Bared for Me(11)

He took the glass from her and pointed to the table in the corner. “Go sit. I’ll get you a drink.”

He needed a drink. He needed something to get a grip on himself.

As he approached, the bartender looked worried.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice as soon as Rocco got near enough. “She just wanted to help. I knew she was staying with you. She was bringing up glasses before I could stop her. I didn’t want to upset her.”

Rocco placed the glass on the bar. “Don’t worry about it. I know what she’s like.” She could get any guy to do anything if she put her mind to it. She just didn’t quite realize it yet. “Get me a whiskey, double. And a hot chocolate. Lots of sugar, lots of cream.”

He took a second to try to calm the burn of adrenalin he’d felt in that insane moment of jealousy. The thought of her finding someone else? Touching someone else?

Hell’s teeth. The sooner she was out of his space the better.

He took a gulp of the whiskey his barman had poured for him and then turned back to take on his temptation.





Chapter Eight





DANIELLE STIRRED HER hot chocolate and watched Rocco down his drink. Then he called for another.

“What are you doing?” she asked, after the bartender had refilled Rocco’s glass.

“Drowning my sorrows.”

“Your sorrows?”

“My torment.”

“What’s tormenting you?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know.”

She put her spoon down before she dropped it. “This is stupid, you should be asleep.”

He shouldn’t be storming down here and looking so damn steely. So damn sexy—all shadow on his jaw, shadows in his eyes. He was her walking forbidden fantasy.

“You’re the one wandering down to the bar at two in the morning.”

“I can’t sleep.” It wasn’t the horror movie. Okay, yes, she’d been freaked being alone for a few minutes, but really it was all the energy building in her body just from being near Rocco. It was like being plugged into an emergency power generator and she was buzzing from the intensity.

That one kiss could do this? Could set her alight—she had enough zing in her to power the entire state for all of the winter. And all she wanted, was more.

“Nor can I.” He glared at her. “Why didn’t you go all the way with the guy you fooled around with?”

Whoa. That had been preying on his mind? Her sex-life was on his mind?

She was so glad she was sitting down because her whole body just turned to jello. But she eyed him levelly. “The guys. Plural.”

“Whatever.” He frowned and knocked back that next drink.

“Well I had to try a couple of times,” she shrugged. “I wanted it to work out.”

“And it never did?”

She shook her head. She didn’t want him to ask more. The sad truth? Her heart had always been his. Her body had wanted none but his.

Maybe he was right. She hardly knew him. Maybe she’d built him up in her head. Maybe she needed to have this time to get to know him. To smash the rose-colored glasses and get over him.

Except the longer she spent with him, the hotter she became. And the more infatuated. Because it wasn’t just the raw sex appeal that oozed from him.

It was his damn ‘do-right’ determination too. That he was so loyal? So strong?

It made her want him all the more.

“Come back upstairs,” he said standing and stretching in a way that melted her muscles more. “We need sleep.”

Dani swallowed, trying to pull herself together as she followed. He lifted a bottle of whiskey from behind the counter and took it with him.

“What’s that for—to render you incapable?” she asked with a sideways look as he guided her into the elevator. “So you can’t get it up?”

He hesitated a second while the elevator doors slid shut. Then he wound his arm around her waist, turning and pulling her close, so her belly was pressed against him.

“Honey, it’s up every second I’m near you.”

It certainly was.

Simmering heat uncoiled, spreading along her veins sending her temperature soaring, she leaned more heavily against him. Unable to resist offering. “But you’re not going to do anything with it?” she asked. “Seems a shame.”

His arm across her back tightened, but the strain around his eyes deepened. “When did you get so sassy?”

She wasn’t sassy. She was sweet on him and she wasn’t getting any better.

She looked into his eyes. As the silence built, so did the heat between them. Desire whispered in her head—the urge to lean closer, to move against him. She needed more than this almost innocent touch.

She gritted her teeth, wasn’t going to grind like the feral animal she felt herself becoming. Who knew want could be so all-consuming?

