Brazen & Burning

God, she was sexy when she lost her temper. Actually, he figured this woman had written the original definition of sexy, from her long, wavy auburn hair to her peek-a-boo blouse and skintight jeans. Suddenly, imagining that they’d once been involved wasn’t so hard to believe.

“We had rules?”

“Don’t toy with me, Adam. Of course we had rules! We wouldn’t even have exchanged last names, except we lived in the same complex and read each other’s mailboxes every day. Why am I telling you this? You know. You know me. You know what I’m like…what I was like. Then. I’m different now. I want different things. That’s why I hired a private investigator to find your new address. That’s why I dressed myself all up and drove a good two hours away from the nearest Nordstrom’s in melt-your-makeup heat to find you.”

“Two hours from Nordstrom’s? You must be suffering horrible withdrawal,” he quipped.

She thrust her fists onto her hips.

“I distinctly remember you regarding the grand opening of Nordstrom’s as something akin to the Super Bowl, mister. We went together. You spent five thousand dollars on a suit in the first half hour alone.” Her tone was even, but sharp. “Don’t you dare condescend to me, Adam Brody.”

Adam clenched his lips together. Her claim did indeed match what his sister had told him about the past few years of his life, as well as the facts he had solid proof of—like a whole closetful of designer men’s wear languishing in the cabin’s guest bedroom.

He raised his hands in surrender.

“I’m sorry.”

Sydney sighed, then turned on a smile that just about outshone the sun.

“You’re forgiven.” She snaked her arms around his neck and pressed close, ignoring the sawdust and sweat clinging to his bare chest. Her breasts taunted him with soft pertness. Her scent enticed him. Her mouth, which she licked to an even glossier shine than her lipstick, begged for a kiss.

And who was he to make her beg?

He curled his hand around the small of her back and lifted her, pressing her lips to his. Immediately, her mouth opened, her hands reached up to grip the sides of his cheeks, her leg twisted around his thigh to bring the center of her sex in direct contact with his. Adam jolted with explosive need, dropping his other hand to her buttocks, crushing her closer until his body throbbed and his chest heaved. Wild sexual instincts overrode every ounce of sense he had. If not for Sydney pulling back, he might have stripped her naked right there.

“Whoa, sweetheart.” She made short work of straightening her hair and clothes, tugging her tank top down so that her erect nipples drew his eye. “I remember we used to love the thrill of getting it on in the great outdoors, but don’t you think we should find somewhere a little more private? I don’t guess your sister would appreciate us screwing in her driveway.”

Adam laughed. He’d never known a woman who spoke about sex so freely. Or at least if he did, he didn’t remember her. Just like he didn’t remember Sydney.

“We used to do it outside?”

Sydney rolled her eyes. “We were a hair away from being certified exhibitionists. Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten about our tryst on the roof of your building?”

“Unfortunately…yes.”

“Excuse me?” She stepped back, clearly not believing him.

No time like the present to tell her the whole truth. “Much as I hate to tell you this…I don’t remember us. In fact, I don’t remember you at all.”

3

“YOU’RE JOKING, RIGHT?”

Sydney searched Adam’s face for any sign of facetiousness, but the sharp planes of his stubble-roughened cheekbones and the kiss-swollen curve of his mouth didn’t show anything but dead seriousness. Even his irises, a unique light brown that reminded her of the fawn-beige paint on her father’s first Rolls Royce, reflected nothing but honesty. They didn’t twinkle with his notoriously wicked sense of humor. They didn’t dart to the side when she persisted in staring.

“Tell me you’re joking,” she pleaded.

He glanced appreciatively down the length of her body. “I wish I was. You seem like someone who’d be hard to forget.”

“Hard to forget? I’m impossible to forget!”

Sydney stepped back, teetering on her high heels, her toes straining against the razor-thin straps. Furious, she cursed and tore off the sandals. Her first instinct was to throw them long and hard across the lawn, but her second instinct—to throw them at his head—stopped her from throwing them at all. Ordinarily, she wasn’t a violent woman. Instead of inflicting physical harm she decided to hold tight to the potential lethal weapons until she figured out how the hell Adam Brody, the man who’d almost made her break the dating mantra she’d lived by, could have forgotten their brief, but awesome affair.

