Her Last Temptation

She hadn’t told Tess or Laine that. In fact, she’d urged Tess to go. And Laine…well, after their argument, she hadn’t been surprised her sister had taken off.

She’d missed them both ever since, much more than she’d ever have expected. Which was silly, really, since she’d always known everybody was destined to leave. Her grandparents, her father. Her remarried mother. Her brilliant sister.

Cat ending up alone had been inevitable. But she’d always thought she’d at least have Temptation.

Dinah clucked her tongue and shook her head, making her poufed platinum blond hair teeter a bit to one side. “I still can’t get over the two of them bailing out of here. You sure you don’t want me to tell your mama…”

“Don’t even think about it,” Cat said, already grabbing two bottles of Bud for the guys waving to her from the end of the bar. “She’s upset enough about the pub closing. The last thing I need is to have her come down here to help out, because you know her helping out would mean me losing my mind.”

Dinah, who’d been one of her mother’s closest friends since their high school years, chuckled. “It’s just because she worries.”

“She worries, I snap. Without Laine here to referee, it’d be a nightmare.”

“You think it’ll be like this all weekend?” Dinah asked. “Because if so, we might need to call in some backup. Tess did say she was going to be as close as Austin…”

Cat shook her head. “It’s okay, I already took care of it. I called an old friend and tapped her to help out tomorrow night.”

Dinah, a fifty-something native Texan whose heart was bigger than most people’s minivans, sighed in visible relief. “Thank the Lord. I don’t think my knees could take another night like this one.”

Cat purposely looked at the beer mug she was holding under the tap and kept her voice casual as she asked, “How are Zeke’s knees holding up?”

Silence. Then Dinah squawked, “You bad girl…as if I know. The man’s more skittish than a virgin in a frathouse.”

Knowing Dinah had had her eye on Zeke for about two years, ever since Laine and Cat had hired the man to cook for their pub clientele, Cat frowned. “You’re running out of time, you know. If you’re going to make something happen, you’d better do it while you two are still working together every day.”

Dinah rolled her eyes. “Sugar, I could bathe naked in that man’s deep fryer and he wouldn’t look.”

“I dunno…warm oil, a hot kitchen, spicy smells. Sounds pretty sexy to me.”

“Me, too,” a male voice said. The hair standing on end all over her body told her exactly which male voice.

Crud. She’d gotten so distracted chatting with Dinah about the older woman’s romantic possibilities that she’d completely forgotten about her own.

No. He’s not a possibility.

She’d been telling herself that for two hours, every throaty, wickedly sexy song the band performed reminding her of just how dangerous getting involved with Spence would be. Even if he had made her almost melt into a puddle when he’d sung one song she hadn’t recognized, about making love in the moonlight on a windswept beach to a woman with fire in her eyes. Made her want to take a drive down to the Galveston coast. With him.

But no. It’d never happen. He was a long-haired musician playing tiny bars in Nowhereville, Texas, for heaven’s sake. The man probably didn’t even own a car. Spence was definitely not the steady, reliable type she’d been telling herself she needed to find. Far, far from it!

The flirting was over with. The guy was a hunk and a half, but so were a lot of other guys. And all of them were the type who walked away.

She’d had enough of those, dammit. From here on out, she was going to be strictly business with this particular one. So she offered him an impersonal smile. “Hey, I was afraid the crowd was never going to let you guys take a break.”

“Me, too,” he said.

Without being asked, she opened a bottle of icy cold water and slid it to him. He picked it up, giving her a grateful nod, and lifted it to his lips.

Lips. Don’t think of the lips. You never notice the lips of the guy at the bank or the post office.

She looked down, her gaze falling on his throat. Her breaths deepened as she watched the way his pulse pounded in his neck and the muscles leading to his shoulders rippled with his every movement. All glisteny with a sheen of sweat. Probably tasted salty.

She added more no-no words to her list. Neck. Shoulders. Muscles. Glisteny. Salty.

“Thanks,” he said as he lowered the nearly empty bottle. “Those lights are pretty hot. I was half wishing I’d worn less clothes.” He cleared his throat. “I mean, lighter clothes. Shorts or something.”

