As they continued walking, one of the fingers circling her arm straightened, then stroked against the side of her breast.
Bailey’s breath caught in her lungs.
That wasn’t a mistake. He did it again.
She flicked him a sideways glance. His expression was closed, and she was on his left side so couldn’t read anything in the patch that covered his eye. He caressed her once more.
Her knees melted.
“Okay?”
His tense, low-voiced question shivered down her spine. Okay? She was simmering like soup in a pan and he wanted it that way. He couldn’t pretend not to know what he was wreaking with those secret strokes.
“Bailey? Okay?”
What was she supposed to say? I sat through a dinner that made me want to cry and now I’m walking down the street and needing you and that makes me want to cry too.
Honesty didn’t seem the right way to go, but she had to come up with something. She looked down at her bare hands for inspiration and said the first dumb thing that popped into her dizzy brain. “I’m thinking I don’t have so much as a promise ring, let alone one that proclaims we’re engaged.”
Finn’s step hitched. His jaw hardened.
Bailey felt like an idiot. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding.” Then she sighed, knowing there was no joke, no laugh, nothing that would make walking down the street with this elephant between them possible Sighing, she stopped short to turn and grip the lapels of his coat.
“I’m confused, Finn.”
“About?”
The dinner we just had? And now your hand teasing my breast? “You and Ayesha,” she said. “The two of you…” Stupid how hard those words were to say. But of course he’d moved on with his life. She cleared her throat. “The two of you were in love, right?”
He was staring down at her fingers on his coat. “What makes you say that?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Spencer couldn’t have made it any clearer without taking out an ad.”
There was a long silence, then he dropped her arm.
“You’re wrong. They’re wrong. Sort of.” His gaze focused over her head, down the dark street. “She had feelings for me. Maybe…” He shrugged. “But we worked together and I didn’t think it was a good idea to take things in that direction.”
“So you didn’t have feelings for her?”
“Damn it!” The barked words caused a passing couple to give them a startled glance, then hurry off. His fingers curled into fists. “Do we have to do this? Do we have to talk now?”
But Bailey wouldn’t back down, ironic as it was that at the start of the evening she’d been dreading a personal conversation. “No. We can go back to Coronado, leaving forever the mystery of why you brought me tonight and why-”
He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her up on her tiptoes so they were face-to-face. “Why I want you so bad I’m walking with a flagpole in my pants? Why your nipples are so hard it looks like you stuffed cherries in your bra?”
She jerked back in his grasp. “Finn-”
Her bad boy kissed her quiet. Fierce, demanding, all hot lips and needy tongue, and the only things swept clean were the sensible objections from her head.
Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas
Facts & Fun Calendar
December 13
Bell ringing at Christmas is a holdover from pagan times when noisemakers were sounded to frighten away evil spirits during winter solstice festivals.
Chapter 13
Towing Bailey in the direction of his loft, Finn knew he’d had too much to drink-though he wasn’t anywhere near binge drunk. Christ, that would be easier. Then he’d be on his way to passing out and feeling nothing, not the grinding loss of Ayesha or the greedy hunger for the woman beside him. There was disaster in the offing, he could feel it, smell it like cordite in the air, but he didn’t give a flying fuck about his sixth sense this time.
“What are we doing? Where are we going?”
He shut her up again by hauling her close for another kiss, thrusting his tongue in her mouth to ensure she kept quiet. There’d been enough of talking tonight and now every cell and fiber of him craved action.
For days, months, hell, it felt like years, he’d been living in the past. Tonight he needed something more than memories and regrets. Something that was now.
The rest of the world might wait until December 31. For Finn, this was the moment to usher out the old and bring in the new.
He set Bailey back on her heels. Her eyes were wide. Her mouth was wet. She licked at his taste on her bottom lip, and at the sight of her pink, velvety tongue, his cock jerked against the hot skin of his belly.
“I’m going home,” he told her, his voice hoarse. Dark, like his mood. “To my loft. Are you with me?”
Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed her hand and pulled her into the lobby of the next building.
“Why do I hear an ‘or against me’ in the air?” she asked, even as he gave a nod at the security guard and pushed her into the waiting elevator.
When the doors shushed shut, he backed her into a corner and circled her waist with his hands. Desire was pumping like a steady back rhythm in his blood, a beat on two, a beat on four, driving up his temperature. Driving up his desperation.
“I’m not playing word games, GND. I want to touch you. Feel you.” She started to say something, but his right fingers pressed briefly against her lips. “In silence.”
She blinked. “Silence?”
He slid his hands up the bumps of her ribs to stop just below her breasts. Her short, fast breaths pushed the edge of his fingers closer to their soft rise. “Near silence, then. You’re allowed ‘like that,’ ‘there,’ ‘please,’ ‘more.’ Nothing else.”
Bailey had never asked for his touch in her life, but he needed to be sure tonight was without words. Without emotions.
With only that insistent thump of blood in his veins.
She swallowed, a flush rising on her throat. “Finn-”
His hands cupped her breasts, squeezed. “Decide.”
The elevator doors opened before she had a chance to reply. He tugged her through them and then to his front door. It opened, then shut with a firm click, leaving them alone in the locked privacy of his loft.
He pushed her against the gunmetal gray paint, staring her down in the dim glow of the one lamp he’d left on in the living area. “Sex, or no?”
She wanted him, he didn’t doubt that, but she could still roll her heaven-blue eyes. “Oh gee, stop with the hearts and flowers, will ya?”
He wouldn’t tell her he’d broken the bank in the hearts and flowers department ten years ago and she’d run away before he could prove it to her. That was then; this was now. “Why are you complaining? From what I can tell your bed’s been empty lately.”
She stiffened. “You really investigated me?”
“Didn’t have to. I know you, remember?” Action. Bending his head, he tongued the curve where her jaw met her throat. “You’re picky.”
She shivered under his hands. “I…I picked you, didn’t I?” The words sounded shaky. “Wh-what does that say?”
He feathered kisses from her ear to her mouth. “That you’re talking too much. We’re talking too much.”
Without words, remember? Without emotion. His teeth nipped her bottom lip.
She arched against him, and he heard that telltale swallowed moan that was the muted sound of Bailey turned on.
Just like that, the two and four rhythmic pound of his blood expanded to a heavy metal-band blast beat. In music production it could create a wall of sound. In Finn it created an explosion of want.