Free I Love the 80s by Megan Crane Page B

her old Wild Boys concert T-shirts for comfort for eight long months, while Adam gallivanted about Manhattan with his brand-new, flexible twenty-three-year-old girlfriend and never thought at all about the life he’d thrown away.
    It represented far too much, and she was sick of all of it, suddenly and completely – so sick of it she felt her stomach clench in response.
    And since it was
her
dream, it was about time she started acting the way she’d be too afraid to act in real life. Otherwise, what was the point? Why dream at all?
    ‘Do you want me to help you or not?’ she demanded then, and her tone of voice was aggressive enough to surprise even her. She decided she liked it, and that the sudden thrill she felt shoot across her skin was power. Her chin rose in a show of bravado as she waited for his reply.
    Her tone also surprised Tommy, clearly, because he lifted his head, his fingers stilling on the guitar strings andthose famous eyes narrowing as he dragged his gaze to hers.
    ‘What did you say?’ He knew what she’d said. She could tell from the arrogant tilt of his head, and that deceptively mild tone of voice.
    ‘I have better things to do than sit on this couch while you ignore me,’ Jenna announced, in exactly the way she fantasized she should talk to people and yet never actually did. In real life she just … faded away. She even got to her feet, and looked down her nose at him, and doing it made her feel like some kind of warrior. ‘And if you do want me to help you,’ she continued, because why the hell not, ‘you shouldn’t be so rude.
You
asked for my help.
You
appeared in my office. You have no reason to get all surly now.’
    ‘Surly,’ he repeated. The arrogant head tilt came, this time, with an almost-puzzled expression, as if he couldn’t quite take it in. ‘
Surly?
’
    ‘Surly,’ she retorted, overenunciating the word. ‘It means bad-tempered and unfriendly. Obviously.’
    There was a long, tense moment, and then, very carefully, Tommy set the guitar next to him on the couch. Without looking away from Jenna for even a second, he uncurled himself from his sitting position and rose to his feet, with that lethal sort of grace that made him so fascinating to watch in all those music videos.
    Except this was not a video, this was three feet across a coffee table, and Jenna’s heart stopped beating for a single, startled moment before kicking back into highgear as he loomed above her. Her mouth went dry, and she could feel her eyes widen. Panic. Or lust. She wasn’t sure she could tell the difference.
    He’d changed out of the outfit he’d worn on set earlier, and was wearing nothing more dramatic than a tight black T-shirt and faded jeans. Both clung to that lean body of his the way she’d often dreamed of doing herself. His feet were bare, long and narrow against the cream-coloured carpet, which struck Jenna as somehow over-poweringly erotic. He was so close that she could see his dark hair, freshly washed, was thick and lustrous and almost shaggy without all its usual product. Suddenly he didn’t look like he was stuck in a time warp, he looked like any smoking-hot male animal in any time, and the force of his attention was entirely focused on Jenna.
    Like she was a target. Or prey.
    She ordered herself to breathe.
    ‘I know the meaning of the word surly,’ he told her, his voice low and husky, though she didn’t mistake the bite in it. Just as she didn’t mistake the way he held himself, all taut and furious and so very full of himself.
Arrogant.
    And yet, what Jenna wanted to do was apologize, for anything at all, just to make him stop looking at her that way. To ease the tension. That was exactly what she’d do in any real-life scenario that got even remotely as intense as this one. She’d all but apologized to Adam as he’d headed out the door, hadn’t she? So, of course, she couldn’t let herself do anything of the kind. Not here. Not with
this
man. Not any