Borrowing a Bachelor (13 page)

She took another sip of wine, her green eyes evaluating his face over the rim of the glass.

He felt that she was still waiting for him to say something, but he wasn’t sure exactly what. “I like you, Nikki. I really like you. I want a do-over. Will you consider it?”

11

SOMEHOW, ADAM HAD MANAGED to say the right thing, because Nikki softened up and came to sit with him on the couch, instead of staying in the chair opposite. And after a couple of glasses of wine, a good laugh and a tickling session that devolved into stroking and petting, she got downright friendly.

After friendly, to his disbelief, came naked. Somewhere in the recesses of his primitive brain he learned a useful lesson:
good things come to men who apologize.

The couch should have blushed, as Adam buried himself repeatedly in Nikki’s body, but it was only a piece of furniture, after all. He’d never really imagined that she’d let him make love to her again so soon, but she seemed as insatiable for him as he was for her.

“Oh, yes…yes! Just like that. Oh, Adam…”

His gaze swept the coffee table and those smug little olives no longer had the power to mock him. He no longer felt like an exhausted medical student, but like the king of the universe, king of the sex gods, king of Nikki, who was panting wildly and moaning beneath him.

The demure office worker had become his own personal X-rated dream girl.

He leaned forward and took her breasts into his palms, changed his angle, slid deeper. His eyes had begun to roll back and Nikki made a low, keening sound that signaled an imminent loss of control, when his cell phone split the air.

Startled, he slipped out of her for a moment while it continued to ring, and she made a noise of feminine frustration as he repositioned himself. But now a ding signaled a text message. It was followed by another ding.

He stole a quick peek at the small window on the phone.

Test a.m.! Where R U?

Shit.
He was supposed to be at his study group meeting. They had another test in Foundations of Medicine in the morning, and here he was making like a billy goat. Was he crazy? Losing his discipline again? The specter of falling back into Loserville reared its ugly head.

“Adam?”

Without realizing it, he’d stopped and slipped out again.

A naked Nikki eyed him in disbelief. “Are you
looking at your cell phone?
”

“No! No, of course not.”

But it was too late.

Nikki snapped upright like a switchblade once the button is pushed. Full of righteous rage, she looked as lethal as a knife, too. Her eyes glittered dangerously.

“Uh, I can explain,” he said.

She shook her head slowly back and forth, looking like a hot, blonde, naked bull pawing the earth.

With him frozen in front of her, the inept toreador.

“You don’t understand,” he said desperately.

She didn’t charge. She grabbed the cell phone and threw it at his head.

He ducked and dove for his jeans, but she stepped on them and then reached for his unfinished beer. Evidently, hell had no fury like a woman forced to share attention with a cell phone.

Nikki upended the beer as he gave up on the pants and crawled for his shirt, so instead of splashing over his head it ran down his butt crack, then foamed and fizzled over his protesting yarbles.

With a hiss of disgust, Adam leaped over the couch and flattened himself against the back of it. “Nikki, I’m sorry! I forgot that I’m supposed to be somewhere right now—”

“I should have known better than even to
think
about dating a med student!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Nikki growled something incomprehensible about assholes, starter wives and pagers. Then she pelted his head with cheese cubes.

“Aw, no, no, no—”

Followed by crackers.

“I
said
I’m sorry!”

And olives, which packed a surprising little wallop when they hit a man square in the temple.

“Shit, are you a back-up pitcher for the Marlins?”

“Captain,” said Nikki wrathfully, “of my high-school softball team.”

The plate caught him in the kidneys as he ran for the door. “Ouch!”

“Champion Frisbee player, too.”

He wrenched at the doorknob. “Anything else I should know?”

“Yes,” she said succinctly. “Now you will never, ever taste my homemade cheesecake.”

Aw, man. He loved cheesecake. “What flavor?” He pulled the door open.

“I make every flavor. I grew up in my mom’s bakery.”

“You can cook?”

“Can a fish swim?”

His stomach growled. “Nikki, can’t we talk this through?”

“No. Get. Out.”

“Can I at least have my clothes?”

She stalked to where he’d left them on the carpet, gathered them up and threw those at him, too.

He clutched them to his privates and crab-walked out.

Then she kicked the door shut in his face, leaving him with her naked image seared forever in his brain.

Adam stood there and wondered how things had gone from so good to catastrophic within thirty seconds. Man had enough problems without the introduction of technology into his miserable life.

Expensive technology. Technology with notes and contact info and downloaded articles from the internet. Oh, hell.

He thought about knocking on the door to ask for his cell phone, but figured his chances of survival if he did so were nil to none.

A jingle of keys a couple of doors down had him quickly glancing to the left.

