Surprise Me.... Isabel Sharpe

T-shirt and black jeans with a silver-studded belt. Black hair, not quite as thick and curled as Edgar’s, in a tousled I-don’t-care style that probably took him hours. “That’s him.”

      Stoner scanned the bar coolly until his eyes lit on Melanie’s, and his sex appeal shot across the room as if he’d cast a hook. She was hit. All he had to do was reel her in.

      He swaggered over, and while the crowd didn’t really part to let him through, it almost seemed that way to Melanie because she couldn’t believe the male power he had, and she couldn’t stop staring.

      “Hey there, Mel-a-nie.” He kissed her cheek; his warm lips lingered, making her shiver. “How ya doing?”

      “Great, now that you’re here.” She looked him straight in the eyes, buzzing full throttle from the mojito and his presence.

      “Good to hear.” He winked and cocked his head toward Jenny. “And who’s this?”

      Jenny nearly slid to the floor in her eagerness. “Jenny Tremont. I work with Melanie. We’re so going to come hear your band!”

      Melanie kept herself from rolling her eyes. So going to come hear your band? Jenny was twenty-nine, but sometimes managed to sound like a tweenager groupie. “You’re playing at Bad Genie Rock Lounge this week, right?”

      “You remembered.” He lifted his chin toward the bartender, who came over as if he’d been waiting all night for his chance to serve this drink. “I’ll have a Leinie’s Red and whatever these ladies are having, another round for them.”

      “Ooh, thanks, Stoner.” Jenny batted her black-lined eyes at him. “I’ll be loose and easy after two of these.”

      “Yeah?” He grinned a predator’s grin, which probably made all the women in visual range immediately wish they were prey. “How about you, Mel? Your barriers go down after a little alcoholic lube job?”

      Melanie wasn’t an English major, but she thought that metaphor was pretty mixed up. However, substandard grammar was not going to stand between her and a chance for fun time with Stoner.

      “Barriers?” She arched on the stool, tilted her head. “What barriers?”

      His laugh was low and rich, so much like Edgar’s it startled her. Their voices were eerily similar, too. If she turned around when he was talking she might get them confused. But that was about the only way to mistake one for the other, and she saw no reason to turn her back to Stoner…until later, maybe. “You are my kind of girl, Mel-a-nie.”

      “Mmm, no.” She waggled her finger at him, loving the way he leisurely half sang her name. “I’m all woman.”

      “I stand corrected.” He took his beer, clinked it with her glass, then Jenny’s, then with hers again. His eyes skittered over her body and landed on her mouth with intensity that made her feel already kissed. “Yeah, you are all woman.”

      Melanie tossed her hair and pouted to suck the straw of her drink, making sure he was watching. The familiar sex-machinery inside her hummed steadily now. This was going to be one excellent evening. Instinct told her so, and her instinct when it came to men and sex was never, ever wrong. Stoner would be a passionate, selfish lover, slightly rough, mostly unschooled, a lover who assumed his own amazing-ness would turn her on so terrifically that he didn’t need to do much more than just be him. Gymnastic, inventive, a show-off, he’d use many rooms and many positions.

      Bring it on.

      There was nothing like that first time, when she could be a man’s perfect fantasy woman. Nothing like the erotic excitement of new bodies discovering each other, finding ways to please—light, lovely, no baggage, no boredom, no boundaries.

      “So you’re Edgar’s brother.” Jenny took her sugar cane stick out of her drink and bit down, sucking out the sweet syrup. “Yup.” He drained half his beer as if it were lemonade. “You don’t seem much alike.” “Never have been.” “Even as kids?” Melanie asked.

      “Not even. I was into everything, and he was scared of everything. Bugs, worms, even the swing.” He laughed. “I’d push him like a few inches on that thing, and he’d scre-e-eam.”

      Melanie immediately felt protective of poor baby Edgar. “I was scared of bugs, too, as a kid. And thunder. Still am, though not as much.”

      “Yeah?” He grinned his sexy grin again. “If it storms while I’m in town, you run to me, baby.”

      “I will.” She let her eyes smolder at him. “Maybe even if it doesn’t storm.”

      “Whoa.” He rocked back on his heels, chuckling. “I’d take you up on that in a heartbeat, Mel-a-nie.”

      “You may have to.” She licked her lips sensually.

      Jenny muttered something else under her breath, nearly making Melanie giggle in the midst of her sex-goddess act. “Luckily, Edgar grew up braver than that.”

      “Seriously. And he is one smart dude.” Stoner nodded slowly. “Smart plus classy. Like my parents.”

      “You come from class?” Jenny sounded so surprised that, thank goodness, Stoner cracked up instead of being insulted. Point in his favor, he could laugh at himself. “I mean, I didn’t mean—”

      “Nah, it’s okay. Go figure, huh? I never fit into that country club shi—stuff, sorry, ladies.”

      “Country club?” Melanie was astounded. Edgar? How could she not know that about him?

      “I was a rebel from the beginning. Gave my parents hell.”

      “Ha.” Another reason Melanie loved bad boys. She understood them. “I was like that, too.”

      “Yeah?” He moved closer, his hip touching her thigh, bared by her short clingy black skirt. “A wild one, huh?”

      “My poor grandparents haven’t recovered yet. They had to move to Florida to get away from me.”

      “Aw, c’mon.”

      She giggled, nearly emptying her mojito. “Maybe not only to get away from me.”

      “What about parents?”

      “Mom was even wilder than me. She wasn’t around much, and when she was, there were different men in and out all the time.”

      “In and out, huh?” He rotated his hip back and forth against her thigh. “Tell me more about that concept.”

      She would, but her mind had turned to lust-mush. “Maybe later?”

      “Definitely later.”

      “Her mom just came back to town.” Jenny finished her mojito and picked up the one Stoner had bought her. “She’s trying to settle down and change her ways.”

      “Aw, man.” Stoner shook his head sorrowfully. “You can’t fight who you are. There’s no point. Like I said, I knew early on I was different from my family. There was nothing I could do about it but be me. So that’s who I am.”

      Melanie wanted to applaud. “I totally agree with you.”

      “Well, then, cheers, girl—sorry. Ms. Mel-a-nie, she is a-all woman.” He clinked their glasses, drained his beer and thunked it on the bar. “And I am sad to say, I gotta get going.”

      Melanie’s adrenaline petered out abruptly.

      “Already?” Jenny looked as bewildered as Melanie felt.

      “I have somewhere to be tonight. I just stopped by to see if I could catch you.” He slid his arm around Melanie’s shoulder. “Bang, you’re caught.”

      Melanie tipped back to look directly into his bottomless blue pools of sex. “I know.”

      “I should be home to Edgar’s place by midnight.” He glanced carelessly around the bar, then