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“I don’t know yet. I’m making it up as I go along.”
Lucy inspected the sauces slowly simmering on the stove, taking a good whiff of each one. Her mouth watered. Unable to resist, she dipped a finger in the warm chocolate sauce and took a taste.
“Mmmm.”
“Lucy! This is a restaurant. You can’t do that.”
“You’re not actually going to serve that cake to patrons, are you?”
“I can’t now.” But he grinned. “Actually, I was planning to eat the whole thing myself.”
“Not without my help, you don’t. What comes next?”
She watched as Bryan used a very sharp knife to cut the cake into four layers, all perfectly uniform. “You’re good with a knife,” she said.
“I’m good with all my tools,” he replied, paying her back for her saucy comments on the beach earlier.
“I’ll bet you are.”
He gave her a warning look, then returned his attention to the cake. He spread fresh whipped cream on the bottom layer, then spooned on some of the chocolate sauce and set the second layer on top. Then came more whipped cream and the bourbon sauce, and another layer. Yet more whipped cream, more chocolate sauce, and some toasted almonds, and the final layer.
“I want to drizzle a glaze on top, but I’m not sure what to flavor it with. Lemon?”
Lucy shook her head. “Too much citrus. I don’t know what I’m talking about, but how about crème de menthe? When I was little, I used to mix orange sherbet with mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.”
“You innovator, you.” He grinned. “Okay, what the hell.” He quickly mixed up a glaze, adding a dash of spearmint extract rather than crème de menthe, which he thought might compete with the bourbon. He garnished the cake with orange slices and sprigs of fresh mint.
“It’s the most beautiful cake I’ve ever seen,” she said reverently.
“You’re not laying it on a little thick, are you?”
“No. It’s a work of art. Shame to cut into it. But you are going to cut into it, aren’t you?” she asked anxiously.
In answer he got out two plates, then wielded his knife and spatula to cut two perfectly uniform slices, which he laid on the plates sideways. He topped each with another small dollop of whipped cream and a mint leaf.
“Presentation is everything.”
Lucy knew she should be admiring the dessert. But she’d eyed a small spot of whipped cream on Bryan’s cheek, and she became fixated on it.
“What?” he asked.
“You have whipped cream on your face.”
“Oh.” He rubbed one side of his face with the dishcloth he kept over one shoulder, missing the spot completely.
“Here, let me.” She took the dishcloth from him. But instead of wiping his face, she stood on her tiptoes and licked off the whipped cream.
Bryan’s pupil dilated. “Oh, Lucy.” His voice was hoarse with suppressed passion. They were standing near the stove, and Lucy reached over to the pan of chocolate sauce, dipped her finger in again, and wiped a little on his other cheek before sucking the end of her finger.
“You do get dirty when you cook, don’t you?” She again stretched up on tiptoe so she could dart her tongue out and lick off the chocolate.
“You are a very wicked girl.” He dipped a finger into the bowl of whipped cream and spread a smear across her lips. “Oh, dear, look, I’ve made another mess.”
Lucy reflexively licked at the whipped cream, but Bryan shook his head. “No, no, you’ve missed most of it.” He leaned down and claimed her lips with his.
The kiss started out light and teasing, but it didn’t stay that way. His mouth went hard, demanding, his breathing harsh and rapid, and Lucy drank it in, his passion elevating hers.
She hadn’t meant to come in here and seduce him. Not exactly, anyway, but clearly that was what she’d done. And this time they were not in a public place, there was no family nearby. They were in a deserted restaurant with just the heady scents of chocolate and orange surrounding them.
Bryan’s kisses moved from her mouth to her jaw and down her neck to her collarbone. He caressed her breast through the thin warmup. “You’re not wearing a bra.”
“I dressed in a hurry.” She pulled his hand against her breast again, hungry for the feel of him. She wanted his touch everywhere on her body.
He slid the zipper on her shirt down, following with a trail of kisses that ended between her breasts. Then he insinuated his hand inside the shirt and eased the fabric aside, bringing her breast out into the light.
