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Sweetly, Deeply, Absolutely
by Kira Archer
 
Copyright © 2016 by Kira Archer. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
 

Chapter One

Jenny Boyd knocked back her second drink and sucked in a breath to help cool the burn scalding its way down her throat. Two drinks was all it took to get her pleasantly fuzzy around the edges. She could probably risk one more and still be able to shake her groove thing on the dance floor, but she’d pace herself. Because she wanted to dance tonight.

She’d finished an amazing two years at a pastry school in Paris and was on a well-deserved vacation, visiting her brother Rick and his wife before starting her final two years. And thanks to her wonderful sister-in-law, Gina, she now had her very first job at the Street Treats bakery. A temp job, of course, while she was visiting. But she couldn’t wait to get started. Well, she could wait a little bit. For now, she was celebrating!

She’d been back in town two days and had finally been able to gather up all her girlfriends for a night on the town. She’d have loved to have Gina there as well, but at eight months pregnant, the only thing Gina wanted to do on a Saturday night was curl up in bed and sleep. Jenny, on the other hand, was partying her fool head off.

And party she did, until she, her bestie, Gretchen, and an old school friend, Maddie, were the only three ladies left standing.

Maddie sighed and gathered up her purse. “Well, ladies, it’s been grand. But I’ve got to work in the morning.”

“Ah, come on,” Jenny said. “One more hour? I haven’t seen you in forever!”

Maddie leaned over and gave her a hug. “I know, babe, but someone’s gotta pay the bills.”

She said it with a smile that didn’t quite match the cheerful tone of her voice, and after one more quick round of hugs, she hurried out the door.

Jenny slumped against the booth bench. “Didn’t she just get off a twelve-hour shift?”

Gretchen sipped at her cocktail and nodded. “She’s got a part-time job on her days off from the full-time one.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “Wow. I thought they were doing okay now. Didn’t Brad’s book finally get published?”

“Yeah, but sales aren’t great, I guess, and apparently even if they were, authors don’t make all that much. Which is sad because he’s actually pretty good. I read his book straight through in two days. Couldn’t put it down.”

“I thought he was still working at the law firm and writing on the side.”

Gretchen downed the rest of her drink. “Nope. Quit to write full time when he got signed by that agent.”

“Nice for him, but sucks for Maddie, huh?”

Gretchen shrugged. “She says she doesn’t mind.”

Jenny didn’t say anything, but Maddie hadn’t looked happy to her. She was all for following your dreams, but not at the expense of your partner’s happiness. Not that it was any of her business.

She finished off her drink and debated whether or not it was time to throw in the towel. It was getting late. And she still had her mother’s voice in her head, telling her to get to bed at a reasonable time. Her mother ran a tight ship, and old habits died hard. It was probably time to call it a night.

But then she spotted him.

Good God, it should be illegal for one man to be that sexy. Tall, devilishly handsome, with a body to kill for and a smile that said he knew it. He was also one of the few men she’d seen who could actually pull off the hipster fauxhawk-and-beard look. The close-cropped hair on the sides of the head with the top a bit poofier, and the perfectly groomed long beard actually looked remarkably sexy on him. She’d seen him on the dance floor a few times that night. The man could move. Incredibly well. If she wanted to have some fun, he seemed like the one to join.

He looked familiar. Really familiar. But she couldn’t, for the life of her, place him. Then again, it was dark, hazy from the fog machines the DJ was using a little too liberally, and she was on the hazy side herself. And the beard didn’t help. Even carefully trimmed and shaped, it obscured half his face. Maybe they’d hooked up once upon a time when she’d done the club scene, before she had decided what she wanted to do with her life. Or maybe he was a friend of a friend. Either way, she didn’t know him well enough to remember him, so he probably reminded her of someone she knew. Either way, she was thinking way too hard about it. And his amused smile kept growing.

“Who are you staring at?” Gretchen asked.

“The gorgeous bit of man-candy over there.”

Gretchen glanced over. “Oh, yum. No fair. Why do you always spot the hot ones first?”

Jenny shrugged. “I don’t. But for tonight, I’ll take the luck and do something about it.”

“Be careful, Jen.”

Jenny waved her off. “I’m not going to run off with him. Just dance with him. He should be safe enough to hang out with for a few hours.”

“Just hang out with, huh?”

Jenny laughed. Gretchen had known her since high school. Which meant she knew her all too well.

“I never said ‘just.’”

Gretchen shook her head. “You’re crazy. Well, at least this one’s not a priest. My grandmother still hasn’t gotten over what happened to the last one.”

“That guy was not a priest. He hadn’t even taken his vows yet.”

“And never will…after meeting you.”

“Oh, stop. I’m not that bad.”

