Sushi: A Forbidden Flowers Story Read online

  “I’m familiar.” Delaney’s is one of my favorite places to grab a pastrami on rye on Sundays when I’m not traveling. They’ve got a salad bar, a soup bar, and a hot bar, as well as a sandwich counter where they make sandwiches to order, a pizza counter where they make rustic pizza in a stone oven from dough they’ve hand-thrown themselves, and a sushi bar. The place is always packed during lunch hour.

  Jordan folds her forearm over her thigh, growing more relaxed. “I usually grab and go, but that day, I decided to eat there and work.” She rubs her lips together and smiles, her eyes growing distant the way they do when someone is recollecting a fond memory. “It was the first beautiful day of spring, and I wanted to get out of my apartment. I figured the change of scenery would inspire me, so I took my laptop.” She shrugs. “And, well, I needed to buy ingredients to make guacamole for my brother’s birthday, so I figured I could kill two birds with one stone. Grab what I needed for guac, then grab lunch.” She releases a breathless sigh, her eyes dancing, her face radiant with infatuation and young love. “I never thought something so insignificant as going to the market would change my life.”

  Once Jordan starts talking, the words begin to flow like she’s been locked in solitary confinement for a month.

  I settle in, listening and jotting down notes without interruption, my digital recorder catching the whole story.

  And what an incredible story it is.

  Chapter Two

  Jordan’s Story . . .

  The first time Jordan saw him was in the produce section. He was browsing for an apple while she searched for a ripe avocado on the next display over.

  Of all the fancy meals her brother could have picked for his birthday dinner, he had chosen Mexican food. The guy lived and breathed Mexican cuisine, so it really shouldn’t have been a surprise, but she had assumed he would have at least wanted to go out to some swanky Manhattan restaurant.

  Nope. Gourmet taco buffet in the comfort of home, so Jordan had agreed to make her famous guacamole.

  Now, here she was, only six hours before festivities were to begin, and she still hadn’t bought the ingredients.

  The strikingly handsome man browsing the apple display wasn’t making her task any easier either. He was tall, fit, with hair that was more salt than pepper. And magnetically attractive.

  He plucked a shiny red apple from the stack, then made his way out of the produce section. Jordan’s eyes followed him until he was out of sight.

  The next time she saw him, she was in the bulk foods aisle eyeing chocolate-covered caramel cashews, an indulgence she allowed herself about once a month.

  He strolled down the cereal aisle toward her, his brow set in a focused scowl as he scanned the shelves, as if he were waiting for something to catch his eye.

  I wouldn’t mind catching his eye.

  The thought bitch-slapped her out of left field. Jordan had never thought she would find an older man attractive, but this guy? Even though he had to have been in his mid to late forties and wasn’t exactly what she would call “hot,” she struggled to tear her gaze away from him.

  There was something captivating about the way he moved. His gait was sure and measured, his hips loose. And his dark-blue eyes were focused and intense. This was a confident, purposeful man. And there was nothing sexier than a man oozing confidence from every pore.

  As his head swiveled in her direction, she quickly turned and pretended to be preoccupied with choosing from the various bulk options of rice.

  After Mr. Fabulous passed, she glanced over her shoulder at his retreating backside. Nice ass. Firm. Round, but not too round. A Goldilocks ass. Just right.

  The material of his untucked long-sleeved J.Crew shirt stretched provocatively over his broad shoulders, tempting her. She had a thing for shoulders and backs. At the gym, she often found herself staring at the backs of the men doing pull-ups or working their lats. Sometimes she went home and masturbated afterward, which was just about the only action she’d gotten in four years. Until recently, she’d been too busy meeting publishing deadlines and doing book tours to have the kind of time a relationship required.

  But yeah, a nice back made her engine purr. And this guy appeared to be in better shape than most of the men her age.

  He also possessed the kind of self-assurance that turned women’s eyes. Pure, raw confidence. The kind of confidence she wrote into her fictional heroes. The kind that always made her heroines open their legs, even if it took the whole book to get them there.

  But fiction was not real life, and Mr. Fabulously Mature was putting her alpha male fictional heroes to shame.

  Maybe it was his Tarzan swagger or the easy way his hips shifted as he walked. Whatever it was, he seemed like a man who knew his way around a woman’s body. He was probably incredible in bed.

  At the end of the aisle, he turned left toward the dairy section and disappeared.

  Jordan shook herself from her mesmerized stupor, then collected her chocolate-covered caramel cashews and headed toward the deli.

  Dodging the hordes of people crowding around both the hot bar and salad bar, she sliced her way toward the refrigerated shelves of premade sushi.

  California roll, scorpion roll, spicy shrimp. She had tried them all . . . and loved them. But today she was in the mood for tuna and salmon nigiri. Pushing past a pair of women scanning the premade sandwiches, she reached for the last package of nigiri sushi just as another hand—a man’s hand—reached forward and landed on the same plastic container as hers.

  Ah, hell no. She had been craving this all morning. There was no way she was giving up her sushi to some guy who—

  Her breath caught as she looked up into the dark-blue eyes of Mr. Fabulous.

