Time Out & Body Check: Time Out / Body Check

“I—None of your business!”

The bell rang again, and in sheer panic, Rainey pushed Mark behind the door and out of sight, pointing at him to stay as she pasted a smile on her face and opened the door.

Kyle was medium height and build, with wind-tousled brown hair that curled over his collar and green eyes that had a light in them that suggested he might be thinking slightly NC-17 thoughts. Rainey stared at him in shock.

He smiled. “Surprised?”

Uh, yeah. He’d grown up and out, and had definitely lost the buck teeth. Plus he had a look of edge to him, a confidence, a blatant sexuality that shocked her. Kyle Foster had grown up to be a bad boy. “It’s nice to see you,” she said, surprised to find it true.

“Same goes.” He looked her over. “You look good enough to eat.”

From behind the door came a low growl.

Rainey didn’t dare glance over, but she could feel the weight of Mark’s stare. “Let me just grab my purse,” she said quickly.

“What smells so good?” Kyle asked, trying to see past her and inside her place.

“I made chocolate chip cookies earlier.”

“I love chocolate chip cookies,” Kyle said.

Was it her imagination, or did Mark growl again? Oh, God. “Burned them,” she said quickly. Liar, liar, pants on fire. She had a glorious tray of cookies on her counter, to-die-for cookies, cookies that were better than an orgasm, but if she let him in, she’d be forced to introduce him to Mark. “Sorry. If you could just give me a sec.” She shut the door on his face and winced. Then she glared at Mark.

“Let him in,” he said. “You can introduce us.” He said this in the tone the Big Bad Wolf had probably used on Little Red Riding Hood.

She pointed at him. “Shh!” She ran into the kitchen, grabbed her purse and strode past the six-foot-plus dark and annoyingly sexy man still standing in her entryway, throwing off enough attitude to light up a third world country.

“Your top’s too tight,” Mark said.

“No, it’s not.”

“Then your bra’s too thin.”

She stared down at herself. He was right—Nipple City. “Well, if you’d stop crowding me.”

He smiled, dark and dangerous. He had no plans to stop crowding her. “And your jeans,” he said.

“What’s wrong with my jeans?”

“You have a stain on the ass.”

She twisted around first one way, then the other, but saw nothing. “I can’t see it.”

“I can. Not exactly date pants, you know?”

“Fine! Don’t move.” She raced up the stairs and down the hallway to her bedroom, tore off the jeans, ripping through her dresser for another clean pair.

Nada.

Dammit! She yanked open her closet and settled on a short denim skirt, which meant she had to change shoes, which also meant she had to redo her hair. Running back down the stairs, she came to a skidding halt at the bottom.

The front door was opened but Kyle was nowhere to be seen, and neither was his car. Eyes narrowed, she followed a faint sound into her kitchen, where she found Mark leaning back against her counter, Zen-calm, every muscle relaxed…eating her cookies.

* * *

“NICE SKIRT YOU’RE almost wearing,” Mark said, and swallowed the last of his cookie. He brushed his fingers off, ignoring the death glare coming at him from the doorway. Rainey had changed out of the sexy jeans and into an even sexier short denim skirt, revealing perfectly toned legs that he wanted to nibble. He wanted to start at her toes and work his way up, up, up past her knees, past her thighs…to the heaven between them.

Something she most definitely wasn’t ready to hear. “You’re good at cookies,” he said. “What else can you cook?”

She crossed her arms, which plumped up her breasts, and he revisited his thought. He wanted to nibble her all over.

Every single inch.

“Where’s my date, Mark?”

He popped another cookie. “Funny thing about that.”

Her eyes darkened, and she leaned against the doorway, arms still crossed as if maybe she didn’t trust herself to come any further into the kitchen. He didn’t know if that was because she wanted to kill him, or kiss him again.

He thought it was probably a good bet that it was the former. When he reached for yet another cookie, she let out a sound of sheer temper and stalked across the room to snatch the plate away from him. “Those are mine.”

Mark was aware that he was known for always being in control, for having a long fuse and rarely losing it, for being notoriously tight with his emotions. Rarely did he find himself in a situation where he wasn’t perfectly at ease and didn’t know exactly what he wanted the outcome to be.

But he was right now. He had no idea what the hell he was doing here.

None.

“Your date had to leave,” he said. “Unexpectedly.”

“Uh-huh. What did you do to him?”

In his world, people never questioned him. And it was a good place to be, his world. Apparently she hadn’t gotten the memo. “Nothing.”

Earlier, in the storage closet at the rec center, he’d stalked her, pressed her against the door. She did the same to him now, but this time her grip on his shirt wasn’t passion. “Tell me, Mark.”

The sound of his name on her tongue did something to him, something it shouldn’t. “He waxes.”

“What?”

“He waxes his body hair,” he said.

She blinked. Paused. “And how did you get close enough to notice that?”

“I wasn’t that close, I have excellent vision. He didn’t have any hair on his arms.”

“He’s a swimmer. So he waxes, so what?”

Yeah, genius, so what? “He had a look in his eye. He was up to no good.”