Gretchen’s eyebrows rose and she raised her hand to count down Jenny’s offenses on her fingers. “You’ve defrocked a priest…”

“He wasn’t a priest yet.”

“Gotten banned from every library within a forty-mile radius for desecrating their research stacks…”

“No one uses those anymore, anyway.”

“Knocked one of the Riverdance guys out of the show when he somehow ended up with a broken leg after a night with you…”

Jenny smiled fondly. “Liam. That was a fun night.”

“Let’s not forget the lawyer you got disbarred for inappropriate use of a courtroom…and the bailiff’s handcuffs…”

“He only got banned from arguing in front of that one judge, not disbarred. I don’t know why he got so bent out of shape anyway. We had his robe dry-cleaned.”

“Oh, and the real kicker, so to speak…that soccer star who spent three days in bed with you and forgot to show up for the championship game.”

“Yeah, I felt bad about that one.” She grinned. “Okay, I get it. But I am trying to tone down the crazy, I swear. At least when I’m in school. But I’m on vacation, damn it. I’ve got a month to relax. If the crazy wants to come out and play, I’m going to let it.”

Gretchen snorted and looked back at His Royal Gorgeousness. “What is he doing?”

“Juggling?”

Jenny watched, mouth open, as Man-Candy juggled three limes in the air while bending backward, tilting his head enough so that the laughing female bartender could pour a shot directly into his mouth. The crowd gathered around him cheered and he popped back up, still juggling.

“Lime!” he shouted.

The bartender tossed a lime slice into the air and he tried to snatch it with his mouth. And missed. To the disappointment of his groupies.

“Again!” he said.

The bartender grabbed another slice, aimed it carefully, and tossed it in an arc. He staggered backward, keeping the limes in his hands going while he focused on the one falling through the air.

“Incoming,” Gretchen said, getting out of the way of certain disaster as he stumbled toward them, his attention on the lime slice.

He caught it in his mouth right as the back of his foot connected with their bench. His limes went flying. And so did he. His butt hit the floor. And his head landed faceup squarely in Jenny’s lap.

She yelped and pressed back against the bench. Little good that did her. She couldn’t really go anywhere with him half lying on her. Didn’t really want to, if she was honest. He was even hotter closer up. Who was she to turn away a gorgeous man who introduced himself with his face in her lap? That would be rude.

He glanced up, opened his mouth, and smiled, the lime slice wedged firmly between his teeth. His friends cheered again and he held the lime up like a trophy. Then he turned his attention to Jenny.

“Hey, there.” He beamed up at her like she was his new best friend. “Sorry about that. I’m usually a bit more graceful with the party tricks.” He slid off her lap and stood, before holding out a hand to help her up.

“Not a problem,” she said. She glanced at the lime he’d dropped on the table. “That was impressive.”

“Thank you.” He looked her up and down, and she shivered as if he’d run his hands over her body. And then she returned the favor, biting her lip as she feasted on the incredible specimen of manhood before her.

He gave her a slow, sensual grin that had her sucking in her breath.

“Interested?” he asked.

Nice line. Short, sexy, and to the point. She approved. “Very. You?”

His eyebrows raised in surprise. Maybe he wasn’t used to women who didn’t play hard to get. Judging by the sudden heat in his eyes, he didn’t mind at all.

“Extremely,” he said. “My place?”

She shook her head. “Dance floor.”

He playfully pouted, and it was all she could do to keep from sucking his bottom lip into her mouth.

She laughed. “Sorry. Only dancing tonight.” For now. “Still interested?”

“Definitely,” he said.

He walked backward, keeping his gaze glued to hers while he made his way out to the floor. The crowd parted for him like he was Moses parting the Red Sea.

Jenny took a deep breath to try to calm her frantically pounding heart and leaned over to Gretchen while still keeping her focus on him.

“Don’t wait up for me.”

Gretchen laughed. “Sorry. If things look like they are getting out of hand, I’m going to come drag you away. If you don’t come home tonight, Rick is going to have a total shit fit. He’ll have half the Hoboken PD out looking for you.”

Jenny’s sigh was full of fondness mixed in with exasperation. She loved Rick, but having a big brother who was a cop took the protective thing to a whole new level.

“You’ve got a point. I’ll try to rein it in, but you might seriously have to come pull me off the dance floor.”

“You really think your self-control is that bad?”

“I know it is.” Jenny set her drink down. “He’s hot and I’m bothered and that’s a recipe for disaster. Well, it’s actually a recipe for some insanely hot sex. But I guess having my big brother come kick down the door would sort of put a damper on the mood. And Rick was very specific about me making it back home tonight. Ugh. Fine. I’ll try to keep it in my pants, if I must.”

“You must,” Gretchen said with a wink, heading off to do a little dancing of her own.

