Downbeat (Biting Love) (6 page)

“Of course.” He cupped my elbow and steered me to his car.

The fierce heat of his fingers goosed my tongue loose. “Hey, how do you know Nixie and Julian? I thought this was your first time in Meiers Corners. For that matter, how did you know about Liese and Logan’s twins?”

“I’m a bit of an information broker.” Zajicek unlocked the door and scissored it open, then poured me into his low-slung car.

“What, like a spy?”

Zajicek grimaced as he slid in on the other side. “Please, Raquel. Spy is so…outdated.” He started the engine and drove onto the street. “And in this case, inaccurate. I simply spoke with Ms. Barton.”

“Oh.” That explained it. The Dolly Barton gossip network made CNN look twenty years out of date. Some say Walter Cronkite reported to Dolly from heaven.

It wasn’t until we passed a four-story cream-brick apartment building with beveled glass, gleaming yellow metal and beautifully varnished wood that I realized we were heading the wrong way. “Wait. That was Bo and Elena Strongwell’s building. Where are we going?”

“Where I am staying.” Zajicek’s long fingers were relaxed and competent on the wheel. “Otto’s B&B.”

“BS.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Otto runs a Bed and Breakfast Smorgasbord. B and BS.”

He looked vaguely offended. “How can I invite a beautiful woman to my room if it’s at a B&BS?”

“Um, because you’re gorgeous and magnetic and they’ll follow you anywhere?”

His lips quirked. “You do not hold your liquor very well, do you?”

“I hold my beer just fine. It’s that fancy stuff that gets me yapping. But I thought we were going to pick up my car. I need it to get to work tomorrow.”

“Where do you work? Perhaps I can drive you there…after.” He raised his eyebrows.

Implying…something. If we were playing ping pong, he’d just lobbed the ball over my head. Floundering, I served back straight. “Where depends on when. Weekdays, I rate insurance policies in Chicago. One night a week and Saturday morning I teach flute. Two more nights are CSUCS and one is the Meiers Corners Symphony, though only CSUCS pays. In between I work at the homeless shelter.”

“You could be a soloist or principal of a major symphony. Yet you rate insurance?” He spiked the conversational ping pong ball back. “Why so many jobs? And why so many non-musical revenue streams?”

“Pays the bills? Don’t put everything in one basket? Point is, I need my car.”

“Should you really drive in your condition?”

“Well…” If we were playing ping pong, he was trouncing me. “Okay, then take me home.”

“Mmm. I shall be pleased to do so.”

His purr was so hot my eyes jerked to him. The flames in his gaze lit my seat on fire. This wasn’t a ping pong match, this was Mr. Moose dropping a boxcar of balls on Captain Kangaroo.

I squirmed, caught his eyes going nova, froze and cleared my throat. “East,” I squeaked. Managed, “Across the river. North on Eighth to Eisenhower.”

He opened the throttle. For a few moments everything disappeared but the wind in my face and the searing joy of riding in a sexy car with a sexier guy. The Allman Brothers’ “Jessica” a la
Top Gear
sang in my head. This would fuel my fantasies for many moons to come.

Unfortunately, Meiers Corners is small enough to drive across in a quarter hour. A few bars later the dream ended when he came to a stop in front of my flat.

He stared in dismay. “This is where you live?”

I looked at my home as he must see it, lawn rioting with garden gnomes, plywood silhouettes and concrete animals, including a life-size moose lipping the leaves of the curbside sugar maple. “Um…yes?”

“All those things are yours?”

“My mother’s. She’s an artist. Normally she doesn’t live here but a kiln fire in her trailer sort of got out of control. The gnomes and flamingos came with. I know it’s a lot—”

“A bit exuberant.”

“—but art makes her happy. She hasn’t had much happy in her life so those ugly gnomes are beautiful to me.”

He considered me. “Why, Raquel, you’ve a poetic soul.”

“No, please. I’m just a working musician.” I tried to find the handle as I spoke. “Thanks for the ride, Maestro.”

