Headed for Trouble - By Suzanne Brockmann Page 0,6
I won’t get a bed.”
Frank hadn’t noticed until now, but it had started, again, to rain. It was coming down faster now. Harder.
The singer clutched his box to his chest. “Rosie, can I walk you to your hotel?” he asked.
Rosie. She only briefly glanced away from Frank as she answered the man. “No thanks, Odell. I’m okay.”
The singer—Odell—still didn’t trust Frank, eyeing him, edging closer, as if he could do some serious damage to the SEAL, who had way more than a hundred pounds on him. “You sure?”
“Thank you, but yes.” Rosie was sure.
And as the skies opened up, Odell was gone.
Rosie looked up into the deluge and just laughed. She must’ve been even more drunk than Frank had thought, so he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her, and together they ran for shelter.
It was pointless—they were already soaked—running wouldn’t keep them from getting any more wet. Still, the sound of her laughter made him smile, and—go figure—he was laughing, too, when she finally pulled him into a narrow doorway.
She was breathless and soaked. Her face wasn’t all that was glistening wet, but her smile was so damn infectious as they stood there, squeezed together in a space where he’d have barely fit on his own. She was warm and soft against him, the neckline of that clingy top truly amazing from his vantage point.
“This seems like a good time for introductions,” she told him. “I’m Rosie Marchado. I’m from Hartford. In Connecticut.”
“Frank O’Leary,” he said. He couldn’t look down into her face without getting an eyeful of her sonnet-worthy cleavage. Sweet Jesus, he loved full-figured women.
“Do you want to …,” she started, then stopped. She made an embarrassed face. “God, I’ve never done this before. You’re going to think that I’m …” She took a deep breath, which completely renewed his faith in a higher power. “I really never, ever do this, but do you want to …”
She didn’t hesitate for more than a second or two, but that was all the time Frank needed to fill in the blank.
Have sex, right here in this shadowy doorway. He would kiss her, his hands sweeping her skirt up, her leg wrapping around him as they strained to get closer, even closer.…
She was going to ask him for it, and he was going to have to turn her down because she was drunk, except, damn, he couldn’t think of anything or anyone he’d rather do.
But then she finished her question with, “Maybe go get some coffee? With me?”
At first her words just didn’t make sense.
She wanted hot, steaming …
Coffee.
She was looking up at him, her lower lip caught between her perfect teeth. She was feeling trepidation both at the fact that she’d been so bold as to suggest to a near stranger that they go get coffee, and because she thought he might actually say no.
Frank started to laugh. “I know a place we can go.” He took her by the hand, and once again pulled her out with him, into the rain.
They talked.
All night.
And by the time Frank walked Rosie back to her hotel in the French Quarter, he knew that even though she’d given him her phone number—in Hartford freakin’ Connecticut—he wasn’t going to call her.
He liked her too damn much.
She’d told him about her fiancé. Ex-fiancé. The sumbitch had dumped her two months before their wedding because—the asshole had claimed—their lives together would be too boring.
Boring? In what dimension? She was funny and sweet and smart and—God damn!—sexy as all get out. The entire time they sat there, sipping their coffee and talking themselves hoarse, he couldn’t stop thinking about how perfect and soft her lips would feel if he kissed her.
But when he’d told her—just a little—about being a SEAL, about being stationed in San Diego, about going TDY in places where American service persons weren’t exactly welcome, Frank knew that even though she claimed to be looking for excitement, hooking up with a man like him, who risked his life as a matter of course, would be too much for her.
Oh, she didn’t say it in so many words. And, in fact, it was just after that that she’d given him her business card with her personal phone number in curvy handwriting on the back.
But Hartford to San Diego …? The sheer distance alone howled of unpreventable disaster. And now here they were, with dawn lighting the sky behind them. Standing just outside the ornate gilded doors of her hotel.