You Only Love Once. Tori Carrington
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bars pretending to be out for nothing more than a good time, but were really angling for a wedding ring.
No. This woman was neither. She probably did something…womanly. Sold wedding dresses, worked in an antique shop, sold perfume at an upscale department store. She probably wouldn’t know how to hold a gun, much less fire one. The thought was altogether appealing. Especially since he didn’t plan to repeat the mistake of sleeping with someone on the force again.
He cleared his throat, then slanted a loaded gaze his brother’s way. “Speaking of the weather, I think I just heard that Hell’s forecast calls for a blizzard.” He pushed from his stool as if compelled by a force greater than himself. “I just spotted me the woman I’m gonna marry.”
“Who was talking about the…” Connor’s spine snapped military straight as he apparently realized what was going on. “Aw, hell, David, I didn’t come over here to watch you play Casanova.”
“You can have the friend,” he said, straightening his shoulders.
“Gee thanks, but no thanks.”
“We’re done, here, right? All we’re doing is talking in circles anyway. Come on. Let’s see if we can go get in on some of this action.”
Connor hiked a skeptical brow.
“I’m talking about pool, doofus. What did you think I meant?”
“I don’t play pool.”
David barely heard him, his gaze fastened on the woman even now bending over to set up her next shot. Her toffee-colored hair swept down over her face and, with cleanly manicured nails, she pushed it so the strands mingled with the hair on the other side of her perfect head. Her gaze shifting back to him, she pulled the pool stick back then scratched, completely missing the ball. She might not know much about the game of pool, but she’d look damn hot stretched across the green felt…naked as the day she was born.
“Look out, here he goes again,” he overheard a fellow officer say to another as he walked by them, the comment punctuated by laughter.
David’s grin merely widened.
“IF THE DEVIL wore jeans, this is what he’d look like.”
Kelli Hatfield laughed at her friend’s whispered comment, then self-consciously tugged the snug, unfamiliar pink material of her new top away from her skin. She didn’t have to ask who Bronte was talking about. The blond guy from the end of the bar, who could easily have posed for Michelangelo’s David, was sauntering their way. And saunter was about the word for it. With his sexy gaze openly fastened on her, he gave the impression that she might be his destination. She swallowed hard, straightened, then resisted the urge to pluck at her top again. She caught her friend’s cautionary gaze but purposefully ignored it. The same way she had ignored Bronte’s groan earlier when she saw what she was wearing. And her arguments when Kelli had suggested they go to the renowned D.C. cop bar for “just one drink and a game of pool.” And her warnings that she was just looking for trouble by shimmying like that when she bent over to take a shot. Until that moment, Kelli hadn’t known she could shimmy.
A delicious, reckless shiver glided down her spine.
Bronte leaned closer. “Don’t even think about it, Kell. The guy’s Grade-A trouble. In capital letters. Bolded. Underlined. A lady-killer and a half.”
Kelli’s smile widened as she brushed off her friend’s warning. When was the last time she had felt this way? Keyed up? Sexy? Ready to take on the world? Well, okay, maybe not the world, but certainly the prime male specimen heading her way. She frowned slightly, not knowing what was worse—the fact that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this way, or the suspicion that she never had. The unclear answer made her all the more determined to pay attention to the fiery emotions.
Sure, she admitted it probably wasn’t very wise to openly encourage a guy in a cop bar, considering her circumstances. But it was her first night living in D.C. after three long years. And, by God, it felt good to be home, in the city where she’d been raised and where she planned to live out the rest of her life. It felt good thinking about her new job and knowing she had a choice apartment in Columbia Heights, the equivalent of which she would never have been able to afford in New York City. Overall, she felt good. And the instant she’d exchanged glances with the man now close enough for her to see the color of his eyes—a warm, vivid blue that sent another shiver sliding behind the other—she’d felt the overwhelming need to cut loose in a way she never had.
“Tonight, maybe Grade-A trouble is what I’m in the market for,” Kelli said, enjoying her friend’s shocked expression.
There wasn’t much capable of shocking Bronte O’Brien. If she were to be honest, Bronte had always been the shocker out of the two of them. Ever since forming an odd union of sorts while taking pre-law at George Washington University, Bronte had been the racy one, reckless, the girl on scholarship who hid her brains behind her good looks. Kelli had lived vicariously through her best friend for years, though she had to admit Bronte’s life had become boring as of late. Still, it was long past time Kelli started doing her own living.
Bronte rubbed the smooth skin between her brows and sighed. “You know, Kelli, I take back everything I’ve ever encouraged you to do. For years, I’ve been telling you that you need to loosen up. Get out and experience life. Get a life.” She slowly shook her head, the dim light burnishing her short red hair. “But this is definitely not what I had in mind. If you won’t take the advice from me, personally, take it from your trusted attorney—you don’t want to do this. I know the guy he’s with—I’ve run across him on the job. He’s a marshal. Anyway, a guy like this one making a beeline for you…well, he has catastrophe written all over him. He should come with a warning label—Commitment Phobic—Use For One-Night Stand Only.”
“You’re not my attorney, Bronte. You’re a U.S. attorney. And I’m not interested in his friend. I’m interested in him.” Kelli looked her full in the face. “Besides, maybe a one-night stand is all I’m looking for.”
“That’s what you say now. Let’s see how fast that story changes afterward.”
Kelli leaned against her stick. “Come on, Bron, lighten up. You’re acting like my sleeping with this guy is a forgone conclusion.” She held up a rigid finger. “One. That’s the whole of my experience with the opposite sex.” An experience she didn’t want to repeat much less remember. “Only then I was so green you could have planted me.”
“So you say. Mark my words, Jed was an amateur. This one’s a pro.” Bronte hooked a thumb to where the guy in question stopped to talk to a couple of men at the bar, though his gaze never strayed from their direction. “A regular heartache waiting to happen.”
Kelli rolled her eyes to stare at the ceiling, then laughed. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” She drew her thumb along the smooth wood of the pool stick then bit softly on her bottom lip. “Come on, Bronte, I’m tired of being a good girl. Fed up with always doing the right thing, both in my job and my personal life. The perfect worker who passes up a vacation day because a coworker needs to go to his kid’s school play. The friend who’s always home because she never goes anywhere, never does anything. The boring neighbor who doesn’t mind feeding your pets while you’re away sipping Bahama Mamas on some tropical island. I want to step outside my safe little box, live a little, even if just for this one night.”
Kelli swallowed, not understanding the scope of her restlessness until that very moment. There had been hints over the past few months. The Egyptian silk sheets she’d dropped a fortune on because she thought they were sexy. Her new interest in cooking exotic foods; she’d even bought a wok, for God’s sake. Her sudden, insatiable hunger for romance novels, addictive books she had only picked up on occasion before, but now her collection had grown so large it had taken five huge boxes to cart it from New York. The simple truth was that she no longer wanted to rub her legs against the sheets…alone. She didn’t want to spend hours concocting the perfect meal only to be disappointed when she discovered she and her dog Kojak were the only