CHAPTER 7
THERE WAS ONE second of stunned silence before everyone broke out in cheers and laughter, all directed toward Dimi.
Mitch winced, then looked at her, and yep, no big surprise, she wasn’t cheering. Or laughing. In fact, it was safe to assume, given the daggers she was at this very moment silently sending him, that she was nothing short of furious.
Sighing, he moved close. Amid the hooting and hollering of their boisterous crew, he bent and spoke into her ear. “You know it was meant in a complimentary way.”
“Really?” With mock sweetness, she nodded. “So I’m assuming, as the coach of said sex kitty, you’re proud.”
Turning his head to look into her fiery gaze, he realized what he’d really done was perfectly line up their mouths.
Her eyes widened as she realized the same thing. Her lips parted. It was far too noisy to hear anything except his own racing heart, but he imagined she let out an involuntary little sound that conveyed her own wanting. “As your coach, I haven’t taught you anything you didn’t already know,” he said, turned on by the shiver she couldn’t seem to contain.
“And why is that?” This was murmured into his ear, which made him let out his own helpless shiver at the feel of her lips against his skin. “You’ve threatened to coach me,” she said. “I know it. You know it. Everyone else knows it, too, and yet you’ve done nothing other than pick out a few clothes and asked me to smile. No…special lessons.”
How well he knew it. The thought of what he’d like to teach her had kept him up at night for weeks now.
“Know what I think?” she asked. “I think you’re all talk, Mr. Hotshot Producer. All show. Yeah, you’re big and tough and unfortunately gorgeous—” She broke off at his choked laugh and frowned. “You must know that you are. But I’m left assuming you don’t know any more than I do about…”
He was still digesting the fact she thought him gorgeous. “About?”
She licked her lips, then bit her lower one before leaning close. Whether it was because she didn’t want anyone to hear her words or because she didn’t want to look him directly in the eyes, he hadn’t a clue. “About…sexual stuff,” she whispered, sending more delicious shivers down every nerve in his body and making him instantly hard.
A common reaction around her, he’d noticed. “That sounded like a dare,” he managed to say.
She lifted one brow, and he had to laugh, because damn if she hadn’t learned far more than she thought, the little tease. “Are you hungry for pizza?” he asked.
She didn’t take her eyes off him. “No.”
Okay, then. “So now’s as good a time as any, right? Let’s have one of those special lessons you’re so worried about.” He held out his hand, and she slipped hers into it with no sign of hesitation other than a hard swallow.
“Hey,” Leo called, rattling the newspaper. “You can’t leave yet, I haven’t read you— Ouch!” he yelled, glaring at Cami, who’d reached up and pinched him.
“Let them go, you idiot,” she muttered, pulling Leo off the chair and hauling him close to whisper in his ear.
Leo listened to her secret and grinned. “Ooh.” Enlightened, he turned to a curious Gracie and whispered in her ear.
Gracie turned to an impatient Suzie and whispered in her ear.
“And so on and so on,” Mitch murmured, tugging Dimi free of the crowd around them.
“Where are we going?” she asked as he pulled her outside.
Yeah, Mitch. Where are we going? Even knowing that being alone with her was an incredibly stupid thing to do didn’t appear to be sinking into his brain.
Not when another part of his body had taken over the thinking process. “Somewhere more suitable,” he said.
“Oh, boy.”
She stared at his motorcycle with a look of terrified delight. “What’s it like to have all that power vibrating between your legs?”
“Pretty much exactly how you’d imagine.”
Her mouth fell open. “Can I drive?”
He slid onto the bike and handed her his helmet. “Nope.”
“Come on, you can make it the lesson.”
“Get on, Dimi.”
“You’re no fun.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet. Now get on.” When she did, sliding her hands around his waist and pressing the front of her glorious body to the back of his, he shuddered. “Hold on tight.”
* * *
He took them deep into the night, along the Truckee River and up Highway 89 toward Lake Tahoe. The night was cold, but the engine beneath them kept them warm.
Or maybe it was their combined body heat, mostly hers. Dimi couldn’t help it. The feel of the vibration between her thighs, matched with Mitch’s big, powerful body pressed so intimately to hers…she was truly going up in smoke, in an utterly foreign way. Never in her life had she gotten aroused for no reason other than lustful thoughts and a motorcycle beneath her, but she was aroused now.
