Hot & Bothered

Victoria blinked as she watched Rocket circle the table to investigate the other models on the shelves. He possessed such bedrock masculinity that she would have thought he’d find her dollhouses too sissy for his consideration—or at least dismiss them with no more than a cursory glance. Instead he seemed fascinated. When he came to the stone castle and glanced over his shoulder at her, his dark eyes all but shot sparks of pure, engaged interest.

“This one’s different. It’s more like a guy’s dollhouse.”

A laugh escaped her. “Good call. I made it for a boy with an extensive collection of metal toy soldiers, most of which are knights, kings, horses and other assorted medieval warriors. It was my first experience with masonry and I’m pretty proud of the way it turned out.” Coming around the worktable to stand next to him, she hauled the castle off the shelf and placed it on the table. “Look.” She reached across his arm and past the turrets into the castle’s open top. “It has a working drawbridge and portcullis and if you move this stone just so—” she demonstrated with a fingertip “—and then the one next to it like this—shazam!” The interior wall swivelled to expose a secret room that had walls bristling with sketches of medieval weaponry.

John laughed. “Excellent! I would have beefed up the back wall here for a better defense, but it looks as if you’ve got the firepower and that’s half the battle. A couple vats of boiling oil, enough supplies to hold off a siege and you’ve got yourself a good chance of holding the fort.” He turned his head to look at her. “Do you make these for a living?”

“Yes.” Finding his face suddenly much too close, his enthusiastic curiosity much too compelling, Victoria eased back a step, trying to ignore the smooth, hot-skinned drag of his inner forearm against her own. “I sort of fell into it by default. I made one for Es and a couple of her friends fell in love with it and wanted one for themselves. Their respective parents commissioned me to make them and from there word of mouth just started to build. It was confined mostly to the Mayfair area of London until last year, when I set up a Web page on the net. Now I’ve got all the work I can handle. More, really. I’ve had to turn commissions away.”

“Have you ever considered mass producing?”

“For about five minutes.” She met his gaze. “But then I rejected the idea. Not only would mass production put me right back in the very situation I was trying to avoid when I left Kimball and Jones—devoting more time to my business than to Esme—it would strip all the individuality out of the process…and probably most of the fun, as well. I need to keep it small. That way I can build each house to suit the little girl—or in the castle’s case, boy—for whom it’s meant. Each child gets a quality, almost-one-of-a-kind dollhouse and I get a creative outlet…not to mention steady employment that’s fairly lucrative for being so selective.” Much too aware of his shoulder bumping up against hers as he leaned down to test the castle’s various working parts, she moved away, going to the shelves and finding make-work straightening the remaining models. “Which reminds me, I should get back to it. You said you had a reason for coming up here?”

When she turned back, she found him checking out her legs once again, but he immediately pulled his gaze up to meet hers. “Yeah. The probability that Jared left town just got a lot stronger. I tracked down the cab driver who picked him up the night your father was murdered.”

“Oh, God.” Feeling her legs go weak, Victoria reached for the stool she used when working at the table and pulled it beneath her hips. “What did he say? Where did he take him?”

“He said the kid was extremely quiet and seemed stunned. Maybe in shock. That when he asked if he was all right, Jared laughed hysterically, but calmed down enough to insist on being taken to the bus station.”

“Did you find out where he went from there?”

“No. I couldn’t find anyone at the station who remembers selling him a ticket. But most teens on the run head for a city and since Denver’s the nearest one to Colorado Springs, odds are better than even that’s where your brother went.”

She pushed to her feet. “I can be ready to leave in ten minutes.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, there. Slow down.” He grabbed hold of her shoulders and leveled a no-nonsense, let’s not-get-ahead-of-ourselves look on her. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“But if that’s where you think he is…”

“Think being the operative word here. Running around like a couple of chickens with their heads cut off won’t gain us anything. We do this the smart way, which means I tap into my resources. First and foremost among those is Stand Up For Kids in Denver.”

“What’s that?”