  “Oh, I—”

  “Sorry.” He pulled his hand away and smiled, revealing perfect, squared teeth except for one lateral incisor that was angled inward ever so slightly, giving his smile character. She made a mental note to give her current book’s hero an angled incisor.

  “Looks like we both have a taste for the same thing today,” he said.

  The heat rose in her face as she tried not to stare. He was even more handsome up close. And he smelled good. Like zesty soap.

  She let out a soft, polite laugh. “Seems that way.”

  Grayed-out scruff covered his jaw and upper lip, but it was obvious that when he’d been younger, he’d had a full head of thick, espresso-brown hair.

  She extended the package of sushi toward him, suddenly in a giving mood. “Here, you can have it. I’ll grab something else.”

  He nudged the package back at her “No, you take it. I couldn’t decide between that and the California rolls anyway. You helped me make my decision.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He flashed her a crooked grin and grabbed a package of California rolls. “Positive. Enjoy your lunch.” He winked, turned, and headed in the direction of the checkout lanes.

  The relaxed sway of his hips in those jeans was positively sinful. And the way that shirt accented those shoulders and that tapered waist better than a candy wrapper was damn near criminal.

  This guy had the market cornered on sex appeal.

  She stood by the sushi display like a frozen fish, staring after the on-the-upper-end-of-middle-aged Adonis as he strolled past the salad bar as if he were on a fashion runway and everyone wanted to buy what he was selling.

  He reached the end of the aisle, paused for a quick beat, then glanced back, catching her staring at him.

  Jolting into action, she spun away, nearly dropping her sushi as flames shot through her body. Her free hand launched forward and snatched a container of chicken dumplings so it looked like she’d been doing something other than ogling him.

  When she looked back up, he was gone.

  “Pull your shit together, Jordan,” she murmured to herself. “He’s just some old guy.” She couldn’t believe she was this hot over a man who appeared old enough to be her own father.

  She browse
d a little longer to see if anything else looked good, then grabbed a bottle of cherry-flavored sparkling water and made her way to the ten-items-or-less checkout. There was no sign of Mr. Fabulous.

  The short line moved quickly, and within a couple of minutes, she was searching for a table in the crowded dining area at the front of the market.

  There was one vacant table by the window, so she nabbed it.

  Once she had opened and sampled one of everything, she fished her laptop from her bag, along with her notebook and pen. A writer’s work was never done, and with all the inspiration Mr. Fabulous had given her, she wanted to get it all down before it poofed from her memory.

  She was just biting into her second piece of sushi, using her free hand to open her notes file, when she glanced to the side, and—oh my God—came gaze to gaze with the man she’d been obsessed with for the past twenty minutes. He was sitting at a table around the corner, tucked behind a display of snack bars.

  She stopped mid-chew and stared back at him. Without even so much as a flinch of guilt at being caught looking at her, he grinned wryly, then calmly glanced down at his phone, which rested beside his California rolls on the table.

  Swallowing, Jordan returned her attention to her laptop, but now that she knew he was sitting less than twenty feet away, it was hard to concentrate. Eating another piece of sushi, her gaze crept across the reddish-brown clay tile floor, past the lightly scuffed black high heels of the woman sitting at the table between them, and finally up to his face.

  He was still looking at his phone, chewing casually, in no hurry.

  Her gaze dropped to his hands. He had sexy hands. Tan and sturdy, with veins that popped out on the back, and long, relaxed fingers tipped with clean, manicured nails.

  With nails like that, he definitely didn’t work construction or do manual labor for a living.

  He pushed up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing sinewy forearms that weren’t scrawny but weren’t thick with muscles either. Like the rest of him, they were solid, provocative, and, dare she say, lickable.

  As she was imagining what those arms would look like holding her down on a bed, she realized he had stopped eating. In fact, he was barely moving at all.

  Her gaze leaped to his face. The moment her eyes met his, she sucked in her breath. He was watching her again.

  Heat blazed up her neck and into her cheeks, and she immediately took an interest in the slivers of bright-pink salmon topping the lumps of sushi rice in front of her. Even her breasts felt feverish, tingling and awash with warmth.

  When she dared to peek at him again a few seconds later, he was still looking at her, except his eyes weren’t on her face. They were aimed lower. Was he . . .? He was looking at her . . .

  She surreptitiously glanced down at her chest. Despite wearing a padded bra, her nipples were standing at attention with such ferocity that they poked out the mint-colored fabric of her Angel Baby tee like twin beacons, revealing the effect this man had on her like she was sending out a mating call.

  There might as well have been a dialogue bubble over her head that said “Fuck me now.”

  A moment later, his eyes drifted to hers without presumption, but with enough heat that she didn’t need a psychic to tell her what he was thinking. He’d seen something he wanted, and now that he had, the game was afoot.

  Whatever switch had been flipped on inside him, she could feel the sexual challenge he was giving off like heat from an oven. And for the first time in years, her body responded.

  People think that an author who writes steamy romance has a sex life that is just as exciting. That isn’t necessarily the case.

  When you write sex for a living, researching it, reading about it, looking at pictures and dirty videos analytically so that you can write accurate descriptions, it becomes work, not something that necessarily arouses you.

