You Only Love Once

“You can have the friend,” he said, straightening his shoulders.

“Gee thanks, but no thanks.”

“We’re done, here, right? All we’re doing is talking in circles anyway. Come on. Let’s see if we can go get in on some of this action.”

Connor hiked a skeptical brow.

“I’m talking about pool, doofus. What did you think I meant?”

“I don’t play pool.”

David barely heard him, his gaze fastened on the woman even now bending over to set up her next shot. Her toffee-colored hair swept down over her face and, with cleanly manicured nails, she pushed it so the strands mingled with the hair on the other side of her perfect head. Her gaze shifting back to him, she pulled the pool stick back then scratched, completely missing the ball. She might not know much about the game of pool, but she’d look damn hot stretched across the green felt…naked as the day she was born.

“Look out, here he goes again,” he overheard a fellow officer say to another as he walked by them, the comment punctuated by laughter.

David’s grin merely widened.

“IF THE DEVIL wore jeans, this is what he’d look like.”

Kelli Hatfield laughed at her friend’s whispered comment, then self-consciously tugged the snug, unfamiliar pink material of her new top away from her skin. She didn’t have to ask who Bronte was talking about. The blond guy from the end of the bar, who could easily have posed for Michelangelo’s David, was sauntering their way. And saunter was about the word for it. With his sexy gaze openly fastened on her, he gave the impression that she might be his destination. She swallowed hard, straightened, then resisted the urge to pluck at her top again. She caught her friend’s cautionary gaze but purposefully ignored it. The same way she had ignored Bronte’s groan earlier when she saw what she was wearing. And her arguments when Kelli had suggested they go to the renowned D.C. cop bar for “just one drink and a game of pool.” And her warnings that she was just looking for trouble by shimmying like that when she bent over to take a shot. Until that moment, Kelli hadn’t known she could shimmy.

A delicious, reckless shiver glided down her spine.

Bronte leaned closer. “Don’t even think about it, Kell. The guy’s Grade-A trouble. In capital letters. Bolded. Underlined. A lady-killer and a half.”

Kelli’s smile widened as she brushed off her friend’s warning. When was the last time she had felt this way? Keyed up? Sexy? Ready to take on the world? Well, okay, maybe not the world, but certainly the prime male specimen heading her way. She frowned slightly, not knowing what was worse—the fact that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this way, or the suspicion that she never had. The unclear answer made her all the more determined to pay attention to the fiery emotions.

Sure, she admitted it probably wasn’t very wise to openly encourage a guy in a cop bar, considering her circumstances. But it was her first night living in D.C. after three long years. And, by God, it felt good to be home, in the city where she’d been raised and where she planned to live out the rest of her life. It felt good thinking about her new job and knowing she had a choice apartment in Columbia Heights, the equivalent of which she would never have been able to afford in New York City. Overall, she felt good. And the instant she’d exchanged glances with the man now close enough for her to see the color of his eyes—a warm, vivid blue that sent another shiver sliding behind the other—she’d felt the overwhelming need to cut loose in a way she never had.

“Tonight, maybe Grade-A trouble is what I’m in the market for,” Kelli said, enjoying her friend’s shocked expression.

There wasn’t much capable of shocking Bronte O’Brien. If she were to be honest, Bronte had always been the shocker out of the two of them. Ever since forming an odd union of sorts while taking pre-law at George Washington University, Bronte had been the racy one, reckless, the girl on scholarship who hid her brains behind her good looks. Kelli had lived vicariously through her best friend for years, though she had to admit Bronte’s life had become boring as of late. Still, it was long past time Kelli started doing her own living.

