Private Dancer (6 page)

Case in point, he told himself as she walked back into the room carrying two tall glasses with lemon wedges stuck on the rims. She already had him drinking iced tea instead of beer. By next week she’d have confiscated his toothpicks.

He’d been through that before. His ex-wife had married him as an act of rebellion against her conservative parents. When the glow wore off and she realized that his pose was for real, that with Sam Nichols what you saw was what you got, she’d bailed out. Just when he’d needed her most.

“By the way, I’m Bev Brewster,” she said, handing him the glass rather than setting it on the table. “And we have a problem.” Smiling, she took a seat next to him on the sofa. “What are we going to do about our clients?”

“Well, for one thing, we can stop tailing each other,” he suggested, edging away from her. “That would save them both some money.”

She drank deeply from her glass. “No. I mean, it’s obvious the Greenaways don’t need private eyes. They need to talk. Neither one of them is cheating, but they’re not communicating either. They don’t trust each other.”

Sam set his iced tea on the table, untouched. “That may be true, but Mrs. Greenaway isn’t paying me for my psychological insights. She’s paying me to tail her husband.”

“Yes, but only because she believes he’s being unfaithful.”

Sam could see where the discussion was headed. Any minute now she’d be lecturing him on the ethics of servicing a client who obviously didn’t need the service. He wanted to concede her point about as much as he wanted to be hijacked by terrorists, but he knew anything less would get him embroiled in a long-drawn-out, no-win argument.

“So what do you suggest?” he said with barely veiled sarcasm. “That we advise our clients to sit down and have a heart-to-heart?”

“Yes!” Bev jumped on the idea immediately. “That’s exactly what they need to do, Sam. If they’d talked in the first place, they wouldn’t have had to hire us, would they?” She was surprised and delighted that he’d brought up the idea, even if reluctantly. Maybe he was a reasonable man after all.

“Do you have an office in the city?” she asked, suddenly curious. She gazed at him intently, noticing the length of his lashes and the way his eyelids drooped slightly at the outer corners. Only their arresting pale blue color kept them from being bedroom eyes.

Sam felt like telling her he worked out of his car, but he knew that would only encourage her maternal instincts. “A small office in El Monte. Very small.”

Bev barely noticed Sam’s mumbled reticence. She wanted to know more about him, especially now that they had their work in common. And she’d been vastly relieved to learn that he wasn’t a rapist, or a felon, or any of the other things she’d imagined. “Do you work alone?”

“Strictly alone,” he said, glancing at her front door.

Sam was only half listening as Bev pressed on with her questions. He was planning his escape. Maybe he could tell her he was due somewhere, anywhere. He wanted badly to come up with an excuse and cut out before she got to the personal stuff, like his marital status and his yearly income. He knew how missionaries operated. They weren’t happy until they’d ferreted every secret a guy had.

The only thing keeping him there was his fascination with her hands. She was doing something a man didn’t often see a woman do in polite company. She was playing with his drink.

She’d finished her own long ago, and he’d seen her glance at his several times. At first he’d thought it was because she was still thirsty, but then he realized something else was going on. She leaned forward, absently dipped her finger into the iced tea, twirled it around and brought the finger to her lips. Her face was slightly flushed, and her eyes were sparkling as she talked and laughed, carrying the conversation, but she wasn’t being openly seductive. He wondered if she was even aware that she was doing it.

“You really like iced tea, don’t you?” he asked softly.

She glanced down at her finger and yanked it out of the liquid as though she’d been scalded. “Oh! I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ll get you another glass.”

She was off to the kitchen before he could stop her, and suddenly he wasn’t in such a big rush to leave. Maybe he’d been too quick to pigeonhole Bev Brewster. A woman who carried a blackjack in her purse and kept a fake revolver in her living room had some instincts that weren’t missionarylike at all.

He dug another toothpick out of his pocket and placed it between his lips. As for playing with his drink ... that was one of the sexiest things he’d ever seen a woman do.

