Steel Lust Read online

  “That would be crass now, wouldn’t it? Ask you to come with me so you can be the third wheel?” She stopped following him to look at a painting of an exquisite nighttime forest scene—the shadows full of eerie, unseen mysteries in contrast with the dreamy moonlight and firefly-lit clearing at the center.

  She heard a door open, then the creaking of what sounded like a screen door.

  “Would you believe I’ve been in stranger situations?” he asked with a rueful little smile when she joined him in the kitchen.

  She thought back to the way he’d been the first time they met. “Yes I would.”

  Through the window above the kitchen table she could see Norma Jean racing around the perimeter of the yard in wide circles.

  “Who painted the forest scene hanging next to the television?”

  “My mom.” He got two bottles of water out of the refrigerator and handed her one. “She teaches high school art and a couple of adult classes at the museum on weekends.”

  “She’s very good.” She took a long drink, not realizing how thirsty she was until she felt it cooling her all the way to her stomach.

  “Thank you. She sells some, but others she can’t part with. My moms ran out of wall space at their house, so now she’s filling up mine.”

  She blinked. “Did you say moms?”

  He nodded and opened the door without looking. Norma Jean came charging back inside, her nails scraping on the ceramic tile before she gained some traction on the carpeted dining area and went rocketing around the end of the fireplace wall.

  “Moms plural, or ‘my moms’.” She gestured with her hands the way the kids who skated in the parking lot behind her studio did. “As in some kind of street slang?”

  When he stopped laughing he said, “Plural. I have two mothers.”

  She stepped out of the way when Norma Jean came skidding back into the room from a different doorway, scrabbled her nails on the floor a second time, then went shooting through the dining room again.

  “Is she all right?” Joy asked.

  “She does this every time she goes out in the winter. Something about the cold makes her frisky.” He locked the door, led her to the built-in bookcases on the back wall of the dining room and pointed to a picture.

  It was matted to hold two four-by-six photographs. In the first, two women stood close, holding a bright-eyed baby boy between them. One of the women was tall and regal-looking with short black hair and piercing dark eyes. The second was smaller, the pale-blonde hair and rich blue-green eyes she’d passed on to her son giving her the look of an ethereal wood sprite.

  In the second frame the same two women, both looking only slightly older, were posed the same way, each of them with their arms around an older, taller Leonardo.

  “My mom Linda,” he said, pointing to the dark-haired woman, then the blonde. “My mom Andi. In case you couldn’t tell, Andi is my birth mother. The first picture was taken when they had their first commitment ceremony. The second was when they renewed their vows for their thirtieth anniversary three years ago.”

  Yep, that definitely made him close to ten years younger than she was.

  He leaned into her bodily as he reached across her and she instinctively turned toward him, accidentally pressing her arm from shoulder to elbow and her breast into his hard chest. The low-burning ember of heat that had been warming her pussy from the moment she’d touched his chest at Lust for Life caught on a spark and ignited.

  “My father, Mark,” he went on, oblivious to the effect he was having on her.

  Joy forced herself to show him she had good manners and looked at the family picture he was showing her. A tall redhead stood in the center of the group, flanked by a teenaged Leonardo on one side and a woman who looked remarkably like his birth mother on the other. Two preteen girls with his same coloring stood in front of them.

  “This is Auntie Stepmom Corrine and my sisters Elaine and Hilary, who are actually teenagers now.” He pointed to a third picture of the girls in formal dresses, as though they were on their way to a school dance. “Lainie is sixteen and Hil’s going to be fourteen next week.”

  “I take it Auntie Stepmom is your mother’s sister.” She looked up and his perfectly shaped and incredibly tempting mouth was right there at eye level.

  “It sounds complicated, but we’re actually one of the more normal families I know.”

  She realized she was staring when his smile faltered slightly. She looked up and into his blue-green eyes and found they’d gone dark.

  “I was the result of a you-don’t-know-’til-you-try experiment between my mother and father, who met and became very good friends in college.” His manner of speech had become distracted. “Mom wasn’t sold on the whole men thing, but they got me out of it, so it wasn’t a total waste of their time.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” she said, and her stomach flipped when he smiled big.

  Joy wasn’t proud of herself for thinking it, but for a very brief moment she was tempted to beg off the gallery opening and ask him to show her to his bedroom.

  “We should probably hit the road if we’re going to get you back in time,” he told her as if he’d read her mind, breaking the spell.

  She remembered to breathe.

  “You’ll come with me?” She pressed a hand to her stomach. “You can stay the night at my place, drive home tomorrow morning.”

  Or spend the weekend fucking.

  His eyes scanned her face. What was he looking for? Did he expect her to flinch at her own impropriety or take back her offer in a show of false modesty?

  She stood her ground and waited for him to answer.

  “Give me a minute to pack a bag and call someone to sit with Norma Jean.”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  How long had it been since a man had this kind of effect on her? She felt nervous as a naïve teenager who’d just gotten her first real crush on the hot guy at school. Only it had been years since she’d been naïve about anything and Leo was far from a boy.

