Time Out (9 page)

Without answering, Mona went inside.

Rainey went home. She made cookies because that’s what she did when
she
was stressed—she ate cookies. Then she showered for her date with Kyle. It would be fun, she decided. And she needed fun. She would keep an open mind and stop thinking about Mark. Who knows, maybe Kyle would be The One to finally make her forget Mark altogether.

She heard the knock at precisely six o’clock. She waited for a zing of nerves. It was a first date. There should be nerves. But she felt nothing. She opened her door and went still.

Mark.

Now
nerves flooded her. “What are you doing here?”

“We left a few things unfinished,” he said.

“We always leave things unfinished!”

A car pulled up the street.
Kyle.
Inexplicably frantic, Rainey shoved at Mark’s chest. “You have to go.”

He didn’t budge. “Hmm.”

Hmm?
What the hell did that mean? She looked around, considering shoving him into the bushes, but he leaned into her. “Don’t even think about it.” With his hands on her hips, he pushed her inside her town house and shut the door.

“You can’t be here,” she muttered. “I have a date.”

He let go of her to look out the small window alongside the front door, eyes focused on Kyle as he walked up the path. “I want to meet this guy.”

“What?
No.
”

The doorbell rang, and Mark turned his head to look at her, his eyes two pools of dark chocolate. “You still have shitty taste in men?”

“I— None of your business!”

The bell rang again, and in sheer panic, Rainey pushed Mark behind the door and out of sight, pointing at him to stay as she pasted a smile on her face and opened the door.

Kyle was medium height and build, with wind-tousled brown hair that curled over his collar and green eyes that had a light in them that suggested he might be thinking slightly NC-17 thoughts. Rainey stared at him in shock.

He smiled. “Surprised?”

Uh, yeah. He’d grown up and out, and had definitely lost the buck teeth. Plus he had a look of edge to him, a confidence, a blatant sexuality that shocked her. Kyle Foster had grown up to be a bad boy. “It’s nice to see you,” she said, surprised to find it true.

“Same goes.” He looked her over. “You look good enough to eat.”

From behind the door came a low growl.

Rainey didn’t dare glance over, but she could feel the weight of Mark’s stare. “Let me just grab my purse,” she said quickly.

“What smells so good?” Kyle asked, trying to see past her and inside her place.

“I made chocolate chip cookies earlier.”

“I love chocolate chip cookies,” Kyle said.

Was it her imagination, or did Mark growl again? Oh, God. “Burned them,” she said quickly. Liar, liar, pants on fire. She had a glorious tray of cookies on her counter, to-die-for cookies, cookies that were better than an orgasm, but if she let him in, she’d be forced to introduce him to Mark. “Sorry. If you could just give me a sec.” She shut the door on his face and winced. Then she glared at Mark.

“Let him in,” he said. “You can introduce us.” He said this in the tone the Big Bad Wolf had probably used on Little Red Riding Hood.

She pointed at him. “Shh!” She ran into the kitchen, grabbed her purse and strode past the six-foot-plus dark and annoyingly sexy man still standing in her entryway, throwing off enough attitude to light up a third world country.

“Your top’s too tight,” Mark said.

“No, it’s not.”

“Then your bra’s too thin.”

She stared down at herself. He was right—Nipple City. “Well, if you’d stop crowding me.”

He smiled, dark and dangerous. He had no plans to stop crowding her. “And your jeans,” he said.

“What’s wrong with my jeans?”

“You have a stain on the ass.”

She twisted around first one way, then the other, but saw nothing. “I can’t see it.”

“I can. Not exactly date pants, you know?”

“Fine! Don’t move.” She raced up the stairs and down the hallway to her bedroom, tore off the jeans, ripping through her dresser for another clean pair.

Nada.

Dammit! She yanked open her closet and settled on a short denim skirt, which meant she had to change shoes, which also meant she had to redo her hair. Running back down the stairs, she came to a skidding halt at the bottom.

The front door was opened but Kyle was nowhere to be seen, and neither was his car. Eyes narrowed, she followed a faint sound into her kitchen, where she found Mark leaning back against her counter, Zen-calm, every muscle relaxed…eating her cookies.

“NICE SKIRT YOU’RE almost wearing,” Mark said, and swallowed the last of his cookie. He brushed his fingers off, ignoring the death glare coming at him from the doorway. Rainey had changed out of the sexy jeans and into an even sexier short denim skirt, revealing perfectly toned legs that he wanted to nibble. He wanted to start at her toes and work his way up, up, up past her knees, past her thighs… to the heaven between them.

Something she most definitely wasn’t ready to hear. “You’re good at cookies,” he said. “What else can you cook?”

She crossed her arms, which plumped up her breasts, and he revisited his thought. He wanted to nibble her all over.

Every single inch.

“Where’s my date, Mark?”

He popped another cookie. “Funny thing about that.”

