The Chocolate Seduction

Mackenzie squeezed Sabrina’s shoulder. “Not when the rewards are worth the wait.”

2

KIT WAS TRYING to convince himself that it wasn’t necessary for him to find out firsthand if Sabrina Bliss lived up to her name. Some things were better left to the imagination. This was one of them.

This…bliss.

So why had he volunteered to help her move?

She hadn’t asked for help. A couple of guys from the kitchen got the idea when she was recently telling them about finally finding an apartment after a month-long search. They’d roped Kit into the deal, and he’d been curious enough to agree. Sabrina came into the kitchen every day and watched him work, sitting silently on a stool, out of the way but very much on his mind. Usually he got into a zone when he cooked. The clamor of the busy restaurant kitchen faded away while he concentrated on molding chocolate tulip cups or icing a multilayered bombe. But Sabrina wasn’t an unobtrusive type of woman. She shot his concentration to bits.

Kit and Parker and Vijay piled out of their cab in Chelsea, telling the driver to wait. Sabrina had been staying with her sister while she searched for an apartment. Mackenzie Bliss had a ground-floor flat in a gently aged brownstone with ivy crawling up the lintel. The street door was open. Kit checked the mailboxes in the vestibule and rang the bell for 1A.

The door opened as far as the security chain allowed. “Why, good morning,” Mackenzie said through the two-inch gap between the door and jamb. Kit nodded. Parker gave her a broad smile. She shut the door, and the chain made a chunking sound when she slipped it free. The men crowded toward her as soon as she opened the door again. She stepped back, holding on to the lapels of her terry cloth robe. “Uh, hi, Kit. What’s going on?”

“This is Parker…” A roly-poly sous chef with a deceptively cherubic face. “And Vijay…” A handsome young Indian who had a deft touch with sauces. “And we’re here to help Sabrina move.”

Mackenzie was clearly surprised, but she recovered to exchange handshakes with the other men. Kit admired her aplomb. Except for minor facial similarities, she was the opposite of her sister—shorter and rounder, softer and kinder, where Sabrina was sharp angles and bright eyes and frequently outspoken. Except around him. With him, she was quiet, observant, a little nervous. Her watchful eyes made him too aware of himself.

“Sabrina’s not expecting you, is she?” Mackenzie let them in. They filed into a short, narrow hallway alongside two shoe boxes, a backpack, a suitcase and a rolled-up futon without a frame, not much thicker than a pallet. They were too early. The moving preparations had barely begun.

“It’s a random act of kindness,” Vijay explained. “Sabrina said to me she was moving this morning, so I came to be of assistance.”

“Isn’t that nice?” Mackenzie had a funny smile on her face as she led them into the living room. “Sabrina? Your movers have arrived.”

Sabrina entered, daubing a towel on her damp hair. She wore loose batik drawstring pants and a brief tank top that tented over her small, high breasts. Kit dropped his gaze to her bare feet, long and bony, then back up, drawn by the irresistible allure of perky, pointed nipples. Vijay was looking at the ceiling. Parker was looking in the same place Kit was, only his mouth was hanging open, showing a tongue wet with spittle.

A modest woman would have clutched the towel to her chest. Sabrina took a long look at the men, then bent at the waist to briskly rub her hair dry. She straightened, flinging the entire curly length of it back off her face. Her breasts moved beneath the top, rounding in the scoop neck before resettling, and Kit thought Parker was about to go into cardiac arrest. His own heart was jumping around in his chest like a caged monkey.

Unfazed, Sabrina threw the towel on the couch and put her hands on her hips. “Hi, gang. What’s up?”

Kit looked at Parker who looked at Vijay who was still looking at the ceiling.

“They’re here to help you move,” Mackenzie said. She stepped farther into the small, cozy room and plopped into a cushy armchair with an unexplained chuckle. She crossed her bare legs, pulling the robe over them. Kit had the sense that she was accustomed to sitting back and observing her sister’s untidy life with a fond, amused tolerance.

“Oh.” Sabrina’s nose crinkled. “All three of you, huh?”

“Muscle power,” said Kit.

“Such beautiful ladies should not be lifting heavy boxes,” Vijay said.

“The more hands we have, the faster it’ll go.” Parker forgot about ogling and cracked his knuckles. “Your new place is a third floor walk-up, hey? Big job.”

“Not as much as you’d think,” Mackenzie said from the depths of the chair.

“I appreciate the thought, guys.” Sabrina came forward and gave Vijay’s cheek a pat. “But it’s not exactly necessary.”

