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“What, are you a waiter now?” she asked, amused at the thought of him waiting tables. Especially since that chest of his could probably double as one.
Nick had, like all the Santori kids, worked in the restaurant in high school. Just as Izzie had worked in the bakery—often eating her paycheck to sweeten her teenage angst.
But he’d been in the Marines for years. She didn’t see him slinging pizzas now that he was back in Chicago. Not after he’d been slinging Uzis or whatever those macho soldier guys carried.
“Maybe. Why don’t you tell me what you want and I’ll let you know if I can get it for you?”
Thin and cheesy New York style pizza was the first thing that came to mind, but Izzie didn’t want to get strung up at the corner of Taylor and Racine. “I already placed my order.”
He smiled slightly. “I wasn’t just talking about pizza.”
God, was that…it was. There was a flirtatious twinkle in those blackish-brown eyes of his. He’d been throwing some subtle innuendo at her and it had gone clear over her head.
“Oh,” was all she could manage.
Cake flour must have clogged her femme-fatale genes in the past two months. It was the only way someone with her experience with men could have missed his double meaning.
“Want to sit while you wait for your order?” he asked, gesturing toward a few chairs in the waiting area.
“No, thanks.” She fell silent. If she opened her mouth again, she might do something stupid like throw out a dumb, “Wow, what I wouldn’t have given for you to look at me like that when I was a teenager,” line, which she so didn’t want to do.
She zipped her lips. She’d be Izzie the uninterested mute. Which was better than Izzie the lovesick mutant.
“How about at a table?”
“At a table…what?”
He smiled again, that sexy, self-confident smile that had probably had woman on five continents dropping their panties within sixty seconds of meeting him. “We can sit at a table while you wait for your order.”
God, she was an idiot. “No, I’m fine here, thank you.”
She had to give herself a break for being so slow. After all, Nick Santori had been scrambling her brains since she was ten—right around the time her sister Gloria had started dating his brother Tony. And though he’d always had a way with females, he’d never looked twice at her that way.
Especially not since Gloria and Tony’s wedding. The one where she’d tripped on her ugly puce gown—which hugged her tubby hips and butt—while they were dancing the obligatory wedding party waltz. She, the kid who’d been in dance lessons since the age of three, had tripped.
Maybe it wasn’t so shocking. She’d been worried about what he’d think of her sweaty palms. She’d been terrified that her makeup was smearing off her face and revealing that she’d had the mother of all break-outs that morning.
Nervous plus terrified times the pitter-patter of her heart and the achy tingle in her small breasts from where they brushed against the lapels of Nick’s tux had left her dizzy. So dizzy she’d stepped off the edge of the slightly raised dance floor and crashed both of them onto a table full of cookies and pastries made especially by her parents for the wedding.
It hadn’t been pretty.
Colorful candy-covered almonds had flown in all directions. Her butt had landed on a platter of cream puffs, her elbows in two stacks of pizelles. Her dress had flown up to her waist to reveal the panty girdle she’d worn in an effort to hide her after-school-cookie-binging bulge.
The icing on the five-tiered Italian cream wedding cake—which she’d somehow managed to not destroy—had been Nick. He’d gotten tangled up in her dress, and had landed on top of her, sprawled across her chest.
And right between her legs.
It was the first—and last—time she’d figured Nick Santori would be between her legs, which both broke her heart and fueled some intense fantasies throughout her high-school years. Shocked by the unexpectedness and the pleasure of it, she’d been slow to part those legs and let him up. Slow enough for the moment to go from embarrassingly long to indecently shocking.
She’d thought her mother was going to kill her afterward.
But that wasn’t all. Because Izzie had the luck of someone who broke mirrors for a living, the incident had also been the money shot of the whole day. The videographer caught the whole thing on film, creating a masterpiece that would taunt her throughout eternity.
She’d been a laughingstock. Everyone in the crowd had whooped and clapped and teased her about it for months afterward. She might as well have worn a banner proclaiming herself, “Lovesick pubescent girl who crushed the cookies and dry-humped the groomsman at the Santori-Natale wedding.”
“I haven’t seen you in here before,” he said, finally breaking the silence that had fallen between them.
“I come here a couple of times a week,” she replied.
