Just For Kicks

“Cross my heart, Mom.” Her tone was ironic, but she gave her friend an affectionate smile. “It feels so much better than it did Monday night—or even yesterday—and I’m pretty sure I’m back up to speed. But if I feel it start to go I’ll call it a night. You have my word on that.” As they headed down Row E for the garage elevator, she gave her friend a friendly bump with her hip. “So San Francisco was good, huh?”

“Oh, wow.” Treena’s pale brown eyes grew dreamy. “It was so great. We stayed at the St. Francis and saw as many sights as we could pack into two days.”

“Jax didn’t play in a poker tournament, then?”

“No, and it was so smokin’ not to have a single thing we had to do. We ate too much and maybe drank a bit too much and just played tourists. And the weather was gorgeous. So much cooler than it is here.”

“Yeah, this is unseasonable for mid-October. The temps should be dropping any day now.”

“I’m beyond ready. It was such a relief when the thermometer took its normal dip a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t prepared for the temperature to start soaring again.”

The noise of the casino bombarded them as the elevator doors slid open into the hotel lobby, but after years of working there Carly was adept at automatically relegating the din to background noise. Dodging the tourists who didn’t wait for them to exit the car before barging into it, they skirted a bellman maneuvering a rolling luggage cart across the marble lobby floor and strode into the casino proper. They passed the Italian bistro, with its smells of garlic, tomatoes and olive oil, passed their favorite little after-work open-air lounge, then took a left at the craps tables, heading for the east wall and the short hallway that led to the employees-only area backstage of the Starlight Room.

“Ms. Jacobsen.”

Damn! Carly didn’t need Treena’s murmured, “Looks like the bum is back,” to know who she’d see when she turned around. Sighing, she pivoted on her heel.

She studied Wolfgang Jones as he strode up to them. Looking at him objectively for perhaps the first time ever, she finally got a handle on part of what her problem was. It wasn’t merely that he was so cool and controlled he was damn near robotic; it wasn’t even that he didn’t seem to like animals. It was those two elements combined with the fact that he had that edge she liked in a man. That don’t-fuck-with-me-and-don’t-even-think-you-have-a-chance-of-tying-me-down edginess that sucked her in every time.

Part of the appeal spoke directly to her own personality, since she had no desire to tie any man down. Never had, never would.

Especially not this man.

Still, there was just something that turned her on about a guy with the confidence to stride through life with his goals firmly front and center.

Really.

Turned her.

On.

Wolfgang had that goal orientation. She didn’t have the first idea what his objectives were, but she didn’t doubt for a minute that he had them. He also possessed one superbly fit body. She might have a preference for men in jeans, but beautifully cut slacks did nothing to detract from the muscular swell of his butt. Neither did his pricy well-tailored jacket disguise the width of his shoulders.

No, ma’am. There wasn’t a damn thing wrong with the physique beneath those upscale threads.

He stopped in front of her, standing close enough that she had to tip her head back in order to look up into his cool green eyes. She tried to assure herself that wasn’t a thrill all on its own, but knew it for the lie it was. Because at more than six feet tall herself in high heels—which meant seventy-five percent of the time—looking up at any man was a treat.

“I need to talk to you about your injury the other night,” he said with crisp precision. Pulling his head back, he slid his gaze slowly down her until it reached her ankle, then back up to meet her eyes once again. “You are better?”

A little curl of warmth unfurled in her stomach. “Yes, very much so, thank you.”

“Good. Then you will need to fill out an incident report so I can close the event.”

The warmth iced over. Yet her eyes still narrowed on his lower lip, noting that when he wasn’t all stern-mouthed the way she was accustomed to seeing him, it was much fuller than she’d previously realized. Yes, indeed, he had that beckoning edge, that look she went for in a guy—not particularly handsome, perhaps, but definitely all man.

If only he would keep his mouth shut.

Still, when she raised her gaze and saw him watching her, a frisson of sexual heat curled down her spine.

Whoa. Wait a minute. That selfsame backbone snapped erect. What the hell was she thinking? She didn’t even intend to go there with this man. “Yeah. Sure,” she said. “I’ll get right on that.” She turned away.