And the way he was looking at her? All that intensity again, that internal debate warring in his eyes.

“I’d kill to kiss you,” he murmured.

“That’s the whiskey addling your mind,” she whispered. “You don’t need to kill anything, you can kiss me any time.” She curled her fingers into the soft fabric of his shirt. She didn’t want to let go. Didn’t want him to step back.

His lashes lowered, his focus on her mouth. “No. I can’t.”

He released her as the elevator doors slid open.

Escaping the disappointment, she walked ahead to his suite, curling her fingers into a fist of frustration.

“You get those calls at all hours?” she asked, purely to try to take her mind off the desire that was killing her. She wasn’t going to beg.

“Often enough. I don’t mind. The promise of the hotel is that everything will be perfect. I like to ensure it is.”

“You get a lot of repeat customers?”

He nodded and let her into his room.

Yeah, she bet he did. In terms of women as well as guests. “So what do you do for fun? Play the field with Logan? Party on?”

Maybe it would help if she learned he was a total playboy sleaze.

“Sometimes.” He placed the bottle of whiskey on the table. “But other times I just relax quietly. Take a look under the bed.”

She turned a suspicious eye on him. “Are you sure? What am I going to find there? An inflatable Annie to help you relieve your problem?”

“Just go look,” he groaned.

Seriously? She went into the next room knelt beside the bed and lifted the white covering. There was a drawer built in.

“Open it.” He leaned against the doorframe.

“I’m not sure I should...”

“Dani,” he laughed. “There’s no monster in there.”

She pulled the drawer open. “Oh, wow.”

It was a library. A lying down library. Rows and rows of neatly placed books in specially built compartments in the wide drawer. All the spines faced up, to be easily read.

“This is fantastic.” She glanced up at him. “Why don’t you have them on shelves on the walls? Why keep it secret?”

“No secret. But I like my bedroom to be minimalist, just the bed. Rest easier that way.”

He didn’t rest easy? “But then you like to read in bed?”

He nodded and flicked on the lamp on the small beside table. “And it’s cool, don’t you think? In a closet-book-worm kinda way?”

She was so tickled that he was a closet book-worm. “You’re the sort of person who’d like a hidden doorway behind a bookcase, right?”

“Or a bookcase behind a door. Sure.”

She laughed.

“Find one.” He nodded at the neatly shelved books. “Read it. Sleep.”

He switched off the main light. The lamp cast a warm glow that was so much kinder on the eyes. She smiled. Everything about the hotel was stylish yet comfortable. It was unique, ornate, discreet. Everything so many of his guests wished to be themselves. No wonder it was so popular.

“Do all the suites have secret libraries?” she asked.

He nodded. “Not as big, but one shelf, yes.”

How freaking cool was that? “I read all Logan’s books when he was away skiing,” she confided. “Did you know he had a million of them stashed in his room?”

“Sure,” Rocco sat on the edge of the bed and picked a book from the drawer. “I read them too. Where do you think I got the idea?”

Yeah but Logan’s weren’t stylishly hidden like this. They’d just been piled up on the floor by his bed.

“Really?” She laughed a little sadly. “I thought it was one thing that connected me to him. I thought that seeing I liked his books, we must think in common or something. How wrong could I be?”

“Don’t think badly of him.”

She didn’t really. She didn’t expect much.

“You actually do have a bit in common.” Rocco reached forward and tousled her hair. “He doesn’t want you to make the same mistakes he did.”

Yeah, well. She hadn’t. So far.

She studied the books again. “I can’t believe you have them broken down by genre and then alphabetically by author.”

“Uh, yeah.” He looked a little sheepish.

“You come across as this so-cool success-story, but really you’re totally uptight,” she teased him.

“I am not uptight.”

“You are. This is so Type A personality. Is it going to bother you if I put this back in the wrong place?” She dropped the book she was holding into a different slot and watched him wince just that little bit. She laughed. “I bet you have everything filed away just so at work too. Your email inbox has no more than ten emails in it, right? The rest are in neat folders.”