas he’d spent with the Hollings family
during his senior year of college. What could he possibly have in
common with a twenty-three-year-old girl? She was just starting her
career, and his was established. All he remembered of her was she
had been a chubby, annoying teenage girl, who blushed and ran from
the room any time she’d seen him.

Praying her teenage crush had died long ago,
he opened the door, blocking Bach’s escape attempt with his knee.
“Hi. I’d invite you in, but I doubt you want dog hair all over your
clothes. Give me just a minute to grab my keys.” In a rush, he
closed the door and took a few steps away, taking a moment to catch
his breath.

Wow. His friend’s little sister was all grown
up. She was still chubby—maybe even overweight by some
standards—but she had gotten hot. Her frizzy mud-brown hair was now
a sleek bob with golden highlights. He hadn’t gotten much of a view
of her in his hasty greeting, but he’d seen enough to have the
beginnings of a hard-on. Maybe this dinner “date” wouldn’t be so
unpleasant after all. As he scooped up his keys and regained his
composure, he debated if seducing his best friend’s sister violated
the Bro Code, and if so, by how much?

Erin stood on his doorstep, where he’d left
her, dressed casually in a khaki skirt and red twinset. She gave
him an uncertain smile when he closed the door. “Hi. I thought I’d
squeeze that in.” The gleam in her eyes let him know she was
teasing.

“Sorry about that, but Bach loves company,
and you would have had brown fur on your sweater.” It sounded lame
even to his ears, and he did his best to change the subject. “So,
what do you think of Seattle so far?”

She shrugged. “I like it. It’s very laidback
compared to New York.”

He frowned. “Were you in New York? I thought
your brother said you were in South Dakota for school?”

“San Diego,” she said with a little laugh.
“Practically the same thing.” Erin shrugged. “I had an interview in
the city last week. The job would be fantastic, and the pay is
phenomenal, but I’m not sure I want to live there.”

“Seattle and New York are pretty opposite.”
They reached the end of his walkway. “Do you have a dinner
preference?”

She cocked her head, making the waves in her
bob frame her face in a way that had his mouth going dry. “Seafood?
I love chowder.”

Blake nodded. “I know just the place. Are you
up for a walk? It’s about six blocks, all downhill—until we come
back. The hills can be a killer if you aren’t used to them.”

She shrugged. “Sure. I’d like to see more of
the area, and I think I can handle the hills. My prospective
employer is only a few blocks over.”

Blake looped his arm over her shoulder in a
casual manner to steer her in the right direction, but didn’t drop
it when they had crossed the street. What he felt before she
stepped away told him her body was curvy and soft—whereas he was
getting hard. He cleared his throat and tried to keep the
conversation light. “Ethan didn’t say what the job was?”

“Biomolecular research.”

He blinked. “Really?” Brains and beauty?
Nothing irritated him more than trying to have a conversation with
someone who was a complete twit. She was getting hotter by the
minute.

She nodded. “What about you, Blake?”

“I do forensic accounting.” He gave her a
grin. “It’s more interesting than it sounds.”

“I’m sure.” Erin shrugged. “Who am I to
judge? I spend all day looking at molecular structures on a
computer screen, and I love it. If it makes you happy, that’s what
counts.”

He couldn’t help feeling she had a marked
lack of interest in him. Ethan had told him Erin would be lonely in
a new city and convinced Blake to “volunteer” to take her out one
night during her stay. Why did he get the impression she didn’t
want to be here? It irked him. Without false modesty, he knew he
was damn good-looking, with golden-blond hair, hazel eyes, a toned
body, and a sharp wit. He was never without a shortage of female
attention. Maybe there was someone else?

“So, are you seeing anyone, Erin?”

She shook her head, her lack of expansion
telling him a bit—either she’d had little luck finding men or had
her heartbroken. He didn’t want to break her heart. All he wanted
was to get his hands on her curves. Erin was so different from his
usual type that it was surprising to be drawn to her so quickly. He
was acting like a horny teenager instead of a thirty-year-old
man.

Noticing she didn’t ask, he volunteered,
“Neither am I.”

Her inscrutable expression made him frown.
“Imagine that.”

Blake frowned. “What’s that supposed to
mean?”

Erin’s brown eyes widened. “Nothing.”

Feeling like an overly sensitive ass, it was
a relief to arrive at the little chowder place in the heart of Pike
Place. “Standing room only,” he joked as he held open the door for
her to precede him. There were three tables in the small
restaurant, and they were all packed. “We can grab chowder and go
sit on the pier.” Striving to sound casual, he said, “Or we could
take it back to my place?”

Erin never took her gaze from the order
board. “The pier sounds nice.” They were up next, and she placed
her order, slipping a ten on the counter as he ordered his.

Frowning, Blake tried to slide it back to
her. “My treat.”