He wrapped his hand around her forearm and swung her back. She gave the long fingers and broad palm grasping her flesh—and pumping heat throughout her system—a pointed look.

Wolfgang set her loose. “Now would be a good time.”

“Not for me, it wouldn’t,” she disagreed coolly. “I’m on my way to work, and I don’t intend to bring myself to my G.M.’s attention by being late. Trust me, Vernetta-Grace is scarier than your entire Security and Surveillance force combined. I’m sure you understand.” She shot him a challenging look from beneath her lashes. “You being so big on personal responsibility and all.”

“Fine.” His mouth adopted the slant of grim hardness with which she was much more familiar. “Then stop by Surveillance and sign off on the report when you’re done for the night.”

“Absolutely. I’ll be sure to do that before we go home.” She turned to Treena. “Remind me, okay?”

“Sure.”

She swung back to Wolfgang. “There you go. Anything else?”

“No.”

“Gotta run, then. We’re on the clock in about fifteen minutes and we still have to change and get into our makeup.”

He stepped back with a stiff nod and she and Treena walked away.

Once they were out of earshot her friend glanced over at her. “It’s going to be a cold day in hell before we stop by to sign off on Wolfgang’s incident report, isn’t it?”

Carly snorted. “Oh, yeah. A very cold day.”

SHE WAS FEELING SURPRISINGLY full of herself when she bopped into the backstage dressing room a few minutes later, and just for a minute she wondered if that should worry her.

As if reading her mind, Treena shot her a dry, sideways look. “You might be having just a little too much fun from your encounter with the wolfman, babe.”

Even though she’d had virtually the same thought herself, her initial knee-jerk response was to deny it. But she couldn’t.

“I know,” she admitted in a low voice. “And I feel like that oughtta be scaring the bejesus out of me. Yet somehow it doesn’t.” Instincts insisting that it was wrong, wrong, wrong to be attracted on a physical level to a man she disliked on a personal one, she raised her hand to erase the admission right out of the air. Even her instincts seemed conflicted, however, for she terminated the motion with a jerky movement that gave her a flashback to her gawky pubescent days. That was an age she’d just as soon not revisit.

Blowing out a breath, she dropped her hand to her side and gave her friend a wry smile. “It was easier when he just annoyed me. But lately it’s as if all my senses are in this warped heightened state whenever he’s around. And I honest to God don’t understand what that’s all about.”

“Maybe simply that there’s more to him than you first thought.”

“I doubt that very much.” Then a beautiful arrangement of exotic flowers on the counter at her station caught her eye. “Hey, would you look at that?” she demanded, raising her voice. She picked up her pace across the room full of dancers in various states of undress. “Somebody must love me lots.”

Rude hoots greeted her statement. “Yeah, Carly,” Michelle said from down the row of stools in front of the long lighted mirror. “You’re off on your regular days and rumor has it that you’ve been laid up with a bum ankle. Yet here you are, all hale and hearty and with a rich new Stage Door Johnnie to boot from the looks of things. What’s up with that?” Tipping up her chin, her lower lip drooping open, she leaned into the mirror to align false lashes along her natural lash line. Then pressing them in place while the adhesive dried, she swivelled to meet Carly’s gaze. “He got a brother?” she asked hopefully.

“Toots, if I had a sugar daddy and he had a brother, you can be damn sure I’d be holding the latter in reserve. It’s been a long, dry spell for me, you know? If the day ever comes when I’m faced with that scenario, I’ll probably need the spare. Just in case I break the first one.”

That brought a fresh spate of ribald laughter and comments, and she dropped her dance bag on the floor in front of her station to root through the blossoms.

Discovering a tiny white envelope, she pulled it out and ripped it open. She extracted the card inside. “‘Hope you’re back on your feet and dancing soon,’” she read aloud. There was no signature. “Huh.” She looked up to find several of her sister dancers grinning at her and a lightbulb went off in her head. “Aw, you guys, these are from you, aren’t they?”

Across the room, Jerrilyn paused in fitting her towering headdress over her slicked-back hair to blow a raspberry. “Yeah, right. When’s the last time you remember us buying flowers for anyone in the troupe?”

“When Georgia had her baby,” Carly said. “Okay, I know we don’t usually. So what was all the grinning about, then?”

