BOOKER

The woman beneath me feels both familiar and brand new. The touch of her skin, so smooth and fair, is well-known. Its more-delicious-than-maple-syrup flavor is achingly recognizable as I kiss an open-mouthed trail down her throat. Starting from the spot below her jaw that once made her moan in the back of her throat.

I also remember these spiky pale pink nipples trying to drill holes through the tougher skin of my palms. Yet the breasts from which they thrust I recall being small and exceptionally firm. The lush curves currently captured by my fingers, my palms, are significantly fuller. And while they’re also firm, the most minute shift of my hands sets off a mouth-wateringly luscious jiggle.

I have felt similar in other women’s breasts, but I cannot recall ever feeling it from hers. The sensation gives me an illicit thrill. The body I touch is intimately known in one sense, yet as if I’m stealing liberties from a stranger in another.

The taste of her mouth is a different matter. I’d recognize it in the dead of night in the deepest, darkest coal mine. “Lena,” I breathe. And lower my head to rock my lips over hers.

I wake up spitting out my pillowcase. Rolling to sit up, I mutter a few choice words under my breath and scrub at my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Shit.” I reach over to click on the lamp next to the bed, then blink in its sudden glare. Sometimes I miss the softer gaslight, which electricity has been replacing over the course of the past several years. As my dream fades, irritation takes its place. The abrading rub of anger has its own weight of familiarity to it.

Once I realized Lola was Lena last night, it didn’t take long for wrath to replace my initial rush of happiness. She has some damn cheek accusing me of promising to write her, then not following up on my promise. I wrote her two or three letters a week, faithfully. She was the one who never wrote back.

It doesn’t help my temper that following our argument last night, Lena was never alone. God knows I kept track. Frustration at not being able to pull her aside to set the record straight, was exacerbated when I missed seeing her leave the club. So, I ended up drinking too much. I’m not hung-over, exactly. But my head has definitely felt better.

Stewing again over the way she’d had the last word, and damned if I intend to let it ride, I throw back the covers and go in search of aspirin and a hot bath.

My righteous anger loses steam when I storm into the club, and belatedly remember it’s far too early for any of the performers to have arrived. I stop and take a deep breath. Well, shit.

Then I square my shoulders. I have a lot of other stuff to do, so I might as well accomplish something while I wait for Lena to show up. I stride straight through the darkened lounge to my office. When I enter it, I find my manager, Leo, rifling through one of the piles of papers on the partner’s desk we share.

“Afternoon, Sarge.” I toss my hat on the coat rack. “What are you looking for?”

“The damn electric bill.” Straightening the pile of papers he’d been searching, he glances up at me. “I could’ve sworn I paid it. Apparently not, though, because I sure as hell didn’t enter the bugger in the ledger. Or file it in the Utilities folder.” Scrubbing his fingers over the raised scar running from his temple to the middle of his cheek, he scowls at me. “Why you thought a senile old warhorse like me could manage your fancy club is beyond me.”

“Maybe because you invest damn near as much strategy in running the joint as you did in keeping us alive in the trenches.” My former sergeant has a habit of talking as if he’s seventy years old instead of the somewhere in his early-to-mid-thirties he actually is. “It’s one bill, Leo. Here.” I hand him a pile from the several peppering the desk and pick up another stack for myself. “You look through that one and I’ll go through this.”

Leo found the bill he sought in the second stack he pawed through. “Well, hell, I remember now,” he says. “I had just opened this when we got word our whiskey shipment was ready up in British Columbia. By the time I arranged for our fellas on Whidbey Island to pick it up and run it to our truck on the mainland, the bill was buried beneath a shitload of papers and slipped my mind.”

“So it turns out you’re not senile, after all. Just busy.”

“Yeah. Good to know.” He flashes one of his rare smiles, but quickly sobers and pins me in his steady gaze. “What’s this I hear about you and the singer I discovered on my trip up to visit my cousin Elmer? I heard she slapped your face. What the hell was that all about?”

Shit. The last thing I want is to get into this with anyone but Lena herself. And yet… “Do you remember when you asked me, back during the war, why I joined the Army?”

“Sure. You said you got caught in your old flivver about to get lucky with some girl. And that your old man pulled strings to give you the bum’s rush out of town and into the University of Washington two weeks before classes began.”

I shrug. “Then you likely remember, too, that I went straight to the recruitment center to enlist.” I meet Leo’s gaze. “Lena was the girl in the car with me. We were high school sweethearts.” And, God, she had meant so goddamn much—hell, everything—to me.

“No shit?” Leo sits down hard on the guest chair. “And you didn’t recognize her?”

