Brazen & Burning

Sydney snorted.

His gaze widened. “Was I married?”

She rolled her eyes and smiled, amazed at his ability to kid about something so damned serious. While Sydney embraced a wide-open attitude toward casual sex, she drew the line at boinking another woman’s husband. Best he knew that right up front. “The Adam Brody I knew was one-hundred-percent bachelor.”

He shook his head. “Renée checked with my friends, all my employees in my office. No one mentioned you. Not even a hint that I had a lover.”

Sydney stood up and swiped dry blades of brown grass off her knees. “When we agreed to keep things private, we did. It wasn’t so hard since we lived in the same condo complex.”

“You didn’t see my sister sell the place? Move my stuff?”

“I left the next morning for Scotland and New England. I was gone two months. When I got back, your condo had been sold, your business was gone…oh, God, your business! That’s why we’d gotten together that night! To celebrate some big deal. Jeez, what happened to the blueprints? The building?”

She watched his Adam’s apple bob. At first, his lips tightened, then relaxed into a devil-may-care smile that didn’t reach his eyes. Sydney tamped down a curse, her mind flying back to the night she’d left him—the night he couldn’t remember. He’d been nearly giddy. Psyched. Like the quarterback of a football team who’d just thrown the winning pass and was simply waiting for his receiver to snatch the pigskin out of the air. No blockers. An open end zone. If Adam had been the dancing type, they might have waltzed all over his condominium to the sweet music of success.

Instead, they’d made love on the living-room carpet.

Hot moisture prickled between her legs as the memory rushed back. The minute the door had closed behind the courier who’d picked up the plans that would make Adam a multimillionaire, he’d ripped off her clothes and licked her skin from top to bottom. She’d laughed and screamed in shocked delight, allowing him his fun and her the pleasure, giving him complete control over the sex that night—never guessing their tryst would be the last.

He’d kissed every inch of her body, not slowly and teasingly like he normally did, but with hot, desperate need. The memory of his mouth on her made her nipples pucker, her skin flush. Her thighs clenched, recalling the way he’d thrust inside her and made her come.

“Maybe we should go inside,” Adam suggested, snapping Sydney’s eyes to his. “You suddenly look like you could use some of Renée’s lemonade.”

Sydney glanced down, wondering exactly how she looked. Thirsty? Horny? Hot? Maybe a finely mixed combination of all three. “Will she spike it with vodka?”

“If you ask nicely.”

Most likely she’d spike the drink with Drano. But Sydney decided to keep her mouth shut and take whatever his sister offered. She had so much to process. And she couldn’t think clearly while her libido overrode her brain.

With an almost inaudible grunt, Adam stood, helping Sydney with a hand on her elbow. She followed quietly, her shoes still dangling from her fingers, her mind swimming with questions and recriminations and sexual memories she hadn’t realized she missed until she’d confronted the man who’d created them. He’d been unconscious for a month? Why did she feel she should have been there beside him, holding his hand? Whispering words of encouragement instead of traipsing all over the highlands with the private tour guide she’d seduced on her last night on the moors?

Why was a damned good question. Sex buddies didn’t do the bedside thing. Sex buddies sent flowers, maybe a naughty card. And she and Adam had only been sex buddies—adult lovers with no other commitment to each beyond sexual exploration and pleasure. Yeah, he’d suggested they take their relationship to a deeper level, but she’d bolted, so certain that allowing herself to lose her heart would somehow destroy the life she’d worked so hard to build.

Then she’d finally realized, with the recent nudge from Cassie, that her life, ideal in some ways, sorely lacked in others. She’d initiated her search for Adam to try this relationship again. To give a good thing a real chance. Now she was a stranger to him. In fact, when she really thought about it, she’d been little more than a stranger for the six months they’d been lovers. And she only had herself to blame.

“Careful of that bottom step,” Adam warned. “I need to refinish the wood.”

Mindlessly, Sydney avoided the step he indicated, then promptly yelped as a sliver protruding from the next step slid into the ball of her foot. “Ow! Ow!”

