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GAUGE BRUSHED the snow from his old cowboy boots and shrugged out of his jacket and sweatshirt, hanging them on the back of a kitchen chair in his small studio apartment. He’d hoped the physical activity of shoveling would help chase away the demons that had been haunting him lately. And it had. But for how long?
He grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the table and unscrewed the top, taking a long pull from the whiskey, standing still as it warmed his chest and then swirled outward to his cold extremities.
The apartment was small but nice. He guessed it had probably been renovated in the past year or so. All the appliances and fixtures were new, the furniture unworn and scratch free. Unlike most of the places he was used to staying in when he was out on the road playing with whatever band he’d hooked up with. Or all the motels rooms, shabby apartments and run-down houses he’d shared with his traveling musician father when he was growing up.
Not that he paid much attention to his surroundings. As far as he was concerned, they were just details. And he probably wouldn’t be staying here except for Nina’s involvement. Nina was one of his partners in BMC, a bookstore/music center/café, and she matched him up with Lizzie Gilbred, the sister of Heidi’s ex, when Lizzie had listed the studio for rent.
He rubbed his chin and screwed the top back on the whiskey, putting the bottle on the table. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the place. He supposed it was all right. There was just something odd about living in the good part of town. About parking his beat-up Chevy Camaro at the curb where few cars sat, but those that did were BMWs, Mercedes and Rovers. You’d think that he’d be used to the fluttering of curtains as neighbors watched him come and go, but it bothered him on a fundamental level he was loath to ignore. What did they think—that he was going to break in and rape their women? Kill their children?
He didn’t know the names of any of them. And he’d lived there for nearly four months. Surely there was something abnormal about that?
Since the places he was used to staying in were shabby, the neighborhoods where they were located tended to be on the grungy side. Usually downtown, crowded with other people that looked like him, where no curtains fluttered because there were usually no curtains. And while he might not stay long in any one place, he always left knowing the names of most of the people around him, and could count more than a few of them as friends.
Hell, here he’d maybe talked to his landlady a handful of times. And she only lived thirty feet away in the Tudor-style monstrosity she called a house. From what he could tell, she used all of three rooms: the kitchen, the back room with the fireplace and what he guessed was her bedroom on the second floor.
He could only imagine what her monthly heating bill looked like.
That’s probably why she or any of the other neighbors weren’t home much. They were too busy working to pay the bills that went along with their lifestyle—like astronomical heating bills.
Speaking of heat…
After pushing the arrow and nudging the digital numbers up to sixty-nine degrees on the thermostat, he picked up his acoustic guitar where he’d left it sitting on the edge of the queen-size bed and walked around with it until the baseboard heaters warmed the place. He stopped near the window overlooking the driveway. Already the falling snow was beginning to cover his work. He hit a dissonant chord and automatically adjusted the tension of the wayward string, tuning and testing three times before he was satisfied.
His gaze was drawn to the back of the Tudor where he could see Lizzie Gilbred spilled across the leather sofa in front of the fireplace. He ran his fingers over the guitar strings, playing the distinctive licks of Muddy Waters’s “Going Down Slow,” the sound making the room feel not so empty. There was a time when he might have brought one of the young women who liked his playing home to warm his bed, but not now. Not since he’d come back to Fantasy, determined to forge a different life for himself.
Not since he’d fallen for a woman he’d had no right falling for. A woman he could never have. A woman who was now married to his best friend.
Gauge closed his eyes and dropped his chin to his chest, his fingers moving as if on their own accord.
There had been times lately when he’d thought maybe returning to Michigan hadn’t been such a great idea. But in his lifetime, the three-year span he’d spent here was the longest he’d spent anywhere. And when he’d left, he’d been even more aware of the hollow loneliness of wandering the country in search of his next gig than he’d ever been before. Partly because he’d gotten a taste of what love, real love, might be like. Mostly because his best friends and business partners, Nina Leonard and Kevin Weber, had been the family he’d never had.
Until he went and mucked things up.
He forced all thought from his mind, giving himself over to the music, feeling the blues wash over him, through him.
A knock at the door.
Gauge opened his eyes, convinced he was hearing things, because it was a sound he hadn’t heard since moving in.
Another knock.
He leaned the guitar against the bed.
He wasn’t sure what he expected when he opened the door. But it sure wasn’t what he found.
Lizzie Gilbred.
Hadn’t he just seen her in her house? What was she doing out in this weather? What was she doing knocking at his door?