Since she’d never ridden a motorcycle before, she’d like to blame it on that, but her body was heating up from the inside out, not a usual complaint of bike riders. Mitch’s hair, sleek in the wind, brushed her face. The soft leather of his jacket drew her fingers. And the scent of him—holy cow, that alone nearly pushed her over the edge.
Then she realized he’d driven her all the way to Incline Village. “Place of sin,” she said when he pulled over and cut the engine.
He tossed a look at her over his shoulder. “What better place, right?”
Oh, yeah. Her lesson. She gulped hard, most of her bravado deserting her. Then she caught sight of where they were and what they’d parked in front of and nearly choked as she leapt off the bike.
A strip club!
Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into, and why didn’t I bring my cell phone, and how can I tell him I no longer want to—
Mitch’s soft laugh broke through her panic as he pulled the helmet off her head and studied her expression. “If you could see your face.”
“Easy for you to be amused,” she sputtered, pointing at the big, siren-red sign that read, All Nude, All the Time.
He tossed a look at the place, then grinned. Widely. “My God, you have an imagination on you.” He wrapped a hand around her wrist, redirecting her pointing finger across the street to another sign that read, Public Beach.
“I thought we could count falling stars there on the sand,” he said. “You can’t see them in Los Angeles with all the lights.”
“Falling stars.”
“Yep.”
She grimaced. “Oh.”
“Now why don’t you tell me what you thought I was going to make you do in that strip club?” he asked softly, leaning close with a mixture of heat and amusement in his eyes.
“Um…”
Shaking his head, still laughing in that disgustingly sexy way he had, he linked his fingers with hers and led her across the street to an incredibly beautiful beach. The water glowed from the meager moonlight, and the sand looked like silk. Above them, the trees rustled in the light wind, and the scent of the mountain air filled her senses.
And so did the man walking silently beside her. He didn’t look so LA right now. Yes, he wore that black leather jacket and even blacker jeans that screamed sophistication and a been there, done that attitude, but she was beginning to see how much more to him there was than that. She remembered how he’d distracted her from that horrible front-page headline. She remembered how in spite of his teasing during the day on the set, he never crossed the line and made her feel anything but…well, wanted. And he’d not even once tried to make a move on her, not a real one, not even when she’d wanted him to.
An uneasy thought.
All along she’d sheltered herself from his charms by telling herself she was just a job to him. But the way he tipped his head and looked at her now made her heart tug. It also made her blood race and all sorts of other interesting things happen inside her. And suddenly, more than ever, she wanted to be the person he’d made her on television. She wanted to be that free, that sexy, and she wanted to be that way with him. “Mitch…” She stopped and turned to face him. “What are we doing here?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No.”
He looked a little surprised. At the water’s edge, he sat on a large rock, then pulled her down beside him.
They stared at each other.
“Hell,” he said after a moment. “I was really hoping you knew what this thing is all about.”
“You mean the thing that makes me want to both kiss you and smack you at the same time?”
A laugh escaped him. “Yeah. That’s pretty much the thing I mean.”
“I haven’t a clue. It scares me, you know,” she admitted. “Not just because I gave up men, or that we work together. But because when it comes right down to it, I know nothing about you.”
Leaning back, he tucked his hands beneath his head and studied the sky. “What do you want to know? I’m an open book.”
“Yeah, right,” she said with a laugh.
“No, really. Ask away.”
“I don’t want to be nosy.” But then she decided to take him up on it because curiosity won out over being polite. “Okay, tell me this. Why is everything so casual for you?”
“Meaning I’m your opposite because you’re so serious?” When she nodded, he said, “I take plenty of things seriously, Dimi.”
“Such as?”
“Such as…my bike. I’m serious about my bike.”
“Name something really important.”
“My bike is pretty important.”
“See?” she said, frustrated. “You’re not taking me seriously at all.”
“Okay.” His smile faded. “How about life? I take that pretty damn seriously.”
His jaw had tightened. His body seemed to, as well. And the part of herself she’d always held back from a man softened. Opened. “What happened, Mitch? Did you…lose someone?”
“Yeah.” His voice was gruff. “My brother, Daniel. He died from an aneurysm on his twenty-ninth birthday.”
“You were close.”
“Close? We were both too busy working eighteen-hour days to spend any time with each other. In our family, work was everything. Everything. Now he’s gone.” He turned his head and pierced her with a look of such loss and regret, she felt her throat tighten. “Sort of takes the edge off ambition, a loss like that.”