B
EV’S HANDS WERE SHAKING
as she opened the freezer compartment of the refrigerator to get some ice. She filled the glass quickly, her fingertips stinging from the cold. Her face was stinging too, but it was for a different reason. She’d exposed an aspect of herself to Sam Nichols that she was profoundly uncomfortable with. It wasn’t just iced tea she liked, as he’d suggested. It was water, liquid, anything wet. She had a ... well, she didn’t know what to call it, but a fetish for wetness.

She’d never gone to a psychiatrist to find out why. She’d been too embarrassed. It had probably stemmed from a silly incident in her childhood. Besides, as annoying as the affliction was, it never became a problem unless she was aroused. And up until forty-eight hours ago, she hadn’t been aroused in a long time.

Icy steam roiled out from the freezer compartment as Bev returned to her immediate problem. She hadn’t actually put her finger in her mouth, had she? Not right in front of him!

She slammed the freezer door and picked up the pitcher of iced tea on the kitchen counter, filling the glass to the brim. Maybe he hadn’t really noticed ... or read anything into it.

“Bev?”

She turned and saw him standing in the kitchen doorway, leaning negligently against the doorjamb, his expression subtly alert. Her heart sank. He’d noticed, all right. He had the look of a man whose curiosity had been aroused, among other things.

“Is that what you like to be called?” he asked. “Bev?”

“Actually, my father calls me B.J.” She had no idea why she’d volunteered the information. She didn’t want Sam Nichols calling her that. She didn’t even want her father calling her that.

A smile appeared on his lips and almost drifted to his eyes. “B.J. That’s a name with possibilities.”

“I’ve got your iced tea,” she said, holding out the glass.

“I don’t want any more iced tea.”

Somehow that didn’t surprise her. She clutched the glass in both hands and told herself to put it down. Instead, she watched him push away from the door and stand tall. His head wasn’t half a foot from the top of the doorway, she realized. He was that big a man.

“Have you been thinking about it too, B.J.?” A faint huskiness snuck into his voice. “Thinking about it the way I have?”

“Thinking? About what?”

“The way I touched you yesterday. The way you touched me.”

She shook her head and turned away from him, setting the glass down on the counter too quickly. Iced tea sloshed over and the lemon wedge tumbled off the rim. Bev breathed in so deeply, the sharp tang of citrus burned her nostrils.

“Why would I be thinking about that?” she said, grabbing a cloth to mop up the spill. She sounded out of breath and hopelessly insincere.

“Maybe because it was exciting.”

She heard him come up behind her and sent up a quick prayer for self-control. The other times they’d been together, he’d been shockingly aggressive, and she’d reacted more out of self-defense than arousal.

This was different. He was different. Quiet, smoky-voiced, alive with sexual danger.

“Was it exciting?”

She tossed off an answer that was meant to be noncommittal. “What if it was? Buying a new dress is exciting.”

“I don’t know what you were shopping for, lady, but it wasn’t dresses.” He drew closer, his voice a rough caress. “You gave me one hell of a jolt. And don’t tell me you didn’t know it.”

Bev felt the heat coming off his body. It ran the length of her back, accumulating in all those nerve-rich places where she was anticipating contact. Her calves were tingling, her shoulder blades, even her buttocks. He hadn’t touched her, but he was driving her crazy wondering when he would.

“Stop it,” she said.

“What? I haven’t done anything. Except try to answer your question.”

“What question?”

“You asked me why you should be thinking about yesterday. Why you should remember what we did and the way it made you feel.” He became silent for a moment. “You still haven’t answered my question. Did you find it exciting when I touched you?”

She felt something brush against the back of her thigh, and her imagination went off like a rocket. Was it his knee? His hand? She pressed against the countertop, her hipbones coming into contact with the cold ceramic tile. There wasn’t going to be a repeat of yesterday’s “excitement.” She had no intention of letting him fondle her again.

He let out a low, sexy gust of laughter that lifted the damp hairs on her neck. “I don’t think that counter’s going anywhere. You can relax your grip on it.”

“Stop it,” she ordered, whirling around to face him. “I want you to stop it! Now.”

“Stop what?”

