In the Zone (Portland Storm 5) (19 page)

The blue dress—a soft-blue plaid, fitted on top in a way that accentuated her breasts—had looked so good on her that I’d convinced her to wear it out of the store when we left. It made me want to pull her close so those amazing breasts would pillow against me. It had a flared skirt that ended just below the knee, a series of buttons that went from chest to hem, and a wide-banded white belt. She stood straighter and held herself taller in it. Even with her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail and only the barest hint of makeup dusted over her face, she looked like a completely different woman when she wore that dress. Probably because she felt like a different woman. Or maybe that was wishful thinking on my part, hoping that my plan was starting to take effect at least somewhat.

I had offered to pay when we went up to the checkout, since it had all been my idea, or at least to split the expense, but she flat-out refused to take a red cent of my money. Maybe it was a bit too presumptuous of me to think she would have allowed it. We’d only really been on one date before now after all.

Once she’d finished paying, I’d asked the saleswoman to remove the tags, and Brie had returned to the fitting room one final time to change. Now, when she came out, her eyes were glittering and bright, the blue of the dress making the blue of her eyes as clear as the sky on a sunny spring day. I loved that she was letting a little leg show, enough to spark the imagination. Her calves were shapely, made even more so by the heels she always wore and the new confidence with which she walked when she joined me at the exit.

I moved all the bags I was carrying into a single hand so the other would be free.

“What?” she said, completely unable to mask the smile in her voice. I must not have been masking my thoughts very well if that was the first thing out of her mouth.

I shook my head. “Nothing. I was thinking I’d never seen a pair of ankles that turned me on quite like yours do.”

She batted at me with the bag she held.

I took her other hand in mine, leading her out toward my car. “Dinner?”

“Absolutely. I’m starving.”

It wasn’t long before we were downtown and parked in the garage across the street from Kells. There was a bit of a crowd around the pub tonight because of the Trail Blazers game, but Tony greeted us at the door.

“Your usual booth, Burnzie?” he asked, pulling a couple of menus out from his podium and leading us that way without needing to wait for my answer.

Brie laughed. “You have a ‘usual booth’?”

I winked and urged her to come along with me. “Do you like Guinness? Please tell me you do, because I don’t know what I’ll do if—”

“I don’t mind one every now and then,” she interrupted.

I waited until she sat on one of the benches, and then I slid in beside her instead of taking up the other seat. The booths weren’t overly large, and I moved farther in than was strictly necessary, brushing thigh against thigh, arm against arm.

“I’ll bring two your way and send someone over for the rest of your orders, then,” Tony said. He set the menus on the table in front of us and left to greet some more customers who’d just arrived.

“So I take it you really like Irish food,” she said after he’d been gone a moment.

“My grandmother’s Irish. Mom grew up there. She got a job as an au pair one summer when she was in college, and the family she worked for was traveling through Canada. That was when she met my dad, and the rest is history.”

“Do you visit your grandmother in Ireland often?”

“Not as often as I’d like. My only opportunity is during my summers off, but I have to keep up my workouts and stay in shape during the off-season. It’s been a couple of years. I’m planning to go this coming summer, though. Mom and Dad try to get out there at least once a year, but that doesn’t always happen because of their jobs and other things getting in the way. Shane probably visits more than the rest of us.”

I hadn’t planned to talk about my family. Mentioning Shane’s name was what reminded me that it was better to keep my fucking mouth shut. Damn it. Brie was smiling at me, her eyes all lit up, and I could see her curiosity burning in them. She wanted to know more, but I couldn’t give her that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

It was hard to talk about my family when they didn’t particularly want to
be
my family any longer.

“So this performance,” I said, changing the subject before she could delve into areas better left in the darker corners of my mind. “Tell me about it. When’s it going to be?”

The corner of her mouth twitched. I might not know her very well yet, but I knew that meant she was annoyed about something. Maybe about me changing the subject. Now that I thought about it, that was when I most often saw this expression on her face—when I stopped us from talking about my life, my family.

I’d have to do a better job of keeping us away from those subjects in the first place.

