A Stranger's Touch. Tori Carrington

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СКАЧАТЬ outer door swung inward, letting in a blast of music. Dulcy stood up and tossed the cigarette into the bowl, then waved the smoke away, hoping she didn’t set off an alarm somewhere. A quick rap vibrated the pink metal stall door. Normally she would have jumped out of her skin at such an intrusion, despite her suspicion of who it was. But now she could only sigh and open the door to stare at her friend Jena McCade.

      “Can’t a girl go to the bathroom?” Dulcy asked.

      “Are you smoking? You were smoking, weren’t you? My God, when did you pick up that nasty habit? People are quitting smoking now, not taking it up.” Jena wrinkled her nose, then reached into her purse.

      Dulcy tried to avoid the spray of her perfume.

      “Only you would steal into the john for a smoke when the place is crawling with grade A men,” Jena added.

      Dulcy snapped straighter and tugged at the hem of her short black leather skirt, an impulse buy she hadn’t had the guts to wear until tonight. The fact that the place was crawling with grade A men was all the more reason for her to be in the john. The cigarette she’d bummed off the barmaid was just an excuse, the lighter in her purse an old one she’d picked up eons ago when she’d briefly dated a smoker.

      The truth was that all the men in the other room only served to heighten her awareness of her heated condition. She stepped to the sink and splashed cold water over her face. Jena grimaced at her in the mirror.

      “What?” Dulcy asked.

      “You do know you just messed up your makeup.”

      Dulcy scanned her features. So she had. So what? She couldn’t bring herself to care. She wasn’t here to entice any of the guys out there to go out with her. In one week she was officially off the market, married and settled. And it couldn’t come soon enough for her. Maybe it was the thought of her honeymoon that was getting her all hot and bothered.

      “Here—” Jena rifled through her purse and came up with a compact. Her perfectly made-up face was puckered in disapproval as she dabbed at Dulcy’s cheeks and nose.

      Dulcy batted her away. “I don’t want to look like I’m on the make.”

      Jena’s devious violet eyes twinkled. “This is your bachelorette party, babe. That’s exactly how you want to look.”

      Dulcy wiped off some of the rouge her friend had applied. No, she didn’t want to look like she was on the make. Simply because she was afraid that if a particularly good-looking guy did approach her, she’d be hard-pressed not to wrestle him to the ground and have at him. And then where would she be? Or, more accurately, who would she be? Certainly not the woman she’d spent the past thirty years looking at in the mirror.

      Then again, she was already having trouble with her.

      She slowly touched up her lipstick, finding the silky way it glided on almost unbearably sensual. She squeezed her eyes shut. Now this was going too far. When she started thinking of her own lipstick as sensual, she was in big trouble.

      God, Brad would think she was the biggest hussy alive.

      Brad…

      “Are you ready?” Jena asked, crossing her arms under her breasts and tapping her foot.

      Dulcy recapped her lipstick then tucked it into her purse. She supposed she’d stalled as long as she could. She had agreed to this night out with Jena and Marie. She’d just have to see it through. She glanced at her watch. She only wished it were later than nine o’clock.

      “HERE’S TO HOCKEY PLAYERS!” Jena toasted an hour later, then lowered her voice to a bawdy whisper. “And their big…sticks.”

      Dulcy blinked and tucked her shoulder-length blond hair behind her ear. Her head felt as if it were stuffed with wool, her limbs felt peculiarly languid, and if she wasn’t imagining things, her friend had just made a brazen reference to hockey players’…private equipment. Not that she was surprised. Jena somehow managed to squeeze the topic of sex into any conversation.

      Dulcy mentally repeated the word. Sex. Sex, sex, sex. She grinned. The magic of the liquor seemed to have squelched her hormone-ridden body. Or, if she was lucky, the unfamiliar feelings had bit the dust altogether.

      “Dulcy, you dropped the ball,” Jena accused.

      Balls and hockey sticks? She scrunched up her face, opening her mouth to correct the mixed metaphor, but somehow the words never made it out. Instead, she shifted in the corner booth of the nightclub and raised her shot glass, the tequila inside splashing out and coating her fingers, as she waited for Jena and Marie to pick up their shots. “To hockey… Hey, wait a minute. Haven’t we toasted hockey players already?”

      Jena nearly gave herself whiplash watching three hot guys walk by the table. Well, at least they were what Jena considered hot. Which sometimes seemed to include any male under the age of forty who could financially support himself. These three guys weren’t Dulcy’s type at all. They were too…muscular, too…alpha, too…smug. She preferred a bit more of a challenge—a man whose own personal criteria in the women he dated extended beyond “breathing.”

      Jena rolled her eyes heavenward, then groaned in lust. “Yes, we have toasted hockey players already. Three times. First, for their smooth moves. Second, for their large sports cups. Third…for their big sticks. Living in New Mexico, where hockey players are a rarity, you can’t possibly be complaining, can you?”

      Dulcy glanced around the club, which was conveniently located just off the lobby of one of Albuquerque’s better hotels. From the real leather, deep-burgundy colored booths and stools, to the brass fixtures and mid-level rock band playing in the far corner, the place was teeming with NHL pro hockey players from a visiting L.A. team, a result of a season kickoff exhibition game against New Mexico’s WPHL division team. The instant Jena had gotten wind of their whereabouts, the location of Dulcy’s bachelorette party was a done deal. There was nothing she or Marie could do to change Jena’s mind. So all of them had checked into three connecting rooms on the seventh floor of the hotel, and headed straight down to the club to “get their party on,” as Jena had put it.

      “To hockey players, then.” Dulcy clinked her shot glass against her two friends’. Licking the salt off the back of her hand and downing the fiery amber liquid, she grabbed for one of the dwindling lemon wedges on a plate in the middle of the table.

      Dulcy shuddered. She’d never been much of a drinker. A beer here, a glass of wine there. And her lips had certainly never before touched a shot glass, much less tequila. Well, unless the glass was wide-rimmed and the contents were called a margarita. But this was her last real night out with the girls as a single, professional female, and she had agreed to give in to Jena and Marie’s hearty demands that she do it right.

      She only wished they had chosen a better-tasting liquor. “Who said this was supposed to get easier after the second shot?”

      “I said it gets easier. I don’t know. Maybe it’s after the third shot. How many have we had? Has to be more than three… But it will get easier.” As the youngest and the third member of the circle, Marie Bertelli had a smile, they all agreed, that could stop Tom Cruise dead in his tracks. Well, all except for Marie, anyway, who thought her looks rated as paper-sack material.

      Dulcy leaned against the younger woman’s arm, Marie’s red hair nearly putting out an eye. She batted the curly strands away. “And СКАЧАТЬ