Seducing Steve (2 page)

The rustle of paper was chased by the rhythmic clicking of a pen. She knew she’d thrown him off balance. His hesitance wasn’t doing much for
her
equilibrium, either. She didn’t try to fool herself into thinking he’d been sitting around waiting for her call.

“If you don’t have other plans,” she reiterated, clenching her jaw in preparation for rejection.

“Will
Sharon
be around?”

Her scowl relaxed into a smile. “I can’t guarantee that, but I’ll provide beer and the movie, if you’ll pick up a pizza.”

“Okay. Try to pin
Sharon
down and hold her until I get there.”

She laughed.

“Do you have a video camera? Never mind, my imagination is better. I’ll be over at six, but I’ll be picturing the two of you all day. If she starts to wiggle, take notes for me.”

“Will do. No onions, peppers, or black olives,” she warned.

“I’m getting the supreme. You can pick off whatever you don’t want.” He covered the phone and told someone on the other end he’d be right with them. “Gotta go. No chick flicks unless it’s something
Sharon
finds particularly arousing.”

“Gotcha,” Sara answered and ended the call.

She settled back in her chair and placed the phone next to her keyboard, staring at the still blank document that had been her nemesis for the past week. The hummingbirds were back, but she didn’t mind. Sara placed the heels of her hands on the gel-filled wrist rest. Her fingers pecked at the keys—slowly at first, gaining momentum as the words flowed onto the page.

Fueled by a mixture of fear and adrenaline, she wrote for over two hours before she looked up. She reached for a small pad of paper and began making a list of things she needed to accomplish before Steve appeared at her door that night. Her jaw set with determination, she stood and left her tiny office, the list clutched in her hand. She was done with denial. She was sick of waiting. She was tired of being too scared to take a chance.

She snatched her purse from the hall table and marched toward the door. Tonight was the night Sara Wright planned to seduce her best friend, Steve.

****

Hours later, Sara was shaved, tweezed, buffed, fluffed, moisturized, perfumed, and as twitchy as butter in a hot skillet. She lit the candles she’d scattered around the living room and started a fire in the tiny fireplace. She stood back to survey the room and shook her head.

“Crap. Not obvious or anything, are you, Sara?”

A knock on the door made her jump back. She glared at the mantelpiece and her cheeks burned. Feeling like an idiot, she quickly blew out two of the candles and marched to the foyer. When she opened the door Steve smiled, and suddenly she didn’t feel so stupid anymore.

“Hey.”

“Here,” he replied, handing over a large cardboard pizza box. “Can I come in now?”

Sara stepped back, holding the box aside as he stooped to pull her to him for his customary hug. She hugged him back with one arm.

“You’re getting better at that, for a Yankee,” he complimented.

“I’ve had years of practice.”

After she closed the door behind him, Steve smirked and snatched the pizza box from her hand once more. “I’m starving,” he informed her, making a beeline for her couch.

“When aren’t you?”

“I like to sleep, too.”

“And you wake up hungry, I bet.”

“Usually,” he admitted, clearing a spot on the coffee table. His brow furrowed as he peered into the dimly lit living room. “Looks nice in here. You rearrange?”

Sara smirked at his stereotypically male cluelessness. “Just a little,” she fibbed, following him.

Steve reached for the lamp beside the couch and switched it on. “I thought you said you were providing the beer.”

She stared at him, amazed at how efficiently he had managed to obliterate the scene she’d set for seduction. Sara spun on her heel and stalked to the kitchen.

“What are we watching?” he called after her.

“I figured we’d just watch something I have. You can choose after we eat.” Sara yanked on the refrigerator door, pressing the heel of her hand to her forehead in an effort to regroup.

She took two deep breaths of refrigerated air, blinking back the burn of tears behind her eyes as she stared at the bottles of beer she kept on hand for him. She kicked herself for thinking she could take the subtle route. After years of strictly platonic bantering, bickering, flirting, and teasing, Steve wasn’t going to pick up on any of the usual cues a woman would give a man.

Sara grabbed two bottles of beer, throttling their slender glass necks and trying to work up the courage to do what she would need to do to make it happen. Subtle seduction wouldn’t work. She wasn’t quite confident enough to employ blatant sexuality, so she’d have to think of something different.

As the refrigerator door swung shut, Sara realized that if she wanted to get what she needed from him, she’d have to be more direct. She also knew in being more direct she would have to resort to appealing to the one thing that would never let her down: his friendship.

Chapter Two

“So, I asked you here for a reason.”

Steve cocked his head as he took the bottle of beer Sara offered. She tucked one leg under her bottom and sank onto the couch next to him, sitting a little closer to him than normal. He swallowed hard and did his best to ignore the fission of electricity that danced up his arm when her sleeve brushed his. All in all, he was pretty proud of himself for not flinching or jerking away. He’d honed his defenses a long time ago.

“Not because you wanted me to buy your dinner and let you torment me with whatever chick flick was mailed directly to your door?” He set his beer aside and raised the lid on the pizza box.

“Those would be the surface reasons.” Sara used the hem of her sweater to twist the cap from her bottle. “There’s a deeper reason.”

Steve liberated a loaded slice of pizza from its cardboard confines. “Oh yeah?”

“I want to talk to you about my next book.”

“What about it?” Half-listening, he lifted the slice and prepared to take a bite.

“I need your help.”

He cast a puzzled glance in her direction. “My help? I’m not a writer. Why would you need my help?”

Sara lounged against the cushion. He resisted the urge to fidget under her steady gaze. A prickling sensation crept up the back of his neck. To cover his discomfiture, he leaned forward and took a healthy bite of his pizza.

“I need help with the sex.”

He choked and sputtered. A chunk of pepperoni lodged in his throat.

