Stud in the Stacks Read online

  I get a hint of that tattoo on his upper arm and shoulder though.

  Unfortunately, the Tarzan-stealer is stepping out of the elevator with him.

  Shit.

  I suck in a breath.

  No matter. Unless she’s actually his girlfriend, planted in the audience to disrupt the bidding on him at the last minute, I might still have a shot.

  And if not, I’ll never see either one of them again, so what’s a little pride lost?

  My heart’s peaking near heart-attack zones, my legs feel buzzy and heavy, and I’m having a little trouble swallowing, but I’m going to do this.

  I lift a shaky arm as Tarzan and the tinfoil woman approach the door. Dammit, she’s pretty, and that shiny silver minidress is doing ah-mazing things for her well-proportioned curves. I’m sporting my trusty old LBD, but next to her, it might as well be a garbage sack.

  “Tarzan? Ah, sorry—Mr. Romance? Do you have a minute?” My voice squeaks and does a weird throaty thing like I’m channeling Kermit the Frog. They both stop and glance at me.

  “Hi,” I say.

  The redhead tilts her head at me curiously. She has green eyes, just like Tarzan, but hers are more on the grassy end of the spectrum while his are a lovely shade of olive with gold flecks adding depth. He should have some flaws close up, but he’s even more deadly handsome in person than he was on a stage.

  Especially when recognition flares in his expression, and a warm smile spreads over his lips. “Hey. Table seventeen, right?”

  Hot, literate, and friendly.

  Why the hell didn’t I demand half a million to get me a man tonight?

  Oh, right. Because the highest a man’s ever gone for at this particular auction was around fifteen grand. I thought I was already in overkill territory.

  “I…yeah.” I look at the woman who doubled my out-of-this-stratosphere bid and go for a smile that says sorry and you bitch and I’m going to try really hard not to throw up because this is way outside my comfort zone but my high school reunion will be even worse, so just bear with me a minute, okay? And I think all I manage to convey is I. Am. Such. A. Dork. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.” She smiles too, and holds out her hand, and I feel like she’s thanking me for taking the bidding so high rather than thanking me for congratulating her on winning. Is this what rich people do? Politely thank each other for helping show off how wealthy they are? “Lila Valentine. And you are…?”

  Definitely not willing to confess my name. “You can call me Miss P.”

  Tarzan coughs. I realize I’ve just asked him to call me something that sounds like a bodily fluid, and my face flares so hot I’m afraid lava might shoot out my nose.

  And I need to stop thinking of him as Tarzan. He’s Knox M., librarian by day, romance novel enthusiast and author of the popular Mr. Romance blog by night. He’s also a studmuffin and, by far, the best candidate for my job.

  “I need a hot date to my high school reunion,” I blurt. “If I still donate that fifty grand for charity, can you be free in three weeks and pretend to be my fiancé? I can also offer a marketing consultation on your blog. It’s great, but I think with some tweaks, you could really turn it into something with some power…”

  I trail off, because now they’re both staring at me, speechless.

  Possibly like I’ve sprouted dancing penises out my ears.

  Or possibly I’ve broken some cardinal bachelor auction rule.

  “I was a big dweeb,” I whisper, and oh, god, I’m going to cry. No way. This is my sales pitch, and while I know the tears would sell it, they’re too real, and I refuse to expose myself that raw. “The biggest. And I wouldn’t go at all, except I need to connect with…an ex…for business reasons, and I just got a promotion at work and I have to prove myself and my last date thought offering to share his eggplant at dinner was foreplay, and I just thought…”

  And I just thought complete strangers would care that my love life is dead and I still haven’t gotten over the trauma of high school. I’m the vice president of marketing at the fastest-growing organic grocery store chain in the nation, and here I am, babbling to two of the world’s most beautiful people about my teenage trauma.

  They’re both watching me, letting me ramble on and on while they stand there, ridiculously attractive and sophisticated and probably thinking about how they’re going to bang each other like monkeys all night, then bang like rabbits all morning, and like drums all day, then feast on caviar and foie gras and champagne dusted with ground fairy wings.

