The Party Girl Read online

  “Oh, I’m with you there. I never waste good wood.”

  He thought for a moment she was making fun of him, but her gray-green eyes—already such large, expressive things—were widened in a challenge. She was making fun of him, but not as a woman finding fault with a man. Unless his ability to read the signals was way off, she was finding the exact opposite.

  More of his, uh, gratitude swelled in response. At this rate, he’d be nothing but rushing blood and poor judgment before the sun came up.

  “Would you care for a cup of tea?” he asked, suddenly all too aware of his hands and a burning desire to place them somewhere inappropriate. In his case, idle hands really were the devil’s plaything. Part of the reason he’d gotten so interested in woodworking in the first place was his incessant need to be moving, flexing, doing something with them.

  The woman’s hands, he noted, were smooth. Dainty. Carefully manicured. He could only imagine what they would feel like pulling open that robe, skimming over the surface of his skin, grabbing him by the...

  “Tea sounds perfect, actually. I hope you don’t mind, but I pulled a few extra blankets from your linen cupboard for Lincoln. I think a little bit of shock might have been settling in. He felt clammy.”

  Lincoln. There was a bleeding man the next room over. Now was not the time to be thinking about this woman’s hands and what they might be capable of.

  “You take good care of him.” Noah busied himself scooping homegrown tea from a tin into two tiny cheesecloth squares. “You’re not like his usual friends.”

  She released a short laugh, a burst of merriment that disappeared as quickly as it came. “I was just about to say the same thing about you. You, for one, appear to have actual common sense.”

  “And you held his hand while I stitched him up.”

  “You’ve probably never seen the inside of a spray-tanning booth.”

  “You came all the way out here without asking any questions.”

  “You’re helpful in the kitchen.”

  “You probably saved his life.”

  She paused, appraising him. “Your answers are a lot nicer than mine.”

  Unsure how to respond, he set a steaming mug on the table and waited for her to sip. She nodded her thanks, and he relaxed. Why the approval of an underdressed, overly made-up city girl mattered, he had yet to determine.

  All he knew was that it did.

  Kendra wished Noah would sit down, but he seemed content to stare at her from his position at the stove. She also wished he’d talk more—she wasn’t used to people being so unnecessarily quiet. Her friends were the sort to never let a good piece of sarcasm go unsaid, and Lincoln was one of those guys who felt silence to be a personal shortcoming. Noah’s oppressive calm was unnerving.

  “So what just happened?” she asked, hoping to prod him into conversation.

  “I imagine you know more than me.”

  “Well, you imagine wrong.” She took a sip of the too-hot-but-otherwise-amazing tea, which tasted like some sort of floral mix. She didn’t know men were aware that tea existed outside of the bleached, mass-produced bags of carcinogens at the store. “I was enjoying an evening in with a friend when he showed up, bleeding, on my doorstep. As you can imagine, my friend wasn’t pleased at the interruption.”

  She snuck a peek at Noah over the top of her cup, all too attuned to the fact that he’d noticed her attire—or lack of it—and seemed to be having a difficult time pretending the opposite. It was cruel of her to taunt him, she knew. There was nothing fair about showing up in lingerie at a stranger’s house and casually discussing natural woods. But she was shaky with the remaining dregs of adrenaline, she’d left a very attractive young man at home, and there were far too many silky pieces pressed against her undercarriage for her to forget that fact entirely.

  She was feeling flirtatious. So sue her.

  “And he’s probably gone home to his own bed by now,” she added leadingly.

  “It is pretty late.”

  She’d had conversations about the weather more engaging than this. “Which of course means I need to head back, toss this robe into the fire and scrub down my porch before the sun comes up. I live in a very strict housing association. No bloody handprints. We like to keep things upscale.”