“Well, hello,” Nikki’s neighbor said. She had long black hair, a steely edge and wore too much makeup. She also looked vaguely familiar.

He shot her a sickly grin.

“Hey, Naked Dude. Don’t I know you?”

“Nope.” But she did look familiar.

She laughed, in a nasty sort of way.

He suddenly remembered where he’d seen her before: she’d wheeled in the cake at Mark’s bachelor party. But he was not having this conversation. And the sound of footsteps hitting metal indicated that someone else was coming up the stairs.

Adam turned so that at least Nikki’s neighbor wouldn’t get the full monty, and jumped into his pants.

“Nice buns,” she said.

He reddened, feeling like a piece of meat.

“You need a part-time job, honey? Because I got some bachelorette parties coming up. And none of the girls’d complain if
you
came jumping outta the cake.”

Adam shot her a speaking glance, and stuffed his boxers into his pocket. Then he shrugged into his shirt and turned away, only to collide with the guy coming up the stairs.

“Ay! Watch out where you goin’,
pendejo.
”

Adam muttered an apology, scooped up his shoes, and fled.

NIKKI PICKED UP the cheese cubes first, then the crackers and finally the olives. She was simply too angry and mortified to cry. Each little thunk expressed her rage as she lobbed the offending morsels into her kitchen waste can.

Bas—
thunk
—tard!
Thunk.

Then she had to get down on her hands and knees with a wet dishrag to scrub the beer out of her rug. This required a whole different rhythm of fury, and she imagined, with twisted pleasure, that the rag was sandpaper and the rug was Mr. Jerk’s face.

How
dare
he look at his phone while they were—

What kind of person did something like that?

And while he’d done intimate, highly erotic things to her, he
still
had never once kissed her on the lips. That was just weird. And wrong. And insulting.

Not that she’d ever, ever, give him the chance to come near her lips again at this point. There were some things that a girl could not forgive. And rubbernecking at a cell phone during hot sex was definitely one of those things.

She tossed the beer-soaked rag into her kitchen sink and stalked off to get her fluffy yellow terry robe with Tweetie Bird embroidered on the pocket.

Then she stalked back into the kitchen and pulled out eggs, cream cheese and butter. She left them on the stovetop to warm to room temperature.

She settled onto her much-abused sofa, the scene of the crime, and switched on the television. Half a bad sitcom later, Nikki meandered toward the bathroom and encountered Adam’s cell phone with her toe. She glared at it and fantasized about tossing it down the garbage disposal.

But instead, she indulged her natural female curiosity—no, it was
not
nosiness—and looked at the screen.

Test a.m.! Where R U?

Hmm. Adam had said he was supposed to be somewhere. Studying, by the looks of this.

He was a medical student. They did spend twenty of every twenty-four hours studying. And the guy had taken time to drive over to her apartment with flowers…

No.
She was not cutting him any slack.
He had looked at his cell phone in the act!

But. It wasn’t as if he’d dialed the thing, after all. It had rung. Then chirped. And then chirped again.

She’d been distracted by it, too.

As if programmed by the devil, the cursed thing rang again, in her hands. She almost dropped it.

Instead, she pressed Talk.

“Burke, where are you and your notes? We’ve been here almost an hour. Do you want us all to fail? What the hell, man?”

Nikki chewed her lip.

“Hel-
lo?
Adam?”

“He’s not available right now,” she said.

“Who is this?”

“But he’s on his way.” And she clicked End Call, ignoring the masculine squawk on the other end of the line.

Nikki had a mental tussle with herself as she washed her hands, then melted butter for her signature homemade graham cracker crust. She had every right to be angry. And she was.

Was this how things had been every day in Aunt Dee’s marriage? Probably.

With the back of a large, smooth spoon, she pressed the graham-cracker mixture flat into the bottom of her cheesecake pan. Adam’s cell phone rang again, but she ignored it.

She wasn’t his secretary. She wasn’t even his girlfriend, or, God forbid, his starter-wife-in-training.

She whipped the cream cheese with sugar, added the eggs one at a time, and then stirred in vanilla, fresh sliced peaches and a tablespoon or two of peach schnapps.

Then she poured the mixture over the crust and slid it into the preheated oven.

Adam’s cell phone rang again, and she sighed.

She let it ring again before she answered. “Hello?”

“Nikki?” Adam said tentatively.

“No, it’s the Jolly Green Giant.”

“I, uh— I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“If you want your phone back,” she said, “you can come by the office tomorrow. Call first. I’ll have Margaret give it to you.”

A small silence ensued. “Okay,” Adam said, sounding defeated. “I guess there’s nothing else I can—”