She bounced a couple of times, as if cold, looking smaller somehow in the oversize camel-hair coat she wore.
Gauge had always had a deep appreciation of women. He supposed it came from not having had a constant female presence in his life. But the opposite sex never failed to fascinate him. Even if that weren’t the case, Lizzie Gilbred would have made a lasting impression on him. It was more than her golden-blond hair and wide, baby-doll-blue eyes. There was an inherent sexiness to her, and he couldn’t help wondering why she covered it up in her strict business suits and pulledback hairstyles.
He couldn’t help thinking that if she hadn’t been an attorney, she’d have made a great stripper.
“Can I come in?” she asked, intruding on his thoughts.
Probably a bad idea in a long line of bad ideas. Just as he appreciated women, he knew them better than they sometimes knew themselves. And he knew that for whatever reason, Lizzie had decided to distract herself with him.
Then again, his girl-dar had been off a little lately. She could be there to evict him.
Gauge shrugged and moved away from the door. “Seeing as you own the place, I don’t know that I can stop you.”
She stepped inside, quickly closing the door after her. She looked around the apartment and then at him. “Am I interrupting something?”
Gauge tucked his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans. Definitely there to distract herself.
Where once the thought might have mildly amused him, now he was vaguely disappointed. But never let it be said that he ever turned a great-looking woman away from his bed. And Lizzie was absolutely stunning. She’d let her coat hang open and he appreciated the snug black cashmere sweater and clingy black pants she wore.
“Am I late with the rent?” he asked.
She smiled. “No. I just thought I’d come up to thank you for shoveling the snow.”
“Mmm.”
“May I?” she asked, indicating her coat.
“Be my guest.”
She shrugged out of the heavy wool coat and draped it over the back of the same chair that held his jacket. She eyed the bottle on the table.
Gauge watched her closely. He knew she was an attorney and that she worked hard. She drove a convertible Audi that was wasted during Michigan’s harsh winters. He guessed that her boyfriend was similarly ambitious with his late-model Porsche and fancy suits.
He’d thought it odd that he hadn’t seen the jerk’s car for the past week. He’d figured maybe the guy had gone on a business trip. Apparently he’d been wrong.
“You want something to drink?” he asked.
“Sounds good.”
“Anything in particular?”
“Whatever you’re having is fine.”
He wasn’t entirely sure that was a good idea, but hell, it had been a while. And though he was able to resist tempting any women home, having one offer herself up on his doorstep…well, he was but a man, after all. And it was obvious that’s what Lizzie was counting on.
“Boyfriend away?” he asked as he handed her a glass holding a finger of Jack.
Her eyes grew wide and it appeared to take some effort for her to swallow as she drank. “Something like that.” She swiped the back of her hand against her mouth. Her lips, he noticed, seemed bare of lipstick. In fact, she didn’t appear to be wearing any makeup at all, which was curious. Whenever he’d seen her, she’d always been well put together.
Then again, one didn’t require proper attire when slumming it.
And he guessed that’s exactly what one sexy Ms. Lizzie Gilbred, trial attorney, was doing. Slumming it. She’d come knocking on his door in need of a quick ego fix. Probably she’d been dumped by that asshole of a boyfriend and needed reminding that she was still desirable.
Then in the morning she’d regret ever crossing that driveway.
But none of that was his concern. The only question was whether he wanted to take what she was offering.
He watched her cross to sit on the edge of his bed and he raised both of his eyebrows. Most women weren’t quite that obvious with their intentions.
“What?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.”
LIZZIE LEANED BACK on the bed, on the mattress she had chosen herself for its durability, if not complete comfort, six months ago when she’d moved into the house and had the apartment furnished so she might rent it out. She was acutely aware of the man picking up his guitar and sitting down on the ottoman in front of the chair across the room. Despite the inclement weather, he wore a T-shirt, a dark brown one bearing the logo of a rock band, the hem not quite tucked into jeans that looked like they’d seen their fair share of wild nights out.
She’d always been a sucker for the tall, dark and handsome type, but Patrick Gauge put a whole new spin on the description with his unruly, longish light brown hair and his lanky, rather than athletic, build.
There was something very enticing about the lost-little-boy look. Even though there was definitely nothing boyish about him.
As he ran his long, callused fingers over the guitar strings, she thought that he was waiting for her to say or do whatever she’d come there for.
