Instant Temptation

CHAPTER 11

TJ was having an excellent dream. He was flat on his back, wrapped in a tangle of warm, feminine limbs, the owner of said limbs working her mouth down his neck toward his chest.

Oh yeah…

She paused to dip her tongue into the hollow of his throat, then sucked a patch of skin into her mouth.

“Mmmm,” rumbled out of him and he rolled her beneath him, slipping a thigh between hers, making her gasp in pleasure as she rocked herself on his leg.

Christ, he loved this dream.

With one hand beneath her panties palming a sweet ass, he ran his lips down her throat, over a narrow collarbone and encountered a bra strap.

No problemo.

He simply nudged it down, and then the silk cup, following its path with his mouth to a warm curve of breast. He swirled his tongue over the tip and felt the nipple pebble. With another groan, he sucked it into his mouth just as two small hands fisted in his hair. Then he switched to the other side, and the warm, sweet body beneath his arched up with a soft cry, riding his thigh for all she was worth.

She was hot and getting wet. He could feel her dampness on his skin.

It was like a drug.

Needing more, his hand came around, slid down her stomach and into her panties in front now, finding hot, wet, silky flesh.

His dream lover’s hands were on the move, too, gliding over his chest, toying with the buttons on his Levi’s, which were damned uncomfortable now that he was hard as a rock.

She got the buttons opened, giving him desperately needed room, and he let out a rough exhale that backed up in his throat when she slid her hand home.

It was getting better and better.

He slid a finger into her, brushing his thumb over her center, and she cried out again, arching up as he teased her nipple with his tongue, then his teeth, gliding his thumb in the rhythm her hips demanded. He knew by the way she was panting and writhing that she was close, and by the way she was stroking him that he wasn’t too far behind, and then suddenly she burst with a soft cry and a name on her lips.

His.

He let her down slowly, skimming his hand back up her warm, sated body, his still hard and throbbing.

That’s when she said his name again, in a shocked whisper. “TJ?”

Well, who the hell else? After all, this was his dream. But the panic in her voice impeded into his dream and he opened his eyes.

It was still dark, but his body told him dawn wasn’t too far off. He focused in on the wet nipple right in front of his eyes. His thumb was rasping back and forth over the other one, both breasts being offered up to him by the bra he’d shoved down.

He lifted his head and met Harley’s startled, sleepy, and glazed-over eyes.

Oh, shit.

“We were dreaming,” she said thickly, and then seemed to realize she had her hands down his pants. She yanked them out so fast he winced, and she covered her face.

Getting out of the sleeping bag without touching her, with his body still cocked and loaded, was an exercise in torture. Grabbing her shirt from the log near their heads, where it’d dried in front of the long-dead fire, he handed it to her.

While she pulled it on, he walked to the edge of the clearing.

He was still standing there mentally flogging himself when she cleared her throat.

Grimacing, he faced the music and turned to her, searching her expression for any signs of distress, fury, or more of that gut-wrenching humiliation and shame he’d seen yesterday.

Nothing. She was showing nothing. “Harley, I’m-”

“Sorry,” she said softly at the same time as he did.

He stared at her. “Yeah.”

“That was entirely my fault,” she said.

He was educated. He helped run a successful business. People paid him shocking amounts of money to be good in any of a variety of dangerous, life-threatening situations. Yet when he opened his mouth, the only thing that came out was a brilliant, “huh?”

“I started it.” She let her gaze drop over his bare chest before she caught herself and closed her eyes, pressing the heels of her hands against them. “God. I’m such a slut when it comes to you. You have no idea how much that pisses me off.”

When she whirled away and headed toward her backpack, he stared at her back and felt a reluctant grin tug at his mouth. “You started it?”

He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t answer.

Even so, somehow knowing she felt that way made him feel a helluva lot better, even if it was possible he was going to die of blood loss from the hard-on he was still sporting. “You started it?” he repeated dumbly.

“I said so, didn’t I?” She was ripping through the mess that was her pack. “It’s almost dawn. I need my camera.”

He moved closer, risking life and limb. “You’re a slut when it comes to me?”

Her head whipped around so fast for a moment he thought she’d turned into the little girl in The Exorcist. “Don’t you dare laugh.” She paused and drew a breath. “Okay. I realize that there’s possibly an etiquette here.” She eyeballed his crotch and grimaced in guilt. “After all, you gave me an, um…”

He arched a brow. “Orgasm?”

“Yes.” She blushed. “That. And I didn’t…” She gestured with her finger in the general direction of his button fly.

“Do me in return?” he finished for her.

She closed her eyes. “I…owe you.”