  The night was really looking up. Throwing him into the madness that was her family might not be fair after everything he’d done for her in the past couple of hours, but she would make it up to him once she got him back to her place later that night. And as much as she was looking forward to celebrating her sister’s big night, she couldn’t deny she was looking forward to getting Leonardo alone just a little bit more.

  Joy browsed the books on his shelves—mostly poetry and philosophy she’d never gotten into herself—and the vast record collection that took up an entire half of the floor-to-ceiling shelves. When Norma Jean trotted up to her side, she crouched down and gave her a good scratch behind her ears.

  “You keep that up and she’ll want to go home with you,” he said, setting a large duffel bag on the dining table as he came back into the room.

  “I highly doubt that.” Joy stood and the dog wandered into the kitchen. “Did you find someone to check in on her?”

  “Agnes was already going to come over and let her out while I was taking you home. I sweetened the pot and convinced her to stay the night.”

  Interesting. “How sweet does the pot need to be?”

  He took out his wallet and put a couple of twenties on the table. “I told her I’d leave her pizza money and she could have friends over as long as no one sleeps in my bed.”

  “And doesn’t completely clean out the liquor cabinet?”

  He gave her a half-smile. “Yeah, I don’t have one of those anymore.”

  “Oh.” She blanched, instantly recognizing her misstep. “You don’t drink.”

  “Not for a little more than a year now.” He picked up his bag. “Ready?”

  They bundled up and she followed him to the garage, him carrying both of their bags, and stopped dead in the doorway, mouth hanging open.

  “Wait a minute, you’re telling me you own a car like this and you walk to work?”

  When she’d heard him say he walked to work every day,
she assumed the reason he’d given about living so close was just an excuse to not have to drive a bad car. Or a cover-up for the fact that maybe he had no car at all. She was not expecting him to own a brand-new, gleaming black Jeep Wrangler.

  He opened the rear door. “As you saw, the shop is three blocks from here.”

  “Still, if I had one of these beauties I’d never walk anywhere again.”

  He gave her a half-cocked smirk. “You probably wouldn’t be stranded in Toledo with a broken wheel axle either.”

  She narrowed her eyes playfully. “Is that a foreign-car joke?” She stepped into the garage and marched around the back of the Jeep. “Are you making fun of my poor broken Honda?” she asked, poking a finger into his chest. “I’ll have you know that car has lasted me a good, long time with zero trouble before today.”

  He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender, but he was laughing.

  “I don’t doubt that it has.”

  She gripped the tails of his scarf and went up on her toes so they were almost nose to nose. “But?”

  He chuckled. “No but.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said and released him. Then clutched his scarf and pulled him close again. Her mind blanked when he got even closer than before. Instinct and desire to kiss him threatened to take over whatever rational thought she had left.

  “Yes?” he asked mildly.

  “Thank you.” She let go and fixed his scarf. “For everything.”

  “You’re welcome.” He went around her to open the passenger door. “Not that you need to thank me. I got out of a day’s worth of boring paperwork in exchange for a night out in Chicago with a certifiable bombshell.”

  Oh yeah. He was totally getting laid later.

  “How do you know my mother is going to be there?” Even as she teased him she thrilled at the compliment.

  Without missing a beat he said, “Lucky guess.”

  “Well this must be a lucky day for both of us,” she said and climbed into the seat.

  Chapter Four

  The gallery had a prime location in a small storefront in the heart of Chicago’s famous Magnificent Mile, but the crowd was quite a bit less stuffy than he’d seen at openings he’d been to in the past. There were the usual handful of old-money art benefactors who took themselves way too seriously, but there was a good mix of younger, more down-to-earth artist types as well.

  And it was a good thing he did well in crowds because he’d hardly seen Joy all evening. For that matter, he’d hardly spoken to her since they’d left his house hours ago. She’d spent most of the three-and-a-half-hour ride on her phone with her family, who had to be the worst grapevine ever.

  From what he’d overheard, the broken axle on her car had turned into her getting into an accident, which quickly turned into her clinging desperately to life, alone in a hospital bed hundreds of miles from home.

  She’d laughed about just turning her phone off for a while, but she was also dealing with the photographer she’d hired so she could attend her sister’s big evening as a guest. Since the photographer had called her constantly throughout the drive, turning off her phone wasn’t an option.

  After they’d arrived at her Lakeshore Drive condo she’d deposited him in a guest room, which had an attached bathroom of its own, and then disappeared. Thinking he had time, he hadn’t hurried about getting ready, but she’d been waiting for him when he joined her in her living room no more than fifteen minutes later.

  She hadn’t done anything more than freshen up her makeup, change into a knee-weakening little black dress and pin a large red flower behind her right ear at the base of her ponytail. She looked just as stunning as he imagined she would have if she’d taken hours to get ready.

  They’d met her family at dinner before the opening. He was a little worried he would be crashing a private celebration, but there had to have been more than twenty people already at the table when they arrived. On time, no less. She’d introduced him to her sisters and mother—who’d thrown her arms around him, and thanked him profusely in Spanish.

