LENA

I need time to get myself together, but it’s colder than a witch’s heart out here. Goose bumps keep piling atop goose bumps up my arms and down my thighs, and I so wish I’d grabbed my coat before I came outside. Of course, had I done so, it’s a pretty safe bet any one of my group not currently out on the dance floor would have been all over me. Demanding to know why I needed it. Where I planned to go with it. In other words, reaping me the precise level of attention that would stop me from grabbing these few brief minutes to myself. Moments I could really use to sort through my emotions. God knows they’re all over the place.

It isn’t just the past few minutes I need to get straight in my head. It’s everything that has been building and building between Booker and me since first discovering the identities of the owner and new singer at the Twilight Room. Every small moment and larger event between us seems to keep piling atop the ones that came before. Forming one great big hazardous and overwhelming ball-up.

Still. I can’t deny I was seriously overheated from that brief dance spent plastered against Booker’s—oh, my—extremely firm self. In that regard, the cold early morning air has quite efficiently cooled me down.

A little too efficiently, as it turns out. Shivering, I cross my arms across my breasts and briskly rub my hands against my shoulders and upper arms in an attempt to restore a hint of warmth. Being out here freezing my seat-cheeks off is baloney—I know that. But darn it all, it took me years not to feel abandoned every time someone came and went in my life. I had finally gotten rather good at avoiding situations that made me feel that way, until Booker blew my world apart. After he abandoned me—and, face it, there’re no two ways about that—it took me almost as long to rebuild all my walls the second time as it had the first.

Walls, which he just handily smashed down during one stupid dance. Heck, not even an entire dance, either, but rather—

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” An irate male voice snarls from not too far away. “Are you looking to get assaulted?”

I flinch, yet am not exactly shocked when I look up to see Booker bearing down on me.

Then his words sink in, and I wrinkle my nose. “Oh, don’t be so melodramatic, Douglas Fairbanks. I was just looking for a minute to myself.”

“Melodramatic, she says.” He strides right up to me until we’re standing toe to toe and swings my coat around my shoulders. Grasping the lapels, he tugs them together until the sides overlap, the knuckles of one of his warm hands lightly pressing into the inner curve of my left breast. Heat floods me once again and I wouldn’t bet all my hard-earned savings it’s entirely due to my coat.

He, on the other hand, isn’t feeling a likeminded warmth. Not if the way he lowers his head to scowl at me is anything to go by. “This place is crawling with fly boys,” he snaps and uses his grip on my coat to haul me a step closer, his knuckles pressing the tiniest bit deeper. “Men who have been goddamn drinking all night. No woman with half a brain in her head waltzes out into an unlighted parking lot without taking someone along as back up.”

My head snaps up. “Did you just call me stupid?”

“Hell, no, don’t be an idiot—” Booker cuts himself off with an abrupt crack of laughter. “Sorry. That’s clearly not the best way to make my point.” As suddenly as he laughs at himself, he sobers again. “But you have to admit, Lena, hanging around the dark lot of a juice joint full of fried servicemen—by yourself—probably doesn’t rank right up there as one of your better thought-out plans.”

I shrug sulkily. Still, put that way I have to admit—if only to myself—he has a point. I was so hot and bothered the possible hazards of coming out here on my own never once occurred to me. And I’m the kind of gal who usually factors in all the risks in order to avoid putting myself in the path of any of them. In this case, however, I hadn’t thought beyond getting a breath of fresh air and a moment alone to drag my composure back where the darn thing belongs. Front and center.

I should be able to simply admit as much to Booker, but I cannot. I have always had a lit-tle problem owning up to when I’m in the wrong. It is not one of my prettier traits. Yet even knowing this, I allow an old anger to resurface and take the place of…whatever it was I felt for him inside. All I say—in a voice even I recognize as much too peevish—is, “I hate all the cigarette smoke. It stinks to high heaven and it doesn’t do my voice the slightest favor.”

“Yeah.” Booker slides his hands to a different position on my coat, and I immediately miss their warmth. After slipping the garment off my shoulders, he holds it for me while I slide my arms into the arm holes, then buttons me up as if I’m a four-year-old. I don’t know if I should be insulted he thinks I can’t handle the job on my own, or just accept there is something kind of nice about being taken care of this way.

Warmth returns the moment he finishes, mostly because he promptly pulls me into a back-cracking, feet-lifted-a-good-foot-off-the-ground hug. Seconds later, as he sets me back on my feet without letting go of me, I marvel I was able to forget the way he hugs in the first place. They were once a Booker special. How could I have forgotten just how tight and warm and real they are? How secure they make me feel?

“That is a definite downside of owning or working in a bar if you’re not a smoker,” Booker agrees. “I have never understood the appeal, myself.” He draws back a little, tucking his chin in to look down at me. “But is it the only reason you’re out here, Lena? Because I thought we had—I don’t know—a moment in there on the dance floor.” His gaze is dead level as it meets my own. “Or maybe I was mistaken. Was I the only one affected?”

I so want to say yes. Lord, I yearn for it to be just him. But his intense gaze drags the truth out of me. “No.”

“No?” His mouth curves up. “So, you felt it, too?”

I shrug. “Maybe.”

