Samuel Kane could count on one hand the times he’d been truly surprised.
He made it his business to anticipate every possible person and event with the power to affect his life and spent a great deal of time developing contingency plans for just such occasions.
He hadn’t planned for this moment.
And now here he was, his mouth hanging open, blinking like twelve years of his life had evaporated and his seventeen-year-old self stood facing Arlie Banks.
Arlie plucked the glass from his hand without invitation and took a swallow. Samuel tried—and failed—not to imagine the channel of heat spreading on her tongue and sliding like silk down her throat.
“After our meeting this morning, I went to see Kassidy Nichols. My best friend from high school?”
Sifting through his memory, Samuel uncovered only the shallowest recollection of her image.
“When I told her that I was coming to work at Kane Foods, she mentioned that once upon a time you had asked her advice about taking me to prom.” She paused, awaiting confirmation.
“I did,” he admitted, steeling himself for the inevitable follow-up question.
“Why didn’t you?”
The part of him dedicated to deflecting pain at all costs supplied a ready defense.
I knew you hadn’t been asked and I felt sorry for you.
He could say this right now. He could end this conversation and send her scurrying away from him tonight and forever.
He might have, if not for what he’d seen earlier.
The look on Arlie’s face the second she’d heard Taegan Lynch’s voice. Her entire body had tensed and before she’d had a chance to rearrange her features, he’d seen genuine fear in the depths of her eyes.
So thick, he could almost taste it.
It had taken every ounce of his considerable restraint not to scoop Arlie off her feet, throw her caveman-style over his shoulder, and carry her away from general vicinity.
Not that such overblown displays of romanticism had ever been within his purview.
He’d only read about them.
“I chickened out,” he said. A huge understatement of the roughly seventy-eight times he’d hovered in her vicinity, rehearsing what he’d say only to have the words evaporate when he took a step in her direction. They were quiet as a sloop sailed past, the cozy family aboard gathered around a table on the deck.
“I would have said yes.” Arlie took another sip from his glass before handing it back to him.
The rim was still warm and wet from her mouth. A smoky communion between them. “Why is that?”
She leaned forward on the railing, her cascade of blond waves almost silver in the moonlight. “I liked you.”
This was why he never drank around other people. In his current state, he was altogether unequipped to deal with this revelation.
Everything he couldn’t say burned at the base of his throat. I liked you too. You were warm, and kind, and the first person who wasn’t charmed by my brother.
His brother.
The whole reason Arlie Banks was on this boat in the first place. Would she be making such admissions if she knew Samuel’s real secret?
What remained of his logical mind warned him that he was in imminent danger of derailing his plan, but he found himself physically incapable of saying words that would wound her further. Words that would send her flying into his brother’s arms for comfort.
The simple, logical explanation he’d been battling since the moment she’d walked into his office had crystalized when he’d watched from the darkness, her narrow shoulders slumped, her body shaking.
He wanted to comfort her.
He wanted her in his arms.
He wanted her in his bed.
What terrible irony it was, discovering the glaringly unexpected flaw in his own plan. By hiring Arlie Banks, he hadn’t just made her forbidden for Mason.
He’d made her forbidden for himself.
Such exquisite torture, to stand next to her in the wake of her admission. To drink in her sexy smirk and to know she could never be his.
“The way I see it, I owe you a dance,” she said as she gazed at the upper deck, where music had begun playing and the crowd had sorted itself into pairs hitting the makeshift dance floor.
Arlie stole his glass once again, setting it on a nearby table, then shrugged off the suit coat he had draped over her shoulders and slung it across the back of an adjacent chair. He experienced a sympathetic twitch, exposed as he was, desperately wanting the familiar weight of it back on his shoulders.
Sliding her small, cold hands into his large warm ones, she tugged him toward a patch of deck beneath a crisscrossing ideogram of twinkling string lights.
Arlie nodded approvingly. “It’s no I Left My Heart in San Francisco, but it will do.”
Samuel blinked at her, hoping he reflected an appropriate approximation of puzzlement. “Was that the prom theme?” he asked, knowing full well that it was.
She smiled wide enough to reveal the tiny dimple at the left corner of her mouth. “Décor-wise, yes. Which you would have known if you’d come.”
“And watch you dance with someone else?” he teased.
“Speaking of dances,” she said, her eyebrows gathering at the center of her forehead in an adorably serious manner. “You have a very important decision to make.”
“And that would be?”
“First or last?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“If we’re going to recreate a dance from the prom we never went to together, we need to decide which part of the night we’re recreating.”
Personally, Samuel preferred the part where they would have fled the Lennox Finch event hall to have sex in the old Packard limo his father would have insisted they take.
Not so his children could enjoy the luxury of riding in it, but so the other guests could see them arriving in it.
