“How do you remember this stuff?”
Mel tapped her temple. “Mind like a steel trap. Other body parts as well, which I hope to be demonstrating before the night is through.” She waggled her eyebrows and directed a sexy pout in Gage’s direction. “So we have firefighting, bartending brothers—”
“Foster brothers, taken in by Sean and Mary Dempsey. They couldn’t have children of their own so they were big on spreading the love to kids who needed it, five boys and a girl. Sean was a big-time fire chief who died on the job just over seven years ago. The oldest son, Logan, died in the same fire.”
“Holy shit.”
“A couple of them—” She nodded at Luke behind the bar. Intimidating Wyatt was nowhere to be seen. “—did a stint in the Marines first.”
Mel’s twisted expression depicted a battle between sympathy for the city’s fallen and imminent collapse into a puddle of lust. “Hot ex-marine Chirish firefighters. Jesus, my panties are going to melt.”
The lust option. Excellent choice, madam.
“Not Irish, just raised that way. And your panties melted about five minutes ago, you dirty bird.”
Mel grinned. “True to the last drop. What’s the skinny on my man, Thor?”
There was something about him, something different that teased the cold edges of Darcy’s mind and refused to come in to the open. “That’s Gage and from here, he fills out his shirt and jeans reeeeal nice. What else do you need to know?”
“Too fucking right,” Mel said, laughing that girlish tinkle, step one of her slide into flirt mode.
“That shit’s wasted on me, you know.”
She giggled inanely. “Just warming the pipes. And I think from the look the cherry popper is giving you, things will be getting nice and warm in Darcyland very soon.”
Lifting her eyes to Beck took effort, as did meeting the unerringly scorching look he was laying on her. So much for benevolent gods. He had to go and grow hotter over the years. Strong arms corded with sculpted muscles stretched his tee sleeves to the limits, walking temptation in a six-foot-two package. Virile, warrior-like, and a beard to boot! Hot damn, she loved a good smattering of facial hair.
Concern lined Mel’s brow. “What happened, exactly? I know you met in high school, but all I can really recall is the ugly crying before the inevitable graduation to ‘guys suck.’?”
“If they’re any good, they will,” they said in unison, drumming the bar with a quick one-two. Ba-boom.
Darcy’s laughter gave way to a sigh. “He was a friend of my brother’s. They used to train together at a boxing gym.”
That look came over Mel again, the one where her brain might disintegrate to lust-mush any second.
“Yes, Melanie, he was a boxer. Control yourself.” Admittedly, it had been verra, verra sexy.
“And?”
“For a year”—and two months, one week, three days— “he didn’t breathe a word to me. He’d come over to play video games with Jack and I’d try to get him to open up, but it was like talking to a brick wall. An unbelievably sexy brick wall. I thought he hated me. He’d get this crimp between his eyebrows every time he looked at me like he’d smelled rotten eggs. Or was trying to solve a really difficult math problem.”
“Kind of like how he’s looking at you now?”
No need to lift her gaze to verify that his eyes were still trained on her. Her skin sizzled with his penetrating heat.
A patchwork of sensual images grabbed hold. Their first kiss during a winter festival at Lincoln Park Zoo, her hot chocolate cooling while his lips kept her warm. A yearlong diet of sexy smooches and teenage exploration, stopping short of home base because Beck refused to take full advantage.
“I begged him to do the deed, but he said I was too young. Finally, when I turned eighteen, he—” She stopped as memories of Beck’s blunt prizefighter hands on her body, seeking out erotic flash points and bringing her to blistering release, assaulted her senses.
“Did you good?”
“So good,” she said, lowering her voice though the bar’s noisy hum provided adequate cover. “I was gaga about him and I thought it was mutual until he sent me packing.”
Darcy still remembered his final words to her all those years ago, spoken in that graveled voice, dripping with sex and menace. Only a month after he had made her a full-fledged woman and claimed every part of her.
Forget you ever met me, Darcy.
And she had, after a year—or five. She stowed the boy in her brain’s basement and went on to a new life, one she chose for herself instead of following the gated path her father had insisted she travel. Underneath this designer sweater and perfectly cut skirt was the project she had been working on for years. A well-traveled, well-adjusted, reinvented woman.
“You’re not a kid anymore,” Mel said. Despite only seeing each other a few times a year, her friend could always intuit when Darcy was about to send out invites to the pity party. “You should go for it.”