  Nothing. Not a laugh, not a chuckle, nary a twinkle in Noah’s eye. His scruff hid the complexities of his expression, but she understood the thin line of lips well enough. Now that the crisis was over, he seemed to have shut down, harboring a formal reserve she couldn’t quite place. He moved cautiously, carefully, never quite allowing them to touch—almost as though he didn’t trust himself around her now that the buffer of Lincoln’s bleeding body had been removed.

  Though that could have been wishful thinking.

  “Do you think I should call his brother?” she asked, dropping the one-sided flirtation with a sigh.

  “That depends. Is it your decision to make?”

  As his words sounded an awful lot like a reprimand, she bristled and sat up straighter. “Matt’s going to marry my best friend, so it’s not like I’m in a great position here. I don’t know what kind of an understanding you and Lincoln have, but I didn’t sign on for bloodshed and secret stitches.”

  “What did you sign on for?”

  Nothing. None of it. Not one tiny bit. She knew feuding divorced couples who dealt with less crap than she did. She splayed her hands helplessly. “He’s like a stray dog I can’t stop feeding. I think about shutting the door in his face all the time, but he’d just press his sad little nose against my window until he starved.”

  This time she recognized a glimmer of a smile. “I never did get your name, by the way,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” She extended her hand across the table and held it there, dying to see what his palm felt like against her own. Although he hesitated, he eventually slipped his hand into hers.

  Gah. Hot and heavy, rough with work, so large it practically engulfed her own. Those were man hands. Big, throbby man hands. Not even the long, deft musician fingers she’d left at home could compare.

  “I’m Kendra. Kendra Khuso.”

  His grip tightened, sending a jolt up her arm before he let go. As if she really had electrocuted him, he tucked his hand under the table, as far from her touch as humanly possible. “You’re Kendra? Lincoln’s Kendra?”

  She pushed her tea carefully away. There was enough incredulity and horror in Noah’s tone that she could fill in the rest of the blanks. And the words doing the filling? They weren’t polite ones.

  “What did he say? Has he been going around again, telling people we’re together when he knows very well we’re not?” She kept her voice at a dangerously level tone. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to go back into your bedroom and rip out every one of his stitches with my bare hands.”

  Noah put both hands up, warding her off. “No, no—it’s not like that. It’s nothing bad.”

  She waited.

  “He just... You know. You’re Kendra.”

  One wouldn’t think that a single name, uttered dispassionately, could contain so much meaning, but there it was. Kendra was pretty good at reading the subtext, and enough of it was crammed in there to fill a whole phone book.

  “We went out once. One time.” She waved one finger, just in case there was any doubt. “And that was over a year ago. Never did I promise him anything more than a good time. Never since then have we revisited a continuation of our relationship in anything but a platonic manner. He knows this.”

  There was no chance for her to say more—and there was plenty she could have added on the subject—since Noah used her outburst as an opportunity to grab a jacket hanging from a hook near his front door and hold it out to her. The material wasn’t flannel, but it might as well have been for all it smelled of buffed
wood and evergreen trees and the hefty promise of man.

  She glanced over her robe—still flimsy, still inappropriate, now a kind of test. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

  “It gets cold here late at night.”

  “I’m plenty warm.”

  Her robe was cut to showcase a generous supply of cleavage at all times, and she didn’t miss the flare of interest that lit Noah’s eyes or the heavy lump of a robust Adam’s apple working his throat as he took her in. She fought the urge to pull the silk tighter around her, determined to let things stand as they were. Bloody and disheveled and inappropriately attired she might be, but she wasn’t alone in the attraction pulsating between them. She was sure of it.

  But not even the telltale signs of Noah’s interest were enough to pull him out of his self-imposed distance. He shook the jacket, holding it aloft until she slipped her arms inside, swimming in the coarse fabric, closing herself off from his view. Only then did he relax enough to say, “I’ll look after Lincoln tonight. You should get home to your friend.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself. “I told you. He wasn’t planning on sticking around. He’s not that kind of friend.”

  “Then you should get home and see to your porch.”

