Any Way You Want Me - By Jamie Sobrato Page 0,26

well as he did when licking a finger? She looked at his mouth and tried to imagine kissing him. Surprisingly, it was an easy fantasy to conjure.

She decided that on their date, instead of giving him a quick heave-ho—unless Drew turned into an obnoxious dork—she would satisfy her curiosity.

Cass tried to make sense of the fact that she was completely horny for a guy who lacked obviously sexy physical attributes. Unlike Yasmine, she liked her men gorgeous and hard-bodied. She didn’t go for subtleties, not in any part of her life, but with Drew…His appeal was all about subtlety.

“What’s wrong?” Drew asked.

“Um, nothing.” She produced a fake-sounding laugh.

“What was that?”

“A finger licking?”

“I know what it was. I mean—”

“How did we go from making stuffed mushrooms to you sucking my finger? I don’t know.”

Except, she did know. There wasn’t anything like sex to distract a guy from getting serious or playing the getting-to-know-you game or pretty much anything else. The last thing she needed was to complicate her newfound happiness with another relationship. But she would hate to turn down a little action in her sex life.

From somewhere in the region of Drew’s ass, a little bell rang. Cass looked at his pants, an old pair of khakis, as he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a digital organizer.

“Sorry,” he said, as he flipped open the top. He read the screen and said, “I’m supposed to be at a family get-together in twenty minutes. Guess I’d better be going.”

“Thanks for stopping by,” she said as she took a step back and gave him some distance. “I’ll see you Monday?”

“Definitely.”

Cass smiled. “Have a merry Christmas.”

“You, too,” Drew said as he stepped out the door, then turned to look at her. “And call me if you have any more computer problems.”

When she was alone in the apartment again, she looked at her crusty hands and sighed. For a crazy moment she’d been tempted to abandon her boyfriend-free happiness for the mysteries of the unknown with a guy who wasn’t her type.

She didn’t want to like Drew, but she did want to get laid. She didn’t really want him to be too into her, and yet she found herself wanting to impress him. Clearly, she needed to get a grip.

Cass had just flirted with her first nerd, and the experience hadn’t even been remotely unpleasant. She might have even called it a pleasure.

7

YASMINE GAZED UP at the pointy top of the eight-foot-tall Christmas tree. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Kyle looked from the supersize tree to her. “What?”

“For one thing, we can’t carry that all the way home. And for another, it would take up my entire living room.”

“Oh, right. Well, how about that one?” He pointed to a tree that was maybe two feet shorter.

“Think tabletop.” Yasmine turned and headed for the smallest trees on the lot.

Twenty feet away, on the other side of a chain-link fence, the roar of traffic was a constant reminder that they were still in the city and not an evergreen forest. A car horn honked, a seagull squawked overhead and the scent of car exhaust filled the air. Ah, urban life. Yasmine loved it.

She caught Kyle’s look of disdain as he peered down at the little tree she’d stopped in front of. “What?”

“It’s just so…small.”

“What is it about guys and tree size? It’s like some kind of phallic thing.”

“Freud was a crackpot.”

“I promise, the size of your tree doesn’t in any way reflect on the size of your manhood. Okay?”

He rolled his eyes at her and strolled over to the next biggest tree. “Did you do this with your parents as a kid? Go pick out a tree every year?”

“A few times, but since we spent most of our holidays in Paris, we normally didn’t have a tree.”

“No Christmas tree? Where did Santa leave presents?”

“In our stockings. We always packed those and took them to France every year, and since whatever we got had to fit in our suitcase for the flight home, I always got tiny gifts.”

“We went out to the woods and chopped down trees when I was really little. Later we had a fake tree, one of those perfectly cone-shaped ones with branches so unbendable you could hang bowling balls on it for ornaments.”

Yasmine tried to imagine Kyle as a little boy and couldn’t. She spotted a cute little tree without any major holes and pointed to it. “How about this one?”

He shrugged. “Sure, I guess if you want to prove size doesn’t