An Offer He Can't Refuse (29 page)

She cleared her throat. "I came to get my bag and then I'll get out of your way."

"I already tucked it into your briefcase," he said, gesturing over her shoulder. "You have a hot date tonight?"

With her guilty conscience and her bitter regrets. "Well, I, um—"

"Is that why you did a world-record dash out of my bed yesterday? You're involved with someone?"

Women the globe over knew to utter this little white lie when necessary. It's how you got out of lunching with the nice but nerdy engineer behind you in the DMV line or from having coffee with the ex-brother-in-law of your manicurist's best friend. "Are you?" Téa asked him instead.

Johnny raised a brow, and in the lantern light she saw that ghost of a grin curve the edges of his mouth again. "If I was married, don't you suppose you'd be dealing, at least some of the time, with my wife?"

She looked him straight in the eye and told the absolute truth. "My grandfather runs a multi-million-dollar food company, but is also reputed to be the leading California crime boss. When I was three, my father brought home another daughter for my mother to raise. Another daughter, just a few months younger than me, whom he'd fathered with his longtime mistress. Not many years after that, he disappeared one day and never came back. So the truth is, Johnny, when it comes to men I don't suppose anything."

And she'd learned not to give them her heart.

Her mouth dried out by the long-winded answer, she lifted her glass and took a bracing swallow. Then choked. Coughed. Choked some more.

Johnny clapped her on the back as she fought the tears in her eyes. "What
is
this?" she managed to get out, though it was more wheeze than question. It had smelled like fruit juice.

"A zombie mai tai. I found the recipe in the bar along with some sixteen-year-old rum." He picked up the pitcher and topped off her glass.

Whatever it was in the drink that had made her eyes water was blazing a molten path to her stomach. Johnny clinked their rims again, and when he took a swallow, she took a cautious one too, just to make sure it was as lethal as she remembered.

The second sip, however, went down sweet and smooth.

She stared into the glass, wondering if he'd somehow managed to detoxify the concoction, and then took another test swallow.

"So, to answer your question more directly," Johnny said, refilling her glass again. "I'm not married."

Téa licked an errant drip off her bottom lip. "Divorced?" Not that she cared or anything, him being a stranger and all.

Johnny smiled at her. "
Never
married."

"Well. Fine. That's… uh, fine." How had this conversation gotten started anyhow? She sipped at her mai tai and enjoyed another warm rush. "But still, I should be going."

"Not so soon," he said, reaching a long arm over the bar. The sound of a guitar and a soft crooning voice washed into the room. A man sang in Portuguese and then the song was taken up by a woman in English. "The Girl from Ipanema."

Téa peered over the bar, saw the sleek boombox that was belting out the mood music, then looked back at Johnny. She might not quite know why this was, but she couldn't pretend not to know
what
this was. "I hate to break it to you, but the music is just about as subtle as Tiki Man's extralarge appendage."

He all-out grinned, then took her glass from her hand and placed both cocktails on top of the bar. "I'm getting desperate. You keep talking about leaving and before you go I want a dance. One dance."

The rum drink was making her rummy, or runny maybe, because looking at him she couldn't muster the steel it would take to walk away. Not when he was gazing down at her with that white smile, not when she could see a slice of his golden skin and hard chest through his half-open shirt.

The back of her neck was hot and she swore she could feel her hair starting to wave in the new, strange humidity of this desert night.

No, she told herself.
No
. But her mouth didn't get the message. "You don't really dance, do you?"

He gathered her close, but not too close. One hand was at the curve of her waist, the other held her fingers against his chest. His naked chest. "My mother thought every young man should have the opportunity to learn the steps and after that we were on our own. In seventh grade, I was forced to take etiquette and dancing from nin8ty-year-old Mr. Benjamin." Johnny's hips started to sway, and his steps led her feet into a gentle samba rhythm.

To make things even more unfair, a saxophone was playing.

His breath smelled like pineapple juice as he pressed his smooth-shaven cheek against hers. She closed her eyes because that mai tai melt was affecting her resistance, her muscles, her sense of self-preservation.

Remember Téa, she thought, he's a stranger. You really don't know this man.

"And speaking of my family—" he murmured.

Had they been? She had to snuggle closer to hear him. "Yes?"

"I visited my brother yesterday. He does business in the area."

"Hmm." Johnny could really dance. With just the slightest pressure of his knee between hers, he was shifting their positions, moving them farther from the bar and closer to the love seat.