  Exposure to something desensitizes you to it. Like if you worked in a dildo factory.

  For the first few days on the job, handling countless latex erections all day might make you hot. So hot that you can’t wait to get home to your husband and fuck his brains out.

  But by the second or third week, every dildo to come down the line is just another dick. The thrill dies, and handling unrealistically supersized dildos for a living—no matter how lifelike they are—becomes just another tedious eight-hour-a-day job where you make less than a living wage, go home with an aching back, look at your husband’s very real cock with a whole lot of meh, because it’s nowhere near as impressive as what you’ve been handling all day, and are too exhausted to even think about having sex.

  What’s so glamourous and exciting about that?

  That was where Jordan was in her sex life. She’d been writing steamy love scenes for so long that sex had become work . . . just something she wrote about every day. Which may have been part of the reason why she had struggled for four years to find a man she wanted to have sex with.

  Yes, she’d been busy, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t had opportunities to hook up. She just hadn’t wanted to. She hadn’t felt the urge. Nowadays, it took a lot to give her that warm, fuzzy feeling she used to get so easily in her teens and early twenties, when kissing and sex had still been novelties.

  But right now, this very moment, with Mr. Sushi eye-fucking her from across the room, she wasn’t just feeling warm and fuzzy. She was hot and prickling all over, wet between the legs, and breathing hard. There was something biologically chemical about this man that awakened feelings inside her she hadn’t experienced in years.

  The two of them spent the next ten minutes playing their back-and-forth game of sexual peekaboo, each glance growing more curious and intense, until finally he stood, tucked his phone in his pocket, and tossed his empty sushi container into the trash.

  Their lunchtime love affair was almost over. Just a few more seconds—a few more steps—and he would walk out the door, taking the exciting flirtation she had found over a shared love of sushi with him.

  She kept her eyes on her small container of chocolate-covered caramel cashews as he approached, trying to hide her disappointment. His black Doc Martens came into her field of vision. She took a deep breath and was just about to look up at him when a folded napkin fluttered from his hand and landed on the keyboard of her laptop.

  She blinked and stared at the napkin for a second, then looked up at him as he passed. He didn’t stop to say hi or even slow down. He just flashed her the wickedest, sexiest grin she had ever seen and kept walking.

  She gazed after him for a couple of seconds, then picked up the napkin and unfolded it to find a note written in impeccable penmanship.

  If we’re going to fuck each other from across the room, don’t you think we should at least exchange names?

  Her mouth fell open on a gasp, and her head popped around just in time to see him disappear out the exit without the barest hint of a backward glance.

  Spinning back around, she leaned toward the window and peered out, watching him as he headed toward the parking lot. He was a couple of feet from the curb and checking for oncoming traffic when he looked over his shoulder, caught her eye, and flashed a seductive alpha-male smirk that landed square between her legs. Then he turned away and strolled into the parking lot.

  She glanced down at the note again. There was a phone number at the bottom. Under his phone number, he’d written: I’m Gabe. What’s your name?

  When she looked back up, a black Mercedes pulled out of a space toward the front of the aisle he’d entered. The windows were tinted, so she couldn’t see if he was the one behind the wheel, but it was a safe assumption.

  Her gaze dropped to the note, then back up at the Mercedes.

  She gnawed on her bottom lip.

  Should she text him? Did she want to?

  What if the thrill she’d found with him over sushi fizzled after taking things to the next level? What if he turned out to be just another creepy older guy who got off on playing seduction games with younger women?
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br />   Then again, what if he wasn’t? What if the next level made him and the game they were playing even more exciting?

  The Mercedes’s taillights flashed red as it stopped at the exit, the left turn signal blinking almost like it was challenging her not to let him get away.

  She had enjoyed herself today. He’d made things interesting. When had lunch at Delaney’s ever been so much fun? And not just fun, but sexy. Erotic even.

  Did she want to risk bursting that bubble?

  She reread the note, stared nervously at the phone number, then looked back out the window. The Mercedes was gone, but she could still envision his hips swaying with the ease of a lion patrolling his territory as he walked through the store.

  Taking a deep breath, she set the napkin on her notebook, took out her phone, and, with shaking fingers, typed his number into a new text message.

  My name is Jordan.

  She didn’t expect a response right away. After all, he was driving. So, when her phone rang less than a minute later, and it was his number on the caller ID, her heart nearly stopped. She’d assumed he would text her back, not call. She wasn’t prepared to talk to him. At least not yet.

  Still, she couldn’t let the call go to voicemail.

  “Hello?” she said somewhat tentatively.

  “Did you enjoy your lunch, Jordan?”

  Flames licked her everywhere just from the commanding, low timbre of his voice. “Yes.” She ran her palm over her throat, hoping none of the other patrons could tell how turned on she was. “Did you?”

  “Very much.” He chuckled softly. “It wasn’t exactly what I’d expected when I left the house this morning, but . . .” She could hear the smile in his voice. “I was pleasantly surprised.”

  She grinned to herself and lowered her voice, feeling flirty. “Oh? Why’s that?”

  There was that low, seductive chuckle again. “I think you know why, Jordan.”