LITMIR.BIZ

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all evening.”

      “So how about it, big guy?” Kat looked through her lashes at Lance. “You up for it? A nightcap, I mean.”

      “And anything else you’re offering, beautiful,” her impossibly handsome fiancé growled back. “You inviting us in?”

      BING!…Bing!…bing…I firmly shut off the irritating bells that kept fading in and out in my head as Kat replied.

      “As tempting as the three of you are, lover, I don’t think my darling sisters would appreciate me poaching on their turf. I’ll let them hand out their own party invitations.” She crooked a pink-polished nail at him, gave him her most smoldering look and began sauntering back into the living room.

      Lance looked at Todd and Dean. “The crooking-her-finger thing—unspoken but a definite legal invite, right?”

      “Hell, don’t look at me.” Todd raked strong surgeon’s fingers through his chestnut curls, and even as Dean’s locked-and-loaded state sent erotic shivers down my spine, I indulged myself in imagining what Dr. Todd’s dexterous fingers could do to a girl. “I’m the schmuck who figured if a nurse’s aide was batting her eyes at me, I had the green light to hustle her sweet ass into the laundry cupboard and give her my best bedside manner, and we all know how that turned out. Sure, the little tramp was fired, but I almost got hauled up before the hospital board. I’d say the crooked-finger thing’s a tease.”

      “That was a no-means-no situation, Whitmore.” Dean saw me watching him and gave me a devastating grin before turning to Lance. “Unlike our groping friend here, Zellweger, you’ve got nothing to lose by giving it a shot. See what happens when you try to cross the threshold.”

      I can’t explain it. Tash says she can’t, either. We both stood there and listened to this conversation, and neither one of us found anything weird about it. All I felt was a kind of dizzy impatience to get Dean alone and out of his clothes, and I couldn’t understand why they were still standing there.

      Neither could Kat, apparently. “Come on in and help me whip up more appletinis, gorgeous,” she murmured as she passed by on her way to the kitchen with the empty pitcher dangling from her fingertips. “Why waste time making nice with the brat and the brain when you could be with the only Crosse sister who can tie a cherry stem with her tongue in three seconds flat?”

      “That’s my cue, boys.” A sharklike grin on his face, Lance stepped over the threshold and into the house. “Think you can perform that trick without the cherry, babe?” he asked as his hand slipped around to Kat’s tush.

      Kat, who’s made it clear in the past that she doesn’t appreciate being handled like a melon being tested for ripeness, gurgled sexily. “I can try. Let’s find some privacy while your dreary future sisters-in-law are deciding whether they’re women enough to handle what their fiancés can give them.”

      “Women enough? What a total bitch!” Tash sputtered in outrage as Kat led Lance down the hall into the kitchen.

      My attention was temporarily diverted from Dean. “But being obviously bitchy isn’t like Kat. Do you think she’s—”

      “She could be right.” Todd’s superheated look at Tash held a hint of dubiousness. “If you’re still set on waiting until after the ceremony tomorrow, princess, I can respect that. I think I’ll head on back to the Hot Box, okay?”

      “The Hot Box?” Tash’s gaze narrowed. “Listen, Pookie, whatever my cherry-stem-tying slut of a sister says, I can show you a whole lot better time than some boob-job recipient in a G-string. Get in here and I’ll show you.”

      Okay, the Crosse triplets could never be mistaken for Jo and Beth and Amy of Little Women. I mean, even now I was storing away the intriguing tidbit Todd had let slip about Tash rationing out the sugar until she was well and truly Mrs. Doctor. Tash had given the impression that her prowess in bed was so amazing her formerly tomcatting fiancé didn’t have the energy to look at other women anymore. But there’s a line we don’t cross, and both Tash and Kat had just jumped eagerly over it. First off, we never diss each other in front of anyone else—not seriously, that is. Secondly, we don’t use what Grammie calls “gutter-talk.” Bitch didn’t quite make that category. Slut did. And Kat’s slam about us not being women enough was unforgivable.

      So, as a panting Tash yanked Todd into the house, I reached out to do the same to Dean…and then let my hand drop. I turned to watch her flounce up the stairs, Todd so close behind her you couldn’t have slipped a piece of paper between them.

      Weak-kneed lust warred with sisterly concern in me. I credit Grammie’s steel-under-marshmallow upbringing with the fact that concern won, at least, temporarily. “I should go after them,” I sighed. “If she’s been holding out all this time only to let Kat goad her into it at this late date, she’s going to hate herself in the morning.”

      “Sooner than that.” Dean’s voice was velvet. “Honey, let her and Todd play doctor while you and I occupy ourselves with our own game. Wanna start out on the sofa, maybe move to the floor when things start heating up?”

      My mouth went dry and every other part of me felt hot and wet. “The floor?” I repeated huskily.

      He held out his hand. “You’ll need room to go crazy while I lick every inch of you. You’ll need even more room to go out of your mind when I give you your big present, little girl.”

      I ask you: who listens to a line like that with a straight face? Okay, all of us, at one time or another, but inside we’re doing a mental eye-rolling, if not actually gagging. But gazing adoringly at Dean, I bought into it unquestioningly.

      “Big…present?” I extended my hand. His fingers folded over mine tightly enough that I winced, but somehow the pain was exciting. “So what are you waiting for? Come in and let’s start unwrapping it.” I felt the standing-on-a-cliff sensation shudder through me for the second time that evening, gave his hand a tug—

      And felt my bones turn to ice as my sisters’ screams tore through the house.

      I ripped my hand from Dean’s and yanked open the hall armoire’s doors. “Hit the alarm monitor beside you!” I shrieked, reaching to the back of the hat shelf. “Someone’s broken into the house! Tash and Todd must have walked in on someone upstairs and maybe Kat and Lance surprised someone else in the kitchen!”

      Where I came up with the double-set-of-intruders scenario is still a mystery to me, but at the time my glamyr-fogged mind seized on it as the only possible explanation for my sisters’ screams. My fingers found the objects I was looking for at the back of the hat shelf—Popsie’s ancient revolver and the box of ammunition that went with it. A few summers ago he’d insisted all three of us receive qualified instruction on how to handle it, overriding Grammie’s objections with the argument that in the time it took for the police to arrive, knowing how to use a gun could save us from being raped, or worse. Bullets spilled to the floor as I loaded it. “I’ll take the kitchen, you go upstairs for Tash! The police should get—”

      “You really are as dumb as I always thought you were, aren’t you?” Dean gave the armoire a careless push. It gouged its way across seven feet of Colonial heart-pine floorboards before coming to a halt in front of the alarm keypad on the wall by the open front door. The next moment he’d batted Popsie’s revolver halfway across the room. “Get the picture now, sweet thing?” he asked in the velvet voice that only minutes ago had been turning my knees to rubber.

      I stared at him, my mind not processing the fact that he’d one-handedly shoved across the floor a piece of furniture that had taken four able-bodied men to move when Grammie’d had it delivered. “What’s the matter with you? We’ve got to help Kat and Tash!” Without waiting for his reply I ran to the living room, grabbed the gun from where it had landed on the sofa and began sprinting to the kitchen.

      I hit the floor so hard that one of my shoes flew off. Pain pierced my left butt cheek as a heart-pine sliver inserted itself through my skirt into my

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