“Are you shushing me?”
Remembering our first fight on my lawn, I yanked my hand back quickly.
“That wasn’t a shush,” I said, backpedaling. “I didn’t say the word shush, so it wasn’t one.”
Some of the other people dining in the thinning-out restaurant were staring in our direction, with all the fuss we were making.
Dalton grabbed my hand and hauled me out of there.
Outside, I barely got one breath of cool night air before he seized me and gave me a kiss to take that breath away.
CHAPTER 12
I moaned into his lips, curving my body to nestle with his as my legs turned to something boneless, like Chicken McNuggets.
He pulled back and stared down into my eyes. “You don’t want to go to my trailer,” he stated.
“I don’t? Is it really messy?”
He moved me, pressing my back and butt against the brick wall of DeNirro’s. The brick was still radiating the day’s sunshine, even though we were in darkness, lit only by streetlamps and the headlights of passing cars.
He traced a line down my cheek and the side of my neck.
“I don’t think you’re a big fan of the Airstream.”
“Are you kidding? It combines the best parts of being abducted by aliens with the best parts of being a pioneer, taking the wagon train west and getting dysentery.”
“Something tells me you don’t like camping.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been.”
“How about hotels?” He handed me the dessert box so he could fish something out of his pocket. He dangled a key between us.
I gasped. “Is that for the No-Tell Motel?”
He looked puzzled. “It’s for the Nut Hill Motel.” Pause. “Oh, okay. I hear it now. Anyway, I have a room there. With a bed. And a few dozen tiny little bottles of booze.”
“We can drink from our fists and pretend we’re giants.”
“That's exactly how I usually drink!” He led me to the long black car with the tinted windows. I went for the back door, but he nodded for me to join him up at the front. “Vern’s got the night off. He found some book club thing he wanted to go to, so that means I’m driving.”
“If you’re driving me, does that make you my butler?”
We both slid into the leather seats at the front of the car.
“That depends,” he said. “Does your butler do this?”
He leaned over and kissed me while cupping one of my br**sts in his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.
Even his joking gropes were sexier than other guys’ concentrated foreplay efforts. Dalton had such a casual ease, like there were no wrong moves, and I wondered if the confidence came from his hotness or the other way around. Either way, my runway was wet and ready for him to land his big plane. Woohoo, down here, Mr. Pilot! Get ready for splashdown!
As he pulled away, I whispered, “What if I’d said no to dinner when you phoned? I’m trying to be charming, and that means I have to say no sometimes.”
“You wouldn’t let me down like that.”
“What am I to you? Just stress relief from a busy day?”
He settled back in the driver’s seat and turned the key to start the car. “I think you cause me more stress than you relieve.”
That made me smile. I don’t know why, but it did.
~
We drove up to Nut Hill and parked in the half-full parking lot of the motel. Dalton pulled a small overnight bag from the trunk of the car, then we held hands as we walked up the steps to the upper level and found our room.
“Woah,” he said, stopping with the door open only an inch. “Deja Vu. I feel like we’ve done this before.”
I glanced around nervously, worried about running into someone I knew.
“I’ve never done this before,” I said, and it was true. I’d never been inside one of the units.
“Must have been in a previous life,” he said, with a smile so charming, I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not.
I remembered the things he said to me the night we met and said, “Right. Previous life. Because we’re made of stardust from the same star, and we’re just being reunited again now.”
“So you feel it, too. I should have never left.”
He pushed the door open, then ran in and leaped on the first bed like a flying squirrel. He patted the spot next to him and waggled his eyebrows. The bedspread matched the motel room in that it was mottled, brown, and at least thirty years old.
I kept going, making my way to the bathroom.
I did a sexy striptease as I walked, dropping my clothes on the carpet, with my panties being the final item off before I reached the bathroom door.
A moment later, I was in the shower, hot water spraying down on me from a nozzle that was unlike your typical hotel shower head. I’d never been camping with my family, but we did go on many road trips, always staying in hotels and motels. One of my mother’s favorite things was to write a funny review of every room’s shower. She would have liked this silver beauty, because it actually found that middle ground between soft spittle and tearing your flesh off.
You’d think that a wealthy actor would stay only in the poshest of hotels, with abundant gift baskets and marble surfaces, and I’m sure Dalton Deangelo would have rented such a place if it existed, but Beaverdale was not Paris. Not Paris at all.
He tapped on the door and I invited him into the bathroom.
“Don’t look,” he said. A few seconds later the toilet flushed, momentarily causing a bracing cold spray from the shower head to turn my ni**les into Skittles.
“Ah, so you do pee,” I said through the shower curtain, which was mostly white. “You don’t have your butler do that for you.”
“Not yet, but I’m hoping for some advances in technology.” A belt buckle dropped to the floor. “Is there room in that shower for one more?”
I hugged my soapy arms around myself, grinning madly. “Come on in. I could use someone to wash my back.”
His toes entered around the edge of the shower curtain. He had adorable toes, with a few dark hairs on the knuckle of his big toe, and the nails were rounded and smooth as though pedicured.
The rest of the leg followed, and I quickly looked up to his face, so as not to make him feel like a sexy piece of meat. Poor fellow. He was so cute, girls probably objectified him all the time.
“Wash your back, hmm,” he said. “I’m more interested in the front, but maybe if you show me the back, so I can make an informed decision?”