“An organization that gives aid to runaways and street kids. I’ll give them a call and fax them Jared’s photograph so they can be on the lookout for him when they do their outreach in Skyline Park Sundays and Tuesdays. Kids learn quickly where they can score a free meal and some toiletries, so if Jared’s in Denver, he’ll likely show up at Skyline sooner or later. I’ve worked with this organization before and they know they can trust me not to return a kid to an abusive situation. And in return, I can trust the Stand Up counselors to give me a call as soon as they spot him.”

“Then we go to Denver?”

“Then I do, anyway.”

“If you think I’m sending you off to collect him all by yourself, John, think again. Jared’s bound to be scared to death, and he doesn’t know you from Adam.”

He gave her shoulders a tiny squeeze. “What do you say we wait until we actually have a useable lead before we argue this to a standstill?”

The commonsense suggestion made her realize the silliness of standing here arguing about it now and she couldn’t help but smile. She gave him a poke. “Deal.”

Surprisingly, instead of treating her overture as the tension breaker she’d intended and returning a smile of his own, John frowned. “Dammit, Tori, I wish you hadn’t done that,” he growled. “Now I’ve got no choice but to get an answer to the question that’s been driving me nuts ever since I landed on your doorstep.”

“What question is tha—?” The query hadn’t fully left her mouth before she was caught against his long, hard body. One strong arm slipped down to wrap around her waist and his free hand tunneled beneath her hair to grasp the back of her neck.

She stared up at him in surprised disbelief as his body heat began to permeate every inch of her he touched. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Miglio—?”

John’s mouth, firm, hot and confident, covered hers, cutting off her demand.

For a moment, sheer astonishment held her immobile. Then she absorbed the taste of him, felt the slide of his tongue and with her heart thundering in the outraged fear that she’d never be able to hold herself aloof from this man, she slapped her hands against the solid wall of his chest and gave it a firm shove.

He didn’t even budge and she suddenly recalled his strength, remembered the way it used to intrigue her, titillate her. She remembered, too, the way it had once fulfilled the until-then-unacknowledged little girl inside of her who’d always longed for someone to stand between her and the world. Somebody to keep her safe.

Well, she’d buried that child the day she’d learned to accept once and for all that the only person she could depend on protecting her was herself. And assembling all the resistance at her disposal, she once again flattened her hands, which within seconds of her reintroduction to the warm, wet silk of Rocket’s persuasive kisses, had softened from a shove to a caress against the rigid muscles of his chest.

Even with steady pushing on her part, though, he held her with ease. He displayed not the slightest hint of roughness, yet his determination to hold on to her was unmistakable. And he kissed her with an expertise that sent her resistance down the drain. His mouth was talented and his kisses were sultry. Forceful.

Familiar. God, so familiar. She knew these lips. She’d kissed them before, studied them as they’d shaped words, slipped bites of food between them with her fingers. It had been six years, but some things a woman never forgot.

Every last defense disappeared and she felt herself start to melt at the knees. For one wild, reckless minute, suffused with a blistering pleasure she’d only known once before in her life, she kissed him back fiercely. She reveled in his hot, rich taste, in the slick inner lining of his mouth that she lapped with her tongue, in the tensile strength that supported her weight so effectively as she plastered herself against him in a futile bid to climb right inside his body.

Then before it even occurred to her to muster the will to pull away, John jerked up his head, released her, and took a giant step back.

“Damn.” He brushed the back of his hand against his bottom lip. Then, dropping his hand to his side, he dabbed his tongue against the lip he’d just touched and eyed her sourly. “It’s still there, isn’t it? I’d hoped it was gone, or at least one of those memories I’d blown all out of proportion over the years. But you’re still every bit as addictive as you used to be.” His hot-eyed regard slid over her from the top of her head to her crimson-polished toes. “Christ. You’re like cocaine in a red bra.”