“New Year’s Day,” she said, masking her aggravation with a shy smile. “It’s a big event. The piece with Devin…it’s only one small part of it.”

“Any chance you’d want me to come?” I had that Light the Lamp Foundation commitment on New Year’s Eve, but the next day was a scheduled day off for the team. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do than spend it with her, watching her dance.

Her eyes flickered up to meet mine. “You want to?”

More than I could ever explain to her. I wanted to be with her more than I wanted just about anything. The more time I spent with her, the more that desire grew. I nodded.

“Oh. Well, I suppose that would be all right.” But just that fast, she turned away from me. Was it really all right, or was she embarrassed at the thought of me being there? She shouldn’t be embarrassed at all. She was insanely talented. She was born to be on the stage, as far as I could tell.

She held the menu in front of her, staring down at it. I took the opportunity to study her hands. They were delicate. Soft. Her skin was like porcelain, all over her body, almost flawless other than a stray freckle or beauty mark here and there. I had found one on the back of her neck, usually hidden by her hair. She had another on the inside of her thigh that I doubted had been seen by very many eyes. Now that I took a moment to study her hands, I realized she had a tiny one on the back of her left hand, directly above the wrist on the side closest to her thumb. I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed the beauty mark.

She blushed and tugged her hand away from me. Then she cleared her throat. “So the corned beef and cabbage is really good here?”

“And the shepherd’s pie. I’ve thought about licking the bowl after eating the shepherd’s pie a few times, but it’s too hot. It comes out piping from the oven, and I love it so much that I eat it faster than I should. The bowl is still scorching when I finish it. I’d burn my tongue. Might never be able to taste again, and
that
would be a damned shame.”

For that matter, I might burn my tongue if I licked Brie right now. With her wearing that dress, I could see more of the slope of her shoulders and her neck than she usually let show. Her blush started at her chest—or maybe even lower—and it crept all the way up her neck, her face, and ended somewhere past her hairline, making me wonder if she had any idea what I was thinking about.

Tony dropped off our beers right as our waiter came to take our orders—Brie asked for the shepherd’s pie—and then they both hurried off, taking our menus as they went.

Without the menu to hold, she started fidgeting with her hands as they rested on the table. I put one of mine over the top of them, stilling her movements.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Why do you think something’s wrong?” She removed her hands from mine and tucked them on her lap beneath the table.

I sighed. “You seem… I don’t know, you seem nervous.”

“I am.” She took a swallow of her Guinness, savoring it for a moment before she continued. “You make me nervous.”

“Do I, now?” I’d have thought she would be well beyond that stage after all the time we’d spent in bed together, but it was no matter. I inched a little closer to her, putting my hand at the base of her neck, one finger lightly brushing the raised bump of her beauty mark. After a moment, she looked up at me. As soon as she did, I bent my head down and kissed her.

The chocolate-and-coffee aftertaste of her sip of Guinness wet my tongue, and with only the tiniest amount of coaxing, she opened for me, a soft hum running through her. I felt the vibrations of it beneath my fingertips.

All too soon, I remembered we were in public and broke away from her. My gaze lingered on her lips. She pulled the lower one inside, biting down on it. I went hard almost instantly, imagining her teeth on me. She’d bit me once, the last time we had sex, in that space between my neck and my shoulder. Hard enough to leave red marks. I wanted her to mark me all over.

“Do you have any idea what you do to me?” I ground out.

Brie laughed, a husky sound that would have brought me to my knees if I’d been standing. “At least a little idea.”

I
KEPT PEEKING
over Brie’s shoulder while she was looking around the Hips & Curves website on my laptop, trying to get a feel for the things that drew her eye. I already knew what drew
my
eye, but this was about her. We’d come back to my place after dinner—she had eventually given in and shared a piece of the chocolate cake with me, although she’d hardly taken more than two or three bites—and now she was ordering a few bras and panties and the like since she’d promised Tanya she would. She was on the sofa, both legs tucked up beside her, leaning back against the armrest. Since I’d just come in from walking the dogs, I was standing behind the couch and hoping to figure out what I might be able to buy for her that she’d actually wear—at least long enough for me to see her in it, watch her confidence grow, and then take it off her.