I try not to wince at the incredulity he doesn’t bother to scrub from his tone. But facing it squarely, I have to admit Lena had a right to be pissed off last night when I failed to even identify who I was trying to seduce. Piled as it had been on top of her laundry list of other offenses I’d purportedly committed. “In my defense, she’s changed dramatically.”

Then, my shoulders stiffen, because I really hate to say this next part after my lame duck attempt at defending myself. “I brought her a glass of champagne.”

“You shot the first salvo in making an advance on an employee?” He gives me a searching look. “That’s not like you.”

“I know.” I shrug like it’s no big deal. Because it’s not. It is no goddamn big deal at all. “She took umbrage.” Mostly over other items on her list of my offenses. “We are, however, going to have a little talk about professionalism when she gets in.”

“Good plan. It doesn’t pay to let slapping go unaddressed.” Leo’s mouth quirks up slightly. “Unless it’s a cat-fight between two women. Gotta admit, I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”

Lena’s voice sounds out in the hall a few hours later as she and the Brasher sisters clatter past my office. I leap to my feet before my better judgment overrules a near-overwhelming urge to track her down now. The last thing this joint needs is every employee within hearing range throwing in their two cents worth. Or, God forbid, taking sides. The upcoming conversation is one best carried out in private.

The trouble with waiting, however, is the way it gives my temper time to stage a repeat performance. I turned myself inside out trying to contact Lena after I enlisted and didn’t hear a thing from her in return. Now she’s accusing me of not writing? By the time Dot and Clara hit the stage for their first act, I have once again worked up a full head of steam.

I cover the distance between my office and Lena’s dressing room in less than a minute flat. Once there, I give its sturdy door a set of authoritative raps. Lena’s response is muffled, and I don’t bother requesting clarification before turning the knob and pushing the door open.

“Hey!” She snaps. “I said ‘just a minute!’” Clearly irate, she swings around to look at me from her makeup table.

My feet flat-out quit on me, grinding me to a dead halt. Because, Jesus.

The lone article standing between Lena’s body and my gaze is a black silk wrapper. Its thin fabric hosts a flock of spread-winged birds I assume are cranes, given the craze for all things Oriental these days.

But who the hell cares? Her seated twist-around has widened the black wrap’s lapels between those unbound breasts, exposing spectacular, pale-skinned cleavage. It’s all I can do to not let it command every scrap of my attention.

Because, damn, she looks good in that.

Lena stares back at me, apparently equally shocked. Then, following my gaze, she jerks the two sides of her wrap together. The better coverage can’t disguise her generous cleavage, but it does restore a few of my brain cells. I take a deep breath, then slowly exhale it.

And get myself back on track. “We need to have a little talk about professionalism,” I say coolly. “Slapping your boss is anything but. Do anything like that again, and you will not like the way I retaliate.”

“I had a darn good reason to smack you, considering all your lies.”

“No, Lena, you didn’t. You’re all indignant about supposedly not getting any of the dozens of letters I mailed you—”

She makes a sound like a tea kettle about to set off its whistle. “There is no supposed about it, you bimbo!”

Swell, now she’s calling me a tough guy? Everyone knows that’s pretty much a synonym for mobster. I breathe deeply again, then manage to say calmly, “Yeah? Well, where were all your letters to me, Lena? You’re pretty vocal about not receiving the ones I damn well sent. Funny thing, though. I never got so much as one from you, either.”

She surges to her feet. “And where was I supposed to send them, pray tell? In Care of the postal gods? You said you’d send me an address, remember?”

“And…what?” I move in on her. “You broke your legs? Lost your voice? You couldn’t bestir yourself to go ask my mother when my letters failed to reach you?”

“Ask your—?” Lena takes an incensed step in my direction. “You waltzed off first to college, then to war, and left me to face everyone with my brand-new reputation as the Quiff of Walla Walla!”

That word from her lips, coupled with the sheer agonized outrage on her face, freezes me for a moment. The town branded her a slut?

I’m still reeling when she recovers enough to step in and stand on her tip toes to thrust her face so close to mine my eyes cross. She drills a finger into my chest.

“You think I was going to call on your mother with a newly minted, Booker-endowed reputation trailing after me like the stench of ground beef left in the sun?”

“People called you a slut?”

“Yes, Booker, they called me a precisely that—among other, equally lovely slurs. What the hell did you expect when Millie Longmire caught us with my blouse unbuttoned and your hand up my skirt?”

“Not that.” The truth was, I’d been so miserable dealing with my own humiliating removal from town, I hadn’t stopped to consider the ramifications to her. I’d ached for her, yes. But— “It never occurred to me you had been left on your own to face down small town gossips.”

