Читать книгу Hot For It - Jodi Lynn Copeland - Страница 5

I’d been to Carinna’s apartment thousands of times--hell, I even had my own key. But something about tonight was different. From the moment I stepped inside her small but cozily decorated living room, something had my gut tightening and every nerve in my body going on full alert the way only an all- alarm fire could typically accomplish.

I knew that something had to do with the weakness she’d let show back at the funeral home; those brief minutes when she’d cried and let me hold her. I knew that letting her more tender emotions show meant she was down and out in a way I’d never seen her before today, and for good reason. I also knew the last thing I should do was sit on the couch beside her and get hammered the way she was asking me to do.

We shared a healthy love of sex, and experience had taught me that mixing sorrow, alcohol and a member of the opposite gender generally led to precisely that. I valued our friendship way too much to risk ruining it over a hasty screw.

“C’mon, Jack,” Carinna goaded me from the couch.

The bottle of gin I’d picked up on the way to the funeral home dangled from her fingertips, open now and several drinks shy of full. Those drinks seemed to be working their magic on her mood--all trace of vulnerability was gone from her gray eyes, the self-assured arrogance I knew and respected shining through.

A teasingly sultry smile lifted her lips. “Be a man and drink up.”

Precisely the problem here was that I was a man. One who had long ago noted she was more than an average woman. With her centerfold curves and Latin coloring, she was stunning, gorgeous. Thoughts of her body, nude and sweaty and on the verge of orgasm, had been my masturbation material for years.

Those X-rated thoughts attempted to enter my mind and harden my body. I quashed them by grabbing the transparent blue bottle from her hand and crossing to the open kitchen. “Tonight’s a martini night.”

Much as she might prefer to get sloshed fast, I knew she wouldn’t say no to martinis. They would still get her drunk, and possibly me as well, but with luck we would pass out before she forgot I was her best friend and I forgot I was a gentleman.

I almost laughed over the irony of that thought--I liked my loving fast, hard and dirty, and for the time being, with no strings attached. I probably would have laughed if Carinna hadn’t chosen that moment to start undressing.

First, the black slacks came down her long, toned, naturally golden brown legs and were kicked aside.

Then the black, short-sleeved silk shirt was unbuttoned and shaken off her shoulders and down her arms.

As a cocktail waitress for a tequila bar on the strip, she was required to wear a risqué uniform that exposed more of her stunning body than it covered. Still, that uniform concealed more than her miniscule black panties and matching bra.

Or not panties, I realized on an indrawn breath as she turned and bent to grab her slacks from the floor. A thong that disappeared between her firm butt cheeks, and had my heart pounding like a jackhammer and my cock rock solid in the space of a heartbeat.

Before I could disengage my brain from the vicinity of my balls and question her motive, she had her clothes in hand and was moving past me, down the short hallway that led to her bedroom. “I just want to relax and forget for a while,” she tossed over a slim, bare shoulder. “That isn’t going to happen dressed in this crap.”

I grunted with the closing of Carinna’s bedroom door, the sound sharp enough to make my erection jump. Then I considered beating my head against the overhead cupboard in the hopes of knocking some sense into it.

Shit, I was an idiot. Make that an ass. She wanted to relax with an old friend, and all I could think about was plowing into her from behind and fucking her stupid.

While her emotions might be in turmoil, despite the confident, even teasing face she currently wore, I was damned glad her head was on straight. Much as I wanted to think I would be a good friend and turn down an offer of sex dealt at the hands of grief and gin, I honestly wasn’t sure I could be that strong.