It didn’t exactly thrill her that her first reaction was a sheer, fierce pleasure in knowing he’d been as affected as she. But she’d put sex behind her over the years, had assured herself that she was beyond all that—at least for the time being. The few times she’d actually stopped and thought about it long enough to realize she didn’t even particularly miss it, she’d simply assumed it was because she was too busy with motherhood and making a living. Somewhere in the back of her mind, though, she’d always believed she’d one day introduce it back into her life. Only she never had, and it horrified her to realize now that the reason she’d rarely been tempted by the men she’d dated was because none of them had been him.

Considering she had serious doubts he’d been similarly celibate, his admitting she’d left an impression seemed the least he could do.

She pushed his unexpected revelation aside until she could analyze it more closely at a later, less befuddled time. Giving the shirttails knotted at her waist a tug, she cleared her throat. “We seem to have retained the chemistry, all right,” she agreed, pleased to hear her voice emerge with commendable coolness, considering she felt like one huge, hot, frazzled nerve ending. The only sign she could see that he might feel the same was the hot color burning high on his cheekbones. “So where do you propose we go from here?”

“To our respective corners, where we keep it nice and professional.”

Victoria wondered how that would work with Esme part of the equation, but she gave him a curt nod. Because he was right. Sex was the last thing they needed clouding an already volatile and confusing situation. Keep the physicality out of the picture and they could figure out the rest as they went along. “Great,” she said with frigid composure. “Fine. Works for me.”

She caught him eyeing her legs again, but he yanked his gaze up and lanced her with the blank-eyed military stare. “Yeah. Dandy,” he agreed. “That’s what we’ll do then.”

GOOD GOING THERE, Ace. John stalked back toward the house with angry, long-legged strides. What are you, a fucking moron?

Tori had always been different from any other woman he’d ever known. Right from the beginning she’d been different, and he should have known better than to get within kissing range of her again.

Most people had a milestone or two in their lives, he imagined. One of his had been the day he’d discovered his dick was more generously proportioned than the average guy’s. Up until then, he’d merely been that skin-and-bones sorry-ass kid of Frank Miglionni, the U.S. Navy’s biggest screw-up. Life with the old man after his mom died in a boating accident had been a series of fleabag apartments outside one base or another, because decent housing on base simply offered too many opportunities for Frank to start feuds with the neighbors. It had been living alone when Frank was in the brig, and being waled on when the old man was home and there wasn’t anyone else around to afford him a more interesting challenge.

Then one day shortly after puberty’s onset, John had started yet another new school in yet another new town. And when he’d dropped his pants in the locker room after gym class, half the guys there had stopped what they were doing to offer up variations of the universally deferential holy shit, dude. It was his first taste of respect, and had made him hunger for more. In that moment, he’d grabbed hold of the new identity they offered as if it were a lifeline.

Then he’d learned there were females out there just waiting for a guy with the kind of equipment he possessed, and that was all she wrote. No one had to tell him twice that his cock size was his identity. First girls and then women admitted him into a whole new world of sex, one involving so much more than just his own fist and a raft of sweaty fantasies. It was the closest thing he’d ever found to a religious experience, and once discovered, he was its most faithful disciple. His new goal became pleasuring as many women as he could lay his hands on, and regaling his buddies afterward was just part and parcel of the process. One it never occurred to him to question.

Until he met Tori.

He’d known the moment they met that she was totally different from the Marine groupies he usually encountered. But he sure as hell hadn’t anticipated the way she would affect him. He’d just blithely laid down the same rules and set the same parameters he always had, never dreaming she’d effect the biggest change in his life since that first milestone. But something about her made him realize he was more than the missile behind his fly that had garnered him the handle Rocket by his Marine buddies. And the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach when he thought of anyone discussing her the way he had discussed so many others altered forever his ability to share the details of his sexual encounters with his friends.

“Hello, Mr. M.”

The soft-voiced greeting jerked him out of remembrances of sun-drenched days and hot steamy nights. Brought him back from a time when killer sex shouldn’t have seemed brand-new, yet somehow had—mixed up as it had been with emotions he’d never before experienced. He had to blink before he could focus on the housekeeper and was startled to realize she was only a foot or two shy of crossing his path as she headed for the staircase, carrying a stack of fluffy bath sheets in her arms.

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