After Midnight

CARTER HAD WANTED Lindsey since the first time he’d seen her. They’d both been two hotshot seventeen-year-olds being interviewed on ESPN, and when she’d looked straight at him with her pretty chocolate-brown eyes, he’d felt that spark shoot through his body.

But she’d always been the ultimate ice queen. Too cool for someone as wild and risky as he’d always been. But he’d gotten to know her better now. More than ten years later, he still wanted her, but he saw her through the eyes of a man and not a lusty boy.

Though, in all honesty, gazing at her now, looking like a gorgeous goddess, she still made him horny as hell.

And it was New Year’s Eve. He’d spent more of them than he wanted to admit higher than the Rocky Mountains and with people whose names he couldn’t recall.

He knew he’d changed over the course of the past year. The winter games had given him a check in the last box of his goals list. And it had been a sobering wake-up call when he’d witnessed Lindsey crash and realized his Nordic angel had feet of clay. Seeing her career end so quickly and unexpectedly had made him understand that he needed to look at his own life. He wasn’t going to be able to snowboard forever at the top level of his event.

So he’d come here to Park City... Okay, in part to be closer to her. To see if maybe she’d be interested in him now that she wasn’t so focused on training 24/7. But she still looked straight through him, as if he was just another man in the room. He wanted to be the only man in the room she saw.

Especially tonight.

“So, gorgeous, have you been thinking about that kiss?” he asked smoothly.

He sure had. It was hard to think of anything else when he was standing so close to her. Tonight she had her long, pale hair pulled back into an elegant updo. Tendrils framed her heart-shaped face and accentuated her long neck. Her mouth was full and sensuous, and she’d coated it with a sparkly lip gloss, which made it so hard for him to tear his gaze away. He leaned in closer. Almost kissed her before he pulled back.

He was waiting for midnight.

Besides, he had more control than that. He didn’t give in to his baser instincts. Not anymore.

“I can tell it’s been on your mind,” she purred, lifting her hand and running her finger over his lower lip, back and forth, before spreading her fingers out and rubbing them over the stubble on his jaw.

She closed her eyes as she touched him for just a second, nibbling at her bottom lip before her hand dropped away.

“I have. You know I’ve been interested in you forever.”

“Forever?” she said. “That’s a bit of an exaggeration.”

Not really. But admitting to her that she’d been his obsession for the better part of ten years wasn’t something he planned to do tonight.

The band had switched to contemporary dance hits, and the loud, infectious beat pumped through the room. Lindsey swayed to it as she took a sip of her lemon-drop martini. It was sad that he knew what she liked to drink. But in a way she’d always been his safe fantasy. The one thing in his life, however distant, that was good and always just out of reach.

Until now.

He wrapped a wispy tendril of straight blond hair that was hanging along the nape of her neck around his finger. Her locks were exquisitely soft. Her skin, showed off by the stunning emerald-green dress she wore, so pale and creamy.

“Not an exaggeration. When we met at ESPN, I knew I wanted to kiss you.”

She pursed her lips and tipped her head subtly away from him. “You were a player even then. And we both know you were attempting to throw me off my game. I almost let you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“My parents. They had sacrificed a lot for me to get where I was, and no hotshot snowboarder with a tattoo was going to change that.”

“With a tattoo. Is this a mark against me?” he asked, rubbing the side of his neck at the site of his first tattoo. It was a courage symbol that he’d seen in Japan when his father, an international businessman, had taken him there for a trip. Carter had been sixteen at the time and had snowboarded in Nagano while his father had worked. The tattoo had been his way of getting his father’s attention while also proving to himself that he hadn’t needed it. What could he say? He’d been a teenager.

She traced the design with her long, sparkly painted fingernail. “Not now. But back then you seemed wild and reckless. Too much for me. I needed to concentrate on my skiing.”

“You were the fast one,” he said with a wink. He knew that a lot of people thought what he did was dangerous—the flips and the 360s—but Lindsey had thrown her body down the mountain at speeds in excess of sixty miles per hour. Something that never failed to turn him on.

She scraped her finger down the column of his neck, sending delicious shivers through his body, and his cock stirred. Seeing his reaction, she leaned in closer, closed her eyes and released a sigh.

“Why is it that you are always racing ahead of me, then?” she asked in a soft whisper spoken right in his ear.

His ability to think was gone. Her breath was warm and her finger kept stroking his neck. All he could think about was her mouth. And how close it was to his. He turned his head to kiss her. Needed to feel her lips under his. But a waitress bumped into their table, jostling the drinks, and Lindsey pulled back.

Carter cursed under his breath but put on a smile for the cocktail waitress, who looked stricken. “No worries.”

“These are for you,” she said, setting down two cards and handing them Lars Usten Resort and Spa pens before walking away.

* * *

IT WAS ONE THING to decide she was going to spend the night with Carter, but she was finding it altogether more unnerving than she would have expected. In movies she’d seen the woman go after the guy, and then there would be a montage of kisses or dancing that ended up with the couple in bed. But she’d always been awkward at this stage.

There was something about Carter that for her was irresistible. His tattoo had fascinated her for a long time, and that stubble of his was just as a soft as she’d imagined it would be. She was letting the martini power her courage tonight...and she had to admit she liked it.

A lot.

“What is this?” She pulled the card the waitress had dropped on their table toward her. He’d been about to kiss her, and though she wanted that kiss, she was glad for the reprieve. She only needed a kiss at midnight. Not a public make-out session before that.

“Some sort of resolutions form,” he said. “So, gorgeous, what do you want for this New Year?”

She arched a brow. “Why do you keep calling me that?”

“Because you are gorgeous,” he said with another sly wink. “Plus, I’m sort of afraid if I say your name, you’ll remember you don’t like me.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t say I don’t like you,” she demurred. He was a little too wild and too out of control to be someone she felt comfortable with most of the time, but tonight that appealed to her. She wanted to forget who she was. Forget the past year had happened and wake up on January 1 as someone else.

That was pitiful, she thought. She should stop drinking. She’d had two martinis, and while she wasn’t drunk, she did have that nice little buzz. But it was the maudlin thoughts that bothered her.

“Okay. What would you say about me, then?”

“I like that tattoo,” she admitted. “And your stubble. How do you get it so soft?”

He laughed. “I’ve got more tattoos if you like that one.”

“You do?” she asked. “Where?”

“I’ll show you if you play your cards right.”

She flushed a little. Not as bold as she wanted to be, but she wasn’t backing away. She was doing this. She was going to be impulsive. And daring. Not Lindsey-like.

Needing a distraction, she glanced down at the resolution list on the card. “Do you do resolutions?”

“Seriously?” he asked with a mocking look. “Do I look like someone who wants to better myself?”

She shook her head, but realized in that instant that he was playing at being the bad-boy snowboarder she’d always thought he was. “I’m not sure about that. I think there is a big part of Carter Shaw the world never gets to see.”