“Well, not tonight.” He stopped. “We’re here.”
She looked up at the building and gasped. The original Vacilli’s. The bakery in Waterbury was one of the franchises, but this was the real one. The windows were dark and the closed sign hung in the door, but she could still see the displays of pastries that made her mouth water. Everyone had a weakness, and hers was most definitely this. Even if she couldn’t go inside, this was pretty amazing.
Then the bakery’s door swung inward. An older man in an apron stood in the now-open doorway. “Detective, welcome.” He turned to Gina, and a confused look flickered in his eyes for the briefest of seconds before he recovered. “And you must be Miss Luca. I understand you are a big fan of our cannoli.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” she said, pushing back the familiar angry embarrassment of someone’s first reaction to seeing her because she refused to let that ruin whatever Ford had planned.
“Good,” the man said. “I’d hate to share the recipe with someone who didn’t love them.”
Recipe? Share? The only message her brain sent back was that the man’s words did not compute. “What?”
The man laughed, and a real warmth filled his gaze as he looked at her. “Yes, you’re here for a very special couple’s baking lesson. Didn’t the detective tell you?”
She turned to Ford the sneak and waggled her finger at him. “No, he’s very good at keeping a secret.”
“Well then, surprise,” the man said. “I’m Conrad Vacilli. Come inside so we can get you set up with espressos, and I can show you how to make the most famous cannoli in Harbor City.”
Gina couldn’t believe it. All the times she’d talked about how much she’d loved the Vacilli’s cannoli, he’d been listening, really listening—so much so that he’d made this happen. Warmth spread through her chest, expanding outward until she couldn’t believe she didn’t have light shooting out of her fingertips.
She leaned forward and brushed her lips across his. “Thank you.”
Ford winked at her and gave her that smile that made her stomach do the flippity-flop thing, and they walked inside the bakery together to learn the secret to making the best cannoli in the tri-state area.
Chapter Fourteen
Gina had flour on the tip of her nose, and Ford wasn’t about to tell her. She’d had a perma-smile on her face for the entire drive back to Waterbury and had chattered excitedly the entire ride to her house about this detail and that detail for making cannoli.
As the street lights lit up the inside of the car as he drove down her street, he couldn’t help but sneak peeks at her smile, her eyes, the joy that lit her up from the inside out. He had no idea how so many people missed it when they saw her, but Gina Luca was beautiful.
Once at her house, he followed her inside, carrying the results of their baking lesson in a white Vacilli’s box, while she continued to rave about techniques and ingredients. He walked behind her so he could watch her ass sway from side to side in that yellow dress she’d put on that clung to her curves. He’d spilled a bag of flour at Vacilli’s watching her move around the kitchen in that dress. It had not been his smoothest moment, but those seemed to be few and far between when he was with Gina—and that was saying something.
The woman just did things to him. She shook things up. And he liked it. A lot. Probably too much.
He should probably be worried about that. He wasn’t. He was too busy wondering how, when they’d first met, he’d missed how her eyes twinkled when she smiled, how the curve of her high cheekbones perfectly highlighted her dark eyes, and how the nose she hated so much gave her a unique look that was so much her own that she redefined what beautiful could be.
“And the mixer,” she said as she closed the front door after he’d walked through and flipped the deadbolt. “I cannot believe how big it was.” She paused for a breath as she leaned back against the door, and her eyes went wide when she looked at him. “What’s wrong?”
Not a damn thing. Everything. That he wasn’t touching her. The fact that she still had clothes on.
“Ford?”
His name on her lips snapped something in him. The Vacilli’s box hit the hardwood floor with a thump. His determined footsteps echoed in the foyer as he crossed over to her. She let out a soft mewl when he pressed his body against hers. He cupped her face in his hands and took her mouth like a man who had just discovered the meaning of life, because that’s what he’d just realized. Gina. She was his meaning.
He couldn’t get enough of her because there was no such thing. The curve of her breast. The dip of her waist. The roundness of her ass. God, she was so sweet everywhere.
He broke the kiss, gliding his lips down the long column of her neck as his hands were busy with the hem of her dress, pulling it higher and higher, desperate to feel her soft skin.