Less clothes? No pants? She might as well just give this up right now. Because no matter how hard she tried to keep her mind focused and professional, she kept sliding down this slippery slope of attraction to this man. She couldn’t possibly survive another round of sexual roulette with him.

But at least this time, Spence was looking uncomfortable, as well. Funny, the way he’d stammered over the words he’d said, about wearing less clothes. As if he, too, had recognized the naughty implication and had been slightly embarrassed about it.

It was cute, that sheepish look on his face. Not to mention completely unexpected. Embarrassment and this guy went together about as naturally as pork chops and a vegetarian.

“It is awfully hot in here, don’t you think?” he finally said, filling the thick silence. How bizarre, this feeling of being in a silent bubble, when all around them voices chattered and glasses tinkled. But, like before, all of that seemed very far away.

“Yeah, well, uh…I guess the crowd of naked bodies makes it feel even hotter,” Cat said.

Then she bit her tongue. Bodies. Another definite no-no word when Spence was around. If this kept up, she was going to have the vocabulary of a ten-month-old.

“Uh, Cat, did you say what I think you said?”

Sure, she’d said the crowd of bodies…oh, God, she hadn’t said naked, had she? Tell me I didn’t say naked.

“Because we’re pretty open to playing at unusual venues, but an entirely naked audience, well, that could get a little…sticky.” His lips twitched, and she knew he was trying to hold back his laughter.

Cat blushed. Literally felt hot blood rise in her face and flood her cheeks. No guy had ever made her blush.

“Slip of the tongue,” she muttered, grabbing for any halfway believable excuse she could find. “I mean, you know, the words, they sort of go together. Naked. And bodies. I might just as easily have said dead and bodies.”

Argh! Just stick a spike through your hand and get it over with, Cat. It’d be less painful than this.

“I think I’d prefer naked ones to dead ones,” he murmured.

She kept prattling on, like an out of control car careening toward a cliff. “You know what I mean, though, right? Some words are kind of a natural fit. Like fried and oysters.”

His lips twitched again. “Most people would say fried goes better with chicken…but if you prefer oysters…”

“I don’t. Prefer oysters, I mean, no matter what their, uh, reputation,” she said, wondering why she’d had to immediately latch on the sex food group when there were so many others available. Bacon and eggs. Hot and tamale.

Dead and duck.

“Me, neither. Nasty little things,” he said, obviously still talking about the oysters.

Cat nodded in agreement. “Shiny and slippery and wet.”

One of his brows shot up. “Shiny…slippery…wet?”

Cat pictured putting her mouth in front of a firing squad for continuing to bring both their minds to places they had no business being. She closed her eyes, unable to manage a single word. She could only shake her head in dismay. When, in the name of heaven, had Cat Sheehan turned into a babbling idiot?

Spence started to laugh—a low, husky laugh that made her tingle, all over. “I’d offer you a shovel, but I don’t have one on me. Besides, you’re doing a pretty good job digging yourself deeper into this hole all on your own.”

“If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go shoot myself now.”

“I just told you I don’t have a shovel, Cat.”

“So you can’t bury me?”

“Uh huh.”

She tapped the tip of her index finger on her cheek, thinking about it, even as she gave in and laughed a little with him. “Hmm, so how about backing up ten minutes and starting this whole thing over?”

Spence leaned over the bar, propping his chin on his fist. “Hi. Thanks for the water. What’d you think of the music?”

“You guys really are good,” she said, thrilled at the chance to keep the conversation neutral.

“Thanks.” He leaned closer, raising his voice as more people crowded close to the bar, waving at Cat to place their orders. “We have a lot of fun doing it.”

Getting back to work, she filled a few mugs, poured a few shots, blew off a few jerks, then returned her attention to the bass player in the corner. “I really liked that song you did about the girl with the fire in her eyes and the moonlight on her hair. Who sang it originally? I didn’t recognize it.”

Spence shrugged, lifted his bottle to his mouth and sipped more water. After sipping, he lowered the bottle and wiped the moisture off his lips with the back of his hand.

Cat just stared, acknowledging the truth: the man was poetry in motion. No small talk in the world was going to make her oblivious to that.

“You didn’t recognize it because I wrote it,” he said.