  Truly, he hadn’t minded that part one bit. Not only was Angelina Pope one of his all-time favorite blues singers, the woman really was a complete knockout. And while Joy was by far the most beautiful, vivacious and incredibly sexy of the three sisters, Mama Pope had blessed all three of her daughters with her incredible genetics.

  Middle sister Sunny had an almost androgynous look to her, with her dark curls cut short and a less-is-more approach to makeup that made her that much more captivating. The dark pantsuit she was wearing just barely concealed her curves, but they were definitely there.

  Youngest sister Love was the glamour girl, with her hair dyed a caramel-colored blonde, cat’s-eye black eyeliner and vivid-red lips. She was wearing a low-cut, floor-length dress in the same shade of red that left every single one of her curves on display.

  Leo had no idea how Sunny’s husband Greg survived family get-togethers without stroking out from lack of blood to the brain in his skull.

  And Joy…he could hardly see straight every time she got within ten feet of him. She’d blown through the door of Lust for Life early that afternoon and he hadn’t had a clear thought in his head since. The woman was the embodiment of raw sex. And his physical reaction to her—to the sound of her smoky voice, her spicy scent, the touch of her hand—shook him to his core.

  Throughout the evening she would appear at his side, drag him to this person or that group and introduce him by saying, “This is Leonardo,” with that sexy little Spanish twist she kept putting on his name. She’d follow it with a pregnant pause before adding “from Grind” as though the person she was introducing him to should know exactly what that meant.

  Even funnier was the way most people acted as though they did.

  If they’d been in Detroit, or even in parts of New York City where his band had become popular he might have believed some of the younger crowd knew who he was. But the band’s following in Chicago was small and consisted mostly of people in their late teens and early twenties who’d been raised on their parents’ grunge. If he was going to guess, a large number of the present crowd leaned toward blues, jazz or opera.

  For Leo, the second biggest thrill of the night, after getting an eyeful of Joy in that dress she was wearing, was getting to meet her father. John Pope was a soft-spoken, elegant man whose legendary career as a blues producer and highly sought-after studio musician was almost five decades long.

  Leo had no idea how long they’d been standing in the corner talking music when he caught sight of Joy watching them from across the room. His gaze locked on hers for a long moment. He watched her set aside her half-full glass of wine on a nearby table without looking. She headed through the crowd toward them as if she was moving in slow motion, never dropping her eyes from his.

  It took him a long moment to realize John had stopped talking.

  Leo turned back to her father and muttered a weak apology.

  “It’s quite all right,” John said, his gaze drifting between Leo and his daughter. “It still happens to me when I look at her mother.”

  He flinched, his mind spinning for an explanation. Surely he hadn’t meant that.

  “Dad, I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to steal your new friend for a few minutes.” She looked up at Leo with an odd kind of light in her eyes. “Do you mind?”

  The question was rhetorical, of course. She’d already hooked her arm through his and was leading him away.

  “Where are we going?” he whispered close to her ear.

  She didn’t look at him. “You’ll see.”

  They were making their way through the crowd, past the bar near the back of the room, heading toward doors that were nearly invisible, they were so well camouflaged as part of the wall.

  “This is nice,” he said as they stepped into a deserted hallway. It was as bland as the exhibit in the gallery itself was colorful.

  Without missing a beat she said, “This is
the best part of the place.”

  She hung a sharp right at the end of the hall, stepped up one step leading to the second floor and turned. Suddenly his arms were full of her. She pressed her curvy body against his, buried her fingers in his hair and kissed him with that lush mouth of hers. His head reeled as all the blood in his body rushed directly to his cock.

  He wrapped his arms around her and drew her close, instantly drowning in her kiss, her exotic scent, her heat. She was moving against him as though she couldn’t hold still, and his thoughts filled with images of her riding him, wild and out of control.

  She broke free with a gasp. “God, I’ve wanted to do that since I walked through the door of your shop earlier.”

  “We would still be at my house if you had,” he assured her.

  “Where did you come from?” Her eyes scanned his face as though she was seeing him for the first time. “You rescued me in a big way this afternoon. My mother can’t stop raving about you. And my father…” She shook her head, the look in her eyes reverent. “He can’t stop talking to you. He never stays at these kinds of things this long.”

  Her grip tightened in his hair, sending an electric thrill through his body and rendering him speechless.

  “Who are you, Leonardo?” She nipped at his bottom lip then touched the tip of her tongue to the same spot. “What kind of spell have you cast over me?”

  Both were unanswerable questions.

  He cradled the back of her head and brought her mouth to his again. He needed more of her, of her taste, her tongue. It was going to be impossible to stop if he didn’t rein himself in, but like the addict he was, he headed straight for the point of no control instead.

  She moaned as he angled her head so he could kiss her deeper, slide his tongue into the delicious, wet heat of her mouth, taking her slowly and then relentlessly until she was clinging to him for dear life. He needed to stop. He was unbelievably hard, almost to the point he wasn’t going to be able to come down without having her.