Jenny sighed and ran her hands down her hips, smoothing out her dress, making sure she maintained eye contact with her target the whole time. “I should have stayed in a hotel,” she muttered as she made her way over to him.

He wrapped an arm around her waist and led her farther out onto the dance floor. Then he pulled her in close and began to move. Each grind of his hips had her cursing her predicament. Not that Rick was her only deterrent. She’d decided to try to be a bit more responsible. Messing up was not an option. Especially not now, when she had the opportunity to help out at Street Treats. The last thing she wanted to do was screw things up with the wrong hookup or a night on the town turning into a horribly hungover day at work.

Her wild ways had gotten her into trouble on more than one occasion, and many of those were not moments she wanted to repeat. Seriously, there was nothing quite so mortifying as getting caught with your pants down, or off, as the case had been, covered in chocolate frosting in the back of a cupcake truck you’d broken into for a night of passionately thrilling sex. By the cops. One of whom was your brother. Who then informed you that the truck you’d broken into was owned by the love of his life, who is now his wife, who’d found her first. Humiliation didn’t come close to covering it.

After that, Jenny had decided to turn over a new leaf. No more random hookups. Generally. No more clandestine sex in public spots. Usually. Parties that ended at a respectable hour. Most of the time. Which meant that the hot guy currently sucking on her neck needed to slow down before she found them a dark corner.

She touched the side of his face to get his attention, but when he lifted his head to look at her, she groaned and dragged him down to her mouth. His beard tickled her face, but his lips were soft and hot against her own. She wrapped her arms around his neck and angled her mouth so he could delve deeper, her whole body quaking with urgent need. Screw her brother and her resolutions and everything else. She’d been so good for months, the only thing she wanted right at that moment was to be bad. Oh so very bad.

What the hell else were vacations for?

…

Jared couldn’t believe he was making out with Rick’s little sister in the middle of the dance floor. It had taken him a minute to place her. He’d only met her once, at Gina’s wedding, and that had been a few years ago. And back then, in the interest of keeping his balls firmly where they belonged, he’d left Jenny the hell alone. It might have been Rick’s wedding day, but Jared had no doubt the man would have taken the time to thoroughly rearrange his anatomy had he touched Baby Sister.

Which was actually a great argument for why he should pry himself away from her and move on. The guy was completely on edge lately. Not that Jared blamed him. Gina was currently eight hundred months pregnant and absolute hell on heels. Between the pressures of impending fatherhood and a wife who was beyond sick of being pregnant, Rick was practically begging to release a little steam, and Jared had no intention of being the focus of all that pent-up anxiety.

Which was what he should tell Jenny. Until she rose up on her toes so she could press every inch of her body against his and deepened her kiss until he couldn’t tell where she ended and he began and he didn’t give a shit as long as she never stopped.

When they finally came up for air he leaned his forehead against hers and laughed. “We should have done this years ago.”

She pulled back so she could see his face, a slight frown creasing her forehead. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean we’ve wasted a lot of years when we could have been having a lot of fun.”

She aimed her best smolder at him. “You’ve already got me. No need for more cheesy pickup lines.”

He frowned, starting to think she might not be kidding. “I wasn’t feeding you another line.”

“Right. So you usually go around telling women you’ve never met that you should have hooked up years ago?” She laughed and twirled out of his arms, her hips swaying to the beat of the music.

He stared at her, at a total and complete loss. There was no way she didn’t remember him. Okay, yeah, it had taken him a second to place her, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that she hadn’t recognized him right away. And he did look a lot different than when he’d seen her last. His own grandmother had said she barely recognized him when they’d Skyped right after he’d grown the beard, and she’d been his de facto mother since he was ten. But she’d been kidding. Though she had told him to go shave before she’d signed off for another rousing game of bridge with her retirement home gal pals.

But there was no way Jenny didn’t know who he was. Yes, he’d kept his distance from her at the wedding, out of respect for her brother…and his love of certain parts of his anatomy. But come on.

She wrapped an arm back around his neck and rocked against him. “Are you going to dance with me, or stare at me?” she asked. Another twitch of her hips and he nearly groaned aloud.

He pulled her close. “Sorry. But the view was too gorgeous to pass up.”

“Hmm.” She draped the other arm around his neck and pressed closer. “You do know how to flatter a girl, don’t you?”

He searched her face for any hint of recognition. He saw interest, amusement. Heat. But not a spark that she knew who he was. She kissed his neck, and his arms tightened around her.

“Just calling it like I see it.”

She nipped playfully at his bottom lip, and whether or not she remembered him suddenly didn’t matter. For the moment. He crushed his lips to hers, exploring her mouth until she trembled in his arms. She might not realize who he was, though he had a hard time believing that, but he was going to make damn sure she remembered him now.