scent. I’ve smelled it before, but I can’t put my finger on exactly where.”
Zane and Lowell exchanged a wordless glance. Apparently his friend had been wearing the same cologne for quite a few years.
“I can smell you, too.” Zane turned his face into the side of her neck and took a deep breath, reveling in her scent. “You smell like flowers, a light mix of lavender and rose. I can also smell your arousal.”
She gasped softly at that, and he smiled against the side of her neck.
“Are you aroused, Dannie? Is being bound like this, blindfolded, and held between two men you can’t see while others are watching making you wet?”
* * * *
Danica’s heart stilled. She didn’t hear everything he said. She had stopped listening after one simple word. Dannie. Okay, not so simple after all. Only one man used that name as a term of endearment when he spoke to her.
“Kalkin?” She dared to put voice to her suspicion.
Who else could it be? But how had he found her? She had told him only that she lived in a small town in Alabama. She never revealed precisely which small town, not to him, not to anyone or anywhere on the Internet. Writing under her given name was taking enough of a risk at attracting crazed fans and stalkers. She had believed a small town in Alabama would provide enough anonymity. After all, there had to be a good fifty or more Podunk little towns in this state.
She had to give Kalkin credit. He didn’t flinch when she called him by name. He didn’t suck in a startled breath. He simply continued to drive her hormones higher into the galaxy with the warmth of his even breaths against the side of her neck and the soft caresses of his hand over the bare flesh of her upper arm.
“Why did you say that?”
For the first time since he had started speaking, his voice raised a smidgen higher than a whisper, and she knew she was right.
“You’re the only man who has ever called me Dannie.”
He didn’t attempt to argue or claim she was wrong. “I’m Zane.”
Zane Kalkin. When she put the names together it stirred something in her memory. At first, she had taken everything he had said in their exchanged messaged and phone calls at face value. Then, she had started to want him, really want him, and she had commenced to digging. She had Googled Kalkin and Tampa. The search results had delivered companies, people with it as their last name, people with it as their first. It had been a surprisingly long list to weed through, and one that proved next to impossible to check off without more information about him.
There had been that one, though. She had immediately dismissed it as ludicrous and way too coincidental. That one leapt to the front of her mind now as clearly as if she were staring at it again on the computer screen.
“Will you take the blindfold off, please?” She made it a request rather than a demand, kept her tone sweet, and forced herself to remain calm. Dominant men didn’t take kindly to orders from their woman. She didn’t belong to him, but she had given him control of the moment. Until she could get that back, she had to play along.
“Why?”
“I want to see you.” She did. She wanted to look into the eyes of the second man in her life to truly betray her before she gouged said eyes from his skull with her fingernails.
He didn’t turn her, but walked around her instead. The man in front of her, the one with his hands still on her hips, the one who had her blood boiling even more than Zane Kalkin, moved around her, too. They effectively swapped sides, and only then did the hands on her hips start to move. They glided up her back, and she closed her eyes behind the blindfold, wishing that touch didn’t feel so fucking good.
The hands stopped at the blindfold, and she felt his fingers working the tie free. She blinked, taking a moment to let her eyes adjust to the contrast of the light in the room, then focused on Zane. Her attention moved over wavy brown hair,