A Stranger's Touch

“You do know you just messed up your makeup.”

Dulcy scanned her features. So she had. So what? She couldn’t bring herself to care. She wasn’t here to entice any of the guys out there to go out with her. In one week she was officially off the market, married and settled. And it couldn’t come soon enough for her. Maybe it was the thought of her honeymoon that was getting her all hot and bothered.

“Here—” Jena rifled through her purse and came up with a compact. Her perfectly made-up face was puckered in disapproval as she dabbed at Dulcy’s cheeks and nose.

Dulcy batted her away. “I don’t want to look like I’m on the make.”

Jena’s devious violet eyes twinkled. “This is your bachelorette party, babe. That’s exactly how you want to look.”

Dulcy wiped off some of the rouge her friend had applied. No, she didn’t want to look like she was on the make. Simply because she was afraid that if a particularly good-looking guy did approach her, she’d be hard-pressed not to wrestle him to the ground and have at him. And then where would she be? Or, more accurately, who would she be? Certainly not the woman she’d spent the past thirty years looking at in the mirror.

Then again, she was already having trouble with her.

She slowly touched up her lipstick, finding the silky way it glided on almost unbearably sensual. She squeezed her eyes shut. Now this was going too far. When she started thinking of her own lipstick as sensual, she was in big trouble.

God, Brad would think she was the biggest hussy alive.

Brad…

“Are you ready?” Jena asked, crossing her arms under her breasts and tapping her foot.

Dulcy recapped her lipstick then tucked it into her purse. She supposed she’d stalled as long as she could. She had agreed to this night out with Jena and Marie. She’d just have to see it through. She glanced at her watch. She only wished it were later than nine o’clock.

“HERE’S TO HOCKEY PLAYERS!” Jena toasted an hour later, then lowered her voice to a bawdy whisper. “And their big…sticks.”

Dulcy blinked and tucked her shoulder-length blond hair behind her ear. Her head felt as if it were stuffed with wool, her limbs felt peculiarly languid, and if she wasn’t imagining things, her friend had just made a brazen reference to hockey players’…private equipment. Not that she was surprised. Jena somehow managed to squeeze the topic of sex into any conversation.

Dulcy mentally repeated the word. Sex. Sex, sex, sex. She grinned. The magic of the liquor seemed to have squelched her hormone-ridden body. Or, if she was lucky, the unfamiliar feelings had bit the dust altogether.

“Dulcy, you dropped the ball,” Jena accused.

Balls and hockey sticks? She scrunched up her face, opening her mouth to correct the mixed metaphor, but somehow the words never made it out. Instead, she shifted in the corner booth of the nightclub and raised her shot glass, the tequila inside splashing out and coating her fingers, as she waited for Jena and Marie to pick up their shots. “To hockey… Hey, wait a minute. Haven’t we toasted hockey players already?”

Jena nearly gave herself whiplash watching three hot guys walk by the table. Well, at least they were what Jena considered hot. Which sometimes seemed to include any male under the age of forty who could financially support himself. These three guys weren’t Dulcy’s type at all. They were too…muscular, too…alpha, too…smug. She preferred a bit more of a challenge—a man whose own personal criteria in the women he dated extended beyond “breathing.”

Jena rolled her eyes heavenward, then groaned in lust. “Yes, we have toasted hockey players already. Three times. First, for their smooth moves. Second, for their large sports cups. Third…for their big sticks. Living in New Mexico, where hockey players are a rarity, you can’t possibly be complaining, can you?”

Dulcy glanced around the club, which was conveniently located just off the lobby of one of Albuquerque’s better hotels. From the real leather, deep-burgundy colored booths and stools, to the brass fixtures and mid-level rock band playing in the far corner, the place was teeming with NHL pro hockey players from a visiting L.A. team, a result of a season kickoff exhibition game against New Mexico’s WPHL division team. The instant Jena had gotten wind of their whereabouts, the location of Dulcy’s bachelorette party was a done deal. There was nothing she or Marie could do to change Jena’s mind. So all of them had checked into three connecting rooms on the seventh floor of the hotel, and headed straight down to the club to “get their party on,” as Jena had put it.

“To hockey players, then.” Dulcy clinked her shot glass against her two friends’. Licking the salt off the back of her hand and downing the fiery amber liquid, she grabbed for one of the dwindling lemon wedges on a plate in the middle of the table.