Erin shook her head. She sounded
lighthearted, but her eyes were serious when she said, “There’s no
need. It isn’t a date.”

Ouch. That smarted. “Sure, of course.”

The clerk dished up their selections and
passed the white bag to Blake. He resisted the totally childish
urge to ask her if she wanted a separate bag so she could carry her
part. What was with him today, acting like a petulant brat?

They strolled the remaining couple of blocks
to the pier, trading meaningless conversation. Blake selected a
park bench, and she sat beside him, taking the paper cup of
chowder. Erin moaned with pleasure at the first bite, making him
wonder how it would be to have her moaning that way in his bed.

“Good?”

She wiped her mouth before answering.
“Delicious. This is definitely a point in favor of Seattle.”

“Do I know how to impress a girl, or what?”
he asked with a hint of mocking. Erin’s lips moved, but the smile
didn’t reach her eyes. She was so infuriating. Why did he even
care? He could call half a dozen girls as soon as he got home and
have them in his bed within the hour. Maybe his self-imposed period
of celibacy had lasted too long. His relationships had started to
seem shallow, based only on physical attraction, so he’d decided to
take a break from sex and try for a serious relationship. The
results had been lackluster to date.

“What do you do here for fun?” asked
Erin.

“Baseball games, the opera, the symphony,
trying different restaurants, and Bach loves the various dog parks.
If you’re the outdoors type, there is swimming in the summer,
hiking or camping in the national forest, whale-watching, or
island-hopping via ferry, to name a few.”

“It sounds nice.”

“It is.” Blake finished his chowder before
they exchanged another word. The silence was awkward, not
comfortable, and he searched his mind for a way to break it. “What
do you like doing?”

“A little of everything.”

He gritted his teeth. “Clearly not
conversing.”

Erin arched a dark brow. “It depends.”

On the company
. Yeah, she didn’t have
to add that part. He’d had just about enough of this frustrating
evening. She annoyed him and turned him on in equal parts. His cock
throbbed each time she opened her mouth to extend a delicate pink
tongue while taking a bite, but his temper raised another notch
with her rebuffs. Perhaps she was just shy? He remembered the way
she used to flee from him. It could be Erin wasn’t as immune to him
as she was pretending to be.

Feeling cocky, he turned toward her slightly,
catching her elbow in the process. Her bowl of chowder spilled down
her red sweater.

“Dammit.” She dabbed ineffectually at the
soup with a pile of thin napkins.

Blake groaned. “I’m sorry. I’m usually not a
klutz.”

“We all have off days.”

It was the perfect, polite thing to say to a
stranger or distant acquaintance. Teeth on edge again, he said,
“Let’s go back to my place. You can clean up there.”

Erin hesitated, clearly on the verge of
declining, when a breeze blew past them, flapping her sweater and
flinging chunks of chowder onto her cheek, making her gasp. On
instinct, he wiped it away, while his thumb continued to caress her
cheek. Her eyes darkened slightly, and he didn’t miss the catch in
her breathing as their gazes locked. Abruptly, she pulled away from
him and got to her feet, but not before she’d revealed a hint of
attraction.

He was feeling buoyant on the walk back to
his place, his mind insisting on producing images of him undressing
her, of touching her generous body, of sinking into her softness.
She’d be his first plus-size lover, and he was eager for the
experience. What was that term he’d heard? Rubenesque. Yeah, that
sounded nicer, more representative of her voluptuousness and
placing less emphasis on her size, as though that was the sole
thing that defined her.

His hands shook a bit with excitement as he
unlocked the door to his house, going in before her to keep Bach
from attacking her with love. She ruined that plan by immediately
bending down to the dog’s level and talking sweetly to him. Erin
giggled when the dog licked her across the face, making him jealous
of his own pet. Bach was getting a genuine reaction from the object
of his interest, not the polite distance she had displayed to
him.

“The bathroom’s that way.” He nodded down the
hall.

Erin nodded, standing up again to head in the
direction he pointed.

“Traitor,” he said to Bach when his dog tried
to follow her.

****

Erin locked the door while feeling silly
doing it. Blake Cooper was not going to open the door and try to
ravish her. Her body responded to the thought, but she pushed down
the effect. Ethan had probably meant well when setting up this
little date with her former crush, but she had no intention of
playing her part. From the exploits Ethan had shared, Blake was a
bit of a man-whore and had likely not batted an eye at the thought
of taking her out. He probably assumed since she was fat, she’d
automatically fall into his bed and enjoy a scrap of attention from
such a hot guy.

He was an arrogant jerk. Not much had
changed, she decided. Blake had all the factors women went
for—sexy, intelligent, and financially stable—so no wonder he
thought every woman should fall all over him. She refused to join
the groupies, no matter how much her heart raced when he touched
her. It had taken her a long time to get to a state of peace with
her excess curves, and she wasn’t going to let a silly attraction
cost her a measure of self-respect.