He shrugged. “I’ve been gone a long time.”
“In the military.”
“Right. Things have definitely changed around here in the past twelve years.”
“Maybe in some ways,” she said. Then she glanced around and saw a minimum of five people she knew—all watching intently as she talked to Nick. Frowning, she muttered, “In some ways it’s still the same small town hell it always was.”
She surprised a laugh out of him. “I somehow think we have a lot in common.”
His laughter softened his tanned face, bringing out tiny lines beside his eyes. It also made him utterly irresistible, as several women sitting nearby undoubtedly noticed.
Nick had been incredibly hot as a teenager. Lean and wiry, dark and intense. As a thirty-year-old-man he was absolutely drool-worthy. Not that he’d changed a lot—he’d just matured. Where he’d been a sexy guy, he was now a tough, heartstopping male, big and broad, powerful and intimidating.
She didn’t suspect he’d changed on the inside, though. Once a Santori male, always a Santori male. The men of that family had always been good-hearted.
Honestly, looking back, if Nick had been a jerk about what had happened at the wedding, she might have gotten over her crush a lot sooner and this moment might be a lot simpler. She could tell him to f-off, remind him he’d once laughed at her and added to her humiliation. Only…he hadn’t. Curse the man.
He’d been very sweet, carefully helping her up—once she’d released her thunder-thigh death grip from around his hips. He’d gently wiped powdered sugar and cream off her cheek. He’d helped her pull her dress back down into place without making one crack about her chubby thighs or her panty girdle. He’d pretended she hadn’t practically assaulted him. And he’d helped her back up onto the dance floor and continued their dance. Absolutely the only annoying thing he’d done was to start calling her Cookie.
As her mother often said, he’d been raised right. Just like his brothers. He was every bit a gentleman—a protector—and he’d never given her a sideways glance that hadn’t been merely friendly. In his eyes, she’d always been Gloria’s baby sister—the chubby ballerina who looked like a little stuffed sausage in her pink tutu and tights and he’d treated her with nothing but big-brotherly kindness.
Until now.
Fortunately, though, she wasn’t sweet Izzie the cookie-gobbling machine anymore. He hadn’t seen her for almost a decade…she no longer blushed and stammered when a hot guy teased her. And she no longer even tried to imagine she could have been a ballerina with her less-than-willowy figure.
Once she’d stopped eating pastries and hit brick-shithouse stature at age eighteen, she’d known her future as a dancer would come from another direction than the ballet.
She’d also learned how to handle men.
Now, she was in the driver’s seat when it came to seduction. She’d been running the show with men for years. And it was high time to let Nick Santori know it.
“So, when you offered to serve me…what were you talking about?” she asked, swiping her tongue across her lips. It was a move she’d perfected in her Rockettes dressing room. Men used to come backstage, trying to pick up the dancers and they all went for the lip-licking. God, males were so predictable. She held her breath, hoping for more from this one.
And she got it.
“I’m talking about me serving you with a line and you tipping me with your number. But since it’s crowded and I’m rusty at that stuff, why don’t you just give me the number?”
Izzie had to laugh. If he’d come back with a smooth line, the laugh would have been at his expense—because she doubted there was one he hadn’t heard. But Nick had been completely honest, which she found incredibly attractive.
She also laughed to hide the nervous thrill she’d gotten when she realized Nick Santori really did want her number. That he really was trying to pick her up.
Her…the girl he’d once complained about having to dance with at a wedding. What were the odds?
“I think I’ve got your number.” She’d had it for years.
He didn’t give up. “Use it. Please.”
He meant it. He wasn’t teasing, wasn’t trying to make her blush, wasn’t treating her the way he treated his kid sister, Lottie, who’d been one of her classmates.
Nick Santori was trying to pick her up. Which shouldn’t have been a big deal, but, for some reason, had her heart fluttering around in her chest like a bird trapped in a cage.
“My name’s Nick, by the way.”
No duh. She was about to say that, then she saw the look in his eyes—that serious, intense look. He wasn’t kidding. He wasn’t pretending they were just meeting.
She sagged back against the wall, not sure whether to laugh or punch him in the face.
Because the rotten son of a bitch had no idea who she was.