  Because that’s what gorgeous, sexy, single grownups do, whereas I’m suddenly confessing to that day in biology class when I felt something aching in my ear and I reached a finger in to rub it and exploded a massive pimple that wouldn’t stop bleeding and I had to go to the nurse’s office and I spent the rest of the year being called Pimple Popper Parker by all the jockholes on the football team.

  And it’s official.

  I’d be far better off taking a solo trip across the country to Netflix and chill in some remote cabin all by myself rather than show up at my reunion with anyone.

  I might fake my own death while I’m out there so I don’t have to explain to my mother why she’s never getting grandchildren out of me. Or explain to my boss why he’s going to have to find someone else to schmooze my ex-husband.

  “Parker, is it?” Knox interrupts gently, and I know what’s coming.

  A big, fat no.

  Before he can utter it, I shove my program at him. “My number’s in there. Just…think about it, and call me. Please.”

  I don’t wait around for the big N-word to drop, because silence is a much kinder rejection, and despite my usual luck with men, I’m hoping the lure of another fifty grand for literacy will appeal to his librarian heart.

  Also, this isn’t yet as mortifying as marrying Randy Pickle in the first place, and there’s no way I’m waiting around for it to get there.

  3

  Parker

  The next week…

  I crash into my apartment Thursday night just after nine armed with a quart of fury, three pounds of hopelessness, and a box of organic cheesecake. That’s the absolute last time I try online dating. Yes, yes, I said the same thing after the clown incident, but I mean it this time. The jackass is lucky a broken nose is all he has—if my brothers had been there, he’d be missing a few fingers and viewing the world through the slit in his butt cheeks.

  And I left work early for this shit.

  I’d psyched myself up into almost believing I could go to my reunion alone when my mother texted the news that Randy’s bringing his new wife. And because she’s my mother, she sent a picture. And because the universe hates me, Randy’s wife is smokin’ hot, he’s turned out not half-bad himself, and she’s probably an experimental physicist who volunteers with pet shelters and runs a charity providing medical supplies to war-ravaged third-world nations in her spare time.

  Part of me hopes that he, too, is staging a date to look like he has his life together, but getting married?

  No way.

  Randy Pickle officially has a better life than me, and since he’s refused all formal requests from Crunchy for meetings about a partnership and expansion into organic beer with his Pickle Hops, I have to go to my reunion.

  Apparently alone.

  As it has every night this week, walking into my apartment reminds me that Tarzan hasn’t called.

  I have a leopard-print throw decorating my simple ivory couch. Zebra art on the walls. Wooden elephant end tables.

  I’ve seen The Lion King on Broadway every Christmas for the last eight years. It’s my annual present to myself. Since my promotion, I’ve started a little nest egg to go on a safari one day.

  I didn’t even have to see Tarzan to know I was going to bid on him last weekend. The stupid ad on Facebook caught my eye—Superhero bachelor auction featuring Captain America, Spider-Man, and Tarzan!—and I was there. Yes, he was so hot the sun has to wear shades to loo
k at him. His smile could steal a thousand virginities and his dancing suggested he actually knew how to get a woman off in bed.

  Honestly? All that’s just the loincloth on the Tarzan cake, if you’ll pardon the horrible expression.

  What really has me hooked is his blog.

  I don’t read romance novels—I don’t have much time to read, period—but I’ve been following his blog and his Facebook page for the last two weeks, and there’s something about his passion for reading and love and happy-ever-after that’s intoxicating. Stimulating. Exciting.

  And arousing.

  I toss my bag by the door, flip the locks, shove the cheesecake in the fridge, and head to my postage-stamp bedroom, peeling off my blouse and jeans as I go. They join the scattered laundry on the skinny path between my double bed and the bathroom door, along with my shoes, bra, and panties.

  I don’t need cheesecake.

  I need something more.