“Oh, honey,” Michelle said. “A woman getting flowers is always a huge event. And some of us have to live vicariously.”

She looked at the arrangement again. Okay, that made sense. Only… “So, who are these from if they aren’t from you all?”

“Did you meet a hot young M.D. in the E.R. Monday night?” Juney asked.

“Nah. I didn’t even go to the E.R., just limped on home and iced it. Besides, the last time I was at the E.R. the hottest thing I saw was a nurse named Brunhilda who you wouldn’t want to drop your soap in front of in the shower room.”

“You are so full of it,” Treena scoffed.

Jo’s head popped up over the mirror that backed Carly’s “Hey, maybe you’ve got a secret admirer.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she agreed doubtfully. Then she looked at the clock on the wall and headed across the room to collect her costume. “If so, I’ll have to figure out who later. I don’t have time to worry about it now.”

The wardrobe mistress looked up as she approached. Adjusting the measuring tape draped around her neck, she pushed a frizzy strand of hair behind her ear and selected Carly’s costume from the rack. “Thanks for sending your costume and wig in with Treena yesterday,” she said, and handed Carly the wisp of illusion and glitter that comprised the first act’s attire. She also passed over a headdress of fountaining, white-tipped gold plumes, then pushed her slipping glasses up her nose. “I like it when I’m given time to get them clean, although you are one of the neater ones.”

Carly returned to her station and quickly stripped out of her street clothes and donned her own fishnet stockings before pulling on the costume. Plopping the headpiece atop a mannequin head, she quickly applied her greasepaint. It looked trashily overdone under the harsh fluorescent lighting, but features tended to disappear beneath the stage lights in ordinary street makeup.

Her friend Eve strolled into the dressing room a moment later and stopped at her station three places down the row to prop her right foot up on the stool. She smoothed her fishnets up her calf and along her thigh. Glancing up, she caught sight of Carly and smiled. “Hey, girl,” she said. “How’s the ankle?”

“Back to normal.” I hope, I hope.

“It better be,” Julie-Ann said in the sugary, upbeat voice she used to slice-and-dice. “I won’t have you messing up my chorus line.” She laughed as if it were all a big joke.

Carly gave the young dance captain a neutral look. “Yeah, I’d sure hate to have my injury ruin your night.”

“Haven’t you heard, Carly?” Treena asked, deadpan. “It’s all about Julie-Ann. Your comfort doesn’t enter into it.”

“Sure, it does,” Eve disagreed. “You heard her—it could mess up her line.” She cocked a brow at the dance captain. “And when did this become your dance troupe again? I thought we functioned as a unit.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Julie-Ann said in exasperation. “Lighten up! It was a joke.”

Uh-huh. The three dancers exchanged brief gazes. Then without further comment they went back to getting ready for the show.

But Carly turned and, reaching between her shoulder blades, gave her back a pat. “Do you see a knife sticking out anywhere?” she asked Treena sotto voce over her shoulder.

The redhead gave her a crooked smile. “Amazing how she does that, isn’t it?” she said equally quietly. “It will forever remain a mystery to me how one woman can smile so angelically while poking her busy little fingers into another woman’s wounds.”

“And if anyone would know how that feels, toots, it would be you.” Treena had come under Julie-Ann’s fire the past several months while she was fighting to get her dancing back up to speed so she could pass the annual audition after an absence of almost a year away from the troupe. Instead of lending support, their dance captain had undermined her friend every chance she got.

Treena’s smile turned into a full-fledged grin. “She has so lost the power to bug me.”

“You’ve definitely decided this will be your last year, then?”

“Yeah. You know it’s time for me. I’m getting too old for this and it’s just plain getting tougher physically. Jax and I have been talking over some of my options.”

“I’ll wager you have quite a few, too,” Carly agreed. “And I’m happy for you, toots. For myself, though, I’m going to miss working with you. What’s it been, a decade we’ve been dancing together?”

“Yes, can you believe it?” Propping her heel on the countertop, Treena bent over her straight leg, stretching out her hamstrings. Slowly straightening, she gave a nod to the bouquet on the counter between their stations. “So who do you think the flowers are from?”