“No, you don’t get to say maybe, baby.” Once again, he commands my gaze. “You either felt it as well, or you didn’t.”

“Okay, fine. I felt...something.”

Booker bends his head and presses a kiss to the left side of my neck just below the curve of my jaw. “Something that made you feel...flushed, maybe? Stimulated?” His voice is low and rough, as if he has to push his words through a throat full of gravel. He shifts his head to breathe directly into the whorls of my ear, “Hot?”

It spurs a shaky little sigh that shudders up my own throat. I tip my head a fraction to the right to give him more room to maneuver. As much as I would rather not answer the question, I murmur, “Um-hmm.”

To any or all of what he said.

With an extremely deep, extremely male groan reverberating in his chest, he crouches slightly to kiss his way down my neck. I have no idea if it’s his hungry-sounding rumble or the feel of the unfamiliar stubble on his chin and jaw scratching my skin that’s doing the trick.

Whatever it is, thrill bumps flash to far-reaching parts of my body. They wash a crazy pattern across my breasts, twisting my nipples into hard, aching points. From there sensation zings—as if on a direct, private non-party line—deep in my lady place.

When Booker reaches the little hollow at the base of my throat, he gives it a small lick with the flat of his tongue. Then he lifts his head and the hot, damp spot goes icy with the loss of his body heat.

He looks up at me through half lowered eyelids. Says, in what even I recognize as a sexually charged voice, “I have something for you.”

The wash of disappointment his words cause promptly drowns every bit of pleasure I felt, and I stiffen in his arms. “Yeah?” I say flatly. “I’ve heard that one before.”

Eyes narrowing, he surges to his full height, his hand wrapped around the back of my neck keeping us near. “Who the hell from?” he demands in a hard voice that somehow commands an immediate response.

“Other men wanting the exact same thing you want from me right now!” I snap back at him.

“And how many of those men have gotten what they wanted from you?”

I thrust my chin up. “I fail to see how that is any of your beeswax, Booker.”

“How many?” he persists.

“Oh, dozens,” I lie with a breezy flip of my hand. “Heck, maybe even hundreds.”

His hand tightens on my nape. “How. Many, Lena?”

Oh, botheration! “None,” I spit out. “Okay? I have refused—well, not hordes of men—but my share. Even when it meant I didn’t get the job I was more than qualified for and really deserved.” I shove my face as close to his as I can , given our height differences. “I have earned every single singing engagement I’ve ever had with my voice, if you can imagine such a thing.”

And I am so through with this garbage. After knocking his arm aside to make him drop his grip on my nape, I take a sizable step back. “How about you, lover boy? How many women have you gotten what you wanted from?”

For the first time since tracking me down out here, Booker looks uncomfortable, and he mumbles something I don’t quite catch.

“Speak up!” I demand, then use his own method of interrogation against him as I rap out, “How. Many, Booker?”

One broad shoulder hitches toward his ear. “I don’t know, exactly.”

“Why, because there have been so many?” I barely take note of the half-seas-over airman and woman stumbling out through Swanny Don’s front door, as I shoot only the briefest glance in their direction. I am too busy bracing myself against the sudden pain radiating out from the region of my heart.

The latter makes me so angry. “Isn’t that just like a man?” I demand sourly. “Demanding ‘the little woman’ hold herself to the highest standards while they go catting around with any woman who will put up with their sorry selves?”

“Or, maybe,” he says in that low, gravelly voice that sets up tingles in long-ignored parts of my body, “I was just practicing so I could get it right for the one woman who matters.”

“Well, good luck explaining that to her when you find her.” The thought of him with “the one woman who matters” shouldn’t grind like so much broken glass in my stomach. Yet it does—and I hate it.

“Yeah, it’s not going real swell so far,” I think I hear him mutter under his breath.

Before I have time to process if those were the words I heard, he straightens. “Look, can we back this up and start over? I bought you something today to commemorate tonight’s success, because I knew in my gut your version of the song was going to be a success. I didn’t do it to get in your damn knickers.”

“Oh.” My voice comes out small, and in truth, that’s how I suddenly feel: small. Over-reactive and petty. “I—” I clear my throat “I apologize for jumping to conclusions.”

“It’s clear you still have some issues with me.”

That shoves the poker back up my spine in a red-hot hurry and I take another step back. Because, really? “Can you honestly say you’re surprised by my “issues”, Booker? I loved you with everything I had and I thought you felt the same way about me.”

I see him about to respond and with a hissed, “Tsk!” I thrust a hush your mouth finger in his face. “This is not me bringing up the letters again. I agree there is something fishy about neither of us ever getting so much as one from the other. But you left me, Booker. I don’t want to hear about your father spiriting you out of town without giving you a chance to contact me, either, because I accept his doing that was an impossible situation you had no control over. But your daddy didn’t stick around Seattle to stand guard over you. You were the one who made the decision to join the Army and go off without so much as a by your leave. You were the one who didn’t bother coming back to Walla Walla to let me hear from your own lips you were going halfway around the world. It was also you who didn’t find a way to call me or to send me a telegram. You. Just. Left. Me.” I poke a finger into his chest to underscore each word. Then take yet another step back and look him in the eye. “Without one damn word.”