“You’re yanking my chain, aren’t you?” She shook the shoes at him, hoping one more chance would convince him to change his story. How could he forget her? Her? “This is payback for my dumping your sorry ass.”

Adam chuckled, and though the sound trickled through her like neat bourbon with a twist of lime, something sounded foreign to her. Un-Adam-like.

Her insides froze. She noticed a scar nestled in his thick eyebrows. She swallowed hard, her mind working furiously.

“What happened to you?”

“Accident, or so I’m told.”

She dropped her sandals on the ground. Moisture deserted her mouth and she struggled to swallow, wishing she had that bourbon he’d reminded her of a second ago. With a tentative step, she closed the distance between them and brushed a lock of chestnut hair away from his forehead.

“Oh, God…”

“That’s nothing.”

He turned around and gave her a full, unhampered view of the still-red-and-puckered scar slashing down his back.

She gasped. “Does it hurt?”

“Sometimes. When it rains.”

Tentatively, she reached out, but stopped with her fingers only centimeters away.

“You can touch it,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

Maybe not, but it sure as hell bothered her. Not because his once-perfect body had been marred by a deep, permanent mark, but because he’d been seriously hurt and she’d known absolutely nothing about it.

“When?” she asked.

“March twelfth, last year.”

Sydney sucked in a breath. March twelfth? She’d left him on the twelfth, then jetted off to Scotland on the thirteenth. She remembered because it had taken quite a bit of coaxing from her publicist and agent to get her on a plane on such an unlucky day. Superstition hadn’t been bred into Sydney, the daughter of pragmatic New England parents. But she’d somehow acquired the habit, most likely because she’d read mostly horror and paranormal fantasy books as a kid.

“That’s the day I left. I mean, that night—I left you that night. It must have happened after…”

He turned, stretching his shoulders and neck. Then, tilting his head toward the side of the house, he directed her to the tire swing and a snatch of shade. He dug his hands into his pockets, but she didn’t miss the way his arms tightened, as if he’d clenched his fists beyond her view.

“Renée thinks I went jogging, got hit from behind. I was wearing running clothes and shoes, though only one Nike Air was found at the scene.” He got quiet, pointing Sydney toward the swing. Yes, her legs felt weak as they walked, but having never had something so basic as a tire to dangle from as a kid—her parents preferred a custom-built playset with Naugahyde fabric seats—she didn’t feel compelled to indulge in that childhood pastime. Instead, she wrapped her hands around the chain and leaned for support.

“What time? I mean, I left pretty late.”

Adam’s eyes met hers and, for an instant, she recognized an expression of the man she used to know. His lids narrowed, slightly crinkling the taut skin at his temple. If she didn’t know that men like him kept their brains well oiled, she imagined she could hear the gears working overtime.

“Sometime before midnight, because that’s when the cops had a call about a body on the side of the road.”

A body? Jogging? Sydney searched her memory, trying to pinpoint what time she’d left Adam’s condominium, trying to figure out how the accident could have happened without her hearing about it, but she’d started shaking so hard, she could hardly breathe.

A body? Adam? God, he could have died. He could have been killed that night and buried and she never would have known. Something in her chest tore, and a hot wave of regret flooded her body. She glanced around, looking for a place to sit. The tire swing still looked gooey and black and forbidding, so she simply dropped down on the grass, knees first.

She’d barely settled onto her heels on the prickly lawn when Adam knelt beside her, wincing at the sudden downward movement.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Me?” She swallowed the lump of disbelief blocking her airway. He’d nearly died on the side of the road. That was why she couldn’t find him when she’d returned from her trip. That was why he didn’t remember her. “What happened to you?”

He looked down, causing a thick lock of hair to fall haphazardly over his eyes. He combed his fingers through the chestnut strands and Sydney’s heart pounded faster. Such a simple, sexy act. Such a simple, sexy man. And he’d almost died.