  I twist the antique porcelain handles over the ancient cast-iron tub, let my hair down, and step under the warm shower, and wish I could get a do-over.

  That I’d bid higher at the auction. That Lila Valentine hadn’t shown up and won him. That, afterwards, I hadn’t blurted out all those horrible high school memories. That despite putting on a good show at work and with my best friends, I wasn’t still socially awkward.

  That he hadn’t been both gorgeous and kind, or that there’d been some flare of attraction lingering in his olive-green eyes.

  That I didn’t have to freaking buy a guy to go with me to my reunion.

  The water cascades around me, and the memory of his smile when I stopped him in that lobby makes me sigh. Oh, that smile. That I see you smile. With that little bit of I know you want me, but not so much that he was insufferably arrogant.

  How could he be? Any other Tarzan would’ve picked “Welcome to the Jungle” for dancing music, but he’d gone with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

  A total goofball choice that he’d thrown himself completely into. Which matches his online presence, and which makes me want to know what else he thinks is funny.

  I close my eyes while the water sluices over my skin, and I breathe in the soft milk-and-honey scent of my soap. The lather makes my hands slick as I rub bubbles over my breasts.

  Not for the first time this week, I tell myself that if I ran the world, the reward for social awkwardness, horrible dates with the wrong men, and having to face exes would be hot, sweaty jungle sex. Which I assume would be earth-shattering.

  No, scratch that.

  Which would be earth-shattering. No assumptions if I’m running the world.

  And if I ran the world, sexy jungle studmuffins would fall madly, desperately in love with book-smart but sexually-insecure world rulers, and they’d prostrate themselves at my feet and beg for a chance to be the one to prove to me that their thick, hard, throbbing loins held the magic elixir of transcendent orgasms.

  They’d line up in my jungle palace, groups of them, dozens of them, hundreds of them, all desperate to pleasure me until I’m a boneless, helpless jellyfish of ecstasy. But they can’t touch me until they dance for me.

  I flick my thumbs over my nipples and imagine a thousand sculpted jungle men, short, tall, lean, stocky, dark, pale—all of them sporting eight-packs, all of them packing heat in their loincloths, all of them begging to touch me, thrusting their hips in seductive rhythms, making promises with their bulging loinfruit that every last one of them could fulfill.

  Dancing and grinding and pleading for the chance to suckle my breasts. To slip their fingers between my legs. To feast on my pussy until they drown. To be the one man whose magic peen can cure me of my fatal case of personal ineptitude.

  But there would only be one.

  One whose piercing gaze would penetrate my soul so deep, I’d feel it in the pit of my womb.

  His hips would sway, and my hips—two sizes smaller in this fantasy—would sway in rhythm. He’d run his strong jungle hands down my bare sides, skin on skin, to stroke my hips, down around to my ass, and we’d move as one, his eyes glazed over with lust as he takes in my skimpy leopard-print bra and matching loincloth.

  While all the other jungle men watch.

  My clit is aching, my breasts tight, my breath short and choppy in the hot shower. I should stop. No good is coming of this fantasy.

  No lasting good.

  But, god, in this fantasy, I’m bold and confident and sexy with me, not just when I’m with my friends or at work. He’s making me bold and confident and sexy. His hands on me, with those long fingers, his short, clean fingernails, his solid knuckles, the tendons stretching to his thick, bony wrist. The way he pinches my nipples and cups my breasts in his palms. The wet stroke of his tongue around my areola, which is also two sizes smaller in this fantasy. The sound of his aroused voice whispering all the naughty things he wants to do to me in the jungle, here in the shower, in my bed after, in the kitchen, up on the roof…

  While I rub my nipple with my left hand, my right snakes down my belly and between my legs. I’ll bet his fingers are rough from all that swinging he does through the trees. I picture myself licking the ridges of his abs as I rub my fingers at the seam of my pussy, that persistent ache deep inside me coiling tighter, and oh, god, he thinks I’m beautiful. He thinks I’m sexy. He thinks I’m a fucking goddess.