“I imagine it does,” she said softly. “But you still seem pretty ambitious.”
“No. I walk away from the job now when the day is done. No stress. I just happen to be good at what I do.”
“I have to agree there,” she said with a little smile. “I’m so sorry about your brother, Mitch.”
He ran a finger over her cheek. “You look so relaxed out here, not so serious at all. What is it about work that makes you that way?”
“You.” She winced. “Well, not just you. It’s everything. The show, the people that rely on the show. It’s all such a huge responsibility. I…I don’t like to fail.” She lifted a shoulder. “And we were. Before you came along and saved us.”
“But why resist the changes so much? You’re such a natural at what we’re doing now. So down to earth, yet utterly, completely sexy. Why did you hide that for so long?”
“Are you kidding?” she said with a laugh. “It’s not natural. You must have heard the stories, Mitch, and they’re all true. I’m pathetic when it comes to…guy stuff. I mean, look at my track record of relationships.”
“I think you were looking at the wrong guys.”
She listened to the water hit the rocks for a moment. Watched the sky, which at their high altitude was more brilliant than anywhere she’d ever been, though admittedly she hadn’t been very many places.
Unlike the man next to her, who’d probably seen and done it all.
A flash lit up her small corner of the night, and she straightened, excited, forgetting herself for a moment in the beauty that surrounded them. “Did you see that falling star?” she whispered in hushed awe, wanting him to experience her world, wanting him to know there was more to life than his city. “Did you?”
“Yeah.” But he was looking right at her, not up. “You know what that means, don’t you? A falling star?”
“That a sun just exploded?”
“That you have to kiss the first person you talk to after you see one.”
She didn’t mean to smile, darn him, but she did. “Really?”
“It’s a law,” he said very seriously.
“Ah.” Watching his mouth, she felt the heat explode inside her just as the star had exploded, wondering if he felt a fraction of the excitement she was feeling, deciding he probably didn’t and—
“Stop thinking,” he commanded softly, slipping a hand beneath her hair to caress the skin at the base of her neck.
“I can’t help it, I analyze everything.” Her lips were so close to his she could feel his warm breath. A frisson of something electric zapped through her, making her shiver with delight. “I can’t seem to help it. It’s just a part of my personality. Like the fact I love chocolate.” She couldn’t stop talking. It was nerves, but she couldn’t shut up. “They’re both just there, and—”
“Dimi?”
She gulped in a deep breath. “Yeah?”
“Shut up and kiss me.”
She laughed. “I’ve never kissed a man while I was smiling before, Mitch.”
“You haven’t kissed me yet.” His fingers tightened in her hair, pulling her closer, and she leaned in, giving him a short, to-the-point kiss.
“How was that?” she asked calmly while the pulse pounded in her throat, in her chest, in her ears. Surely it was just the mountain air making her blood hum and body sing. Sure, she could just—
She leaned forward and kissed him again. She couldn’t stop herself. More stars exploded in her eyes, bright points of pleasure at the feel of his mouth against hers. A moan of deep, dark pleasure resounded in her ears, hers, she realized with shock, locking her arms around his neck so tight he returned the deep, dark sound, but only because she was choking him.
“Sorry!” she gasped, backing up, horrified at her ineptness.
But he didn’t let her go far, instead sliding a thumb over her frustrated frown. “It’s okay. Breathing is optional,” he assured her.
One second Dimi sat there staring at him, humiliated to the core, and the next she’d garnered her courage to try again.
Go for the moon, she told herself, and pressed against him, her mouth on his. She was kissing him, kissing him as if she was starving for it.
And he was kissing her back, his mouth opening, making her let out a little whimper of need. She wanted more. She took more, losing herself in it until he let out a hissing breath. His fingers reached up and entangled with hers, making her realize she’d fisted them in his hair, tugging hard on the silky strands.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, face flaming as she pulled back. God, what had she been thinking? What had Cami been thinking? She couldn’t do this! “I think,” she said shakily, “I’m ready for dinner.”
“Are you sure? Because I’ve got your hands now, so we could just try the whole thing again—”
“I’m sure.”
He searched her gaze, then sighed and stood, pulling her up, as well. “Next time,” he muttered, “I’m going to go bald before stopping you again.” He stroked her cheek. “Remember that.”
She would do little else.