“And then, maybe, with the whole sex element out of the way, she’ll finally find some guy deserving of her,” Gauge added.
Kevin got out of his chair and for a second Nina thought he might sucker punch Gauge. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
He instead turned to reshelf the book he’d been reading.
“Nina?”
She realized she’d been watching the fit of Kevin’s jeans as he moved and blinked to look back at Gauge. He grinned at her.
“Would the guy be either of you?”
She’d intended the question to be as forthright as his suggestion. Instead it came out as a husky whisper.
She shivered all over, her nipples growing hard, her panties growing damp.
She’d never felt so wanton in her life. An idea like this was something more up her grandmother’s alley—at least if you believed what she said when she talked about the old Motown days, and Nina did.
But now that the proposal was floating out there as a possibility, she found that she’d also never felt more turned on.
She looked at both of them leisurely. Took in Kevin’s intense, soul-searching gaze. Pondered Gauge’s sexy, suggestive grin.
“Well?” she asked, a fire igniting deep in her belly. “Would it?”
Gauge shrugged. “If it did include either one of us, you’d never know, would you?”
3
LATER THAT NIGHT, Nina lay back against her iron bedstead in her apartment above the store, staring at the ceiling. Her twenty-pound cat Ernest Hemingway’s furry body curved against her thigh on top of the down comforter, his soft snores breaking the silence.
But it wasn’t her cat she was mindful of just now. No, the suggestive conversation she’d shared with Kevin and Gauge was what dominated her thoughts to such a degree that she found it impossible to close her eyes.
Naughty images trailed through her mind one after another. First, there was Gauge holding himself above her, his hair framing his handsome face as he stared into her eyes. Then she blinked and his features were replaced by Kevin’s full mouth as he leaned in to kiss her.
She caught her breath and groaned, tossing the comforter off and covering Ernie with it. While the downstairs area of the old workspace had been completely updated when the three of them had joined forces three years ago, the two upstairs apartments had been left as is, the radiator heat hard to get exactly right. It was either too cold in her sprawling, two-bedroom place, or way too hot.
Of course, she recognized that her thoughts might be just as much to blame for her overheated condition.
She licked her lips and threw her arm over her head, watching as Ernie freed himself from the blankets and twitched his tail at her before turning his back and jumping from the bed. She idly listened as his nails clicked against the areas of the polished wood floor not covered by rugs and then heard him crunching his dry food in the kitchen.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent a sleepless night thinking about a man. Correction, two men. Her best friends and business partners.
And if she had a brain in her head, she’d turn on the television in the corner and let Conan laugh her to sleep, putting a smile on her face that had nothing to do with either Gauge or Kevin or, Lord forbid, both of them at the same time.
What made secret fantasies special was that they were secret.
Okay, so, yes, she could admit to herself in the safety of her own bed, she’d had a dream once that had featured the two men in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with friendship or business. It had been last summer and on the heels of a memory that now stood out in stark clarity. The three of them had been at a garden party one of Kevin’s late mother’s friends had thrown. While everyone else gathered around the ice sculptures and buffet tables, they had changed into their suits and taken advantage of the Olympic-size pool nestled in a landscape designed to look like a mountain oasis. They’d been fooling around, splashing each other to break the boring monotony established by the stuffy gathering, then they’d graduated to dunking each other.
And then what had happened next had likely set the stage for what she was considering now….
“I don’t know why women insist on buying bathing suits like the one you have on,” Kevin had said of her red string bikini. “The way you keep having to rearrange the top or the bottom, it’s obvious they weren’t meant for swimming.”
Nina had been adjusting the top; her right nipple was in danger of peeking out from behind the wet fabric. She’d watched as her skin puckered in awareness of Kevin’s steady gaze, giving a little shiver as the material chafed against the sensitive tip.
Gauge’s voice had sounded from behind her. “They don’t buy them for swimming,” he’d said, hooking a casual finger into the back of her suit bottom.
It was something he’d done at least a thousand times before. A teasing move not unlike what a brother might do. But in the wake of Kevin’s comment on her suit and her reaction to his gaze, the air rushed from her lungs in a soft whoosh at the feel of his hot finger against her cool skin as he tugged her closer to him.
Kevin drew nearer her front. “So you’re saying they buy them to drive men like us nuts, then?”
Nina was fascinated by the way droplets of water clung to Kevin’s dark hair as he pushed it back from his face; she found it suddenly difficult to tread water. Abruptly she discovered that she wasn’t only in the deep end literally, but metaphorically, as well. And when she felt Gauge press against her from behind, and Kevin from the front, she had the sensation that she was soon going to be in way over her head.
She grasped Kevin’s shoulders to keep above the water at the same time as Gauge grasped her hips.
“Whoa there, sweetheart,” he’d murmured against her ear. “We wouldn’t want you to go under on us.”
She’d restlessly licked her lips, her heart going a million miles a minute, her body flushed with heat despite the cool water as she considered what they might have in mind.
She felt Gauge’s hands slide over her bottom and down the back of her legs even as Kevin reached for the arms she had around his neck for balance, her breasts pressed against the hard wall of his chest.
Then Gauge caught her foot and hoisted her up, catapulting her a few feet so that she hit the water face down.
The cad.
When she came back up for air, she sensed that she’d lost the battle with her top but didn’t make a move to right it. Instead she merely stared at the two of them wickedly, watching them watch her as she allowed her body to float to the surface, her breasts partially exposed, the material of her suit bottom clinging to her swollen womanhood.
“You know, you’re both right,” she’d said as she slowly did the backstroke, coaxing both breasts out. “Women don’t buy these kinds of suits for swimming. We buy them to drive the opposite sex wild.” She’d leisurely licked her lips. “Absolutely, positively, stark raving mad.”
And judging by both their heated expressions, she’d achieved her goal.
At least for one, sweet moment.
Then Kevin’s mother’s friend had come over to the pool to tell them the barbecue was ready….
Recovering from the memory to find herself not in the cool water of a swimming pool with two hot men, but in the middle of her empty bed while a winter storm raged outside, Nina groaned and rolled over, burying her face in her pillow. She hadn’t thought about that time since it had happened. Okay, maybe she was lying. She had thought about it. Usually right around the time she was about to drop off to sleep and found her