A few weeks back I shared a snippet from Tamara Hogan's new novella Touch Me. If you couldn't get enough of Bailey and Rafe, you'll be thrilled to hear there's more to come. Tempt Me will hit shelves this October and WE GET A SNEAK PEEK! (Can I get a woohoo?) Without further ado, I give you today's excerpt...
Rafe
stroked a callused finger over the sinuous body stretched before him—her
delicate teacup breast, her supple stomach, the curve of her slippery
hip—softly, so softly. “Beautiful,” he murmured reverently.
She was Woman, femininity incarnate…and he’d created her with his own hands. Finally. Relief trickled through his system, a cool mountain stream.
Stepping
back from the table, his clay-slick hands extended in front of him, he
assessed the abstract nude. Yeah, the hip proportion was slightly off,
but it was pretty damn good for a guy who hadn’t seen, much less
touched, a flesh-and-blood female hip in over a year. Why had his bitch
of a muse finally given him permission to express his burning memories
of that night in clay? Maybe he had a chance to save his upcoming
gallery show after all.
Nudes.
That was the answer. A series of nudes, utter simplicity in line and
form. A pale, pearlescent glaze, lit from within like her skin. He had
to get the ideas down on paper before they disappeared into the ether.
The
sketch pad was by the door, leaning against his duffle bag and some
perishables he’d hastily unloaded from the Jeep when he’d returned to
the cabin so unexpectedly earlier that day. He’d left before daylight,
giving himself plenty of time to drive back to Minneapolis and catch his
flight, but with each southbound mile, the odd sense of...wrongness, of
disquiet, had grown. A half-mile north of the Cloquet cut-off, he’d
flat-out panicked, suddenly certain that signing the contract to design
functional art sound systems for The Pignello Group’s new nightclubs
would be an epic mistake, a fork in the road he wouldn’t be able to
navigate back from. And miraculously, a wisp of an idea was awakening
with a slow, languid stretch. He recognized his muse immediately, a
familiar friend he’d inexplicably been on the outs with. Without giving
himself time to reconsider, he turned the car around and called his
agent, instructing her to call off the deal she’d spent months
negotiating on his behalf.
He
looked at the nude and smiled. If he needed any more validation that
turning down the sound system commission had been the right decision, he
was looking at her, stretched out and damp, on the cabin’s
newspaper-protected dining room table.
As
he swaddled her in damp cloth and plastic wrap, headlights swept across
the west wall. Who the hell…? He hadn’t taken the time to close the
security gate behind him when he’d driven in earlier, but the private
road leading to the cabin was strewn with No Trespassing signs. Couldn’t
people read? And when had it gotten dark?
He
glanced at his sketch pad again. Maybe if he didn’t answer the door,
whoever it was would turn around and go away, and he could—
The garage door opened with a muffled hum. Whoever had just arrived had the next best thing to a house key. Damn it.
He
flicked on the room lights with a nudge of his elbow, and then stalked
to the kitchen sink to rinse the worst of the clay from his hands and
wrists. He had only himself to blame for the unexpected company. His
family thought he was on a plane to Los Angeles, and he hadn’t told
anyone about his change in plans. Maybe Lukas and Scarlett were sneaking
away for a long weekend. Maybe it was Sasha with her latest lover, or
his father and Claudette. He glanced at the kitchen counter, where his
silent cell phone mocked him. He’d turned it off after letting Brooke
and the pilot know that he wouldn’t be traveling to California as
planned.
Ratcheting
back his annoyance, he flipped the switch that would flood the driveway
and garage area with light, and opened the heavy oak door. “Wow.” Every
surface—the pine boughs, the gravel driveway, the electrical wires,
Bailey’s tiny red clown car—was filmed over with ice, and—
He
blinked. Nope, he wasn’t hallucinating; that was Bailey’s Mini Cooper
all right, limping into the garage as a wicked rain/snow mix spit from
the sky and froze on contact. What the hell had she been thinking,
driving in such dangerous weather conditions? It was sheer dumb luck
that she hadn’t skidded off the road, slamming into one of the thousands
of lethal, telephone pole-sized pine trees lining the road for miles.
And
why hadn’t she emerged from the garage yet? “Shit.” Ducking back into
the cabin, he jammed his arms into his parka, slung a knit scarf around
his neck, stomped his bare feet into a pair of thick-soled Sorels, and
headed back out. Needles of sleet pricked his face and bare hands as he
shuffled across the driveway as quickly as he dared.
Any
thoughts he might have had about renting her a hotel room in town until
the weather cleared flew out the window. No one was going anywhere
tonight.
He’d keep his hands to himself if it killed him.
Entering
the double garage, he found Bailey sitting in the still-running Mini,
her white knuckles clutching the steering wheel. When he tapped on
driver’s window, she blinked but didn’t move. It took a couple of tries
for him to get the car door open—the iced-over handle kept slipping from
his hands—but when he finally succeeded, a blast of sauna-hot air
escaped. Somehow, the little car’s defroster had kept her windshield
free of ice.
“Bailey?” No response other than a shiver. Adrenaline crash. He
glanced down at the gearshift. At least she’d managed to put the car
into Park. “Bailey, I’m going to turn the car off now.” As he reached
for the ignition, his parka sleeve brushed against her down vest, a
whoosh of rip-stop fabric. So much for keeping his hands to himself. His
traitorous hearing picked up her gasp over the sound of the ice pellets
pinging off the garage roof.
He
inhaled as her emotional reaction flooded the cab. She was ambrosia. He
wanted to swim in her, wallow in her, let her desire for him plane the
rough edges off his frazzled libido. But… He waited several silent
seconds, and then sighed. Yep, there it was. The guilt chaser.
With Bailey, there was always guilt.
He
gently peeled her cramped fingers off the steering wheel. Despite the
heat in the car, they were cold as icicles. Now that he had a firm grasp
on her hands, he turned her body so she sat sideways on the driver’s
seat, and tugged her to a standing position. “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s
go inside.”
“Rafe?”
She looked at him, blinking owlishly. She wasn’t wearing a lick of
makeup, and her blonde pixie hair was completely covered by a black knit
cap with two tiny ears sewn onto the crown. “I need to leave.”
Her
words sliced like tiny swords, but the emotions behind them were so
much more complex: desire, guilt, sheer panic, and utter exhaustion.
“Look at the weather. Let’s go in the cabin, get warm in front of the
fire, and figure out what to do. Come on.” Closing the car door, he led
her out of the garage and into the ice pellets pounding down from the
sky. “What were you thinking, driving in weather like this?” he
muttered, trying to shelter her body with his. Even through the layers
of down, her essence leached into him. He gulped like a parched man
crawling on hands and knees to a desert oasis.
Hell. What random cosmic alchemies had conspired to make her—an innocent, guilt-ridden human—the sole object of his desire? Why wouldn’t anyone else do?
“The
roads were okay south of Eveleth,” she muttered, skating across the
driveway with him in a sloppy duet. “Got a late start. Had some work—”
An explosion rocked the night, a blown transformer shooting sparks into the black sky.
“Aah!” Bailey slipped and lost her footing.
He grabbed her. Bobbled.
And they both went down.
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