Wrote it. Wrote poetry? She blinked a couple of times, trying to backtrack and remember what the heck they’d been talking about before he’d gotten her all distracted with his water-drinking abilities. Then she remembered. “You wrote that song? The one about the hot night and the whispers in the dark?”

Wow. She never would have guessed. Not only because the music had been so good, but also because of the unbridled emotion of the words, juxtaposed against the raw, haunting power of the melody. It had sounded…hungry. That was the only word she could find to describe it. “I’m impressed. You must have had quite a lot of inspiration to write such a powerful song.”

She hadn’t been fishing for information. She hadn’t. It was none of her business what inspired him to write such a sensual, heated ballad. But she still held her breath, waiting for his response, hoping he wouldn’t say he’d written it for the love of his life. His longtime girlfriend.

God, please, not his wife!

When his answer came, she couldn’t help feeling a sharp stab of disappointment. Because a faraway look of longing and hunger accompanied his words. “I wrote it for a girl I was crazy about a long, long time ago.”

HE’D WRITTEN the song for her.

Staring at Cat, Dylan focused on those vivid green eyes of hers—those catlike green eyes. He silently willed her to read the truth that screamed loudly in his brain but didn’t cross his lips. It was you. It was always you.

The girl in the song, with moonlight shining on her hair, had been Cat Sheehan bathed in the glow of an enormous bonfire the night of a homecoming game many years ago. If he closed his eyes, he could still see her there, standing completely alone, staring at the flames. She’d been lost in thought, seeming separate and distinct from the rowdy teenagers all around her.

It was so easy even now to remember the way her eyes had glittered and her skin had taken on the golden sheen of the fire. Her hair had positively come alive, as brilliant and dazzling as the flames that leaped and crackled against the star-filled night sky. And even from several feet away, he’d seen the way her lips had moved, as if she were whispering something for her ears alone.

He’d wanted to be the one she whispered to.

Wondering why she looked so sad, so serious and so lonely, he’d even moved closer. He’d been driven to understand why she stood there by herself, as if a curtain had descended between her and everyone else. Everyone except him.

Then someone had taken her arm and she’d rejoined the living, laughter on her lips, as always.

And, as always, she hadn’t even noticed him standing there in the shadows. Apparently, she’d never really noticed him. Certainly not enough to make an impression. Because judging by tonight, Cat had absolutely no idea that they’d been classmates at Kendall High a mere nine years ago.

It wasn’t her fault. Cat had never shunned him; he’d just been too intimidated to make her notice him. Not intimidated by her…but by the intensity of his own feelings, which had simply overwhelmed him, particularly after the night of the bonfire.

Because that had been the night he’d realized there was so much more depth to the beautiful, vivacious Cat than she ever let the world see. The night he’d realized the two of them had something very deep and intrinsic in common.

Their solitude.

Things had changed, though. Because now, she definitely noticed him. For the past ten minutes, during her adorable, fumbling conversation—which was so unlike the self-assured Cat he remembered—she’d been staring at him with intensity, interest and pure, physical want.

He knew the look. Tonight, he almost certainly mirrored it.

Then again, if she’d ever really looked at him, she would have seen that look on his face throughout the entire year they’d gone to school together.

Not meeting his eyes as she rubbed the surface of the bar with a damp rag, Cat said, “You have a lot of talent.”

“Thanks. Music’s my passion.”

“Your only passion?”

“Not only. There’s also video games.”

One of her delicate brows lifted. “Rock and roll and video games. So are you just a mature-looking fifteen-year-old?”

“Smart-ass.” He didn’t elaborate on the video game thing, thinking she probably wasn’t ready to hear that he didn’t merely play them. He created and developed them. Very successfully.

“Goes with the territory,” she said with a shrug.

“Being a smart-ass?”

She looked past him, nodded at someone, then got busy making a couple of scotch and sodas. “Yeah. Can’t take things too seriously when perfect strangers are talking to you like they’re your best friend night after night. Telling you their troubles. It’d be too damned depressing, especially for someone like me.”

He hadn’t thought of it that way. Then, curious, he asked, “Someone like you?”