“Not sure. The police report and doctors concurred that I was hit from behind. I didn’t wake up from the coma for over a month, and when I did, I’d lost all memory of that night, as well as everything for about five years before.”

She forced a grin, managing to quirk only half her mouth. “So I shouldn’t take it personally that you don’t know who I am.”

He reached up and touched her cheek. The gesture might have cracked Sydney’s heart another inch wider, but she realized he was only swiping away a bug.

“It took a few days before I even remembered Renée.”

“But you remember her now,” Sydney asked hopefully.

He shrugged again. “She’s my sister. She’s been around longer than five years.”

Or six months.

“She’s really protective of you,” Sydney said, not wanting to dwell on the fact that despite his injury, it still hurt that he didn’t remember her.

“She’s the only person who thought I’d survive.”

“I would have thought so! I would have…if I’d known.”

Adam’s mouth curved into a frown. “Why didn’t you know? Why didn’t Renée know about you? What were these rules you talked about?”

Sydney smirked. She supposed she should feel embarrassed or remorseful at this point—and she did. But not about the rules they’d—rather, she’d—laid out at the start of their affair. Her dictates had kept things neat, clean and had allowed her the illusion of organization in her dating chaos. The only thing that truly cued her normally inactive mechanism for regret was that her rules had kept her from finding out about Adam’s accident. She’d created the rules to protect her heart from the distraction and inherent selflessness of love. She hadn’t meant them to cut her off from providing help or solace to a friend.

“We had an agreement to keep things between us. Only between us,” she answered.

“Why? Are you married?”

Sydney snorted.

His gaze widened. “Was I married?”

She rolled her eyes and smiled, amazed at his ability to kid about something so damned serious. While Sydney embraced a wide-open attitude toward casual sex, she drew the line at boinking another woman’s husband. Best he knew that right up front. “The Adam Brody I knew was one-hundred-percent bachelor.”

He shook his head. “Renée checked with my friends, all my employees in my office. No one mentioned you. Not even a hint that I had a lover.”

Sydney stood up and swiped dry blades of brown grass off her knees. “When we agreed to keep things private, we did. It wasn’t so hard since we lived in the same condo complex.”

“You didn’t see my sister sell the place? Move my stuff?”

“I left the next morning for Scotland and New England. I was gone two months. When I got back, your condo had been sold, your business was gone…oh, God, your business! That’s why we’d gotten together that night! To celebrate some big deal. Jeez, what happened to the blueprints? The building?”

She watched his Adam’s apple bob. At first, his lips tightened, then relaxed into a devil-may-care smile that didn’t reach his eyes. Sydney tamped down a curse, her mind flying back to the night she’d left him—the night he couldn’t remember. He’d been nearly giddy. Psyched. Like the quarterback of a football team who’d just thrown the winning pass and was simply waiting for his receiver to snatch the pigskin out of the air. No blockers. An open end zone. If Adam had been the dancing type, they might have waltzed all over his condominium to the sweet music of success.

Instead, they’d made love on the living-room carpet.

Hot moisture prickled between her legs as the memory rushed back. The minute the door had closed behind the courier who’d picked up the plans that would make Adam a multimillionaire, he’d ripped off her clothes and licked her skin from top to bottom. She’d laughed and screamed in shocked delight, allowing him his fun and her the pleasure, giving him complete control over the sex that night—never guessing their tryst would be the last.

He’d kissed every inch of her body, not slowly and teasingly like he normally did, but with hot, desperate need. The memory of his mouth on her made her nipples pucker, her skin flush. Her thighs clenched, recalling the way he’d thrust inside her and made her come.

“Maybe we should go inside,” Adam suggested, snapping Sydney’s eyes to his. “You suddenly look like you could use some of Renée’s lemonade.”

Sydney glanced down, wondering exactly how she looked. Thirsty? Horny? Hot? Maybe a finely mixed combination of all three. “Will she spike it with vodka?”

“If you ask nicely.”