“
Dragan
.” He reached across to seize my questing hand and brought it back to kiss it. His dark head moved over my hand, his lips lingering warm on my skin. “Is your mother home now? Or may I—come in?”

Again, the ping pong ball parted my hair. I was beginning to agree with Nixie—I was far too innocent for the likes of him, although I would have said “obtuse”. “My mom’s always home, but you can come in if you want.”

He smiled at me, a sort of half-puzzled, half-disbelieving expression. “Do you truly not understand your own attractiveness?”

I opened my mouth, shut it. Opened it again. “Well…I’m female, so I have the usual parts guys like. But I’m not anything special.”

“You truly do not know.” He gave a single abrupt nod. “I will be pleased to rectify that.”

He said it like he’d taken up a challenge.

Yikes. This was one male I did not want to challenge. I groped with my free hand, finally managed the door and jumped out of the car, but as fast as I was, Zajicek was faster. By the time I took my first step he’d leaped out his own door, gotten my flute from the front trunk, zipped around and placed a hand on my elbow.

With it, he guided me solicitously to my front stoop.

As I dug in my purse for my keys to unlock the door, he stood over me, his heat beating against me in increasing waves until I couldn’t ignore that he was still there. I looked up.

He leaned over me, his eyes dark with intent, right on top of me, looming so close I gasped. His gaze zoomed to my parted lips. He bent…

Chapter Four

A movement from the flat caught my eye. I glanced up. The drapes twitched, as if a lifted corner had been dropped.

Zajicek straightened. “It appears we have an audience—besides the gnomes and bunnies, that is. Ah well. Goodnight, Raquel.” He bent, brushed lips on lips, sliding my keys from my nerveless hand while he did, opened my front door, handed me my keys and my flute bag and shooed me in.

My small living room was dark. I dropped my flute bag onto the rocking chair and pressed fingers to my buzzing lips.

To my right, beady eyes gleamed.

I jerked around to look. A garden gnome stared at me from the top of my music filing cabinet.

I relaxed. Mom’s creations were creepy but not violent, mostly. Although in a pinch her concrete bunnies swung from the ears like a baseball bat.

The lamp by the couch clicked on. I jumped.

“Have you been drinking?” My mother, in a frilly apron with the slogan “Potters Do It By Touch”, sat on the couch, carving a gnome—she’d found a hunk of white porous stuff in the dumpster of our cheese and sausage
Wurst Und Käse
store, which she called soapstone but which I suspected was actually petrified mozzarella.

“Hi, Mom. You know I usually go out for a beer with friends after rehearsal.”

“Yes, but usually you are not stumbling over your own feet.” She
tsked
. “As that great German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, ‘It’s all fun and games until someone gets their eye poked out’.”

“I don’t think that was Kant—”

“Who was that nice man you were with?”

I sucked in my tonsils. “Um, nobody.”

“‘Nobody’ has expensive taste in liquor. I smell Grand Marnier on your breath.” The deep-throated
vroom
of Zajicek’s engine brought her to her feet. She shuffled over to the window, twitched aside the curtain. “Apparently ‘nobody’ also drives a Lambo.”

I bowed to the inevitable. “Maestro Zajicek is our interim conductor while Hugo’s recovering from a minor stroke. He’s unfamiliar with Meiers Corners and wanted my help getting around.”

“Zajicek.” She returned to the couch and her gnome carving. “That is a good Czech name, like your father’s. So he took you out for a drink, hmm? What did he do to make you as red as a nice ripe tomato?”

“Umm…”

“Perhaps showing him around included showing him his hotel room?”

Zajicek spiked ping pong balls; Mom lobbed Obvious Bricks. Images crashed into my head of king-size beds and sweaty bodies. I turned much redder than a ripe tomato, nice or otherwise. I was trained in martial arts and knew fifty ways of incapacitating an attacker, but the only defense against an inquisitive mother is a swift retreat. “Goodnight, Mom.”

The gnomes were laughing.