"He was recently married. He mentioned that his wife knows you and your sisters."

"Really?" She blinked up at him, and the reflection of the lantern light in his eyes dazzled her. She stumbled a little, and he squeezed her waist to help steady her.

"His wife is Felicity Charm."

"
Really
?" Téa remembered Felicity well from her school years at Our Lady of Poverty. The other woman was now a star on GetTV. "I always liked her."

One of Johnny's dimples deepened. "Everybody does."

And she'd married Johnny's brother. Wow. Maybe he wasn't such a stranger after all. The idea made her smile. "It's a small world, isn't it?"

"More than you know, Contessa." His head lowered.

He was going to kiss her. Téa swayed back, one last instinct not yet under his spell.

'Trust me," he whispered. 'Trust me."

"I'm In the Mood for Love"

Julie London

Julie is Her Name
(1955)

Trust me, he'd said.

The two words struck Téa like a one-two punch. It was her most well-defended yet most tender vulnerability, that longing to trust a man. And here was Johnny Magee, the embodiment of all her teenage fantasies, whispering it to her like a hot promise.

She shivered, and he drew her closer. As he shifted their bodies to the rhythm of the music, his thigh brushed the pad of her sex. Heat spread across her pelvis and between her legs. She had to clutch at his shoulder to keep from stumbling again.

He rolled his chin across the top of her head and put his mouth by her other ear. "One dance," he said again, an apparent expert in stereophonic seduction. 'Trust me."

Despite the goose bumps breaking out all over her body, Téa managed to hold onto her sanity and then look up and catch his gaze. "Johnny. Trust a beautiful man on a warm night when he's plied you with alcohol and has his hands all over your body? They make afterschool specials and Lifetime Movies of the Week about moments like this. They'd call it something like 'Her Secret Seduction.'"

He froze, and she tripped over his suddenly still feet. "I don't know how you do this," he said, his voice half-exasperated, half-amused. "Every time I think I have a handle on things between us, you derail me."

"I do?"

"You do. Knock me right off my feet and onto my egotistical ass." He sighed and pushed her a little away. "You are the most infuriating woman."

"Now, see, I like the sound of that." It sounded as if she had the upper hand. Well, if not the
upper
hand, at least
some
hand on this situation.

Sighing again, he pulled her close once more and resumed dancing, his cheek resting on top of her head. "Afterschool special," he grumbled. "I must be losing my touch."

Relaxing into his embrace. Téa smiled against his shirt. She rubbed her face along the linen and then found herself flesh-to-flesh with his bare chest. Another wave of hot prickles rushed over her skin and she felt his heartbeat kick into a higher gear. His hand tightened on her waist.

'Téa—"

She didn't want to lose contact with his naked skin. "Hmm?"

His movements slowed and his thigh found its way between hers. He lingered there, his hard muscle a presence against her sex, his erection tucked against her belly.

And Téa didn't want to lose that contact either.

"Answer a question for me," he said, moving his head so they were cheek-to-cheek. The ends of his hair tickled her ear. "Is it still seduction if she sees right through it?"

Seduction, she thought, closing her eyes as another hot shiver trembled through her. He wanted her, Johnny Magee wanted
her
, and it was still hard to grasp the idea in her mind. It was a fantasy as old as the one about trust—a fantasy shared with a hundred pints of Ben & Jerry's and a thousand batches of undercooked brownies. The beautiful blond boy across the room, the dance floor, the playing field, shedding the cheerleader hanging onto his arm to take up with Téa Caruso.

She'd shed fifty pounds and still never believed the fantasy could come true.

"Téa. Contessa." He kissed the corner of her eye, then the corner of her mouth. "What's going on in that busy head of yours?"

That she could have
this
fantasy. That she could
choose
it, unlike the interlude the afternoon before that had happened upon them both. If she knew that's what it was, a fantasy—and not a threat to her heart or her secrets—if she kept it clear in her mind that the only thing she was trusting here was how her body responded to his, then maybe she could know what it was like to bed the captain of the varsity team after all.

If there was a wicked, groupie-sex kind of feel to the idea, she was going to ignore it. This was Johnny, who she now knew wasn't a stranger and wasn't some anonymous sports star or celebrity. This was Johnny, whose desperate kisses and hot hands had turned her wild the day before.

It wouldn't change who she was or what she'd done, but she could feel that again. Though this time while keeping her decorum about her.