Instead she silently sipped her whiskey and took her fill of him while he was otherwise occupied. Watching his biceps flex with his movements. The pull of the denim against his groin. The thickness of his neck above the frayed collar of his T-shirt. God, he was rough.
He kept a neat place, she’d give him that. Not overly so—she couldn’t detect the scent of any cleaning products—but there wasn’t any dirty underwear lying around. Her gaze went back to his groin. Of course, that might be because he didn’t wear underwear.
The idea made her hot.
She leaned back farther on the bed, letting the gold liquid creep through her veins, warming her along with the glass of wine she’d had at her place.
She shouldn’t be there. Shouldn’t be tempting fate along with her tenant. But when she’d glimpsed the rest of the night gaping before her like a fathomless pit faced with the choice of checking a cell phone that would never ring or coming over here to see what temporary trouble she could get into, well…this was definitely preferable.
“The quickestway to get over the old guy is to take up with a new guy,” her friend Tabitha was fond of saying.
Of course, Lizzie didn’t really plan to take up with Gauge. She merely wanted to indulge in something she never had before. More specifically, she wanted to experience a one-night stand. Find out for herself why they were so popular. Any risks involved would be offset by her psychological need to escape her thoughts, if only for a few precious hours.
“Are you playing at the pub this weekend?” she asked, conscious of the way his fingers stroked the strings with the finesse of a pro.
He nodded and then leveled that intense musician’s gaze at her. “I’m surprised.”
“By what?”
“I didn’t peg you as a pub kind of woman.”
She smiled. “I take it women don’t surprise you often.”
“No. Not often.”
She watched the way his thick, long fingers manipulated the strings, noticing that the acoustic guitar was old. Two newer guitars—another acoustic, one electric—sat in stands nearby. Scratches marred the front of the one he held, and there even appeared to have been some patchwork down one side.
He played a few more chords, then switched the CD player on.
“Had that long?” Lizzie asked.
He blinked as if seeing the guitar for the first time. He rested the bottom on the floor and moved it so she could see the back. Dozens of words were engraved in the wood. “This guitar shows all the places I’ve traveled, cities, towns.” He turned it back around.
“Wherever my guitar is, my heart is.”
He leaned the instrument against the ottoman and rested his elbows on his knees, making no secret of his interest in her where she half lay on his bed.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked, his voice as quiet as his playing.
Direct. She liked that.
“Mmm. I’m absolutely positive.”
3
GAUGE HAD LEARNED A long time ago that the touch of a woman could be as intoxicating as any liquor. And while Lizzie Gilbred might emerge more Chivas Gold to his Jack, she was an intoxicant all the same as she slid farther back onto the bed, stretching out like a supple black cat with blond hair.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” she asked quietly.
His answer was a shake of his head.
“I am. A talker, I mean.”
Gauge reached down and took off his right boot, then followed with his left.
He watched her watch him.
“I guess it goes along with the territory. You know, my being a trial attorney. When you come up against opposing counsel, you had better be a pretty good debater.”
Gauge took off his T-shirt. He wondered how much debating she’d done before she’d crossed the snowcovered driveway from her large house to his small apartment. Had she considered all the angles? Taken in the possible consequences?
For reasons he couldn’t quite name, he had the feeling that she hadn’t. Something, some event, had pushed her to come to his place on the spur of the moment. And his silent disrobing across the room from her was his way of giving her a chance to change her mind.
He lowered his hands toward the fly of his jeans and paused. Instead of scooting toward the end of the bed in order to make her exit, sexy Lizzie Gilbred ran her pink tongue along her lips, her gaze riveted to his actions.
Let it not be said that he hadn’t given her ample opportunity to hightail it out of there. Realize that what she was about to do was something she couldn’t take back or erase.
He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed.
“You have a great physique,” she said quietly, reaching out to run her fingertips down his right arm. “Must be the guitar playing.”
Gauge shifted to face her, taking her hands and bringing her to a sitting position. She appeared ready for him to kiss her. Instead he reached for the hem of her sweater and slowly brought it up, purposely avoiding meeting her lips. This wasn’t about intimacy—it was about sex. Pure and simple. An escape as stimulating as spirits. He tugged the soft material over her head, tousling her golden hair and revealing that she was every bit as shapely as he’d suspected. A bloodred satin bra did what his palms were suddenly itching to do, namely curve under the fleshy orbs of her breasts.
He skimmed his fingers over the glossy material and she inhaled deeply.
Gauge looked into her eyes to find a mixture of fascination and curiosity on her beautiful face.