“You got me.” She paused in tucking her hair beneath the turban portion of the headpiece to look at her friend. “I might check with the hotel florist tomorrow to see if anyone remembers anything. Because I honestly don’t have a clue.”

“Hey, maybe it was Wolfgang.”

Carly choked, then laughed so hard tears began to leak over her bottom lashes. “Oh, shit, if you made me ruin my makeup you’re a dead woman.” She grabbed a handful of tissues and gently pressed them beneath her eyes to catch the overflow before it could smear her mascara. Once she was certain the damage was contained, she turned to her friend. “Do you honestly see Mr. Grim and Grimmer sending flowers to someone he’s not sharing the sheets with?”

“Well…no.”

“Me, neither. Hell, I can’t even see him loosening up enough to do the hootchie-kootch.”

And if sometimes she jerked awake from a dream of him hanging over her in a red-hot naked lather…?

Well, that would just remain her guilty little secret.

CHAPTER SIX

WOLF WOKE UP THE following morning to Niklaus playing music at top volume. The discordant notes and screeching guitar licks found a corresponding pulse in his left temple, which began pounding in tune with the inharmonic sounds wailing out of the living room speakers. With a groan he rolled to the side of the bed, where he sat with his elbows dug into his knees and his aching head propped in his hands.

God, he felt awful. Burning his candle at both ends didn’t even begin to cover it. He’d been running his ass off the past seventy-two hours, working his shift by night and squiring his folks and Niklaus around Vegas and its environs by day. He’d eaten rich foods he was no longer accustomed to and worked like a dog to live up to his mother’s expectations.

Which had meant talking. Smiling. Being frigging pleasant.

What he’d netted from so much unaccustomed sociability was a dangerously volatile temper. Generally a well-managed animal, it was suddenly hurling itself at its cage doors, slavering and snarling for release. Having to listen to crap music at high decibels on too little sleep verged perilously close to the key that beast was searching for.

But even if he believed in the self-indulgence of losing his temper, this wouldn’t be the time for it, since it would be the height of unfairness to take it out on Niklaus. The kid was having a rough-enough time as it was. Wolf remembered too well what it was like being ordered to pack up your belongings just when you finally got yourself settled in, only to have to start the whole lousy process all over again somewhere else.

And that was on top of the guilt he felt at leaving Niklaus to fend for himself last night.

After seeing his folks off at the airport for their flight back to Bolivia, Wolf had fully intended to take the teen home, order whatever pizza Niklaus wanted and ease him into his new situation. Instead, they’d arrived home to a message on the answering machine from the Avventurato Surveillance team’s number-one man, Dan McAster. “Emergency’s come up in the casino,” Dan’s voice had snapped out in its usual gruff-spoken way. “I need you here, ASAP.”

So he’d had to leave Niklaus alone in a strange condo in a strange city practically the minute the teen’s grandmother—the only person to provide Niklaus with a modicum of security—had left town. As if the kid hadn’t already had enough to contend with moving in with an uncle he barely knew.

All the same—Wolf dug his fingertips into his pounding temple—that music had to go before his head exploded.

Climbing to his feet, he reached for the shirt he’d draped over the desk chair last night and pulled it on. Not bothering to button it, he grabbed a pair of khaki shorts out of a drawer and yanked them up his legs, zipping the fly as he walked into the living room.

He strode straight over to the stereo and cranked down the volume.

Niklaus, slumped on his tailbone on the couch, glowered at him, and Wolf jerked his head at the wall connecting his unit to Carly’s. “Show a little consideration, Nik. We’ve got a neighbor.”

To his surprise, the boy’s expression lit up. “I know, I saw her out on the balcony last night. She is hot! And she’s got like a hundred dogs and cats. How totally great is that?”

The mention of Carly’s animals made Wolf want to furrow his brow and curl his lip back from his teeth. He managed a noncommittal expression, however, because he didn’t want to ruin the first sign of pleasure he’d seen on the kid’s face since Niklaus had learned his grandparents were dumping him in Las Vegas.

“Yeah,” he grunted. “Great. Totally.” My ass.

God, she made him nuts. He’d cooled his heels in Surveillance last night for a good hour after the la Stravaganza show was over, waiting for her to show up. But had she? Hell, no. She’d blown off the one simple request he’d made of her, and he was still steamed about waiting for her to make an appearance when he should have been back home with Niklaus.