Her eyes darkened, and she leaned against the doorway, arms still crossed as if maybe she didn’t trust herself to come any further into the kitchen. He didn’t know if that was because she wanted to kill him, or kiss him again.

He thought it was probably a good bet that it was the former. When he reached for yet another cookie, she let out a sound of sheer temper and stalked across the room to snatch the plate away from him. “Those are mine.”

Mark was aware that he was known for always being in control, for having a long fuse and rarely losing it, for being notoriously tight with his emotions. Rarely did he find himself in a situation where he wasn’t perfectly at ease and didn’t know exactly what he wanted the outcome to be.

But he was right now. He had no idea what the hell he was doing here.

None.

“Your date had to leave,” he said. “Unexpectedly.”

“Uh-huh. What did you do to him?”

In his world, people never questioned him. And it was a good place to be, his world. Apparently she hadn’t gotten the memo. “Nothing.”

Earlier, in the storage closet at the rec center, he’d stalked her, pressed her against the door. She did the same to him now, but this time her grip on his shirt wasn’t passion. “Tell me, Mark.”

The sound of his name on her tongue did something to him, something it shouldn’t. “He waxes.”

“What?”

“He waxes his body hair,” he said.

She blinked. Paused. “And how did you get close enough to notice that?”

“I wasn’t that close, I have excellent vision. He didn’t have any hair on his arms.”

“He’s a swimmer. So he waxes, so what?”

Yeah, genius, so what?
“He had a look in his eye. He was up to no good.”

She gaped at him. “Tell me, was it like staring in a mirror?”

Well, maybe a little. But Mark had taken one look at the guy and seen a player. He’d asked the asshole what his plans were. Kyle had seemed amused by the question but had answered readily enough—candlelit dinner, dancing, capped off with a canyon drive to stargaze....

Bullshit the guy wanted to stargaze. No guy wanted to stargaze. Kyle wanted to get laid. In fact, Mark would bet his million-dollar bonus that the guy had a string of condoms at the ready. “I didn’t like him.”

“You didn’t like him,” Rainey repeated. “And I should care,
why?
”

“I’m an excellent judge of character.”

She made a sound of disgust. “The last time you scared one of my dates off, I told you to never interfere in my life again.”

He grabbed her as she went to pass by him. “The last time I scared off your date, it was because you were about six inches away from being raped.”

She jerked as if he’d hit her, reminding him of one fact—they’d never talked about that night, about what had happened when he’d finally caught up with her.

Never.

And apparently they weren’t going to do it now either, because she shoved at him hard and he let her go. She turned to her kitchen window, not moving, not speaking, just staring out at the backyard, her eyes clouded with bad memories.

Feeling lower than pond scum, he sighed. “Rainey—”

“Why are you here, Mark?”

“I…” He had no idea.

She turned to face him. “I agreed to go out with Kyle tonight because I’m looking for something. Someone. Or at least I think I am. I’m…not lonely, that’s not the right word. I love my life. But I want someone in it. It’s been a while for me and I’m ready. I want to be in a relationship.”

His gut hurt, and he had no idea why.

Her mouth curved, though the smile didn’t meet her lips. “And I’m guessing by the panic on your face that a relationship is the last thing you’re looking for.”

He wasn’t showing panic. He never showed panic.

“Fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I made up the panic. God forbid you show an emotion.”

“You think I don’t have emotions?”

“I think you’re miserly with them.” She gave a faint smile. “But I do sense the slightest elevation in your blood pressure.”

Now he rolled
his
eyes and she let out a low laugh. “Listen, I can’t be like you, Mark, that’s all. I’m not tough and cool as ice in any situation. That’s not me. I want someone to care about me, someone who
wants
to be with me. Now I’m all dressed up with none of that in sight at the moment, so unless you want to be witness to something as messy as an uncontrolled emotion, you need to go.”

“I would,” he said quietly. “But—”

“But
what?
”

“I don’t want to.”

At that, she dropped her head between her shoulders and let out a sound that was either another laugh or something far too close to tears for his own comfort. “Mark, you
know
what broke up our friendship.”

“Yes, you kicked me out of your life.”

She sighed. “I didn’t kick you out of my life. You left to go coach in Ontario, and I…”

“Stopped talking to me.”

“It was temporary—I was mad,” she said. “You remember why.”

He let out a long breath. “Something about me being an interfering asshole.”

“First, you rejected me. Then—”

“You were sixteen!”

“Then,”
she went on stubbornly. “You followed me on a date and beat the guy up.”

“It wasn’t a date. He picked you up after you ran out of my place. And in the ten minutes it took me to find you, he had you pinned in his backseat and was pulling off your clothes!”

Remembered humiliation flickered in her eyes. “Okay, so I acted stupid and immature, but I was hurting.”

He blew out a breath and shoved his fingers in his hair. “It wasn’t your fault. What he did to you wasn’t your fault.”

“What he was doing was consensual.”

“You didn’t know what you wanted.”