Her Secret Santa Read online

  “Hey. My space.”

  “I like your space. Did you figure out if you want me to take off my jeans yet?”

  “Yes. No!” She closed her eyes. “They stay on.”

  “Let me know if that changes.” He was in close enough that his warm breath brushed her temple. “And as for me sitting next to you, it was for the discussion we’re going to be having about hot massage oil, sex manuals and naked Santas. I thought you’d want a little discretion.”

  Yes, but she also wanted distance, from his big, bad, tough, gorgeous bod. With distance, she could remember that she’d been hurt and embarrassed by the fact that six months ago she hadn’t been enough to hold his interest for more than two dates and she didn’t think anything had changed there. Bottom line, she’d thought they could have had something…

  Hell, she still thought it. Damn him.

  He was slouched back, legs sprawled out in front of him, one long arm stretched out along the back of the booth behind her. He had shoved his sunglasses to the top of his head and had at least a day’s growth of stubble growing on his strong jaw. He looked more than a little dangerous.

  Luckily she already knew she was only in danger if she let down her guard—and that wasn’t going to happen again.

  Their waitress was young and cute and snapping a wad of bubble gum, which she almost swallowed when Eddie smiled at her. “What can I get you?” she practically purred.

  He turned to Ally, a question in his gaze. “What sounds good?”

  What sounded good? His voice. “Pizza.”

  “Pizza it is,” he said. “And two beers.”

  The waitress beamed at him as if he’d just given her the moon, then she bounced off. Yes, bounced. Allie slid him a look. “Does that ever get old?”

  “What?”

  “The adoration?”

  He smiled the smile of a man confident in his own skin. “No.”

  Rolling her eyes, Ally leaned back when the waitress brought their beers. She was a complete lightweight in the alcohol department but she had a feeling that tonight she’d need the fortification. She took a long pull, watching as Eddie did the same.

  Then he set down his bottle, gave her a heavy-lidded look, and pulled open the sex manual to the bookmarked page. “Interesting.”

  Thinking he’d found something she’d missed, a clue of some kind, she leaned into him, trying to see what he was looking at. When she moved, his biceps brushed the side of her breast. And if that wasn’t enough to send a bolt of sheer desire through her, he smelled warm and deliciously male. She ignored it all. “What? What did you find?”

  “It says here the key to a hot kiss is to make it as similar to the sexual act itself as possible.”

  Oh, God. His voice was like a shot of whiskey. Low and smooth and potent. To distract herself, she took another long pull on her beer and slapped the bottle to the table.

  His gaze went from the beer to her mouth, and he smiled. “It says that a kiss should be long and wet and deep, preferably with a slow glide of the tongue.” He cocked his head and kept looking at her. “I like the slow glide part.”

  She remembered! Worse, her body remembered too. Her breasts felt…full. Her thighs were clenched, and between them, she felt an undeniable tingle.

  “It also says that full body contact is suggested, from chest to groin to thigh.”

  He hadn’t used a single obscene word and she’d gone damp. She squeezed her thighs and let out an indistinguishable sound that she covered by downing the last of her beer.

  He was watching her carefully. “I think we’re ready for the next chapter,” he murmured. Then he started to read. “Getting from the kiss to the naked stage—”

  He broke off when she slapped her hands over the pages. If he continued in that voice, she might have an orgasm on the spot. “We failed there.”

  His gaze searched her face. “Failed?”

  “Okay, not we. Me. I failed.”

  He studied her a long moment. “Explain.”

  “We went out.” Damn beer. Her tongue felt loose. “Twice.”

  “Yes.”

  “We kissed.” She pointed to the book. “Long and deep and wet.”

  Now his lips curved and he sighed in fond memory. “Uh-huh.”

  “And then nothing. You never called me again. No naked.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. “You never gave me any indication that you wanted to go in that direction, or even that you wanted to see me again. In fact, when I walked you inside your place after our second date, you patted me on the shoulder and said you’d be real busy over the next couple of months but that it’d been real nice hanging out.”

  “And it had been nice.”

  “It felt like a brush off.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was me…trying to open up.”

  He shook his head in bafflement.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “I said it was nice. Nice is a perfectly good word, Eddie.”

  He looked at her as if she’d come from another planet. “Nice is the word you use to describe the guy you call when you need a tire changed. Nice is the man at the store who reaches something on the top shelf that you can’t. Nice is for the neighbor who brings in your mail when you’re out of town. Nice is not for the guy you want to go out with dancing until dawn and then come home and get naked and sweaty and have some wall-banging sex. Nice is not for the guy you want to take you to the mountains for screaming sex beneath the stars.”

  Oh my. Wall-banging sex?

  Screaming sex?

  God, all she could think was, Yes, please. Where did she sign up for that?

  “Ally?”

  She realized he was waving a hand in front of her face, and she jumped.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes,” she said faintly.

  Pay attention.

  Distance.

  They were both keys to a good, smart, effective investigation. “All of those traits,” she said. “The car thing, the mail thing…I like them. I’d like them in a man.”

  “Yes, but they put a man decidedly in the ‘friend’ category.”

  “When I date someone, I want them to be a friend.”

  Still watching her, he took her hand. “So what are you saying? That you would have kept going out with me as a friend, or as a friend and also…more?”

  She swallowed and looked away. “Well, I guess we’ll never know.”

  He paused, then shook his head. “No wonder you close a staggering seventy-five percent of your cases when most investigators are lucky to get thirty. You probably drive your suspects so insane, they’ll confess to anything.”

  She was fairly certain that was not a compliment. “I’m good at what I do.”

  “Yes. Of that, there is no doubt. But how about other things outside the job?”

  She was quiet a moment, trying to come to terms with what needed to be said. “There are some areas in my life that could use some work,” she admitted. When he sent her a slow, knowing smile, she rolled her eyes and had to smile back. “I’m working on it,” she said softly. “At my own pace.”

  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THEIR PIZZA ARRIVED, and Ally dug in. After her long day, she felt like she was starving to death. She was halfway through her second piece before she realized Eddie was skimming the notes in her file and smiling.

  “You’ve made a list of all the fire stations,” he said. “Are we all under suspicion?”

  When she didn’t answer, he raised a brow, then kept reading. When he came to her list of suspects, he tossed back his head and laughed out loud. “Me? I’m your sole suspect?”

  She lifted a shoulder.

  Still smiling, his gaze ran slowly over her features. “Any time you want to search my person, you let me know.” He turned a few pages. “A list of places that sell dirty wrapping paper. And a list of the adult novelty shops in the area. So what’s the plan? You going to go storm them, gun blazing?”