  Which, sadly enough, was what she’d most likely end up doing. Even though she recognized, on a cognitive level, that the evening’s turn of events could have resulted in a much worse outcome, she had just enough overwhelmed emotion left in her to rise up on a wave of irritation. “You know, it’s a pretty unfortunate state of affairs when two sane adults are forced to cater to the whims of a fully grown, irresponsible man-child intent on getting himself killed.”

  “He’s not that bad.”

  “You must not know him as well as you think.”

  “I know him better than anyone.” Noah’s words were a challenge, his stance even more so.

  Unable to stop herself, she reached out to touch his arm. He immediately tensed, a twitch of muscle under her fingertips and then...nothing. He didn’t move, didn’t breathe, a statue until she lifted her hand away again.

  “I’ll clean up the car before you go,” he said, as if nothing bizarre had just passed through them. “It’s late. You should relax. Drink more tea. Make yourself at home.”

  She was going to protest, to encourage Noah to do his own relaxing and let a professional detailer soak up the rivers of blood in the upholstery, but something about the firm set of his mouth stopped her.

  He was right, of course. It was late and she was exhausted. Besides—who was she to complain when someone else was offering to clean up after Lincoln? It wasn’t a task she relished by any stretch of the imagination, and the sooner she could get home, the sooner she could turn her ringer off and pretend this strange night had never happened.

  “That’s sweet,” she said. “But I feel I should warn you—I’m the sort who pokes around in medicine cabinets the second you let your guard down.”

  He turned and studied her carefully. “What do you look for?”

  “Oh, you know.” She waved her hand airily. “Expired prescriptions. Rash creams. Secret sex paraphernalia.”

  She held his gaze steadily for that last bit, wondering if perhaps she’d finally pushed too far. She often did. Years of trying to suppress her true nature in her twenties—and to impress men, of all terrible, clichéd reasons—had led to an outpouring of the opposite now that she was in her thirties. As it turned out, her true nature was a wily, aggressive thing.

  “Still willing to leave me alone in here?” she asked when he didn’t respond.

  “Of course. If Lincoln trusts you, then so do I.” His simple words did much to unseat her, though not nearly as much as what came next. “Besides—the bathroom isn’t where I keep my secret sex paraphernalia.”

  Chapter Two

  “Why are you smiling at me like that? Stop smiling at me like that.” Kendra pointed a letter opener at Whitney, the customary line of bracelets on her wrist jangling a warning. “Don’t you have a consultation in like five minutes?”

  Whitney, impervious to hints of all kinds when they didn’t align with her own purposes, slid in through Kendra’s door and shut it behind her. For good measure, she flipped the blinds on the giant window that overlooked their medical spa’s reception area. Such obvious attempts at secrecy could only mean one thing.

  “Don’t you dare give me those big innocent eyes. I saw Lincoln’s car parked in your driveway on my way to work this morning.”

  Yep. That. That was the only thing overtly closed blinds could mean.

  “Ye-es.” She strung the syllable out, wondering how to sidestep this particular fiasco. “He came over last night.”

  Whitney’s grin spread. “I thought Derek was coming over.”

  “He did.”

  “I knew it!” Whitney tossed herself into one of Kendra’s chairs and slapped her hand on the desk. “Matt owes me fifty bucks. I told him Lincoln would swing both ways if the situation called for it. So? Don’t hold back. What exactly did the situation ring up to say?”

  “Much less than whatever is playing on repeat inside your head right now, that’s for sure.”

  Kendra adored her best friend. There was absolutely no question of that. She adored Whitney enough to pack up all her belongings and move to an upstate borough with a much smaller rotating male population than she cared for. Enough to start a medical spa with her and two of their other friends, despite the fact that working among so many familiar faces meant she rarely got a moment’s respite. Enough to be honestly, truly, deeply happy when she’d recently become engaged to Lincoln’s brother, Matt—a guy so perfect for her it was sometimes painful to watch them together.