Most likely she’d spike the drink with Drano. But Sydney decided to keep her mouth shut and take whatever his sister offered. She had so much to process. And she couldn’t think clearly while her libido overrode her brain.

With an almost inaudible grunt, Adam stood, helping Sydney with a hand on her elbow. She followed quietly, her shoes still dangling from her fingers, her mind swimming with questions and recriminations and sexual memories she hadn’t realized she missed until she’d confronted the man who’d created them. He’d been unconscious for a month? Why did she feel she should have been there beside him, holding his hand? Whispering words of encouragement instead of traipsing all over the highlands with the private tour guide she’d seduced on her last night on the moors?

Why was a damned good question. Sex buddies didn’t do the bedside thing. Sex buddies sent flowers, maybe a naughty card. And she and Adam had only been sex buddies—adult lovers with no other commitment to each beyond sexual exploration and pleasure. Yeah, he’d suggested they take their relationship to a deeper level, but she’d bolted, so certain that allowing herself to lose her heart would somehow destroy the life she’d worked so hard to build.

Then she’d finally realized, with the recent nudge from Cassie, that her life, ideal in some ways, sorely lacked in others. She’d initiated her search for Adam to try this relationship again. To give a good thing a real chance. Now she was a stranger to him. In fact, when she really thought about it, she’d been little more than a stranger for the six months they’d been lovers. And she only had herself to blame.

“Careful of that bottom step,” Adam warned. “I need to refinish the wood.”

Mindlessly, Sydney avoided the step he indicated, then promptly yelped as a sliver protruding from the next step slid into the ball of her foot. “Ow! Ow!”

“Aw, hell.” Adam scooped her into his arms before she could protest and kicked on the screen door with his boot. “Renée, open up!”

His sister came running, her face a pale mask. “What? Adam, put her down! You shouldn’t be carrying anyone so heavy!”

Amid the pain, Sydney grimaced at the insinuation. “I’m not exactly Shamu the whale, sister.”

“Adam shouldn’t be lifting anything heavier than live bait,” Renée chastised, then turned her glare on Sydney. “You don’t look like bait.”

“Should have seen me when I was sixteen,” Sydney shot back, trying to rationalize that though the pain throbbing in her foot made it feel as though she had a two-by-four shoved in the tender arch of her foot, it was likely only a good-size sliver. Besides, there was no way Adam could carry both her, slim though she was, and a plank of wood.

“Back off, Renée. Stop being a bitch. Sydney is hurt. Go get the tweezers and the first-aid kit.”

He deposited Sydney on a comfortable—although worn—striped couch and knelt down beside her to take a better look at her injury.

Sydney swallowed a scream when Adam brushed his finger over the protruding splinter, sending a renewed wave of pain up her leg. She wasn’t good with pain. She was a certifiable wimp, with a pathetically low threshold for discomfort.

Sydney protested when Adam brushed his fingernail over the splinter again. “Ow! Ow! Ow! Stop doing that! It hurts!”

“I’ll bet it does. But I know pain. I think you’ll survive once I take the splinter out and get some ointment on. Think you can suck it up long enough for that?”

Sydney couldn’t contain a wisecrack, despite the ache in her foot. “If you remembered me, you wouldn’t ask,” she teased.

He met her stare, breaking into one of his heart-stopping smiles when she winked. Yes, she wanted him to catch the double entendre she’d made with the word “suck.” Too bad Renée returned before he could respond.

“Here.” Renée handed her brother the tweezers, then popped open the first-aid kit and slid it onto the couch beside Sydney. She remained quiet, but Sydney sensed a slump in her shoulders, as if Adam’s chastisement had hit home.

“Can I get you a lemonade?” Renée asked, her tone surprisingly close to sincere.

Sydney smiled. Apparently, she wasn’t the only woman in the room who had some sucking up to do. “That would be awesome, thanks.”

Renée nodded and hurried out of the room.

“Was that a truce?” Sydney asked as Adam twisted her foot gently to the side so he could see what he was doing.

