Page 8 of Hot Irish Halloween

His.

3

GUY FOR THAT

PENNY

Ho. Lee. Shit.

It was JCarr, standing before her in the flesh, and what magnificent flesh it was.

The man had to be at least six foot four, towering above her even though she was average height for a woman (by American standards anyway) and wearing stack-heeled boots. His frame was massive. A jacket and navy sweater stretched across broad, muscular shoulders. His corded thighs were encased in denim.

Up close, the creases in his forehead were more pronounced. The beginnings of squint lines radiated from his eyes like half-stars. In his picture, they’d been darker. Now, they were lit up to a mossy color somewhere between light brown and dark green by the late afternoon sunshine. His hair in the pic had seemed darker, too, but in sunlight it was a silky golden brown. Her fingers itched to touch that hair and test the silkiness with her palms.

A collection of tiny scars were visible up close, some over his eyebrows and along that deliciously chiseled jawline. Those scars begged to be stroked and kissed. This wasn’t a pretty boy but a man who’d been seasoned by life, maybe even hardship. He was broken but beautiful.

And for some reason she couldn’t fathom, she wanted to climb him like a tree, hug him, and get wrapped up in those strong arms. Breathe him in, sink into him, and tell him never to let her go.

But this was all wrong. He was the wrong man at the wrong moment.

“Where’s Latin Lover?” she asked when she regained her speech.

JCarr’s brows lifted, even as his eyes shifted from hers to her mouth and back again like he didn’t speak English.

“Okay, let’s try it again.Donde esta el…el…” Flustered, she gave up trying the few sentences in Spanish she’d learned in high school. “Never mind. Are you the Latin Lover, or are you JCarr?”

He was still staring at her as though she were an alien who’d crash-landed on his front lawn. “I’m Jack Carr. Valentine. It’s really you.” Why was he staring at her like that? He huffed a laugh, rubbing his clean-shaven jaw and gazing at her with narrowed eyes that glittered with a look she didn’t recognize.

Floored and disoriented by this entire exchange, Penny pulled out her phone and opened the app and the message chain. Nothing from Latin Lover was in her mailbox. Where his username had been at the top of the message chain, it now said JCarr.

No. No fucking way could she have made such a huge mistake. She hadn’t been drinking ayahuasca coffee or snacking on raspberry edibles at that café. Unless they’d spiked her java with a shot of whiskey and made it “Irish,” she’d been perfectly lucid when they’d chatted.

JCarr — Jack, whoever, pulled his own phone out of the pocket of his jeans. He stabbed the screen with a thick finger and showed her the same. Her messages to him. Agreeing to this meeting and a date for a Halloween ball. This was really happening.

All that stopped seeming to matter as she stared at the big hands with the dusting of golden hair on the calloused knuckles and the veins along the back. Her eyes followed the path of those veins where they disappeared at his platinum wristwatch. His fingers bore tattoos like mysterious hieroglyphics waiting to be deciphered. If she kept looking at that masculine hand porn, she might need a change of underwear soon.

Penny became aware that he was standing a little too close while she was staring at the messages. He smelled like he’d dropped out of Heaven, freshly showered with a spritz of good cologne like rainwater in a pine forest. A more subtle but equally heady scent lay underneath. She’d never quite understood what it meant when she’d read that someone smelled like a man, but now she got it. And it was intoxicating.

“Okay, so, it is you,” Penny declared, making herself take a step away from the phone and the man holding it. “But I —” She looked up, and her tummy flipped to see he hadn’t stopped staring down at her. The intensity in those eyes, the slight parting of his lips, as if he was contemplating what he was having for lunch, and it just might be her, made her pulse quicken.

When that mouth lifted at the corner into a tilt and he kept staring into her eyes, she was flooded with lust again.

I’m already here, she rationalized to herself. It would be rude to take off now, right?

Yes, very rude. She should at least talk to him before she bowed out and took her thirsty ass home to her B.O.B.

“Okay. Coffee,” he said after another century of waiting for her to finish that sentence. His gaze slid from her eyes to her mouth. Again. Penny swallowed hard.

“Wh-what?”

“Coffee. Unless you want something else,” Jack said. God, his voice was deep, almost growly.

She was going to need a towel to mop up after herself if he said much more. Please let him be the strong, silent type.

Penny didn’t know if his “something else” meant real food or going straight to his place to fuck right then and there. He probably meant the food.

“Right, it is lunchtime. Um…I think coffee.”

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