  I flick at my clit, imagine Tarzan kneeling between my legs, and I gasp out loud.

  You’re delicious, my fantasy man tells me. You’re ruining me for other women. No one else will ever compare. I want you. I need you. I need to fuck you right now. I want you in my bed. I want to touch you and lick you and make you scream my name.

  I slip two soapy fingers into my pussy and pinch my nipple harder. I’m wet and tight and slick, and I imagine Tarzan lifting me against the shower wall, spreading my legs, thrusting deep into me with his long, thick, solid cock while steam swirls around us and water sluices down his solid pecs, dribbling in the ridges of his eight-pack, his hips rocking and his cock pumping into me harder and faster and harder and yes yes YES, right there, I’m shattering and gasping and clenching around my own fingers, panting and gasping and arching into my release.

  I slump against the shower wall and my small bathroom comes back into focus.

  The plain white shower curtain liner. The old-fashioned ceramic knobs. The ding in the corner of the tub from that mishap I had with a wrench when the showerhead broke.

  Hot water pours over my left boob, and not even the lingering satisfaction of a self-made orgasm can cover the disappointment and mortification of my dating life.

  I know better than this.

  Not the taking care of my own needs part—a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do—but the Tarzan part.

  I need to forget he exists and go on to plan B. Which is really plan Q or R at this point.

  Time to call in a favor from one of my friends.

  4

  Knox

  Saturday morning, after a hard workout at the gym, I pause outside my door to listen to the end of a chapter in Lucy Score’s Pretend You’re Mine. Again. I’ve been trying to get through this chapter for the last thirty minutes. Not the book’s fault—I’ve been struggling to get into any books this week, so I went back to an old favorite, and the narrator nails it.

  No, it’s not the book. It’s me. My mind keeps wandering back to last weekend.

  To wide apricot lips, vulnerable hazel eyes, and that program that’s been taunting me on my nightstand.

  I pop out my earbuds and push into the apartment. Nana is standing in the living room, one hand on her walker, the other pointing a Wiimote at the TV. “Die, ducks, die!” she crows in her sweet old lady voice.

  Gunshots blast on the big screen, two mallards fall, and a hound dog pops up out of the grass holding both dead ducks.

  I toss my gym bag next to the island separating the kitchen from the living room and glance at the screen. “Nice score.”

  “I’m not t
alking to you.”

  “You ate my Lucky Charms. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “And you went and got yourself a sugar mama who’s going to lock me up in some second-rate senior citizen home.”

  It takes me a second to catch on. I forgot I hadn’t filled her in on the details of my bachelor auction date yet. We’ve been two ships passing in the night this week, and with my regional manager breathing down my neck about the patrons coming in and asking me to sign their copies of the Post with the picture of me as Tarzan, the date hasn’t exactly been at the top of my mind.

  “Lila? She promised me you’d be able to see through the bars on the windows. And the nurses and doctors are very nice. They’re only cheap because they love working for free. Not because they’re not actually nurses and doctors.”

  Her scowl’s adding a few layers of wrinkles, and I’m struggling to not grin as I go digging through the cabinets for a late breakfast.

  Was my date with Lila fun? Sure. Was she pretty? Hell, yes. But was there chemistry?

  Let me put it this way: She’s not the woman who’s been distracting me all week.

  What Lila did takes money.

  What Ms. P did takes balls. I’ve never been able to resist a damsel in distress.

  Lila and I had a picnic in Central Park and talked about our romance novels—always a part of the full Knox Your Socks Off date experience—along with some weird shit I’ve seen while working at the library, and some of the things she’s done and seen as the personal assistant to an eccentric, reclusive billionaire. I didn’t ask why she bid so much, she didn’t offer, and we parted with a peck on the cheek.

  She texted yesterday to ask if I was free this weekend. I declined.

  If we’d met at a deli or a bar or a bookshop, I probably would’ve gone out with her again. But I don’t like the idea of starting a relationship—even a casual one—with a hundred grand hanging over my head.