Cat shrugged, suddenly looking uncomfortable. “I mean, well, anyone who gets riled up a bit too easily, like I used to do.”

Riled up easily? Oh, yeah, Cat Sheehan had had a reputation for that. He didn’t know if the Kendall High football team had ever gotten over being told they were a bunch of spiteful, fatheaded kindergartners with big egos and little dicks.

She’d done it during a pep rally.

Over a loudspeaker.

In front of the whole school.

Cat had gotten suspended. She’d also earned the never-ending devotion of all the freshmen who’d been used as walking punching bags by some of the bullying members of the football team.

“So you still get riled up too easily?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not me. Miss Reasonable, Miss Calm, Cool and Collected, that’s me these days. I can handle anything.”

She tried to meet his eye, tried to maintain a sincere expression, but didn’t quite manage it. Dylan couldn’t help it. He started to laugh.

She shot him a dirty look, then dissolved into helpless laughter, too. “Okay, so maybe you are getting to know me. And the answer is yes, I probably do take things too personally and get myself in trouble on occasion. But I have handled things pretty well all on my own for a long time now. Despite what anyone in my family might say. And I’m determined to stay out of trouble, in spite of some of the things I’d really like to do.”

He wanted to ask if she’d told off any dumb jocks lately but didn’t want to tip his hand too soon. “For instance?”

Her smile faded, that tension returning to her slim body. “I fantasize about driving one of those bulldozers outside right onto the lawn of the courthouse and leaving a big Porta-John on the front steps. It’d have a big Welcome Home sign for the city officials who voted me out of business.”

Cat’s words gave him the opening he’d been waiting for…a chance to try to find out why she appeared so tense. “So, are you really closing the bar?”

Her mouth tightened. “End of the month. Demolition ball swings in July. Gotta make way for progress…how could we ever live without four lanes?”

“That blows.”

She nodded, blinking rapidly, and Dylan recognized her anguish. He now understood the slump in Cat’s shoulders, the unhappiness that had likely caused those dark circles under her beautiful eyes.

Cat was hurting.

Sure, she was playing tough girl—hadn’t she always? But the pain beneath the surface would be obvious to a blind man.

“Is there anything I can do?” He figured there wasn’t, but needed to ask, anyway.

“Just keep rocking the walls down this weekend so we can go out firmly in the black…and so I’ll have a little money to live on while I figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”

“I can’t picture you being unsure of yourself for long, Cat Sheehan,” he murmured, hearing the intensity in his voice.

She apparently heard it, too. Her eyes narrowed in skepticism. “You think you know me already, huh?”

Oh, yeah. He knew her. He’d known her for years. He’d watched her with simple devotion when he’d been a young, geeky kid to whom she’d never have given a second look. And he’d seen her in his dreams in the years that had followed.

“Yeah. I think I do know you.”

But not as well as he planned to.

LATE THAT NIGHT, as Dylan helped the rest of the guys load their equipment and instruments into Josh’s van, he tried to ignore Banks’s curious stares. Banks had been watching him, a knowing grin on his face, every time Dylan had wandered over to the bar to talk to Cat when they were on break. During their final set, he’d thought his friend was going to explode with curiosity. Only the fact that the crowd had been so responsive—not letting them wrap up the night until they’d played an hour longer than scheduled—had distracted the guy.

But now they were alone. Josh and Jeremy had gone back inside for the last of Jeremy’s drums. Banks made full use of the opportunity. “So, what happened? You going back in there for a late-night rendezvous?”

“Big words, Banks. Still working on being the smart one?”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to figure out I’ve got a 130 IQ just because I know how to pronounce the word rendezvous.”

“One-thirty, hmm? I’m so sorry.”

It was an old bone of contention and a constant source of baiting. Because Dylan’s was just a smidge higher.

His friend smirked. “Warning, warning, comparing IQs…your geek-o-meter is in the red zone.”

“F. You.” But Dylan was smiling as he said it. He finished storing the microphones and amps, then helped Banks load up his keyboard.

“So, seriously, man, what are you going to do about the Cat woman?”

“Don’t call her that.”

“Right, ’cause, uh, she was much younger when you went nuts over her? So, it’s Cat girl, huh?”

“Do you ever shut up?”