“What’s the difference?” Though he’d been to a good many black tie benefits and other philanthropic events where dancing had been required, it usually only involved a quick ceremonial sweep around the dance floor with an appropriately well-healed debutante.
“At the beginning of prom, you’d have one hand in mine and the other on my shoulder. By the end, I’d have my arms around your neck and you’d have yours around my waist.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” Stepping closer to her, he tightened the knot of his tie in an ode to his younger, painfully prim self. “I was a very shy boy.”
“True,” she said, reaching her delicate fingers up to loosen the knot again. “But I was a very persistent girl.”
Their eyes met for a beat of time that seemed to last forever.
“Last,” he said.
“Last dance it is.” Arlie kicked off her shoes. “I was definitely over these by end of prom.”
He let his hands land on the delicate swell of her hipbones. The warmth of her skin bloomed through the thin, silky fabric, radiating into his palms.
“Who did you end up going with?” he asked, trying his best to sound only mildly interested.
Raising an eyebrow at him, Arlie rested her hands over his, guiding them to her lower back.
“Kassidy.” Her breasts nudged his ribs as she reached up, lacing her fingers behind his neck as she began to sway in time with the music. “We created quite a stir.”
“I’m sure.” He began to move with her, his lower back aching with the effort of keeping his hips from grazing hers.
“Do you remember how the Lennox Finch chaperones used to use a King James Bible to measure the distance between couples?” Arlie asked.
“Vaguely. I wasn’t big into the social gatherings.” To Samuel’s irritation, and despite his most strenuous wishes, he felt the telltale heaviness gathering low in his groin. Perfect. He was officially his teenage self again, complete with inconvenient erections.
“But you came to the party after graduation,” she said.
Shit.
He’d been hoping she wouldn’t bring that up.
In those days, he and Mason had looked enough alike that they were frequently mistaken for each other by teachers and friends. Until they opened their mouths.
Mason’s mouth had been opened a lot that night.
Tongue-kissing his way through half the senior class, he’d finally made his way over to Arlie, who, for the very first time in their entire teenage career, seemed to be listening attentively to what his brother had to say.
Samuel remembered the stab of panic he’d felt when his brother leaned in, whispering into Arlie’s ear before disappearing out the back door of the house where they were illicitly gathered. Just then, their classmate hosting the party announced they would be playing seven minutes in heaven.
Quickly slipping into the small guest bathroom, Samuel had inspected himself in the mirror. He’d then taken off his suit coat and tie, and stowed them away in the linen closet next to a stack of folded washrags before popping the first three buttons on his shirt.
With hands shaking from pure, fizzy adrenaline, he had mussed his hair, turning this way and that to make sure it resembled Mason’s.
Once the rest of him looked right, he’d removed his glasses, hiding them behind a bottle of designer hand lotion before making his way down the hallway, fingertips trailing along on the wall to orient himself in space.
Luckily, the other partygoers had assumed he was drunk rather than disastrously near-sighted—an unexpected boon in his favor.
A crisply folded fifty tucked into their hostess’s palm was all it took for her to magically draw Mason’s and Arlie’s names from the red plastic cup.
Among a hearty chorus of catcalls and lascivious hooting, they’d made their way into the closet. As soon as the door closed behind them, they were abruptly plunged into inky darkness.
“Is this weird?” she’d asked.
Afraid that words would fail him as they so often had, Samuel had leaned into her instead, until slowly, in an absence of light as primordial as the beginning of the world, they’d found each other in the dark.
Timidly at first, their lips grazed. Warm, dry and velvety, her breath was honey-sweet and hot on his cheeks. Her scent was a gift to the senses left available to him.
Yielding to a need deeper than thirst, his tongue had slid over hers, demanding more. More of this. More of her.
Then he’d found the softness of her breasts beneath her thin cotton blouse. She had moaned into his mouth when he had thumbed her nipple, hard as a pearl. She had pushed his free hand down to the edge of her skirt and beyond, pressing it against the damp heat of the panties between her thighs.
“Please.”
This one word had unstitched him. Not because she’d wanted him. Because she had wanted him only when he was pretending to be his brother.
Breaking the kiss, Samuel had drawn back, panting.
For a strange measure of time, he was neither anchored in the past or present, but some muddy fusion of both.
Same sensations.
Different time.
He was back on the deck of the Dolce Vita, Arlie Banks in his arms, her eyes wide and her lips swollen and glistening. The hem of her silky dress was drawn up to her waist and his hand was beneath it, coated with the slick warmth of her desire.
His own mouth stung, blood throbbing in his veins, a painful ache in his cock.
What had he done?
“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling himself abruptly away from her. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“All this time.” She blinked up at him, eyes dark, pupils dilated with desire as if she had plucked his memories from the very air. “I knew it was you.”