“Are you offering?”

Her mouth fell open, and he let out a low laugh. Her eyes narrowed and she shoved a toothbrush into her mouth, vanishing into the woods.

He shook his head, grabbed his own toothbrush, and made his way into the woods in the opposite direction.

By the time he got back, Harley was peeling an orange. She looked up at him, for a single beat, her gaze both soft and unguarded, and he felt an odd catch deep inside.

Then she blinked and the moment was gone. She handed him half of the orange.

“Thanks.” He had no idea what she was thinking. “You okay?”

“Don’t worry, TJ. I know what that was. Or rather, what it wasn’t.”

“Okay, good. Maybe you can explain it to me.”

She shoved a piece of orange in her mouth. “We’re going to be okay. All we have to do is get back to where we were.”

“You mean home?”

“No.” She gave him a duh look. “I mean metaphorically. We need to get back to basics. Back to ignoring each other. And/or bickering.”

“I see,” he said, when he really didn’t see at all.

“I mean something real between us would never work,” she said. “Knowing that makes it easier. Right?”

“Right.” Christ, she was making him dizzy. Or maybe that was because most of his blood was still drained out of his brain and in his-

“It’s not like you’re even around to be a boyfriend,” she said, still talking, still under the apparent illusion that he was following her logic. “You’re gone all the time. You like women in your bed but not your life. Et cetera, et cetera.” She sucked on a piece of orange and blew a few of his brain cells.

“So trust me,” she continued. “I don’t look at you and think relationship. Mostly I look at you and think I wish I had something to hit you over the head with.”

He blinked. “So I should stay at arm’s length then?”

“Eight to ten inches should do it.”

She’d walked away by the time the laugh tumbled out of him, but he didn’t remain amused. He’d just been thoroughly put in his place, dumped before he could even think about doing the dumping.

Even more disconcerting, he got it. He got her. Because he knew her better than she wanted to admit. He knew that thanks to her sweet, hippy-throwback parents, she’d grown up with an utter lack of tradition, and he knew she secretly yearned for exactly that.

She wanted a solid, stand-up guy, with a white picket fence and two point four kids. Which is what had drawn her to Nolan. Nolan was one of those solid, stand-up guys, one who’d absolutely give her what she needed.

Unlike him. “Harley-”

“Ignoring each other,” she said. “Remember?”

Yeah.

Her eyes drifted to his bare chest, then darted away, but not before he caught the flare of heat.

“I’m going to have a hard time ignoring you when you’re looking at me like I’m lunch,” he said, reaching for his shirt.

“I’ll work on that. Maybe you could get fat or ugly or something.” Ignoring his laugh, she sat on the edge of the ridge as dawn rode in, banishing the last of the dark, bringing first a deep violet, then a lighter purple, and finally pink into the sky. TJ sat with her, and in silence they watched Mother Nature do her glorious thing.

As the sky lightened, far below a handful of coyotes moved through the meadow, looking for breakfast. TJ counted four coyotes and…“What the hell? That looks like”-he sat up straighter-“a badger?”

“You’ve never seen that?” Harley asked, looking through her camera lens. “The two breeds have a sort of symbiotic relationship when they need to. The coyote can run, but they’re not good diggers. And the badger-”

“Can dig but not run.” He grinned. “They’re working together for breakfast. Amazing.”

The only sound was the hum of insects and early morning bird chatter, since Harley’s long-lens digital camera snapped silently. “Look,” she murmured, leaning into him to show him her LED screen and a gorgeous shot of one of the coyotes up close, nose quivering in the air as the animals caught their scent on the morning air.

“You’re good,” he murmured, turning his face into her hair.

“It’s the camera.”

“It’s more than the camera.” He pulled back and looked at her. “Hell, Harley, you really should come work for us.”

“Why?”

“Well, for money, for one thing. Our clients would pay big bucks for you to document their trips.”

Standing, she pulled on her pack. “I’m going to try to fix the equipment on that west ridge.”

He pulled on his pack also, and they headed out. Normally, being on the mountain in the morning was his favorite time. The air was crisp with a hint of the warmth the day would bring, and the residual dew made everything sparkle. Far above, the majestic peaks were still snow-tipped. The ground beneath their feet was soft and spongy from the rain, everything around them bursting with fall colors.

“So,” he said after a few minutes. “Why exactly aren’t we going to follow through with this thing between us?”

“There is no thing, TJ.”

“Really? ’Cause it felt like a thing this morning when I made you come.”

She tripped, and sent him a glare. “No-talking zone.”

He grinned. She was walking with attitude, and she was sexy as hell. “You want me,” he said.

