Seduced in September (Spring River Valley Book 9) (3 page)

It had all seemed so civilized last night, and yet it had resulted in her sneaking around his apartment in the nude trying to get dressed without making any sound. He’d thank her later for sticking to her convictions, she was certain of it.

Whether or not she’d be grateful to herself remained to be seen.

Once she’d gotten the shoes buckled (they were going straight in the trash when she got home) she checked her purse to make sure she had enough money for the cab ride across town. Her keys, her wallet, her cell phone, her birth control pills were all intact. She hadn’t worn a watch, but she estimated it to be before seven a.m., so she could take her daily dose on schedule.
Whew
.

She hesitated, her hand on the front door knob.

This was wrong.

How would she have felt if she’d woken up to find no trace of the person she’d made love to all night long? She couldn’t just disappear like a ghost, but what could she do? A kiss on the cheek would wake him up. A note might seem like she was expecting something.

She rummaged in her purse and came up with a pen and a receipt from Quick Mart for the pack of gum she’d bought the other day. Good enough. Crouching by his cluttered coffee table, she scrawled her phone number on the back of the receipt. What else could she say?
Call me
seemed implied by the presence of her number, but she didn’t want to command him to do so. They would run into each other at the hospital—at least once a week she caught a glimpse of him and Tanner when they brought someone into the ER by ambulance. She planned to nod and smile but not to throw herself over the counter in front of her desk and profess her undying devotion. They could be polite, friendly even, but they never needed to mention this little indiscretion to each other ever again.

Some misguided sense of duty, or maybe it was a bit of recklessness left over from last night, had her sneaking back into the bedroom on tiptoes, ignoring her pinched heels and aching arches. Her pulse quickened when she laid eyes on him again. He was gorgeous. Dark brown hair tousled, his features smooth in sleep, a shadow of stubble on his jaw…only a very strong woman could walk away from that. Or a complete fool.

Someone had once told Lily that the courage to say no was nothing more than the fear of saying yes. So if it was courage that guided her to place the makeshift note on her vacated pillow just beyond the spot where his gentle breathing might blow it away, it was certainly fear that had her backing out of the room, step by cautious step, until she made her way back to the living room. There, she released the breath she’d been holding.

With the precision of a brain surgeon, she turned the knob and pulled the front door open, slipped outside, and shut it behind her, barely disturbing the cool morning air.

An emotion that should have been relief but felt more like regret overcame her. They’d promised each other—and Lily had promised herself—that last night was nothing more than two people blowing off steam and celebrating the last weekend of summer. Neither of them needed or wanted anything more.

At least that’s what she had to make herself believe.

The natives were restless, or so Quinn surmised based on the insistent drumbeat that woke him from a dead sleep.

He groaned and pulled the nearest pillow over his head to drown out the sound that had to be his upstairs neighbors practicing percussion. Boom, boom, boom. The pillow did nothing to muffle the sound. In fact, it only got louder when he attempted to plug his ears.

Realization hit him in slow motion. The pounding wasn’t his neighbor’s base drum; it was his brain banging on the inside of his skull which had somehow become too small to contain it. Like a sponge, it had apparently soaked up all the alcohol he’d downed last night and was now seeking escape through his ear drums.

His next sound might have been a whimper, except he remembered he wasn’t alone. He could still smell her lilac perfume and imagine the silky feel of her golden hair brushing his chest as she leaned down to kiss him.

As much as it hurt to move even the smallest muscle, a slow smile spread over his lips. Oh, it had been a good night. A very good night. In fact, it had been exactly the kind of night he’d promised himself he was going to have.

Even though the damnable sunlight was streaming in around the window shade, he decided there was a slim chance the “night” wasn’t quite over. Maybe his head hurt, but the rest of him was fine, and if she was up for it…

“Hey? You awake?” The words scraped his throat. How could drinks that went down so smooth leave it feeling so raw?

With extreme caution—each movement reminded him that his head wasn’t quite screwed on all the way—he rolled over in bed and discovered he was alone.

If he concentrated hard enough, he found he could temporarily ignore the insistent pounding between his ears, but after a moment he realized there was nothing else to listen to. He didn’t hear the shower running; he didn’t hear the clink of dishes from the kitchen (the last woman he’d brought home had made him breakfast in bed). The distant whoosh of traffic reached him along with the chirping of birds, but no one was breathing in the bedroom except for him.

Had she left? Or had he imagined her? His addled brain showed him a pair of stormy blue-gray eyes and a waterfall of rich blond curls. He knew from the tingling skin across his shoulders that she’d left him with some scratches and very possibly a bite on his inner thigh.

Oh, man
. Now was
not
the time to be thinking about that.

He reined in a wave of unrequited lust and slowly pulled himself to a sitting position. The boom, boom, boom intensified, and his brain decided to exert some unwelcome pressure on the backs of his eyeballs. What the hell had he drunk last night?

He remembered sparkling gold flakes and the burn of some kind of spice. It was good. The bad kind of good that leaves you regretting everything you did…at least the parts you could remember.

Car!
The thought sent a pulse of panic through his torso, and his head rebelled by stabbing him in the eye. He covered his face with his hands and cursed.
No. No car.
He’d obviously gotten a ride home from Tanner and probably gave his partner his keys. He certainly wasn’t dumb enough to drive in this condition.

Peering over the edge of the bed, he found his pants in a bundle, lying next to his shirt which was splayed open like a kite. His underwear hung from the shelf above his bed.

His grin returned despite the pain in his skull. It had been a very good night.

Yet she was gone.

