Vicki sighed at the memory. Even at fifteen, she’d known that if he couldn’t bring himself to kiss her unless he was drunk and horny because his usual cheerleaders hadn’t been available earlier, she wasn’t going to have a prayer of respecting herself in the morning. So she’d pretended it was all a joke and pushed him away.

He’d never tried to kiss her again. Not until the night she’d called him in on his white steed and he’d arrived at the cocktail lounge ready to protect her at any cost. Even if it meant pretending that he loved her as much as she had always loved him.

Vicki took a shaky breath as past and present overlapped in her head, her heart. She wrapped her fingers around the cool glass and the rubies and diamonds on her pretend engagement ring glinted in the light from above her head as she lifted the glass to her lips.

“The same for me.”

The sound of Ryan’s low voice had the glass nearly slipping from her fingers as he slid onto the bar stool beside her. But she couldn’t drop the drink, not when she needed it so badly. The Scotch burned like fire as she gulped it down.

She put her empty glass on the bar with a clack and kept her eyes trained on the bartender. “Another, please.”

Ryan put his hand on her arm, but she was so sensitive from a full night of touches that she flinched. It was either that or throw herself into his arms, right then and there.

She couldn’t.

She wouldn’t.

But, oh, how she wanted to.

She hated feeling him stiffen beside her as her flinch registered, hated the way he so carefully removed his hand when he’d been so free with his affection earlier, hated it even more when he said, “I’m sorry, Vicki. I should have realized how tired you were. I should have gotten us out of there earlier.”

She was long practiced in control, had made an art form out of it the past few days by channeling all that lust, all that need, into her art.

All night long she’d held onto her self-control for dear life, had kept it tightly grasped in her strong hands. But as she reached for it one more time, she felt it fluttering just out of reach.

Her hand shook as she lifted the glass to her lips.

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” She could see bits and pieces of her reflection in the rusting mirrors behind the bar, enough to know she looked just as tired, just as weary, just as beaten as she felt.

“I’m the one who told the reporter we were engaged,” he reminded her. “I’ve seen the way the team celebrates news like that. I knew what was coming. You didn’t.”

She still wished he’d run the plan by her first, but his intentions had been for the best. Just like they always were where she was concerned.

Even that made her angry now, the knowledge that even with a man known to be the baddest of bad boys, he remained utterly and completely full of good intentions around her. And, in the end, it was so much easier to give weight to that frustration than it was to accept her forbidden feelings for the shockingly gorgeous man sitting beside her.

“You only did it to help me,” she said in a voice that dared him to contradict her, “so how could any of this be your fault?”

Especially the part where she’d always loved him.

God, if he weren’t here, she’d have a couple more drinks and then lay her head down on the bar top and pretend it was all just a bad dream.

But there wasn’t time for her next breath before Ryan’s hand was on her neck and he was moving over her, his strong thighs trapping hers between his, his dark eyes flashing with heat as he stared down at her.

His mouth was a breath from hers before she could react, before she could get a single synapse to fire, or send out another silent reminder to herself about control and self-restraint and impossible futures.

“Here’s how.”

His words were a breath on her lips and then he was covering her mouth with his and kissing her like she’d never been kissed before in her life, not even by him the past two times.

This kiss was a full-on slick of his tongue against hers, as if he was trying to learn all the shades of her taste. As his kiss spiraled deeper, darker, hotter while he pulled her closer and savagely took everything she could give, how could she do anything but give in—at least for a split second of heaven—to the need to taste him for herself?

She wanted him so bad, years of need culminating in this moment in a bar when he was kissing her like he needed oxygen from her lungs to breathe.

The two drinks she’d just gulped down, plus the champagne that had been refilled constantly for her at the Hawks’ team party, were making her reactions slower, fuzzier, looser.

She could use being drunk as an excuse.

Only, even when she was a teenager, hadn’t she known better? Hadn’t she been smart enough to realize that being the drunk lay was so much worse than not being laid at all?

And if Ryan didn’t want her when he was sober, it meant he didn’t actually want her.

She forced herself to pull back from his mouth. From the heat that poured from him, that drew her hands to his strong arms, to his broad chest, to his tight, muscular hips.

“No one’s watching us now,” she made herself say, the words escaping her mouth between her panting breaths. Even back when she’d thought herself to be madly in love with her ex, his kisses had never left her this out of breath. Or anywhere close to the edge of giving over every last part of herself. “No one in this bar cares about baseball or whether we’re engaged or not.”

With those reminders in place between them, meant to douse the fire jumping and flickering so wildly, she would have scooted away from him.

But he didn’t let her move.

And, oh, if she didn’t end up even more lost to desire, to pleasure, at the way he used his muscles, his strength, to keep her right where she was. Still, she had to try, at least one final time, to try to save herself before she went all the way under.

“The show’s over now. You don’t have to do this, Ryan.”

“Yes,” he growled, “I do.”

And then his mouth was back on hers and he was pulling her from her bar stool to fit tighter between his legs, his hands hard on her hips, his tongue forcing hers to dance with his again in a kiss that was as close to making love as she’d ever come with all her clothes on.

The groan she’d been trying so hard not to let go of sounded wanton and breathless into his mouth as Vicki gave in to what she’d wanted for so long...to be in Ryan Sullivan’s arms.