A lot of Kit’s reactions to Sabrina weren’t necessary, but he had them anyway. After undertaking years of travel and adventure while he tried to figure out his place in the world, he’d finally come to the point where he was ready to settle down and make a real home. By all rights, he should have been attracted to Mackenzie. She appeared to be precisely the kind of woman who would suit his new vision for his life. But he couldn’t get Sabrina out of his head.

“We want to help,” said a ruddy-cheeked Vijay.

“You might be fooled,” Parker said, putting a hand on his midsection, “but this isn’t fat—it’s muscle.”

“Of course it is.” Sabrina reached out and squeezed Parker’s biceps. “One-hundred-percent muscle.”

“We’re here,” Kit said. “You might as well take advantage of us. We have a cab waiting outside, but we can also call for a van….”

Sabrina cocked her head to aim a smile his way, but she didn’t turn toward him or touch him. He tried not to feel seriously deprived, especially when he saw the chili pepper tattoo on the back of her bare shoulder. That tattoo had been driving him crazy for a week, peeping out from under the straps of her sleeveless dresses and tops, never quite showing itself.

“The thing is,” she said, “I travel light. Did you see the stuff in the hallway?” She gestured. “That’s all there is, aside from a garment bag and bunch of cleaning supplies that Mackenzie’s going to lug over so she can scrub out my new place.”

“You don’t have furniture?” Vijay asked, dismayed.

Parker was gleeful. “Man, this is the best moving job ever.”

Kit clapped his hands, being brisk to cover up his dismay at discovering that Sabrina was as flighty and footloose as he’d suspected. “Let’s load up then. Our cab’s waiting.”

He knew what it was like to travel light, had been that way himself for years. But he’d had enough of that lifestyle. Everything had changed for him a couple of months ago when he’d stood over a gravesite in Cleveland and said goodbye to the only family he’d had left. Now that he was completely and utterly alone, he finally understood how important it was to make a bond, to build a family, to have someone to hold on tight to.

First step was finding that someone.

Sabrina Bliss was the slippery type. Not what he was looking for.

“I can do it myself,” she was insisting, but the men were already discussing who should take which end of the futon. Kit solved the problem by slinging the awkward bundle over his shoulder. “Wait, let me get my shoes,” Sabrina said as he grabbed a string-tied shoe box and headed out. Mackenzie had already run off to the bedroom to change.

The luggage and the shoe boxes went into the cab’s trunk. Kit had to wedge the futon, folded like an overstuffed crepe, into the back seat. Sabrina loped out of the brownstone in sandals, her damp hair flying behind her. She climbed into the cab with her garment bag and a big straw satchel, sliding herself into a space beneath the futon.

Kit asked the driver if it was okay for a passenger to sit up front. “Mackenzie?” he said, opening the door.

She rattled down the stoop with a mop and a broom and a bucket filled with assorted cleansers, dressed in comfy sweats with her house key held between her teeth. “Mmph.”

He got her settled, then peered in the back of the cab. “Room for one more—the muscle of this operation.”

Vijay and Parker bumped into each other trying to get there first, but Kit moved nimbly past them and bent one end of the futon so he could squash it down and fit inside, his legs arranged like puzzle pieces. “Take the next cab,” he said, winking to the losers as the taxi drove away.

Sabrina stared straight ahead for a silent minute. “But Vijay doesn’t have the street address,” she said after they’d turned the corner onto Ninth Avenue.

“Damn,” Kit said cheerfully. Her thigh was pressed against his and he could feel the dampness of her hair seeping into his T-shirt. Her shampoo smelled like flowers in the rain.

Sabrina didn’t seem too concerned. “I guess we can manage on our own.” Her eyes slid sideways toward Kit. “Seeing as the muscle’s here.”

Mackenzie hooked a hand over the seat back as she turned to speak to them. “But that was rude, leaving Parker and Vijay at the curb when they were nice enough to…” Her voice trailed off when she saw that Kit and Sabrina weren’t really listening.

They were looking into each other’s eyes, pushing the rolled and folded futon down across their laps. “I’ll make it up to them,” Sabrina murmured.

“I’ll buy them beers after work.” Kit had never been this close to her. Her lashes were brown, and one of her eyes was slightly darker than the other, hazel mottled by green and gold flecks. Her nose was narrow, with a sharp tip, but her mouth looked soft, especially when she wet her lips. She didn’t have on a speck of makeup and he could see a couple of freckles and tiny dots of moles, plus a thin white scar on her chin and small lines around her mouth—imperfections that made her even more perfect. He thought that she was the kind of girl who wouldn’t care if her hair got tangled in the wind. She would exchange fun days in the hot sun for a few extra wrinkles later on. She’d laugh and frown and wear her expressions on her face without scheduling Botox injections first.

The lonely boy inside Kit wanted her as a friend. The man on the outside simply wanted her.