“No talking.”

“I want you back,” he told her. “I think I’ve proved that. So what’s the problem?”

“My problem?” She stopped so abruptly he nearly plowed her over when she whipped around to gape at him. “It’s you! It’s always been you!”

He raised a brow.

She blew out a breath and pushed him in front of her to walk in the lead. “You drive me crazy,” he heard her mutter.

“Maybe, but you’re watching my ass as I walk.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a great ass,” she admitted, surprising a laugh out of him. After about five minutes, she sighed. “Okay, it’s possible I overreacted back there.”

“No. Really?”

“My problem isn’t you, per se,” she said. “But more the way I seem to react to you.”

“Is that an apology?”

“For what?”

“For molesting me in my sleep.”

“I was kind of hoping we could forget about that.”

Normally that would be fine with him. After all, he never begged a woman to want him, and he didn’t plan to start now. If she hadn’t been interested, he would have let it go.

But she was interested. Interested enough to come all over him, panting his name as she did. It’d been erotic as hell.

Which left him confused. He glanced back at her. She was small and curvy, and walking with an attitude that was making him hot.

Oh, wait.

He was already hot.

Their little wake-up call might have cooled her jets, but his were still on and ready to go.

Halfway up to the impaired camera, they came to a natural gorge. Just on the other side, up about fifty more feet, was the ledge where the camera was placed. Between there and where they stood was what was normally just a low-lying creek. But the rain had it swollen and rushing like a raging river. It was a good twenty feet wide, knee-deep in the middle, and roaring over slippery rocks. Worse, on either side, the banks were muddy and unstable.

Harley was standing at the edge with a funny look on her face.

“What?” he asked.

“There are frogs.”

“There are always frogs. Especially after a rain.”

“Doing it.”

He looked down at the rocks she was staring at. Yep, she was right. There were frogs doing it.

“Don’t stare,” she said, and made him laugh.

“Maybe there’s something in the air,” he said hopefully, and then it was her to turn to laugh.

She moved a little bit downstream and then closer to the edge of the water just as a fish leapt straight up into the air and then dove back under. With a startled gasp, Harley took a step back and caught her heel on a rock. She would have gone down, but TJ caught her.

Instead of pulling immediately free of him, she turned within the circle of his arms to face him, further surprising him when her fingers fisted in his shirt.

“You okay?” he asked, holding onto her. “Your ankle?”

“I’m good.” And yet she didn’t let go. Instead she stared up into his eyes.

TJ wondered what she saw when she looked at him like that, all soft and unguarded, as if maybe she saw things in him that he didn’t, couldn’t. And suddenly he felt unguarded, and before he could stop himself, he dipped his head and ran the tip of his nose along her jaw.

“Time to cross,” she said shakily, and turned to stare at the water. Then, without another word, she started to step into it.

“What are you doing?”

“I need to get to the other side.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “You can wait here if you want. Or-”

“Yeah, yeah, or head back. Just hold up a minute.” He took her hand, and waited until she met his gaze. “Trust me?”

“With my life or my body?”

He shook his head and guided her farther up the mountain, out of their way. About a quarter of a mile later, the water slowed and narrowed, but more important they weren’t near a sharp turn, with an unsteady and precarious hillside that looked as if it might go at any moment.

She looked at the new spot, then at him, conceding. “Your knife, your Fritos, your expertise. You’re a handy guy, TJ.”

“Handy,” he repeated, and watched her expression change as she remembered just how “handy” he’d been in the sleeping bag.

“I didn’t expect the water to be this high this late in the season,” she admitted.

“Fall can be risky.” He looked around and found a wrist-thick, chest-high stick with a natural fork at one end for wedging between rocks, which he handed to Harley. “Use this as a staff.”

He searched the thick growth for another one for him, then grabbed her arm when Harley would have headed across. “Wait. Lose your shoes and socks first.”

He kicked his boots off and attached them to his backpack by their laces, then rolled up his pants. “We’ll have better traction in bare feet. Plus, having dry shoes on the other side will be a bonus.”

She bent and untied her boots and pulled off her socks, stuffing them into her pack.

He smiled at her bright pink toenails, and knew it was yet another peek into the complicated psyche of Harley Stephens. She worked as a mechanic, a woman in a man’s world. If she wasn’t covered from head to toe in coveralls and grease, then she was behind a desk analyzing data by herself. The toenails seemed to be her concession to being a woman beneath it all. “Pretty. Come on.” He went first, sucking in a breath as the icy water washed over his feet and halfway up his calves.

“Holy shit!” she squeaked, following him.

Grinning, he reached back for her hand and led the way.