Her Last Temptation

Crud. She’d gotten so distracted chatting with Dinah about the older woman’s romantic possibilities that she’d completely forgotten about her own.

No. He’s not a possibility.

She’d been telling herself that for two hours, every throaty, wickedly sexy song the band performed reminding her of just how dangerous getting involved with Spence would be. Even if he had made her almost melt into a puddle when he’d sung one song she hadn’t recognized, about making love in the moonlight on a windswept beach to a woman with fire in her eyes. Made her want to take a drive down to the Galveston coast. With him.

But no. It’d never happen. He was a long-haired musician playing tiny bars in Nowhereville, Texas, for heaven’s sake. The man probably didn’t even own a car. Spence was definitely not the steady, reliable type she’d been telling herself she needed to find. Far, far from it!

The flirting was over with. The guy was a hunk and a half, but so were a lot of other guys. And all of them were the type who walked away.

She’d had enough of those, dammit. From here on out, she was going to be strictly business with this particular one. So she offered him an impersonal smile. “Hey, I was afraid the crowd was never going to let you guys take a break.”

“Me, too,” he said.

Without being asked, she opened a bottle of icy cold water and slid it to him. He picked it up, giving her a grateful nod, and lifted it to his lips.

Lips. Don’t think of the lips. You never notice the lips of the guy at the bank or the post office.

She looked down, her gaze falling on his throat. Her breaths deepened as she watched the way his pulse pounded in his neck and the muscles leading to his shoulders rippled with his every movement. All glisteny with a sheen of sweat. Probably tasted salty.

She added more no-no words to her list. Neck. Shoulders. Muscles. Glisteny. Salty.

“Thanks,” he said as he lowered the nearly empty bottle. “Those lights are pretty hot. I was half wishing I’d worn less clothes.” He cleared his throat. “I mean, lighter clothes. Shorts or something.”

Less clothes? No pants? She might as well just give this up right now. Because no matter how hard she tried to keep her mind focused and professional, she kept sliding down this slippery slope of attraction to this man. She couldn’t possibly survive another round of sexual roulette with him.

But at least this time, Spence was looking uncomfortable, as well. Funny, the way he’d stammered over the words he’d said, about wearing less clothes. As if he, too, had recognized the naughty implication and had been slightly embarrassed about it.

It was cute, that sheepish look on his face. Not to mention completely unexpected. Embarrassment and this guy went together about as naturally as pork chops and a vegetarian.

“It is awfully hot in here, don’t you think?” he finally said, filling the thick silence. How bizarre, this feeling of being in a silent bubble, when all around them voices chattered and glasses tinkled. But, like before, all of that seemed very far away.

“Yeah, well, uh…I guess the crowd of naked bodies makes it feel even hotter,” Cat said.

Then she bit her tongue. Bodies. Another definite no-no word when Spence was around. If this kept up, she was going to have the vocabulary of a ten-month-old.

“Uh, Cat, did you say what I think you said?”

Sure, she’d said the crowd of bodies…oh, God, she hadn’t said naked, had she? Tell me I didn’t say naked.

“Because we’re pretty open to playing at unusual venues, but an entirely naked audience, well, that could get a little…sticky.” His lips twitched, and she knew he was trying to hold back his laughter.

Cat blushed. Literally felt hot blood rise in her face and flood her cheeks. No guy had ever made her blush.

“Slip of the tongue,” she muttered, grabbing for any halfway believable excuse she could find. “I mean, you know, the words, they sort of go together. Naked. And bodies. I might just as easily have said dead and bodies.”

Argh! Just stick a spike through your hand and get it over with, Cat. It’d be less painful than this.

“I think I’d prefer naked ones to dead ones,” he murmured.

She kept prattling on, like an out of control car careening toward a cliff. “You know what I mean, though, right? Some words are kind of a natural fit. Like fried and oysters.”

His lips twitched again. “Most people would say fried goes better with chicken…but if you prefer oysters…”

“I don’t. Prefer oysters, I mean, no matter what their, uh, reputation,” she said, wondering why she’d had to immediately latch on the sex food group when there were so many others available. Bacon and eggs. Hot and tamale.

Dead and duck.

“Me, neither. Nasty little things,” he said, obviously still talking about the oysters.

Cat nodded in agreement. “Shiny and slippery and wet.”

One of his brows shot up. “Shiny…slippery…wet?”

Cat pictured putting her mouth in front of a firing squad for continuing to bring both their minds to places they had no business being. She closed her eyes, unable to manage a single word. She could only shake her head in dismay. When, in the name of heaven, had Cat Sheehan turned into a babbling idiot?

Spence started to laugh—a low, husky laugh that made her tingle, all over. “I’d offer you a shovel, but I don’t have one on me. Besides, you’re doing a pretty good job digging yourself deeper into this hole all on your own.”

“If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go shoot myself now.”

“I just told you I don’t have a shovel, Cat.”

“So you can’t bury me?”

“Uh huh.”

She tapped the tip of her index finger on her cheek, thinking about it, even as she gave in and laughed a little with him. “Hmm, so how about backing up ten minutes and starting this whole thing over?”

Spence leaned over the bar, propping his chin on his fist. “Hi. Thanks for the water. What’d you think of the music?”

“You guys really are good,” she said, thrilled at the chance to keep the conversation neutral.

“Thanks.” He leaned closer, raising his voice as more people crowded close to the bar, waving at Cat to place their orders. “We have a lot of fun doing it.”

Getting back to work, she filled a few mugs, poured a few shots, blew off a few jerks, then returned her attention to the bass player in the corner. “I really liked that song you did about the girl with the fire in her eyes and the moonlight on her hair. Who sang it originally? I didn’t recognize it.”

Spence shrugged, lifted his bottle to his mouth and sipped more water. After sipping, he lowered the bottle and wiped the moisture off his lips with the back of his hand.

Cat just stared, acknowledging the truth: the man was poetry in motion. No small talk in the world was going to make her oblivious to that.

“You didn’t recognize it because I wrote it,” he said.

Wrote it. Wrote poetry? She blinked a couple of times, trying to backtrack and remember what the heck they’d been talking about before he’d gotten her all distracted with his water-drinking abilities. Then she remembered. “You wrote that song? The one about the hot night and the whispers in the dark?”

Wow. She never would have guessed. Not only because the music had been so good, but also because of the unbridled emotion of the words, juxtaposed against the raw, haunting power of the melody. It had sounded…hungry. That was the only word she could find to describe it. “I’m impressed. You must have had quite a lot of inspiration to write such a powerful song.”

She hadn’t been fishing for information. She hadn’t. It was none of her business what inspired him to write such a sensual, heated ballad. But she still held her breath, waiting for his response, hoping he wouldn’t say he’d written it for the love of his life. His longtime girlfriend.

God, please, not his wife!