of one of the husbands from The Real Housewives of New Jersey, probably as close to an Italian prince as she would ever get.
But it wasn’t what she was hearing that was of primary importance. It was what she was seeing. Tanyalee felt her eyes bug out as she stared at Dan’s pants. His open pants, to be exact. And the extremely large lump pushing out from the gaping zipper. “Oh, dear God,” she whispered.
“You want that?”
She nodded.
He was right in front of her now. She looked up, up, into his face. Tanyalee felt one of his hands roam up the center of her back and slide over the nape of her neck. He claimed a handful of hair and tilted her head back. It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t rough. It was just … direct.
Dan stepped forward until he was nearly on top of her. He used his body to push Tanyalee until she bumped up against the wall. Then he used his feet to spread her legs, nudged his thighs against the inside of her stance, and she gasped. Dan laced his fingers in hers and pressed their joined hands on the wall over her head, a move that caused her breasts to push up and out, and his eyes wandered down her throat to her chest.
It was the oddest thing, but Tanyalee noticed that this display of dominance didn’t scare her. Not one bit. When Dan met her gaze with his again, she saw there was respect. Admiration. Like he was in awe of her. Now, of course, this wasn’t the first time she’d seen awe in a man’s eyes, but this was different somehow. Dan wasn’t so overwhelmed with her that he was a slobbering puppy dog, the way Wim had been. God, that had made her sick to her stomach sometimes! The eyes of the man now towering over her told her one thing—she wasn’t the seducer here. She was the seduced.
Tanyalee almost came in her panties.
“I gotta ask you some questions before I kiss you,” he said.
She nodded helplessly.
“Were you staring at me while we were waiting at the gate at O’Hare?”
“Yes.” She’d told the truth. When had she started doing that?
“When’s the last time you were with a man?”
She had to do a quick calculation. “More than ten weeks ago. Closer to eleven.”
“Why were you in Arizona?”
Tanyalee sighed and averted her eyes.
“Look at me and tell me the truth.”
She returned her gaze to Dan and saw that his expression had softened. This man was awfully good at getting information out of people—maybe he was one of those secret interrogators from the CIA, like in the movies, and he just ran a cheese factory as a cover! “If I answer truthfully, do I get to ask some questions of my own?”
Dan chuckled again. “Sure. So why Arizona?”
Tanyalee nodded, knowing there was no way around it. “I needed time away to deal with a personal issue. I had to think about changes I could make that would help turn things around for me. I haven’t always been a good person, and I had to come to grips with that fact.”
Dan paused, thinking for a moment, weighing her response. “So the fraud and the shoplifting—you were at fault, right?”
Tanyalee rolled her eyes and groaned, and before she could even think of fighting him on this point, Dan lowered his head and placed his lips on the side of her neck. She gasped from the pleasure of it. Then he trailed his tongue down to her shoulder, and bit her softly. “Your turn to ask a question, baby.”
“That’s not fair,” she managed. “I can’t even think straight when you do that.”
“Who said anything about fair?”
“Um, oh, Lord … uh…” He licked softly into the hollow of her throat and Tanyalee felt a hot bolt of need land between her wide-open legs. This was going to take some concentration. “Okay. All right. What I want to know is, um, oh my … do you really own cheese factories?”
“Nope.” His lips moved across the tops of her breasts and his tongue found a hard nipple just under the lacy surface of her bra cup. He flicked at it.
“No?”
“Nuh-uh.” He took the nipple between his teeth and gently bit down.
“Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. Okay. Right. Then what do you do for a living?”
He removed his teeth from her nipple. “I can’t tell you, Taffy.”
“Well, that’s just silly. Why on earth not?”
“I can’t even tell you why it is I can’t tell