“Seems like. Renée doesn’t like being called a bitch, particularly when she’s acting like one.”

“Bitch isn’t always a put-down, you know. There’s a whole movement that considers the word an acronym for Babe In Total Control of Herself.”

Adam grinned as he tried to wrangle the tiny silver tweezers with his big male fingers. This was why men didn’t pluck their eyebrows.

“I don’t suppose you’ve been elected the spokes-model for that movement, have you?” Adam asked, his tone wry.

Sydney’s spine straightened at the surge in her blood pressure. “Are you calling me a bitch?”

“See—no one likes it.”

Just at that moment, he tugged the splinter free, giving Sydney two justifiable reasons to yelp.

He held up the tweezers, still holding tight to a half-inch sliver of wood. “Yeowch. I really need to refinish all those steps.”

Sydney winced. The two-by-four had been removed, but her foot still stung like hell. She reached over and grabbed the ointment out of the first-aid kit.

“Here, let me.”

Sydney considered protesting, then realized his hands felt good. Had Adam ever given her a foot massage? She couldn’t remember, so she figured he must not have. There was nothing more noteworthy in a man’s pampering repertoire than the ability to give a good foot massage.

He cleaned the wound with a cotton ball doused with hydrogen peroxide, then dried her skin with a square of clean gauze. His movements were gentle, but sure. His hands strong and hot. His fingers nimble. Long. As his touch trickled over her increasingly sensitive skin, she found herself staring in fascination at his clipped nails, bruised knuckles and sunbaked skin.

Images of him sliding his hands up her bare thighs flashed in her mind. He no longer had the smooth hands of an artist, with only small calluses from pencils and pens. His hands were stronger now, rougher. And so much more interesting.

“You seem to remember your first aid,” she said, wondering if she should break the current of intimacy crackling between them. Or was the electricity all in her mind? All in her memory? All in her irrepressible libido?

Adam dabbed antibiotic ointment and then covered the wound with an adhesive bandage. He rubbed the ends in place, then continued to caress her with hard, intense strokes that lulled her muscles to instant relaxation.

She moaned.

“You have great feet.”

He continued to soothe the balls of her foot with circular motions that destroyed her ability to sit up straight. She sank back into the couch cushions and allowed his touch to ignite and kindle all the sexual wants she’d planned to have sated today, before she found out he didn’t remember her. Before she discovered that he’d nearly died.

“You have great hands,” she murmured.

“How great?”

She forced her eyes open enough to see the irreverent, wicked gleam in those almond eyes of his—the same gleam she’d seen a hundred times before. Like the night they’d made love on the terrace of her condo while a party went on in the courtyard below. Or the time he slipped a toe beneath her dress in a booth at a restaurant, and, finding her pantyless, had brought her to climax just as the waiter delivered another round of drinks. They’d been risk-taking lovers, hedonistic and selfish and adventurous.

Was any of that irreverence left?

He moved one hand to her arch, the other her ankle. He smoothed and rubbed until hot shards of fire sizzled upward, making the center seam of her jeans too tight against throbbing, intimate flesh.

“How great are my hands, Sydney?”

His calluses bit at her soft, pedicured flesh and she snagged her bottom lip with her teeth to staunch her moan. Even when he smoothed his fingers over her calves, encased in jeans, she experienced a potent reaction to his intense massage.

“Your hands are awesome. Still too low, in my opinion, but awesome.”

He shifted, kneeling flush against the couch so he could knead her thighs. He wedged his hips between her knees, bringing her eye-level with a bare chest still glistening from the heat. She took a deep breath and lost herself in the spicy male musk sizzling off his skin.

“How’s this?”

Sydney watched his gaze drop, watched the fascination intensify in his eyes, watched his mouth set in total concentration as he massaged her legs, his thumbs dipping lower and lower as his fingers worked their way higher and higher along her thighs—closer and closer to home. Every ounce of his attention was focused on his task, lulling her to complete relaxation.

He had one thing on his mind. And if that one thing was what Sydney suspected, she and Adam were about to have a very interesting afternoon.

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