The question threw her into a quandary. “I don’t know. Whatever it is you’re doing.” The problem was he wasn’t doing anything, at least not anything physical. “You’re intimidating me with words,” she said, “baiting and teasing, playing with me. I’m not a child, for heaven’s sake. I can’t be turned on and off like some battery-operated toy.”

“Interesting concept.” He studied her through lowered lashes, his expression flickering with curiosity and a blue-eyed arrogance that was distinctly male, distinctly him. “As for the child business,” he said, “that was the furthest thing from my mind. You don’t look like a child. You don’t feel like a child. If I’m playing with you, it’s an adult game and you qualify.”

He raised his hand, a lazy arc of motion. Bev flinched back, certain that he was going to touch her in some way, perhaps even intimately.

“Don’t try to kid yourself, Lace, or me,” he said, rolling the toothpick between his fingers before he took it from his mouth and flicked it into her kitchen sink. “I’m not calling the shots here. You’re woman enough to have a man if you want one, and simply because you want one.”

“Stop it,” she whispered again. He was so close she couldn’t breathe. She looked down, trying to escape the probing blue of his eyes. What she got for her effort was a breathtaking view of a man’s lower body, muscular and endlessly rangy. Encased in faded jeans, his thighs made her think of the weapon she carried in her purse—a steely blackjack sheathed in soft leather. And because he was standing with one hip cocked, her eyes darted irresistibly to the front of his jeans, where stress lines fanned out from material pulled too tight.

God, what was she doing cornered in her own kitchen by a man like him? He was sex personified. And why was she letting him talk to her about such private things? Even she and Paul didn’t discuss the way they touched each other. Obviously, she hadn’t weighed the consequences of bringing Sam Nichols to her house.

“I think it might be a good idea if you left,” she said without looking up.

“I think it might be the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

She felt him touching her hair and realized he was removing her headband. As dark waves tumbled around her face, he eased his hand to her nape, gathered a fistful of locks, and slowly drew her head back, willing her to look up at him.

“Something tells me we’re just getting started, Lace.”

His voice was soft, but Bev could feel the force behind it. Inexplicably, she didn’t fight him. Not because she was startled into submission but because looking up and meeting his eyes had a slow, paralyzing effect on her. There was a natural gauntness in his features that spoke of hunger and dark impulses. He wasn’t the kind of man who seduced a woman for hours and hours, she realized. She couldn’t imagine him waiting patiently until a woman was ready, or putting a woman’s pleasure before his own. There was a roughness in him, a simmering promise of violence. He was a throwback to primitive times when survival depended on raw, brute strength. When Sam Nichols wanted something, he didn’t wait to be invited, he took it.

Bev realized all that in the matter of seconds, and with the flood of information came another awareness. She wasn’t breathing. Her whole body seemed to be caught in a spasm of expectation, waiting to see what he would do next.

“I want to touch you again,” he said. “I want to slip my hand inside your blouse and feel your breath catch.”

He freed the top button of her blouse and Bev let out a sound that made him smile.

She clutched at his hand. “That was a gasp! People gasp when they’re being physically assaulted. It has nothing to do with arousal.” Who was she kidding now? She was so shocked and excited she could hardly stand up. Her blood didn’t know which way to rush.

He brought her hand to his lips and bit down gently on the knuckle of her forefinger. The message in his eyes was explicit and unmistakable. He wasn’t playing anymore. He wanted a woman and he meant to have one before he was through today.
He meant to have her
.

If she didn’t stop him now, she would never summon the strength. He was too powerful, too physically overwhelming. But what disturbed her even more than the inevitability of his seduction was her own reaction. Some errant part of her wanted him to touch her again, to make her gasp.

She tried to deny the raw excitement that was coursing through her, but she couldn’t close the floodgates. It was as though something wild and sweet inside her had been cut loose from its bonds, a trapped energy set free. She seemed to crave the dizzying, shocking feelings he evoked, as rough as he was, as primitive as he was. She didn’t understand what was happening to her, unless it was the result of being emotionally immobilized for so many years. She was being catapulted back into life, into feeling things again.

He relaxed his fist and let her hair fall free, his fingers warm on her neck. “Have you ever made love on a kitchen countertop?”