Slap Shot by Lily Harlem Page A

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    “Have they all gone?” I asked Rick an hour later.
    “Yeah, they need their beauty sleep,” he said with a laugh and bolted the door.
    “Then it’s time for me to go too.” I reached for my purse from the chaise.
    “Please, Dana, wait.” Rick wrapped his fingers around my wrist.
    “Why?” My breath hitched as I looked up into his face.
    “Because I want to talk to you.”
    “About what?”
    “The, er, girl, the dancer.” His voice quieted. “With the blonde hair. You knew her?”
    My lips tightened and my knees jerked as if they’d been whacked from behind. Oh shit, he saw Tina giving me a hug goodbye.
    “It doesn’t matter how,” he went on. “I just…” He shook his head and his jaw clenched. “Damn it, Dana, talk to me. Quit with the games.”
    “They’re not games, it’s how I feel.”
    “Then explain why you feel this way.”
    “Explain why I don’t want a man in my life?”
    He dropped my wrist and I folded my arms over my chest.
    “Yes, that would be a good place to start.”
    I shrugged. “What do you want me to say? That I’m not attracted to you?”
    “If you did that would be a lie because I know you’re attracted to me. I can tell by the way you look at me. By the way your body reacts whenever I touch you. By the way you call out my name on a breathless pant whenever I give you what you really need.”
    I sighed and shivered at the same time, goose bumps rising on my flesh at the memories. “Rick, what do you want from me?”
    “Just the truth.”
    “But why does it matter so much?”
    He reached for my arms, unfolded them and grasped my hands in his enormous palms. “Because I haven’t felt like this in years.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I haven’t ever before been desperate to spend time with someone, want to see them smile and get to know everything about them. You fascinate me, you’re a challenge.” He paused. “A wild thing.”
    I stared up into his earnest face. “But that’s just it. You don’t know me so how can you think you want those things from me?”
    “Because when I’m with you the need to touch you is a gravitational pull and when I’m not with you I’m plotting how I can see you again, how I can spend time with you.” He dragged in a deep breath. “Each tiny snippet of information about yourself that you release is like a piece of treasure, something that I store away and bring out in the dead of the night and think about.” He released my right hand and placed the pad of his thumb beneath my chin. “And every wonderful time your sexy little body has responded to mine has chipped away at the feeling of aloneness that has been in my life for far too long.”
    My heart was swelling in my chest and my breathing was tight. “But, Rick, if you really knew what had happened in my past you wouldn’t feel that way, I promise. You might think you want me but you wouldn’t, you don’t really.” How could he? My beginnings had been demeaning and my first steps into the world sordid.
    “Don’t tell me I don’t want you,” he said in a low rumbling voice as his lips brushed mine. “And who hasn’t got a past, Dana? Everyone has a past.”
    I licked my lips and drew in his intoxicating flavor.
    “Take me, for example,” he said. “My past is biting me on the butt big-time. Laurie Sharp was one hell of a mistake.”
    “She would have put a lot of men off women for life.”
    He gave a naughty smirk. “Baby, I like women far too much to be put off by one psycho.”
    I glanced away. “But Laurie was one night, one mistake.”
    He sighed. “Yeah, one seriously hideous lapse of judgment.”
    I reached up and rested my hand on his upper arm, letting the strength and the heat of him seep onto my palm. It was awful that he was living with this shadow—a shadow of hate, madness and revenge. I wished I could magic it all away for him and take the distress out of his beautiful eyes.
    “If I tell you something, can you keep it to