“Aw, hell.” Adam scooped her into his arms before she could protest and kicked on the screen door with his boot. “Renée, open up!”

His sister came running, her face a pale mask. “What? Adam, put her down! You shouldn’t be carrying anyone so heavy!”

Amid the pain, Sydney grimaced at the insinuation. “I’m not exactly Shamu the whale, sister.”

“Adam shouldn’t be lifting anything heavier than live bait,” Renée chastised, then turned her glare on Sydney. “You don’t look like bait.”

“Should have seen me when I was sixteen,” Sydney shot back, trying to rationalize that though the pain throbbing in her foot made it feel as though she had a two-by-four shoved in the tender arch of her foot, it was likely only a good-size sliver. Besides, there was no way Adam could carry both her, slim though she was, and a plank of wood.

“Back off, Renée. Stop being a bitch. Sydney is hurt. Go get the tweezers and the first-aid kit.”

He deposited Sydney on a comfortable—although worn—striped couch and knelt down beside her to take a better look at her injury.

Sydney swallowed a scream when Adam brushed his finger over the protruding splinter, sending a renewed wave of pain up her leg. She wasn’t good with pain. She was a certifiable wimp, with a pathetically low threshold for discomfort.

Sydney protested when Adam brushed his fingernail over the splinter again. “Ow! Ow! Ow! Stop doing that! It hurts!”

“I’ll bet it does. But I know pain. I think you’ll survive once I take the splinter out and get some ointment on. Think you can suck it up long enough for that?”

Sydney couldn’t contain a wisecrack, despite the ache in her foot. “If you remembered me, you wouldn’t ask,” she teased.

He met her stare, breaking into one of his heart-stopping smiles when she winked. Yes, she wanted him to catch the double entendre she’d made with the word “suck.” Too bad Renée returned before he could respond.

“Here.” Renée handed her brother the tweezers, then popped open the first-aid kit and slid it onto the couch beside Sydney. She remained quiet, but Sydney sensed a slump in her shoulders, as if Adam’s chastisement had hit home.

“Can I get you a lemonade?” Renée asked, her tone surprisingly close to sincere.

Sydney smiled. Apparently, she wasn’t the only woman in the room who had some sucking up to do. “That would be awesome, thanks.”

Renée nodded and hurried out of the room.

“Was that a truce?” Sydney asked as Adam twisted her foot gently to the side so he could see what he was doing.

“Seems like. Renée doesn’t like being called a bitch, particularly when she’s acting like one.”

“Bitch isn’t always a put-down, you know. There’s a whole movement that considers the word an acronym for Babe In Total Control of Herself.”

Adam grinned as he tried to wrangle the tiny silver tweezers with his big male fingers. This was why men didn’t pluck their eyebrows.

“I don’t suppose you’ve been elected the spokes-model for that movement, have you?” Adam asked, his tone wry.

Sydney’s spine straightened at the surge in her blood pressure. “Are you calling me a bitch?”

“See—no one likes it.”

Just at that moment, he tugged the splinter free, giving Sydney two justifiable reasons to yelp.

He held up the tweezers, still holding tight to a half-inch sliver of wood. “Yeowch. I really need to refinish all those steps.”

Sydney winced. The two-by-four had been removed, but her foot still stung like hell. She reached over and grabbed the ointment out of the first-aid kit.

“Here, let me.”

Sydney considered protesting, then realized his hands felt good. Had Adam ever given her a foot massage? She couldn’t remember, so she figured he must not have. There was nothing more noteworthy in a man’s pampering repertoire than the ability to give a good foot massage.

He cleaned the wound with a cotton ball doused with hydrogen peroxide, then dried her skin with a square of clean gauze. His movements were gentle, but sure. His hands strong and hot. His fingers nimble. Long. As his touch trickled over her increasingly sensitive skin, she found herself staring in fascination at his clipped nails, bruised knuckles and sunbaked skin.

Images of him sliding his hands up her bare thighs flashed in her mind. He no longer had the smooth hands of an artist, with only small calluses from pencils and pens. His hands were stronger now, rougher. And so much more interesting.