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Silence fell in the car again. Nikki thought about how to dance for him. What would a guy like Adam be looking for?
“Do you have an iPod or anything for music?” she asked. She hadn’t gotten around to downloading any songs on her own phone.
“Um. No, but there’s a clock radio in the room.”
Nikki nodded. Not ideal, but it would work in a pinch. Now…how to read him? She might as well ask.
“So,” she blurted. “Do you like it fast and skanky, or do you prefer slow and sensual?”
Adam’s jaw dropped. He swiveled toward her and the ice pack fell off his nose and into his lap. “Excuse me?” he asked, in strangled tones.
4
UNDER THE ICE PACK, Adam popped a woody. Had the girl really asked him that?
“Oh, my God!” she said. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I meant, you know, about dancing.”
Adam’s brain was still locked on the concept of fast and skanky sex, even though he tried valiantly to get rid of the images. It didn’t help that the girl sitting in the driver’s seat was so smoothly, er, curvilinear. Or that he’d seen her practically naked, peered either up or down every one of her female crevices.
His woody wasn’t going anywhere, which was inconvenient to say the least, since they were now approaching the hotel. Down, boy! Play dead.
Adam really didn’t want to do introductions in the parking lot. Nikki, meet Johnson. He’s enthusiastic to make your acquaintance…as you can see.
Adam got himself under control with difficulty as he gave her somewhat convoluted directions on purpose. At last Nikki pulled into the Marriott Courtyard where he and the guys were staying.
“Didn’t we just pass this?” Nikki inquired.
Adam mumbled something about being tired and forgetting to tell her to turn, but her puzzled frown told him that she didn’t buy it.
Nikki opened the driver’s-side door and got out, treating him to another view of her spectacular legs and ass, though he vaguely wished she hadn’t felt the need to put on the skirt.
He got out as she surreptitiously scratched at one of her insect bites, and he took pity on her. “I have a first-aid kit with some cortisone cream in my room.” It stayed permanently in his carry-on, and had come in handy more than once.
She nodded, her face a study in mortification under all that makeup. “Thanks.” She wobbled along next to him and he took her arm to brace her as they crossed a small hillock of grass to reach the sidewalk.
Adam slid the key card through the slot at the rear door of the place, and stood aside to let Nikki enter before him. That was when he noticed the little clumps of mud and grass stuck to her spike heels. He turned his sudden laughter into a cough/snort.
Nikki turned. “Are you okay?”
“F-fine,” Adam said. “Allergies.” And he led the combination stripper/lawn-aerator to room 198. Another electronic snick and they walked inside.
The door closed behind them and the two of them stood there like morons, Adam looking everywhere but at her and she looking everywhere but at him. Finally he broke the silence. “I believe I promised you some cortisone cream.”
“Oh, yes,” she said gratefully. “And you should probably get some more ice for your nose.”
He nodded.
Adam went into the bathroom and rummaged the tube of cream out of the first-aid kit. He handed it to her, noticing that the skin of her chest and neck had flushed deep scarlet and perspiration had beaded at her temples. Clearly she was nervous. Had she really never done this before?
As she took the cap off the tube and squeezed some cream onto her finger, he retreated back into the bathroom, wet a washcloth with cold water and brought it out to her. He stopped at the sight of Nikki, twisted like a pretzel with her skirt rucked up, rubbing at the bites on her behind.
How anyone could find the sight provocative, he didn’t know—he guessed he was just an unusual guy. But the position she was in elongated her neck and emphasized her curves, displaying all the lean muscle on either side of her elegant spine and the sexy flare of narrow waist into hips.
If only he could get past the indignity of what she was doing, she’d look like one of those portraits of nude bathers that he’d seen in museums. Though he doubted that Degas or Renoir had ever painted anything called Nude with Cortisone Cream.
“That’s much better,” she declared, pulling down her skirt again with a forced smile. She handed back the tube. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“So, I guess I’ll just, um, turn on the radio…and you can get, um, comfortable.”
While she gets even more uncomfortable. But Adam nodded and she teetered over to the nightstand and began to fiddle with the clock. A burst of static had both of them wincing, but Adam couldn’t look away from the sight of her bent over.
“What kind of music do you like?” Nikki asked over her shoulder.
“Any rock station is fine.” He swallowed hard. He remembered from the bar that she appeared to be completely hairless under that tiny thong she wore. Completely.
“I’m just, uh, going to go get that ice,” he said in strangled tones. “Be right back.”
“Okay.” She looked relieved, and he wondered if she’d bolt while he was out of the room. But when he returned with some fresh ice cubes in his nose pack, she was still there, swaying awkwardly to an oldie but goodie—”Light My Fire” by the Doors.
“I can do this,” she declared, as if she were trying to convince herself as well as him.
“Even with no pole, huh?” He couldn’t resist teasing her a little bit.
“Oh. I forgot about the pole,” she said, looking distressed.
“Don’t worry about it. You can use a chair or something, right?” Adam pulled a chair out from under the room’s desk and set it in the middle of the floor. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and held the ice pack to his nose.