Bronte rubbed the smooth skin between her brows and sighed. “You know, Kelli, I take back everything I’ve ever encouraged you to do. For years, I’ve been telling you that you need to loosen up. Get out and experience life. Get a life.” She slowly shook her head, the dim light burnishing her short red hair. “But this is definitely not what I had in mind. If you won’t take the advice from me, personally, take it from your trusted attorney—you don’t want to do this. I know the guy he’s with—I’ve run across him on the job. He’s a marshal. Anyway, a guy like this one making a beeline for you…well, he has catastrophe written all over him. He should come with a warning label—Commitment Phobic—Use For One-Night Stand Only.”

“You’re not my attorney, Bronte. You’re a U.S. attorney. And I’m not interested in his friend. I’m interested in him.” Kelli looked her full in the face. “Besides, maybe a one-night stand is all I’m looking for.”

“That’s what you say now. Let’s see how fast that story changes afterward.”

Kelli leaned against her stick. “Come on, Bron, lighten up. You’re acting like my sleeping with this guy is a forgone conclusion.” She held up a rigid finger. “One. That’s the whole of my experience with the opposite sex.” An experience she didn’t want to repeat much less remember. “Only then I was so green you could have planted me.”

“So you say. Mark my words, Jed was an amateur. This one’s a pro.” Bronte hooked a thumb to where the guy in question stopped to talk to a couple of men at the bar, though his gaze never strayed from their direction. “A regular heartache waiting to happen.”

Kelli rolled her eyes to stare at the ceiling, then laughed. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” She drew her thumb along the smooth wood of the pool stick then bit softly on her bottom lip. “Come on, Bronte, I’m tired of being a good girl. Fed up with always doing the right thing, both in my job and my personal life. The perfect worker who passes up a vacation day because a coworker needs to go to his kid’s school play. The friend who’s always home because she never goes anywhere, never does anything. The boring neighbor who doesn’t mind feeding your pets while you’re away sipping Bahama Mamas on some tropical island. I want to step outside my safe little box, live a little, even if just for this one night.”

Kelli swallowed, not understanding the scope of her restlessness until that very moment. There had been hints over the past few months. The Egyptian silk sheets she’d dropped a fortune on because she thought they were sexy. Her new interest in cooking exotic foods; she’d even bought a wok, for God’s sake. Her sudden, insatiable hunger for romance novels, addictive books she had only picked up on occasion before, but now her collection had grown so large it had taken five huge boxes to cart it from New York. The simple truth was that she no longer wanted to rub her legs against the sheets…alone. She didn’t want to spend hours concocting the perfect meal only to be disappointed when she discovered she and her dog Kojak were the only ones around to eat it. She wanted to live the lives of those romance heroines rather than just read about them.

“And as for your worrying about me getting my heart broken,” she continued, “give me a little credit, will you? I think I deserve at least that after all the heartaches I watched you experience. I never said word one to you all those times you got yourself in trouble over some walking stud muffin.”

“What, are you actually inventorying each of my doomed romances so you can be sure to get in all your I told you so’s?” Bronte grimaced and held up her hand. “And don’t try to give me that innocent look either.” Her blue eyes twinkled as she sipped her purple drink. “Just how do you think I learned how to give you a hard time now?”

Kelli squinted at her.

“Every little jab I’ve just hit you with, you’ve poked at me over the years.”

Touché. She leaned over the table and lined up her next shot. Right before she would take it, she glanced past the cue ball and directly into the suggestive eyes of the man in question. She scratched so badly she nearly tore a hole in the green felt.

The guy grinned and began swaggering their way again.

Bronte dropped her voice. “Just don’t say I didn’t tell you so, you hear?”

Kelli didn’t absorb her friend’s words, concentrating instead on the heat spilling through her bloodstream, the tingly tightening of her breasts. Tonight she wanted to be the ravisher and the ravishee. She wanted to throw her hands up in the air and say “I am woman, hear me roar.” And she wanted to swallow the gorgeous guy moving toward them whole.

Shamelessly she openly eyed the man’s physique. Oh, he was a cop all right. There was no denying that. Everything about him spoke of cockiness and authority, a rough-around-the-edges attitude that stemmed as much from knowing himself capable of saving someone’s life as from the certainty that he could take a suspect’s. And he was still young enough to think himself immortal.