“Millie was one of the biggest gossips in town,” Lena snaps, “but it never occurred to you she might spread what she’d seen all over tow—” Cutting herself off, she steps back. Seems to gather her dignity around her. “Nevertheless, that was what I dealt with. So, don’t tell me how unprofessional it is to have slapped you. If you ask me, I had enough provocation to beat you senseless.”

My temper erupts again. “You know what the trouble is with getting on your high horse, Lena?”

She arches a pale eyebrow. “No, but I’m sure you’re dying to tell me.”

“It is a long way down when you tumble off. And I would hesitate to claim the moral high ground, if I were you. You left town with my best friend!”

She doesn’t bluster, as I expected. Hell, she doesn’t look the least bit embarrassed, let alone get defensive. Instead, she looks me in the eye and drawls, “Yes, Booker, I did. And I would do it again in a heartbeat. Will supported me when you waltzed off and never looked back.”

I am so furious over the way she stubbornly clings to that fucking fiction when it’s the farthest thing from the truth. I’m even more frustrated because she sounds as though she honest-to-Christ believes the shit she’s spewing. So I grab her, thrust my fingers through her hair and use my thumbs on her cheeks to tilt her head back. And shut her up in the only manner I know how.

I kiss her.

And her mouth. God, that mouth. It’s my dream all over again, only this time I’m wide awake and it’s real. Hell, I have kissed my share of women since leaving Walla Walla as a teen.

I couldn’t recite the names of nine-tenths of them if you held my feet to the fire.

Never have I forgotten Lena. God knows I tried, more than once. Yet I did not, could not, forget her. And with a single touch of my mouth to those pretty, pretty lips, our old chemistry explodes.

It’s not just me, either. When I wrapped my hands around her head, Lena grabbed my wrists and I was sure this was it, she was going to rip them away in no uncertain terms. Determined to get what I can, while I can, I twist my mouth over her soft, plush lips, opening them to my tongue.

And the next thing I know, she’s on her tiptoes and using the leverage of her grip on my wrists to strain again me, that unfamiliar soft, lush body plastered to the harder planes of my own so tightly a stray thought couldn’t slide between us. Her breath sloughs in rough rhythm against my lips, into the cavern of my mouth. And all I want is to breathe in when she breathes out.

I whirl us a half turn and back her against the wall next to her dressing table. Without relinquishing her mouth, I release her head and skim my hands down her amazing curves. Cupping her ass, I haul her up.

She jerks, but quickly gets her bearings and wraps her legs around my waist.

Turns out she isn’t nude beneath that siren wrap after all. But when the crotch seam of a filmy pair of French knickers aligns perfectly with the erection straining the fly of my slacks, we both suck in a breath as if we’d touched naked skin to naked skin.

I lift my head to look at her. The midnight-blue rimmed, lake-blue eyes gazing back at me have darkened several shades, and vivid color stains Lena’s cheeks. She returns my regard from beneath half-mast eyelashes. Slicks her tongue over her bottom lip.

I groan and rock my mouth over hers once again.

I’d just instigated a slow grind against her when a tap sounds at the door. Lena startles against me, then unlocks her legs from around my hips and squirms to be let down. Small distress sounds whisper in her throat.

“Shh,” I murmur almost silently against her mouth. “Shh.” I draw my head back slightly to look at her.

The room is beginning to darken and her front teeth gleam from between her parted lips. I glance fondly at the left incisor, ridiculously pleased to see it still at a slight angle to its center-tooth neighbor. I can’t stop myself from going in for another taste.

Lena’s hands cupping my jaws block me—not to mention her calm-voiced, “Let me go.”

Even stated in a low whisper, she sounds pretty damn sure about what she wants.

I set her loose and step back.

The knock sounds again. “Lena,” one of the Brasher sisters call. “Are you in there?”

“I’m running late getting ready for my number.” Lena has to raise her voice to reply but she sounds completely confident—even as she presses a hand to her diaphragm and struggles to control the tempo of her breathing. “I’ll come by your room after the show, okay?”

“Be sure to, ’cause Clara came up with a darb idea for what we can do tomorrow before work. See ya later, alligator.” And the sisters’ footsteps continue down the hall.

Lena turns to me. “You need to go.”

“I think we should tal—“

“No. I need you to go.”

So, I do. She is late getting ready for her act. And this was a huge mistake. It’s a good thing my hoofers interrupted.

I might not have thought so in the heat of the moment, but… yeah. Sure.

It is a damn good thing.

Hell.

Fortuitous, even.