  But her friend had lost serious touch with the single life lately. If you asked Whitney, Kendra was participating in nonstop sexual interludes with every handsome face that passed by—which was a lovely dream and all, but much less possible to put into practice than one might imagine.

  “Please don’t say that,” Whitney said. “Make something up. Tell me how you were up all night making Derek-Lincoln sandwiches.”

  “If by sandwiches you mean having tea, and by up all night you mean in an exhausted sleep by two o’clock, then yes. It was quite a thrilling night.”

  “Damn.” Whitney got up from the chair and straightened her pencil skirt, an eyebrow raised in question as Kendra made sure all her buttons were up and zippers pulled tight. As one of their two plastic surgeons on staff, Whitney had to look the part of the staid professional, even though they all knew she was anything but. “You could at least find out for me if Lincoln would be willing to participate in that sort of thing. I’ll buy you lunch with my fifty dollar winnings.”

  “Why is Matt placing bets about his brother’s sexuality in the first place? It’s weird.”

  Whitney leveled her with a calm stare. “I love that man to death, but there are only so many topics of conversation we can have over dinner before Lincoln, sex and the unique properties of both collide. We’re like an island of monkeys with typewriters eventually writing Shakespeare.”

  “Aww. You paint such a romantic picture.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask what kind of sandwiches we talk about you making?”

  No. Absolutely not. Not if she wanted to preserve their friendship. As a woman who enjoyed sex—and who wasn’t afraid to admit to it—she’d heard enough behind-her-back judgments to last a lifetime.

  “I’ll see what I can find out from Lincoln as long as you don’t show up late for your consultation,” she promised. Then, a hand firmly on Whitney’s back, she propelled her out the door. Honestly, keeping this place in operation was like running a daycare sometimes. Her friends needed a stern hand and regular snacks.

  Because Kendra served as the spa’s esthetician in addit
ion to the practice manager, she had her own clients to see to. She was just getting ready to head to the tranquility room to prepare for her afternoon body-wrap appointment when a knock sounded again.

  “No, Whitney, I didn’t hide anyone’s salami. No one slipped me a pickle. And I don’t even want to hear what you have to say on the subject of white bread.” She pulled on the handle with more force than was strictly necessary. “Wait—Lincoln?”

  “Damn, Kendra. Now you made me hungry.”

  His words were light and teasing, but from the way he hunkered in the doorway holding his side, she could tell that he was in quite a bit of pain. Oh, Lincoln. She might not have a medical degree like Whitney or Jared, their other plastic surgeon, but it didn’t take much to recognize a man who clearly needed to return to his tree-root nest in the woods.

  She passed a hand over her eyes. “Please tell me you’re here for a complete medical workup.”

  “This little scratch?” He scoffed. “Please. It’s only a flesh wound. I don’t suppose you have my car keys on you?”

  His gaze traveled over her shoulder to the coatrack behind her desk, where the bulbous weight of her favorite Coach bag hung. Sensing his motivations, Kendra leaped back and scrambled to pull his keys out, holding them out of his reach. “Nuh-uh. No way. You shouldn’t be driving right now and you know it.”

  “C’mon. Just hand me my keys and we can forget this whole thing ever happened.”

  “Where’s Noah?” she demanded.

  She ran to the far side of her desk where Lincoln couldn’t get to her. He was stronger than her—as well as faster, taller and much more prone to outbursts of temper. In a battle of any physical kind, he’d probably win.

  But she was undoubtedly smarter. Bore sharper nails. And still had all her blood and body parts intact.

  “I can’t believe he’d just let you out of the house like this,” she said.

  “Noah doesn’t tell me what to do.” Lincoln sounded for all the world like a child who’d just been given an ultimatum to eat his dinner or risk losing dessert. He made a lunge for the keys, but the sudden movement was a mistake. Clipping his injured side on the edge of her desk, he fell to his knees with a muffled whimper, only the top of his hair—not over-spiked with product for once—visible over the metal edge.