Dulcy shuddered. She’d never been much of a drinker. A beer here, a glass of wine there. And her lips had certainly never before touched a shot glass, much less tequila. Well, unless the glass was wide-rimmed and the contents were called a margarita. But this was her last real night out with the girls as a single, professional female, and she had agreed to give in to Jena and Marie’s hearty demands that she do it right.

She only wished they had chosen a better-tasting liquor. “Who said this was supposed to get easier after the second shot?”

“I said it gets easier. I don’t know. Maybe it’s after the third shot. How many have we had? Has to be more than three… But it will get easier.” As the youngest and the third member of the circle, Marie Bertelli had a smile, they all agreed, that could stop Tom Cruise dead in his tracks. Well, all except for Marie, anyway, who thought her looks rated as paper-sack material.

Dulcy leaned against the younger woman’s arm, Marie’s red hair nearly putting out an eye. She batted the curly strands away. “And you’re a terrible liar. Maybe that’s the reason why you’re not married yet.”

Marie made a face that only made her look cuter, if that was possible. “Yes, well, you probably wouldn’t be getting married either if you were still living under your parents’ roof. How’s a girl to get any man to stick around in that environment?”

Dulcy conceded the point. Marie’s parents, along with her three impossible older brothers, were convinced that sex was strictly reserved for the married—at least, when it came to women. All three Bertelli brothers had always had very active sex lives, from what Dulcy could remember. As for Marie, she couldn’t even kiss a guy at the end of a date without the entire Bertelli family swooping down and grilling him about his income and investments and religious affiliation. In that order.

“Arranged marriage,” Jena said.

Dulcy and Marie stared at her.

“Oh. Sorry. Guess they already tried that route, didn’t they.”

Not only had Marie’s family tried that route, but they had failed, virtually chasing her from town, until Dulcy and Jena had tempted her back.

Marie grimaced. “Anyway, in reference to my inability to lie, I’ll have you know that I talked my way out of a traffic ticket this morning, thank you very much. I told the nice police officer that I was late for a court date, batted my eyes and, presto—” she snapped her fingers “—he tore up the ticket.”

Jena waved her away. “That’s because you’re so damn cute, especially when you lie.”

Marie looked for support from Dulcy. “Sorry. She’s right, kid. You couldn’t lie to save your life.”

Finally, Marie smiled. “I resemble that remark.” She fingered nearly every one of the corn chips in the bowl she’d dragged closer, then picked the smallest one, always counting calories. “When are you two going to stop calling me ‘kid,’ anyway?”

Dulcy grabbed the largest chip. “I don’t know. When you move out of your parents’ house, maybe?”

Jena lined up the three empty shot glasses in front of her and began filling them. “You’ll also have to make up for the four years you’re younger than us. Don’t forget that.”

“So, in a word, the answer is never.”

Her martyr’s sigh never failed to amuse Dulcy.

“Yes, well, I wouldn’t be under my parents’ roof if not for you two. If you hadn’t called me six months ago with that proposal to move back and go into practice with you two and the infamous Bartholomew Lomax, I’d still be in L.A. in my comfortable little apartment in Redondo Beach.” She wiped the salt from her hands. “Not everyone has the money you were born with, Dulcy. Or makes a killing setting serial killers free like you do, Jena. I’ve spent two years keeping L.A. streets safe for John Q. Public by working in the DA’s office.”

“And making nothing in the process,” Jena added, sliding one overflowing shot glass in front of Dulcy, another in front of Marie.

“Yeah. Which is precisely why I have to live with my parents until we start turning a good profit.” Marie lifted her glass. “To success.”

Jena lifted hers. “To hockey players…and their tight buns.”

Dulcy laughed and hoisted her glass. “To love.”

She and Marie went through the salt-licking, fire-downing, lemon-grabbing process, then stared at Jena where she sat with her glass in the air.

“What is it?” Dulcy asked.

Jena shook her head so that her sleek raven hair swayed, then fell disgustingly back into place. “You had to go and do it, didn’t you. Say the L word.” She sighed.

“What’s wrong with the L word?” Marie asked.

“Nothing,” Dulcy said.

Jena twisted her lips. “Well, seeing as this is your night, I’m going to refrain from arguing that point with you.” She raised her glass again. “To hockey players.”