Her hands were in his hair, holding him close as he kissed along the line of her exposed collarbone. He raised his hand and brushed the back of his knuckles down the long column of her neck to the collar of the thin material of her dress. Her answering moan tipped him over the edge.
He grabbed her hips and turned her around so she faced the door and made quick work of the zipper on the back of her dress. There was no slow teasing between them, not tonight.
“Take it off.” He barely recognized his own voice in the gruff command.
She turned around and reached for the light switch.
“Leave it on.”
She hesitated but left it alone. Then, she let the yellow dress slide off her body to pool at her feet, her eyes on him, a sexy come-hither upward curl on her full lips. “Like what you see?”
“‘Like’ isn’t the word I’d use.” He curled a hand around her wrists and pulled her arms up above her head, pinning them to the door with one hand. “‘Obsessed with’ seems about right.”
Eyes watching her face for her reaction, he brushed the back of his knuckles over her hard nipples, pressing against the pale pink of her sheer bra. “‘Can’t get enough’ comes to mind.”
Desire swirled in the dark depths of her hooded gaze, and he pinched her nipple through the material, and she let out a needy moan. “‘Want it all’ is definitely correct.”
He put his leg between hers, moving it so that his thigh rubbed against her panty-covered mound. “The question is, what do you like?”
He unsnapped the front clasp of her bra and sucked her nipple into his mouth, raking his teeth over the hard nub. “Do you like that?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice breaking.
Rolling her other nipple between his finger and thumb, he moved his leg away from touching her. She let out a frustrated groan that he felt down to his balls. He cupped her breast, rolling his thumb in circles around her nipple again and again before taking his hand lower, stopping only when he got to the top of her panties. She pushed her hips forward, silently begging for his touch. Poor Gina. She was as lost as he was. He kissed the spot where her shoulder met her throat, that pulse point that was always so sensitive to his tongue, his lips, his nipping teeth.
“Are you wet for me?” he asked against her flushed skin.
She let out a tortured moan. “Yes.”
He slipped his fingers beneath the elastic of her panties, brushing against the tight curls at her apex but not going any farther. “Do you want to fuck me?”
“Yes.” She bucked against his hand, undulating her hips in an obvious effort to get him to touch her where she needed him.
But he wasn’t going to do that. Not yet. He needed her to understand what this was about. They weren’t just fucking. Not anymore. This was more. “Do you want me to fill you up and make you mine?”
Lip caught between her teeth, she nodded. “Yes.”
“I want you to be mine.” It was a declaration, a promise, a prayer. He picked her up and headed for the stairs. “No one else’s.”
…
It was just talk, the kind of out-of-your-mind, turned-on-beyond-belief talk that didn’t stay true in the light of day, but Gina wasn’t going to think about that now. Not with Ford touching her like that and looking at her like he really meant it—like he’d fallen for her the way she had for him. And that’s what it was, and that’s what made this so good and so bad at the same time. She loved him. There wasn’t any two ways about it. Ford Hartigan didn’t have to make her his, she already was.
“Be careful of the wonky step,” she said as he carried her up the stairs.
His grip tightened on her. “You don’t have to worry when you’re with me.”
He brought her into the bedroom and set her down near the foot of her bed. Then, he started to unbutton his shirt, and her jelly legs decided it would be better to watch the show from the bed. Her legs were smart.
Totally unconscious of the fact that she was in her underwear while he was doing a strip tease—even if he probably wasn’t thinking of it that way—Gina took in the moment, packing it away in her memory bank for a night probably not that long from now when Ford would be gone.
His shirt went first, followed by him reaching behind his head and yanking off his undershirt. That gave her an unobstructed view of his muscular chest and arm-porn-worthy biceps. She meant to stay on the bed, really she did, but her legs—smart legs, remember—had other ideas. While he flipped off his shoes, she was next to him, tracing her hands across the expanse of his shoulders, circling his flat nipples with her tongue, and lowering herself to her knees to better follow the happy trail leading from his belly button to the button of his jeans.