She briefly caught her bottom lip between her teeth again. Maybe he was just the thing this good girl needed to turn very, very bad.

He reached the pool table just as someone finished feeding the jukebox a slew of coins. Bronte rolled her eyes as Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” attempted to drown out the hum of conversation and clink of glasses from behind the bar.

The devil in blue jeans slapped a fiver on the edge of the pool table near the coin slot. “I play the loser.” His grin made her heart race. “David McCoy.”

Kelli repositioned her pool stick and slowly shook his hand, the heat the simple touch generated exhilaratingly cathartic. “Kelli Hatfield.” She released his hand then tapped the stick lightly against her side. This was one game she was going to enjoy losing. “You’re on.”

TWO HOURS LATER, David launched a renewed assault on Kelli Hatfield’s luscious mouth and backed her toward her stripped bed in the corner. Her hungry but obviously inexperienced response made him harder than steel. As drop-dead sexy as the woman was, an innocence clung to her silky skin like an irresistible perfume, making him want to breathe her in, eat her alive, thrust into her like nobody’s business.

And that’s exactly what he intended to do. That is, if he could pull his thoughts together long enough to take things further than kissing.

The strength of his reaction was like a sucker punch to the gut. Even he had to admit surprise at how quickly they’d ended up back at her place, clawing at each other’s clothes, devouring each other’s mouths. He’d lay ten-to-one odds that the woman even now clumsily unzipping his fly had never uttered the words “one-night stand” before, much less indulged in one. Still, he hadn’t had to resort to any of his old come-on lines at the bar. It had always been a bit tricky trying to get a woman between the sheets while keeping her well away from serious commitment territory. After their sexually charged game of pool, he’d simply suggested they get out of there, and she’d agreed. Even Connor and her friend, Bronte, had held up their hands as if their leaving were inevitable and said little more than “Bye” when they grabbed their coats and practically ran from the bar.

Just thinking about the remarkable, lightning-fast string of events sent David’s pulse rate skyrocketing off the charts. Hell, he felt he might lose it if he couldn’t bury himself in her hot flesh right then and there.

He supposed she might be drunk, but he knew what signs to look for and she displayed none of them. In fact, he didn’t detect a hint of liquor. Rather, he tasted something hot and undeniably sweet on her tongue. Then there was her skin….

Peaches. She tasted like peaches, for crying out loud.

Off went that stretchy pink top and her lacy bra. He palmed her breasts and groaned at their nicely rounded weight. Not too big. Not too small. Pure heaven.

“Wait…I…” she whispered huskily.

He pulled an engorged, pale nipple into the depths of his mouth. She gasped and ceased trying to speak.

With more strength than he would have thought possible, she reversed their positions then pushed him toward the mattress. Off went her slacks, his jeans. Before he knew it, his fingers were entangled in her hair, his mouth greedily pulling at hers, and she was poised, ready, above him.

He tugged his mouth from hers and met her eyes. In the fleeting beams of passing headlights, he saw on her face a gravity, a need, a beauty that made him groan. He’d experienced one or two one-night stands in the past, but this was different somehow. Rather, Kelli Hatfield was different. He’d never felt so in tune with a woman, so completely wrapped up in her. And though they didn’t know each other well, he felt that he knew her on a level that transcended the trivial details normally exchanged during the traditional first few dates. He didn’t know what college she had attended in New York, where she’d said she just moved from, but he knew that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. And that was saying a whole lot.

Her gaze remaining locked with his, Kelli lowered herself. His hips bucked and suddenly her tight, slick flesh surrounded him.

He recaptured her mouth and closed his eyes, feeling an odd sensation of inner calm even as their movements grew restless, their breathing ragged. When they climaxed together minutes later, he felt an odd sense of completion that stemmed from more than just the physical. The sensation was foreign, frightening, electrifying, and completely blew his mind.