Dragan drove to Otto’s with his usual fine precision, but underneath, his thoughts were roiling.
Rocky
, indeed. With her delicious breasts, that wealth of chestnut hair, the smooth contralto that poured like perfumed oil over his skin? And those huge blue eyes that a male could stare into forever…no, she was no Rocky.

He was briefly glad he’d destroyed those hideous glasses.

Even more attractive than her lovely face and figure, she was a talented musician, her tone and technique singing easily above the rest, sometimes brilliantly enough to be artistry. He’d heard the best, and she could certainly rival them, given the proper venue.

But she worked at an insurance company. She could have played with the top orchestras, or even soloed. She had beauty and talent. Did she not know how special she was?

Apparently not, since she let a bar host make her wait in a half-empty place.

She didn’t seem to have a clue how attractive she was. Despite his stolen kisses, flirting and all of the passes he’d made at her, she simply didn’t get it. A lovely innocent. She needed education in the way society worked.

He could teach her.

Excitement plumed in his belly at the thought, excitement that even the highest-stakes gambling and endless rounds of partying hadn’t stirred recently.

Because of her? No, it couldn’t be. Not only had he had the best of the best, his tastes ran more to mistresses with well-tutored tongues and wanton sophisticates with no strings attached.

So his excitement wasn’t because of Raquel. Not her, but because teaching her would make all his favorite vices new again. Gambling, drinking…

Sex.

The rising plume ignited. Tasting the pink blush riding her delicate cheeks, sipping her breath through the hesitant parting of her lips as he kissed her…and in bed, oh yes, her whole face would flush that pretty pink as he stroked her between her sleek thighs. Her voice would sweeten, urging him to give her more,
harder
. Her firm, plump breasts would heave under him as he thrust into her, driving her to the peak. And then, when she was lying with her thighs parted in relaxation he would come between them and thrust her into a tight vortex of pleasure yet again…

He nearly went up the curb. He slammed on his brakes.

Taking a deep breath, he looked around. He was a block from Otto’s. He carefully released the brake.

He was going too fast, both with the car and with his beautiful innocent. Although she wasn’t fragile like an orchid flower. But definitely untried, like a rosebud…roses.

He drove past Otto’s, heading for Chicago and a special all-night florist he knew.

Oh yes, educating the naive beauty would be a very pleasant distraction indeed.

Somehow I escaped a hangover the next morning, but I was groggy when the alarm went off. Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette”, better known as the theme to
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, was running through my sluggish brain.

I hit snooze several times. I was late and knowing I was going to have to truncate my morning practice session when I yawned and stumbled toward the shower, scratching myself…and saw my flute in the rocking chair in the living room rather than its accustomed spot in my room, remembered why it was there and nearly melted right there. I took a very long, very cold shower, shivered through drying and brushing, burned half a loaf of bread making French toast while trying not to think of Zajicek’s kisses and strong arms saving me from my own damned feet. Then I had to suffer through my mother’s pointed looks (abetted by a new figurine joining the Seven Dwarfs on the table, the Eighth Dwarf, Guilty) as I shoveled down breakfast. I not only missed my practice session but was twenty minutes past my time to leave and ten minutes past burnt-toast-and-scrambling time.

I rushed toward the door, remembering I’d left my car in Redfox Village as I twisted the knob. Dammit, I’d have to run the ten blocks to Nixie’s to borrow a car to make it to work anywhere close to starting time. I flung open the door and kicked into a sprint——and nearly did a somersault over the hood of my car, waiting for me at the curb. I managed to deflect most of the damage by landing with a half-twist that would have done my martial arts teacher, Mr. Miyagi, proud. I got up, dusted off the worst of the damage, unlocked the car, slid in and slapped my coffee in the cup holder as I slammed the door shut. I started to dump my lunch in the passenger seat—

A dozen blush roses lay there.

I gasped and caught my lunch just before it wrecking-balled into the profuse array. Sweet musk filled my airways, caressing my tongue and palate, so heady it nearly made me go into convulsions.