2
THE WOMAN HAD FLOUR in her hair. She smelled like almonds. Her apron was smeared with icing and whipped cream. Food coloring stained the tips of two of her fingers.
And she was utterly delicious.
The hints of flavor wafting off her couldn’t compete with the innate, warm feminine scent of her body, which assaulted Nick’s senses the way no full frontal attack ever had. Though they were in a crowded restaurant, surrounded by customers and members of his own family, hers was the only presence he felt. He’d been drawn to her, captured in an intimate world they’d created the moment their eyes had locked.
“You’re name’s Nick,” she said, as if making sure. Her voice was a little hard, her dark eyes narrowing.
Worried she had an ex with the same name, he replied, “I’ll answer to anything you want to call me.”
“Anything?”
He nodded, unable to take his attention from that bit of flour in her hair. He wanted to lift his hand and brush it away. Then sink his fingers in that thick, brown hair of hers, tugging it free of its ponytail to fall in a loose curtain around her shoulders. His fingers clenched into fists at his sides with the need to tangle those thick tresses in his hands and tug her face toward his for a brain-zapping kiss.
She had the kind of mouth that begged for kissing. One that promised pleasure. God, it had been a long time since he’d really kissed a woman the way he liked to kiss a woman. Slowly. Deeply. With a thorough exploration of every curve and crevice.
Recently, his sex life had been limited by proximity and his active status. He hadn’t had any kind of relationship in years. And the sex he had was usually of the quick, one-night variety, where slow, indulgent kissing wasn’t on the agenda.
He could kiss this woman’s mouth for hours.
Nick didn’t understand why he was so drawn to her. All he knew was that he was attracted to her in a way he hadn’t been attracted to anyone for a long time. Not just because she was beautiful under the apron and that messy ponytail. But because of the wistful, lonely look she’d worn earlier that said she didn’t quite belong here and she knew it. Just like the one he’d had on his face lately.
“You’re single?” he asked, wanting that confirmed.
She nodded, the movement setting her ponytail swinging. It caught the reflection of a candle on the closest table, the strands glimmering in a veil of browns and golds that made his heart clang against his lungs.
“What’s your name?” he finally asked.
She arched one fine eyebrow. “We haven’t settled on what we’re going to call you yet.”
He turned, edging closer to her as a group came into the restaurant. The brunette slid along the wall, farther away from anyone else. Nick followed, irresistibly drawn by her scent and the mystery in her eyes. “I guess you have a Nick in your past?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It didn’t go well?”
“I’d have to say that’s a no.”
“Bad breakup?”
“No. We never even dated.” One side of her mouth tilted up in a half-smile. It held no happiness, merely jaded amuse ment. “He barely even noticed my existence.”
“Then he was an idiot.”
The other side of her mouth came up; this time her genuine amusement shone clearly. “Oh, undoubtedly.”
“He didn’t deserve you.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You’re better off without him.”
“Nobody knows that better than me.” She sounded more amused now, as if her guard was coming down.
“Enough about him,” Nick said. “If you don’t like my first name, call me by my last one. It’s Santori.”
He watched for a flare of surprise, a darting of the eyes to the sign in the window, proclaiming the name of the place.
Strangely, she didn’t react at all. “I think we’ve already determined what I should call you. You said it yourself.”
Puzzled, Nick just waited.
“Idiot,” she said, tapping the tip of her finger on her cheek, as if thinking about it. “Though, honestly, it doesn’t quite capture you now. It might have sufficed years ago, but for today, I think we’ll have to go with…complete shithead.”
Nick’s jaw fell open. But the sexy brunette wasn’t finished. “By the way, that number you wanted? Here it is, you might want to write it down…1-800-nevergonnahappen.”
And without another word, she shoved at his chest, pushing him out of the way, then strode out the door. Leaving Nick standing there, staring after her in complete shock.
“I’d say that didn’t go well.” Mark stood right behind him, watching—as was Nick—as the brunette marched off down the street like she’d just kicked somebody’s ass.
Well, she had. Namely his. He just didn’t know why.
“No kidding.”
“I see you haven’t lost your touch with women.”
“Shut up.” Shaking his head in bemusement, he lifted a hand and rubbed his jaw. “I don’t know how I blew that so badly.”
