asked.
“No.” She glanced back at her mother’s house with a little grimace, then shrugged. “Just taking a moment to enjoy the strains of that new Christmas melody classic, ‘The First Santa Claus Is Coming to O Little Town of Bethlehem.’”
He wanted to laugh. “Neighborhood celebration getting to you?”
Her sigh whispered beneath the clash of carols in the distance. “I hate Christmas.”
A familiar refrain. He stuffed the last of the flattened fountain box into the recycle bin. “Tell me something about Bailey Sullivan I don’t already know.”
“Really?” Her eyes widened, all thick sexy lashes and unforgettable blue. “You want to talk?”
No.
Yet now that he’d thrown out the comment he couldn’t play coward. Anyhow, turnabout was fair play, and last night he’d given her the CliffsNotes of his own life story.
“I just got to thinking…if I left the wild side and went straight, maybe you, on the other hand, went crooked.” He looked over, curved his mouth in what he thought she might take as a smile. “You know, perhaps somewhere along the line little Miss Perfect fell off the great balance beam of life.”
“I was never Miss Perfect.” She was frowning.
“Could have fooled me.” He rocked on his heels, staring her down with his one eye. “But then again…you did, didn’t you?”
A shadow crossed her face and he dropped his gaze to adjust the placement of Gram’s cans.
Then she gave a little shrug. “Maybe I did change. Maybe I turned into someone with my own wild side.”
He snorted. “Wild? You wouldn’t know wild if it bit you on the butt.”
Another frown pulled her brows together and she stamped closer to the hibiscus hedge between them. “That’s what you did,” she hissed. “Remember, Finn? You bit me on a lot of places, including my butt.”
Hell. She had to remind him. There was no explaining away or excusing the primitive need teenage Finn had felt to mark Bailey’s perfect skin. Her neck, the inside of her thigh, the high curve of her round, pretty ass, because it was one of the few places a hickey could be hidden by her itsy bitsy, teeny-weeny bikinis that drove him so crazy.
He cleared his throat. “That was a long time ago.” He shifted the recycle bin two inches to the right. “We’re no longer two adolescents hopped up on hormones.”
“Is that what you’d call it?” She ran her forefinger over one of the yellow hibiscus flowers, its ruffles closed up tight for the night.
As if he’d confess to it ever being anything more. Not when he could also recall with perfect clarity the roadkill she’d made of his heart when he’d discovered she’d left for college early, despite their summer plans. At his autopsy, they’d find the four-chambered organ still flattened, without a skid mark in sight.
He ignored the old ache in his chest and went back to concentrating on gaining the advantage. “In any case, I’m more interested in this wild-thing Bailey you claim to be now.”
She shrugged again. “Okay, maybe wild is an overstatement in comparison to your checkered past, but I live a pretty full life.”
“Oh really?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “If I had to guess, I’d say you’re a rigid, seventy-hour-a-week, all-work-no-play jobaholic.”
“No-”
“And that even the balls-of-steel senior partner at the firm you run trembles when you call his name.”
Her quick glance back at her house made it clear she supposed her mother had been filling him in. Then she put one hand on her hip. “Maybe he trembles for reasons you don’t know about.”
Oh yeah, like she was doing the horizontal tango with a white-haired lawyer who’d been married for fifty-three years. As if he’d believe
She exhaled an insulted huff and her other hand fisted on her other hip. “You think I can’t get a man?”
This was too easy. Maybe it was mean of him to needle her, and he didn’t know why it pleased him so much to make her mad, but he hadn’t had this much fun in months. “I know you won’t keep one.”
She huffed again. “Who cares when L.A. is chock-full of eligible bachelors?”
“The bachelor you spend most of your leisure hours with lives in the condo below yours and is gay.”
Her jaw dropped. “How-”
“Easy. The Secret Service’s Office of Protective Research keeps extensive files on anyone who threatens the security of the president or the country.”
A flush burned on her cheeks and her eyes sparked. “I have never threatened anyone or anything in my life!”
Finn lifted a hand. “Then, Bailey, so much for your claim of a bad-girl transformation.”
“I’ll show you a transformation.”
Then she did. She did it so quickly that he couldn’t leap away fast enough. One second she was glaring at him over the hedge and the next she’d grabbed him around the neck, yanked his head close, and sank her teeth into his bottom lip.
“That’s what you get,” she said, pulling back. “You wanted to take a bite out of me, so I took mine out of you.”
She continued to glower at him, her breasts heaving against a fuzzy white sweater. “Though a garden hose might have been a better weapon.”
“I’ll say,” Finn muttered, because he couldn’t let her have the last word.
Or the last kiss.
He grabbed her shoulders and hauled her against the low, narrow hedge. He pressed close to it too, not even noticing the rattle of leaves and the dig of branches on his way to her lips. Her body was rigid beneath his hands, but her mouth was hot. Soft and hot, and he almost wished for that threatened cold blast from the garden hose because he was teenage-horny again, his cock going hard to fight the denim of his jeans.
He pushed his tongue between her lips. She made a sound, but he didn’t care if it was a protest. She’d had her chance at punishment; this was his. The inside of her mouth was peppermint-sweet-as if she’d been sucking on a candy cane not long ago-and his eye closed at the intoxicating taste.
With her shoulders cupped by his palms and his tongue curling against the velvet of hers, time rewound. He was twenty again, nineteen, sixteen. The age he’d been that fateful day when he’d looked at her and the dark rebel inside him had recognized the golden girl who could be the calm to his hormonal storm. He’d cursed her, the world, fate, the moment he’d recognized it, but he’d been unable to take his feet off the path.
But it had never been so purely cerebral, he admitted, as he slanted his head, taking more of her mouth as he ran his hands over her sharp shoulder blades to the round globes of her ass. Not cerebral in the least. He’d been sixteen and he’d wanted sex too.
There were easier girls to get it from, he’d known that. Known them. It took time to persuade the good girls to put out, that was a given. It was going to take time to get Bailey to bed. But that hadn’t stopped him from still wanting her. From wanting, wanting, wanting her.
Now nearing thirty-one, Finn didn’t seem to have the patience of his teenage self. He found her waist and burrowed under the soft sweater to the sleek skin at the small of her back. Even that wasn’t enough, and as he tracked his lips from her mouth to her warm cheek, his fingertips tucked under the waistband of her jeans.
At the same time that he found her lobe and bit down, he shoved his hands lower to fill his palms with the naked, curved globes of her ass. Bless thong underwear.
She jerked, her skin goose-bumped against his hands. He gentled his lips on her ear and rubbed his nose against her soft hair. Her familiar perfume filled his head.
Like that, it was a dozen years ago again. Leaves rattled as he tried moving closer. Like then, always needing more of her sweetness and the fire he wanted to find beyond it.
“Finn…” Bailey whispered, her throaty voice shivering down his spine.
“What?” He pressed a kiss to the rim of her ear. Still aching like sixteen, still as mesmerized.
“Finn?”
