No one ever asked a man that. No one. But she had to spend the next ten days in a Land Rover with this man. She was already attracted to him, already thinking about how long it had been since she’d had sex, let alone the kind of sex her chemistry with Keenan promised. The only way to make it worse was to get into an increasingly heated verbal sparring match. “I’m thirty,” she said mildly, “on a leadership team comprised of men who are all at least ten years older than I am. I’m a woman in a male-dominated industry. I can’t fail. I can’t even make a mistake. If something goes wrong while I’m gone, all I’ll hear for the rest of eternity is ‘remember that time Rose took her granny to Turkey and the pricing system went down?’”
He laughed again, a low, soft chuckle that wove with the wine heating her veins. “Anything’s funny when it involves the word “Turkey.” We’ll figure something out, Jetlag,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
She automatically woke up her phone to check the itinerary. “We’ve got the dawn hot air balloon ride, then Goreme and Derinkuyu.”
“We will figure something out,” he said again.
“It will be fine. It will be just fine. We’re eight hours ahead of them. I’ll check in before we leave for the day and see what happened at the end of their day, then again when we get to the next hotel, which will be early morning for them. Or something like that,” she said, because she was confusing herself. She swallowed the last of her wine and reached for the bottle. “It’s going to be fine.”
Keenan’s hand closed around hers. “You probably know this, but drinking that much red wine after twenty-four hours of travel isn’t the best idea.”
Goose bumps shivered up her arm to her nape. “Making sure my phone worked before I left North America was the best idea,” she said. She tilted her wrist, still in his grip. The wine sloshed into the neck as she held it just below level, over her glass. “This is second best,” she said, and started to pour.
His fingers tightened around her wrist, heat and pressure, strength and threat. She flicked her gaze from the glass to his eyes, hot and dark with promise. “I can’t make your phone work, but I can do better than second best.”
Chapter Two
Keenan was going to kill Jack.
Or Jack was going to kill him. Either was possible, at this very moment, Rose staring at him, the bottle suspended over her wine glass, empty enough that only a thin sliver of liquid sloshed up the neck toward the opening. Still clasping her wrist, he stared right back, using the ticking seconds to memorize her face, partly out of habit, partly because he was captivated. Her hair and her eyes were the same shade of rich chestnut brown, a color he’d never seen in anyone’s eyes before. Her pale skin testified to a life lived indoors, slender fingers poised over a keyboard, razor-sharp mind slicing problems into neat ribbons. If she’d started the day in Lancaster with any makeup on her face it was long gone by now, leaving her with a pale rose mouth. The color in her cheeks he attributed to the wine, or maybe to the fact that he’d just baldly propositioned Jack Powell’s sister.
Jack, the lying bastard.
With his peculiar mixture of half-truths, half-lies, Jack had managed to keep the fact that his sister was a knockout from a team of Navy SEALs. He rarely talked about Rose, and when he did, he made her sound like a ballbreaker. He bragged up her fast-track promotion to the leadership team, highlighting the way she kicked ass and took names, totally focused on her career. He probably sorted through pictures for the ones that showed Rose in the least flattering way possible. Eyes closed. Hair in a ponytail. Suit jacket obscuring her curves. Mouth full of food. Jack, the most outrageous storyteller in a group known for tall tales, had fooled them all into thinking his sister was a cross between a drill sergeant and a maiden aunt.
Rose Powell was a knockout. She wore black leggings and gray knee high boots, a gray long-sleeved T-shirt that hugged her chest and hips, and a swingy loose black sweater that drew his eye every time she moved. She’d obviously ignored any advice Jack gave her about walking around tumbled ruins and streets unevenly paved with marble blocks carved thousands of years ago, and she was obviously strung as tight as parachute cords after a High Altitude Low Opening jump.
He needed to forget about Jack. Jack was half a world away, unable to pound Keenan into the earth for what he’d just said, but it was entirely possible Rose would do her best to end him, right now. She could do it too. Every time she looked at him he sat up a little straighter, but that was probably because when they made eye contact it was like taking a punch to the solar plexus.
She’d been a little unfocused there at the end, but now her eyes sharpened. For a long moment they were frozen, Rose with the bottle in her hand, Keenan meeting her gaze. The only thing that moved was the wine, gently flowing back and forth along the neck.
If she poured the glass, she was out. No way would she get drunk to sleep with a man. Wait. If she poured the glass she was in, because wine was sexy, lowered inhibitions, that kind of thing. Christ. He wasn’t the one with jet lag. He should be thinking more clearly than this. He’d landed in Istanbul months earlier, and somehow never caught a flight stateside, somehow never went home. He was an expert at navigating from point A to point B using only the sun, but he didn’t have the map that showed him how to get home.
“You can do better,” she said, repeating his words. “You must like living dangerously.”