She looked down. “What are you doing?”
“Getting your nipples to poke the front of your shirt. That’s really sexy.”
She tried not to roll her eyes. “How long have you been thinking about that?” She raised her gaze, but his attention was on the front of her shirt.
“Since you walked out of the bathroom.”
“That’s pervy. This whole time when we were talking about your dog and my cat and your former fiancée?”
“Yeah, it’s called multitasking.” He looked up and shrugged one bare shoulder. “I can talk to you about one thing but be thinking about something totally different.”
“Must be a detective thing.”
He chuckled and stuck his spoon in the middle of the sherbet. “More like a guy thing. We talk about shit you want to talk about, but we’re really just trying to get you in bed. Again.”
“You don’t care about past relationships?”
He pulled out the spoon and set the bowl behind her on the table. “I only care about you.” He slid the pink-covered spoon across the tip of her left breast. “And me. And how I’m going to get you out of those panties.”
She gasped. “You got sherbet on my shirt.”
A purely carnal smile curved his lips. “Isn’t that a shame? I guess I’ll have to clean it off.” He dipped his head and sucked her through her shirt. The mix of cold sherbet and hot mouth scattered tingles across her chest and down her abdomen. She arched her back and ran her fingers through the side of his dark hair as he licked her shirt clean. When he was through, he popped a few buttons and pushed the material aside to suck her bared breast. Without lifting his mouth, he placed his hands on her hips, lifted, and sat her down. Right on the bowl of ice cream. It tipped sideways and raspberry sherbet slipped between her thighs.
“Crap!” She grabbed the bowl and scooped up the sherbet. “That’s cold!”
“Looks like I made another mess. This time on your panties.” He took the bowl from her hands and placed it on the table by her hip. He hooked the leg of a chair with his foot and pulled it forward.
“Put your feet on my shoulders while I clean you up,” he said as he sat and scooted the chair even closer.
She didn’t have to be told twice.
“Umm.” He licked a spot on the inside of her thigh with his wet tongue. “You taste good. Like raspberries and warm skin.” He kissed a path to the edge of her panties. “When I’m finished tasting you right here, I’m going to hit that spot of yours again.”
She leaned back and rested her weight on her hands behind her. “You said something about making me scream like a porn star.”
He smiled and dipped his head. Being a man who could multitask, he managed both.
Chapter 15
Goodtimes: Seeks Bad Boy…
The next morning, Lucy woke to something wet against her cheek. She opened her eyes and gazed into a red furry face and big brown eyes looking back at her. Millie licked her cheek, and Lucy rolled onto her back to get away. “Gross,” she said as she wiped dog spit from her face. She glanced at the empty pillow next to her and sat up, holding the blue-and-white-striped sheet over her bare breasts.
After she and Quinn had had sex on the kitchen table, they’d ordered takeout and watched Cold Case Files. She’d discovered that Quinn loved NYPD Blue reruns, but throughout the show, he’d point to the television and yell, “That would never happen!” or “No one does an interview standing over a corpse.”
After the ten o’clock news, they’d taken a shower. They’d soaped each other up, touched and rubbed and made love against the shower stall. Then they’d climbed into Quinn’s bed and fallen into an exhausted sleep. At least she had. Around 3:00 a.m. he’d awoken her to make love again. He’d been sweet and gentle and her heart had about burst, unable to contain her feelings in such a small place. They’d had sex four times. Four amazing times, made even more amazing because she loved him.
She loved him but didn’t really have much of a clue how he felt about her. Oh, she knew he was attracted to her and that he liked her well enough. She wasn’t sure what that meant-in the long term. Heck, she wasn’t even sure about the short term after it was safe for her to go home again. For him, last night could have been just sex.
In the distance she heard a low and steady thumping and something that sounded a little like a conveyor belt. She glanced around for her clothes and recalled she’d last seen them on the bathroom floor. She slid naked from the bed. “Don’t even think about it,” she warned Millie as she walked to the master bathroom. Her clothes weren’t there, and she wrapped herself in a towel and moved down the hall to the guest room. She traded the towel for her pink terry-cloth robe and followed the thumping sound to a third bedroom set up with a desk, weight equipment, and the object of the noise. Quinn, wearing a pair of loose gray shorts, with an iPod strapped around his arm and headphones plugging his ears, was jogging on a treadmill. His hair clung to the back of his neck, and with each step of his running shoes, the bottom of his shorts flipped up a little.
Lucy moved into the room and sat on a workout bench loaded with black weights resting in the bars at one end. She crossed one leg over the other and studied his smooth skin, the play of muscles, and the slight indent of his spine. Over the rasp of the treadmill, it sounded like he was talking to himself. She listened closer and smiled.
Good Lord. He was singing. And not well. In fact, it was quite awful. So awful that she couldn’t even begin to recognize the song. Maybe he was singing about falling on something, and when he hit a particularly sour note, Lucy laughed. She couldn’t help it.
The wires to his iPod swung as he looked back over his shoulder. “Christ,” he swore, grasped the hand rails, and put his feet on the sides of the treadmill as it continued without him. He pulled the earphones from his ears. “How long have you been sitting there?”
“Long enough.”
He turned off the treadmill and grabbed the white towel hanging on the rail. He wiped his face and said into his towel, “Well, that sucks.”
She tried not to smile. She really did. “It’s a good thing you’re good-looking.”
He ran the towel over his head, then he hung it around his neck as he moved to stand in front of her. “Are you saying I have a shitty singing voice?”
“Yeah.” Her foot swung back and forth as her eyes took in the hard muscle of his chest. “What were you listening to?”
His gaze lowered from her face to the deep V where her robe had fallen open. “Velvet Revolver. They’re going to play here in a few months.” He looked up into her face. “Wanna go?”
Her foot stopped. “With you?”
“No.” He frowned. “With Millie. Of course with me.”
“Like in a real date?”
He shrugged his bare shoulders. “Yeah. Why not?”
The concert was about three months away, which meant he saw them together three months in the future. Last night hadn’t been just about sex for him. “Sure. When was the last time you were on an actual date?”
He wiped his chest with the towel. “Not counting all the Internet dates, I think it was when Kurt set me up on a blind date about four months ago.”
“I hate blind dates.”
He hung the towel over the weight bar. “She wasn’t bad. We just didn’t hit it off.” He unhooked the iPod and moved to the desk filled with his laptop and open files.
“I hate getting all dressed up and going on dates and all you get out of it is a waste of time.”
He set down the iPod and picked up a coffee mug. “Her cat was even more annoying than yours.”
Lucy opened her mouth to defend Mr. Snookums, then closed it. “How long were you in her house?”