Sara sat up and gave his back a solicitous pat. “I’m sorry, bad timing.”

Her hand slid up to his shoulder. His fingers went lax and the slice slipped from his grip, landing in the box with a splat. Facile fingers curled into the muscle, kneading the knot of tension at the base of his neck. Her touch had the same effect it always did—his brain stutter-stepped, his breathing slowed, and his cock stirred. Nothing new there.

Steve forced the barely chewed bite down his throat and washed it down with a healthy pull from his bottle of beer. “Sex?” He gasped, lowering the bottle. His dick perked even more. He stretched one leg, hoping to make an unobtrusive adjustment to the denim biting into his crotch.

“You remember sex, don’t you?”

“Vaguely,” he managed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as his mind raced. Her fingers slipped into his hair and his johnson all but stood up and cried “Hallelujah!’ Desperate, he grabbed the pizza box and hauled it into his lap, hoping mounds of cheesy sausage would camouflage the pepperoni threatening to burst from his jeans. “We don’t talk about sex.”

Sara scooted closer still, angling her body toward his and he stopped breathing altogether. “I need to talk to someone about it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s been a long time since I’ve
had
sex.”

He glanced at her. Her blue eyes shone with earnest intensity. Steve was glad for the cardboard buffer between them. “Why me? Isn’t there a, uh, girlfriend, or maybe your mom...”

“I need a man’s perspective on things.”

Steve gaped at her as she gently pried the box from his grasp and set it aside. His cheeks flushed, and he feared they glowed as red as his hair. “What kind of things?”

“What you like, what you don’t like. When you expect it, how do you go about getting it—”

He shook his head so hard his brain sloshed and held up one hand to stop her. “I can’t talk about sex with you.”

“Yes, you can.”

He continued shaking his head, wavering between fight and flight and wishing ‘fuck’ was on his list of options.

“Steve, how long have we been friends?”

His brow puckered. “I don’t know... Eight, nine years?”

“And how many times have we come close to kissing?”

His heart stopped beating. A well-worn montage of near-kisses flashed in his mind’s eye. “We don’t kiss.”

“We don’t kiss because we both know once we start, we won’t want to stop,” Sara asserted.

Steve tossed his uneaten slice of pizza into the open box. “Why are you doing this?”

Sara reared back. “I just... I think it’s time.”

“Time? Time?” His voice rose and his mind reeled.

This isn’t really happening. Not now, not after all this time. This is just one of Sara’s weird conversations. She doesn’t really want you. She just wants to talk, so talk. What the hell does she mean ‘time’?

“Eight years, Steve,” she murmured, answering his unspoken question. “I’ve been divorced for almost a year now. It’s been a while since you’ve dated anyone steady…”

“Yeah, I hear you,” he snapped. Dragging in a breath, he scrubbed his face his palm. “Why now?”

“Why not?” Sara leaned forward, placing her bottle on the table next to his. “We’ve never had good timing, you and I...” She shrugged. “I was with Adam...”

The tang of bitterness flooded his mouth. “You weren’t just
with
Adam, you were
married
to Adam.”

“Yes, and I think we can agree my marriage was a mistake.”

Running his hand through his hair, Steve mumbled, “Jesus Christ, I... I just got used to the idea that this would never happen.”

“It could happen.”

Pushing to his feet, he paced the tiny living room and looked everywhere but directly at her.

He’d broken a date to be here tonight. Not that he considered the date a sacrifice. Drinks with the possibility of dinner with some woman whose name escaped him the moment Sara upped the ante with her offer of pizza and a movie. He didn’t think twice about breaking the date. However, he did spend most of the afternoon trying to pretend that breaking a date to eat pizza with Sara didn’t make him pathetic. All he was sacrificing was another uncomfortable evening in an overpriced restaurant, pretending to be interested in someone who wasn’t Sara.

Sara, who was sitting on the couch watching him prowl the room like a caged tiger. He forced himself to come to a halt in front of the fireplace. She rose and took a big step closer to him, but he was too freaked out to lower his defenses. He held up his hands to halt her progress, and turned to brace his hands on the mantle.

“I can’t start thinking about this again.”

She pressed her hand to the center of his back. “Don’t think.”

He tensed, squeezing his eyes shut as the warmth of her palm seeped through to his back, searing his skin, branding him as hers. He swallowed past the lump in his throat. “Don’t you see? As much as I wanted to, uh, kiss you, I needed you to be my friend more.”

Her hand slid down his back and into his palm. His fingers closed reflexively around hers. “If I promise we’ll always be friends?”

For a split second, he wondered if this was another one of those dreams where he’d wake up sweaty and alone. Gathering the last of his nerve, he turned to face her, meeting her gaze directly. “What do you want to know?” he asked, his voice holding more than a hint of caution.

“Everything.”

He bit down on his impatience and shook his head. “Ask me something.”

“Do you still want to kiss me?”

“Yes,” he answered without a second of hesitation.

Sara smiled, and she swayed closer to him. “What’s stopping you now?”

Her statement did stop him. The mish-mash of crazy thoughts caroming around in his head came to a screeching halt for a moment. Just one moment. Then, nothing could have stopped him.

He wrapped his arms around her, embracing her as he had dozens of times over the years. She tipped her head back, her hand cradling the nape of his neck. Sara stared straight into his eyes, and he knew he was a goner. He searched the depths of her blue-green eyes. “We’re really going to do this?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

His hands splayed across her back, his fingers pressing into her. The warmth of her skin seeped through the soft sweater she wore. Her eyes sparkled as she stared up at him expectantly. He dipped his head, his lips hovering a mere inch from hers. She didn’t flinch or pull away. The tip of her pink tongue darted out to moisten her lips, and he exhaled, releasing the fervent desire he’d held back for so long. “Thank God.”