He was hardly blown away by surprise. But he was plenty steamed.

What did surprise him was how close he still felt to losing the tight rein he had on his temper. The need to be nice these past few days must have taken even more of a toll on him than he’d realized. All the same, he had to put it behind him. Get his head screwed on straight.

Niklaus suddenly surged to his feet. “I’m gonna go take a shower.”

“Okay, good. I’ll take one when you’re done, then we’ll go grab some breakfast and visit a couple of schools to see if we can find one that fits.”

The boy scowled at him. “I don’t suppose any of the schools in this town has a decent soccer team?”

His tone was pure teenage, don’t-give-a-shit boredom, but Wolf took one look at his nephew’s stiff posture and intense gaze and realized the answer mattered a great deal to him.

“I don’t know, but I’ll see what I can find out. Your grandmother mentioned you’ve got a real talent for the sport.”

Niklaus shrugged and slouched off toward the bathroom.

Wolf was on the phone trying to get sports information from the nearest school when hysterical barking broke out next door. It continued unabated throughout the remainder of his conversation, and his temper was straining at its leash by the time he finally slammed the phone down. “Son of a bitch!”

He looked down the hallway toward the bathroom, but the shower continued to pound unabated. With an abrupt, decisive nod, he snatched up the incident report that he’d brought home from work and strode over to pull his door open with a force that damn near removed it from its hinges.

A UPS driver who was turning away from Carly’s door jumped, and Wolf wiped the scowl from his face as he approached her.

“Is that for Carly Jacobsen?” he asked, nodding at the package in the woman’s hands.

The brown-uniformed woman glanced down at the name on the label, then nodded.

He reached out for it.

She took a step back. “I need a signature, and it has to come from the recipient.”

“How about from the recipient’s husband?” he said, and reached for it again. “I was just visiting next door.” He could hear the dogs’ hysterical barking on the other side of the door, and at the end of his patience, he roared, “Sitz, dammit!”

Blessed silence fell.

He turned his attention back to the woman. “Look, I don’t know why Carly isn’t answering the door, but give me the package, will you, please? If she has to wait until tomorrow for you to attempt another delivery, she’ll be hell to live with.”

It was apparently a complaint with which the woman was familiar, for she handed him an electronic device and a stylus to write his signature, then passed him the package. “Have a good one,” she said, and marched off down the hallway, disappearing a moment later down the stairs.

He waited long enough for her to exit the building, then whirled around and knocked on Carly’s door. The dogs started barking again and he lost the last tenuous grasp he’d had on his wrath. Hammering on the door, he half expected the solid wood to give way beneath his fist at any second. “Open. The. Goddamn. Door!”

Over the thundering of his own heart and the clamoring of the dogs, he somehow heard the slap of feet against the tile foyer on the other side of the panel. Then Carly’s voice snapped, “Sitz!” and once again the mutts fell silent.

His jaw sagged at the sound of the German command coming from within her apartment, and he barely managed to snap his mouth shut again before the door whipped open.

Then he caught his first good glimpse of her standing on the other side of the threshold, and it was all he could do not to let his jaw drop all over again.

But, holy shit. Her face was scrubbed clean and her hair was wet. She was all gold and pink as water dribbled along her temples, down her smooth throat and over her chest, soaking into a white tank top and turning the edges of the material transparent. As he watched, the transparency spread across the uppermost thrust of unbound, truly spectacular breasts. Puckered nipples that he imagined were the result of leaving a steamy bathroom for the air-conditioned chill of the rest of the apartment poked against the still-dry portion of the top’s stretchy fabric. Her feet were bare, and the sun filtering into the foyer from the living room window turned her pointy-hemmed skirt translucent enough to highlight her mile-high legs. He’d take a wild stab here and guess that she’d recently climbed out of the shower.

Hands hanging limply at her sides, she, too, looked him over as if she’d never seen him before. Even as the thought crossed his mind, her slender eyebrows drew together over her nose and her gaze rose to his face. “What do you want, Jones?”

“Uh…” He couldn’t remember and latched onto the first thought to waft across his mind. “You spoke German.”