To my slight disappointment, she seemed to be veering toward the sensible and away from the sexy. It would take time, I knew, and more than a little encouragement for her to step outside her comfort zone. Simply getting her to buy clothes that were colorful and shapely instead of drab and boxy had taken no small amount of cajoling, even though it was clear from the way her face lit up that she liked what she saw in the mirror.

As she scrolled down a page of bras, a lacy black one caught my eye. I pointed at it on the screen. “What about something like that?” I asked.

“Not a chance,” she scoffed. “That wouldn’t do a thing to hold me up. What would I want with a few scraps of lace?”

“I don’t know,” I murmured, thinking about all the reasons
I
might want to see her in a few scraps of lace and leaning my head down closer to hers so that my breath tickled her ear. “Maybe so you could feel sexy when I undress you.” I had one hand resting on her shoulder. I drew it up higher until my fingers rested over the pulse that was jumping in her throat. “So you could make me crazy with wanting to know what you had on underneath your clothes. So you could watch the need in my eyes as I found out for myself.”

“There’s not much sexy about saggy, baggy boobs drooping halfway to my waist draped in something that doesn’t have enough support to do them any good.”

“Ah,” I said softly. I slipped my hand down the column of her neck, my fingers teasing the skin of her chest. I dipped my hand beneath the fabric of her dress, only stopping when my fingertips rested at the upper curve of her breasts, just where her bra stopped. “You mean these boobs? Because I can promise you there’s not a damn thing that you could put them in to keep me from getting hard in an instant. Truss them up, wrap them tight, let them jiggle and wobble and bounce—it’s all going to turn me on.”

“You’re incorrigible.”

“Maybe so, but I know an amazing pair of breasts when I see them, and that’s what these are.” With that same hand, I undid the top button of her dress, watching from above as the fabric spread a bit. Her breathing turned shallow when I undid the next button, and one more, then dipped my fingers under the top of her bra and slid my hand in to cup one breast in my palm.

Her nipple pebbled as soon as I made contact, and she sucked in a breath, her head falling back against my shoulder. I kissed her, first her mouth, then the long column of her throat. Her pulse thundered beneath my lips and tongue.

“If you don’t stop touching me, I’m not going to end up ordering anything.”

I grinned down at her. “I don’t know. I kind of like the idea of you going around half naked.” I waited a beat, savoring her pursed lips and narrowed eyes. “Or all naked.” I waggled my brows at her, only withdrawing my hand right before she aimed a throw pillow at my head.

She tugged on the collar of her dress, as though that would do anything to keep me from thinking about everything she had hidden underneath it. “Do you constantly think about sex?”

“Not constantly, no.” I headed into the kitchen for a bottle of wine and some glasses. “Well, maybe I do now. Since you.”

I could hear her fingers tapping on the keys, so she must be putting an order in. Probably without the lacy bra. Too bad. I’d give my left nut to see her in something like that. But then again, there was nothing preventing me from ordering a few things for her and having them shipped here so I could surprise her. Nothing
too
crazy, of course. Just a few things that weren’t quite as sensible as the rest, to see what might strike her fancy.

When I sat down next to her and passed a wineglass into her hand, she closed down the browser and shut the lid of the laptop. I slid it off her lap and set it on the coffee table, next to my own glass and the bottle, and took the sticky note from her hand, placing it on top of the computer where I’d be able to find those numbers later.

She took a sip, her gaze focused squarely on me, although I couldn’t even attempt to interpret what was behind it. “Since me?” she finally said. I cocked a brow, and she set her glass next to mine. “Since a week ago, or since…”

“Since that night over the summer. I’ve hardly been able to get you off my mind.” I took her hand and laid her palm out flat on my thigh, tracing the creases and lines until she shivered. “I tried dating a couple of girls when I got back here, hoping they’d help me forget you since I doubted I’d ever see you again. It didn’t work.”