He pushed her up against the Sub-Zero fridge and kissed her breast, first with reverence, then with an increasing hunger. As he suckled, flames of hot desire shot from her breast through her body to the very core of her, and the heat made her whimper with need.
He peeled off her shirt and then his, fumbling with the buttons in his haste, getting his hand caught in the cuff, tugging until buttons flew off. He pressed his bare chest against hers and groaned.
“Oh, yes.” The hair on his chest abraded her sensitive nipples, sending more of those white-hot flames licking through her, making her squirm.
“Lucy, we have to stop.”
“Oh, no. No, no, no, don’t do this to me.”
“We don’t have any birth control.”
“We don’t need it. I have the implant.”
“Seriously?”
She went to work on his linen suit pants. “I wouldn’t joke about something like that. Now, make love to me, Bryan Elliott, or that pot of chocolate sauce is going over your head.”
Seven
Bryan had always been a man who used his good judgment in all decisions, but he was beyond judgment now. Lucy Miller had just removed the last barrier to their making love. No unforeseen consequences could result from their intimacy.
He kissed her again, inhaling her. She smelled even better than the chocolate, which would have been a poor substitute for indulging in Lucy.
“I should take you up to bed,” he whispered.
“No. You’ll change your mind if I give you even half a chance.”
“Or you will.” He slid both hands inside the stretchy waist of her warmup pants. She wore only the briefest of thongs under them, which meant her cheeks were bare. He filled his hands with her rounded bottom while he continued kissing her, rubbing up against her small but perfect breasts. Her nipples were hard as glass beads against his chest, and they burned him like a brand.
She managed to get his pants unfastened and her own hands were as busy as his. She thrust them inside his boxers, groaning as one hand found his arousal.
“Whoa, Lucy.” He had to distract her or he was going to go off like a defective bottle rocket. He couldn’t recall the last time he was this turned on, possibly never. But he felt as if the foreplay had been going on all evening. Every look she gave him, every innocent or not-so-innocent touch, had led to this.
He pulled her pants and thong down past her knees in one fluid movement. She gasped in surprise, but she was about to get an even bigger surprise. He leaned down, placed a shoulder against her waist, wrapped his arms around her thighs, and picked her up in a fireman’s carry.
She squealed in protest. “Bryan, what are you doing? Put me down.” She reached out and slapped at his rear, but it was hardly more than a tap.
He retaliated with a slightly smarter smack to her bare bottom. “Behave.”
“Ow!” She laughed. “What are you doing?”
He carried her only as far as the large counter where the chefs assembled the plates of food just before the wait staff whisked them out to their patrons. “You think you’re the only one who’s allowed to do something outrageous? You think you’re the only one who can seduce?”
“Oh, Bryan, I didn’t set out to seduce you. Not really.” She wrapped her hands around his head, pressing his face against her breasts, and he didn’t protest. He was in heaven.
“I was worried about you. You’d been gone so long. If you hadn’t had the whipped cream on your face, this never would have happened.”
“Well, it did, missy. You started it and I’m going to finish it.” He leaned against her, pushing her until she lay with her back on the counter. Then he stripped her pants and underwear all the way off her feet, pulling off her running shoes in the process. They dropped with a clunk to the floor, and he pulled her knees apart and stepped between her thighs.
She quivered with anticipation, and he had to admit it would have been easy just to drop his own pants and bury himself in her. He tested her readiness with one finger and felt that she was slick.
She gasped at his featherlight touch.
“Please,” she said. “Do it now.”
Not before he’d tasted her. With his own stomach knotted in anticipation, he leaned down and, using his fingers to open her, lightly grazed her with a flick of his tongue.
She wiggled and moaned again. “Oh, no, please, no more …”
“Maybe you’ll think twice before you do that trick with the chocolate sauce again,” he said with a low growl before tasting her once more. He held her hips firmly so she couldn’t wiggle right out of his reach, and he tasted her yet again, drinking more deeply this time, letting his tongue explore.
Lucy reached out and grabbed a handful of his hair. “Bryan!”
He did not take pity on her. He waited until he sensed she was verging on the peak of pleasure. Then he raised up, shed his own garments, slid her hips to the edge of the counter and plunged himself into her warmth.