“You roomed with me in college, so you already know the answer to that question. Now stop stalling. Did she recognize you? Did she realize you were the same nerdy little nobody who used to practically wet your Dockers whenever she came around back in high school?”

Banks. Couldn’t live with him. Couldn’t kill him and throw his body off the Chrysler Building.

“She didn’t remember me.”

Banks had the courtesy not to laugh. In fact, he frowned a bit. “Well, you can’t be too surprised, can you? I found your high school yearbook one time in college. You look nothing like you did back then.”

High school. Seemed like a lifetime ago.

He’d only attended public school for one year—his senior year—and he’d been only fifteen years old the day he’d started. A skinny kid who’d been accepted into a dozen colleges before he’d even started shaving.

He’d wanted to be normal. Just…normal. Instead of the whiz kid who’d skipped a few grades in the exclusive private schools his parents insisted he attend. His one outlet—which had driven his parents nuts—was his nonstop devotion to his music. Even though his mom and dad had ranted about how he was burning his brain cells, betraying his intelligence and making a mockery of his brilliant musical gifts, he’d never stopped working out his teen angst with his stereo or his guitar.

Until that year. When he’d finally gotten them to agree to let him finish out school with regular kids for a change, in a public high school.

Their agreement had come at a cost. A high one.

His music. For the entire school year.

That’d been the price—he could spend his senior year at Kendall High if he agreed to let his father lock away his guitar and his entire CD collection.

God, it’d been hard. Particularly when he’d started school and realized a fifteen-year-old senior wasn’t going to fit in very well anywhere. He’d missed his music terribly. So badly he thought about giving up—about going back to his old school less than a week into the new year.

Then he’d seen her—Cat Sheehan, the high school sophomore who’d fired his imagination and awoken every angsty teenage hormone in his body. She’d been the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen and her smile had literally made the breath leave his lungs.

So he’d stuck it out, somehow making it work, if only so he could catch glimpses of her throughout the day. Could feel his heart skip a beat when she smiled that smile. Could share, if only from a distance, in her delightfully wicked personality.

And after the night of the bonfire, he’d made it his personal mission to find out why there seemed to be another side to Cat that no one else in the world ever saw.

He never had. But maybe now, he’d have another chance.

Eventually, he’d found a way to fit in at Kendall High. He’d built his own group of friends. He’d done the brain thing—chess club, honor roll, debate team. He’d made his parents proud, devoting the entire year to more “appropriate” pursuits.

And he’d kept his promise, staying away from his guitar. But that hadn’t stopped him from writing songs in his head. Songs about the blond angel who barely even knew he existed.

“I mean, it’s not like you two had any classes together or anything, right?” Banks asked, still apparently thinking he needed to make Dylan feel better. “You were the same age, but you were a couple of years ahead of her.”

“Right.”

“So it’s not like she knew you and then forgot about you.”

“You don’t have to try to cheer me up,” Dylan said, surprised to realize it was the truth. “Like you said, I don’t look anything like I did then.”

Definitely not. Then he’d been a skinny runt, a geek and a freak. Nowhere near the realm of Cat Sheehan and her crowd.

Her crowd…well, actually, she hadn’t had one. She’d fit in everywhere. Not a stuck-up cheerleader, not a druggie, not a jock, not a brain. She’d just been this nice, smart, funny girl who happened to look like a goddess. One who had a caustic wit and a strong sense of justice that could either get her out of trouble or—probably more often—deeper into it.

She’d been the girl everyone wanted to be like. The girl who’d told off the football squad. Who’d organized a blood drive when one of their classmates had been in a serious car accident. And who, on one occasion, had come to the vocal defense of a nerdy kid who’d made the enormous mistake of sitting at the jocks’ table at lunchtime.

That’d been him.

She’d swooped in right before he’d gotten himself pounded. Taking him by the arm, she’d smiled brightly, saying, “You promised you’d sit with me, cutie.” Then she’d pulled him up and tugged him away, the determination in her eye and the firm set of her lips daring anyone to try to stop her. Beelining to another corner of the cafeteria—a safer corner—she’d pushed him into a seat and plopped down next to him, staying for a good three minutes, to keep up appearances.