Nikki took a deep breath, approached the chair and grasped the back. Then she began.
She gyrated her hips to the beat of the music and pressed her pink lips into a pout. After a few moments, she took the bottom of her shirt into both hands and began easing it up, teasing him with the sight of her breasts in a red push-up bra. She whipped the shirt over her head and spun around.
When she turned to face him again, she ran a hand down her smooth, flat stomach, sort of slithering it around. She played with the button at the waistband of her skirt.
The bra was the second article of clothing to go, leaving her breasts bare except for a pair of strategically placed pasties with tiny tassels that shook in every direction and betrayed her total lack of rhythm, but who cared.
She was all enticing skin and curves.
A minute or so later, she ditched the skirt, letting it drop to the floor. She stepped out of it, gyrating her hips, and kicked it to the side.
Adam’s woody made a return appearance when she plunged her hand into the front of the G-string.
Adam stopped breathing at the sight.
She rotated her hips as if they were mounted on ball bearings, then leaned forward and squeezed her breasts between her arms so that they thrust forward. Then she worked her shoulders, shimmying them, too.
A cold trickle of water, followed by another one, rolled down Adam’s throbbing nose and dropped onto his now equally throbbing denim-clad crotch. He was half-afraid it would start to steam.
Nikki put her hands up to her hair and pushed it on top of her head as she gyrated, letting it tumble down over her shoulders as she turned her back to him. Hot! Hot!
But then his gaze dropped again to her ass and the mosquito bites, now shiny with cortisone cream…not to mention the tufts of mud and grass on her heels. Worse, the twin mosquito bites now stared out at him from each cheek like a couple of angry red eyes.
Her thong formed two frowning eyebrows as it dipped horizontally from each hip, and the vertical part in this context looked like a nose. The cheeks were, well, cheeks. And that sweet, sweet underside as her bottom met her thighs—well, it grimaced at him.
Adam couldn’t help himself—he guffawed, knowing as he did so that it was probably the worst offense he could commit.
Nikki stopped dead, her whole body stiffening in outrage.
He winced and ducked reflexively, thinking that she’d throw something at him. But it wasn’t anger on her face as she turned—it was something much worse: shame. Complete and utter humiliation. And shock. And deep, deep hurt.
“Nikki—”
Shaking, she ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.
Nice, Adam. You’ve sure gone and done it now, haven’t you? His bedside manner needed work. He groaned and walked to the door, then knocked softly. “Nikki, I wasn’t laughing at you—”
“Yes, you were!” Her voice was thick with shame.
“No, not the way you think.”
“I know I have no rhythm or talent and I know I’m fat,” she wailed.
“Fat? Are you crazy? No, Nikki, you’re not. And you do have talent…” Okay, not much, but enough to get a guy’s motor running, that was for sure.
“It was the M&M’s,” she blurted.
“Huh?”
“Oh, God…why don’t you have something in here that I can just kill myself with?”
Alarmed, Adam tried the knob, but she’d locked herself in. “Nikki, you can’t be serious. Please, please, let me explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain,” she wailed. “I danced and you laughed.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, no, no. Look, just give me a chance—”
“You would have to have an electric shaver,” she said bitterly. “I can’t slit my wrists with that.”
“Nikki!”
“And no sleeping pills. Not even any freaking dental floss that I could strangle myself with.”
“Nikki, don’t you think you’re blowing this out of proportion? I mean, even if I had laughed at your dancing—”
“You did!” This time she bellowed it.
“No, I didn’t. Not the way you think.” Adam ran his hands over his face, which was a mistake, since he aggravated his nose all over again. “Look. Nikki, do you have a sense of humor?”
“What?”
“I asked if you have a sense of humor.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you have to ask,” Adam said patiently, “then you probably don’t have one.”
“I do, too.”
O-kay. “Then turn around and look at your, uh, bottom in the mirror.”
Silence. Then, she said, “You want me to check out my own butt?”
“Yes. Just do it.”
More silence. “Whatever,” she said, in tones that indicated she was only humoring a lunatic.
Adam waited.
“Oh, my God!” she shrieked. “It looks like there’s a whole face back there!”
“Exactly.”
Now a definite giggle emerged from behind the bathroom door. Almost faint with relief, Adam made another suggestion. “Okay, now look at your heels.”
This time she whooped.
More progress.
“I ask you,” Adam appealed to her, “if you would not have laughed yourself.”
Silence.
Then Nikki unlocked and opened the door, her eyes brimming with mischief and streaky makeup behind the wet washcloth she held to her flushed face. She’d pulled on the hotel’s terry bathrobe.
Adam held up his hands, palms out. “Funny?”
“Funny,” she confirmed, nodding.
He nodded, having absolutely no clue what to do or say next. “Listen, I feel really bad that you thought I was laughing at your dancing.”
“It’s okay.” She scrubbed at her eyes with the cloth, only succeeding in smearing around all the black and purple goop she had on.
“Can I fix you a drink from the minibar while you take that stuff off your face? It’s the least I can do to make things up to you.”