“Oh!” Lucy cried out. “I can’t—Oh, my—”
Bryan thrust again, more deeply this time, and again until he was buried to the hilt. She was tight and warm and slick and he was going to lose control of himself. It was too much.
He felt Lucy’s spasms of ecstasy just before she cried out one last time. Three more hard thrusts, and it was over for him, too, but he’d known he wouldn’t last long inside Lucy. Not with the buildup he’d had over the past hours—hell, the past days.
Lucy sat up suddenly and, still joined to him, threw her arms around him and kissed him. She clung sweetly to him and rubbed her face against his hair.
“Please don’t leave me, don’t ever leave me,” she said. “I want to be together like this forever.”
He thought about telling her how awkward it would be for the chefs to work around them when they came to work tomorrow, but he held his tongue. This wasn’t a moment for humor.
Lucy might seem strong, but in many ways she was fragile, and he had to remember that. She might have been a bit brazen tonight, but he knew she didn’t take this sort of thing casually.
He tried not to take her plea about never leaving too seriously. People said all kinds of strange things during a sexual climax. Refined ladies cursed like sailors, and sailors wept like children.
He hoped she didn’t mean anything by it. Because he would leave her eventually. No matter how much he didn’t want to.
He gently separated himself from her, wrapped his arms around her and slid her off the counter and onto legs that wobbled slightly before she found her balance.
“You okay?” He smoothed her hair out of her face.
“I think I’ll live.”
“Ready to put your clothes on and go upstairs?”
“You aren’t seriously asking me to go upstairs without eating some of that cake, are you?”
Funny, he’d forgotten all about the cake. “Let’s take it with us. We can eat it in bed.”
She grinned, pushed him farther away from her and retrieved her discarded clothes. “Last one dressed has to spread whipped cream all over the other one and lick it off.”
That was one contest Bryan wouldn’t mind losing—though winning sounded pretty good, too.
Lucy had sobered by the time they got upstairs, fully dressed and carrying two plates of cake plus the rest of the dessert, which Bryan had sealed into a Tupperware cake plate.
Her face grew warm as she recalled how wanton she’d been—and then how she’d clung to Bryan, pleading with him not to leave.
She hadn’t meant to do that last part. She’d still been in the throes of the most intense orgasm of her life, and the words had just poured out of her right past her brain.
She knew she still had some issues about Cruz Tabor. The In Tight drummer had ended the relationship without warning, in the cruelest of fashions, and now she had a sort of phobia about being abandoned.
But such pleas would be useless where Bryan was concerned. Their relationship could not be anything but temporary. He’d given her fair warning—unlike that bastard Cruz, who’d led her to believe he was crazy in love with her and that he would marry her someday.
She would just make things worse if she clung to Bryan. She had to adopt the mindset that every day they had together was a gift, and that when they inevitably parted ways, she would have some incredible memories and, hopefully, no hard feelings.
Hell, she wasn’t even sure Bryan wanted to have a relationship, temporary or otherwise. She’d pushed him into sex, and men were pretty helpless to say no when sex was offered.
She chanced a glance at him as the elevator reached his loft. He was staring at her.
“What?” she said with a nervous giggle.
“You’re just so absolutely gorgeous I can’t stop looking at you.”
“Oh, yeah, right. In these really sexy clothes, no makeup, glasses, my hair’s a wreck—”
“Stop that. You are beautiful, with or without designer clothes and cosmetics. I don’t know who told you you weren’t, but he was an idiot.”
The door opened, and he ushered her ahead of him.
“It wasn’t a he. It was my mother. She thought I was going straight to hell when I died anyway, for being willful and lazy and disrespectful. But she said that at least she didn’t have to worry about me doing bad things with boys, because God hadn’t gifted me in a way that would make any boy take notice.”
Lucy had always made light of her mother’s criticism, but saying the words aloud after all these years still produced a tightness in her chest.
“That’s criminal,” Bryan said, his jaw pulsating. “No wonder you don’t miss your parents so much.”
“Oh, she meant well. She was always so afraid for me—afraid for my soul. She just knew I was headed down the path straight to hell. The sad thing was, I proved her right.”