Well, there was nothing to be done about it at the moment. His choices seemed pretty clear. He could go back to sleep—and likely wake up feeling a little more human at some point before he had to go back to work tomorrow, or he could drag his ass to the shower and try to reduce the swelling of his brain by drowning it in cold water.

Sleep won out. Grateful that unconsciousness was an option, he rolled to the side, grabbed the other pillow and pulled it toward him. Something crackled in his year and, cringing, he rummaged under his head for the source.

The small rectangle of cheap paper looked like a receipt. He squinted at the blurry letters and managed to make out the words
Quick Mart
and
spearmint
. He’d gone to Quick Mart last night? That was clear across town. And for what? Gum?

A millisecond before his hand received the command from his brain to crumple the paper up and throw it at the wastebasket, it occurred to him that the receipt wasn’t his. He flipped it over and peered at the dainty set of numbers written on the back in blue ink. A local phone number. It had to be hers.

Dulled by his hangover, he spent the next couple of minutes flipping the little paper back and forth, hoping to find a name to go with the numbers, but there was none. How was it he could recall the color of her eyes and the texture of her skin but not her name or anything else about her?

The cantankerous trill of his cell phone nearly knocked him out of bed. Now he did whimper as he scrambled on the floor and retrieved the phone from the pocket of his jeans. The second ring nearly split his skull open and, blinded by the pain, he jabbed at random tiny buttons and yelled “Hello?” until he managed to match the speaker portion of the phone to his ear. Maybe it was her.

“Good morning, Mr. Goldschlager. This is your wakeup call.”

“Ugh. Sorry, I’ve got the wrong—I mean,
you’ve
got the wrong num—”

“It’s me, dumbass.”

“Tanner?”

“Bing, bing, bing! Now for the sudden death round, the million-dollar question is, how hung over are
you
this morning?”

“Ugh, God. On a scale of one to ten, ten being a coma, I’m a solid eight.”

“Better than I expected. How did you get back to your place?”

Not surprised by the question, Quinn found himself nodding in response. Tanner had a twin, but that didn’t stop him from treating Quinn like his younger brother sometimes. “Checking up on me, Mom?”

“You didn’t call for a ride.”

“I told you, I was going home with…someone.”

“So you hooked up?”

“Uh…
yeah
.” He had. He definitely had. The pillow had been the proof; it smelled like lilacs. The receipt and the phone number were evidence he hadn’t just imagined the best sex of his life. “I told you who I was going home with.”

“The blonde?”

“Yep. You know.”

“No. What’s her name?”

Quinn cringed. He rubbed his eyes to chase away the blurry images and managed to rise and snatch his underwear from where it dangled off the shelf. It didn’t seem right be talking to his partner while he was completely naked. “Uh…I was hoping you could tell me. You didn’t happen to see who I was talking to when you and Evie left last night, did you?”

“Last person I saw you talk to was the bartender, who, as I recall was not a blonde…or a woman.”

“Great.” Quinn slithered into his briefs and lowered himself back to the bed.

“You don’t know her name?”

“Uh…not really.”

The low whistle Tanner emitted pierced Quinn’s mushy skull like a hot bullet. “Dude, you’re killing me.”

Tanner lowered his voice. “Is she still there?”

“If she was, I’d ask her what her name was.”

“Right before she slapped you.”

“Okay, I’d…rummage in her wallet while she was asleep and look at her driver’s license. But she’s not here. She left her number, but no name.”

“How could you sleep with someone and not ask her name?”

“I know her name. I just…can’t
remember
it right now.”

“So who is she? Maybe I know her.”

“Blonde, blue eyes, smells like lilacs.”

“That’s all you know?”

Quinn suppressed a wicked grin. “She bites.”

Tanner groaned. “TMI, man.”

“So, do you think I should just call the number? Maybe I’ll recognize her voice.”

“And if you don’t? I guarantee if she finds out you don’t remember her name, she’ll never speak to you again.”

“I know it’ll come back to me. It’ll be fine. She obviously wants me to call her. She left the number on my pillow.”

“I think if she really wanted you to call, she’d have left her name or maybe her whole self.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Look, I had a fantastic time last night. That much I definitely remember. She did too.”

“Are you sure?”

“Tanner, this is me we’re talking about. Of course she had a good time.”

Tanner laughed, and the sound had the same effect on Quinn’s brain as a cheese grater. He moaned and clutched his skull. “Okay, okay. I’ve got to go take a shower and a bottle of aspirin. Then I’m going to call her.
Can you drive me to Colette’s later so I can pick up my car? I guarantee by then I’ll know her name.”

“
Sure, and I’ll take that bet.”

“Name your terms.”

“Tell me her name when I come to pick you up, and you can drive our next…five shifts.”

“And if I don’t, you can drive the next ten.”

“Deal.” Tanner hung up, and Quinn sat for a long time staring at the phone, willing himself to recall everything he could about last night. He remembered skin on skin, soft moans of delight, and moments of pure ecstasy, but her name still escaped him. How could he blank on something so important?

He didn’t care so much about winning his bet with Tanner as he did about finding the woman who’d completely rocked his world. Her voice would do it, he was sure. All he had to do was call her.

* * * *

“Omigod, Ricki, stop barking, please. You’re killing me!” Lily shuffled across the cool tiles of her Aunt Madelyn’s kitchen, the yapping Pomeranian dancing around her heels. He wanted breakfast in the worst way, and if he didn’t stop barking, Lily’s head would explode and she’d never be able to liberate the contents of the can of fancy dog food she’d just retrieved from the cupboard.