“You’re a puzzle,” he murmured hotly against her ear, “and I want to work you out.”
“So your strategy is to come right out and ask me who I am?”
“It never hurts to be direct.”
Emma had always found directness overrated. “Guess you’ll just have to use your big brain to figure me out.”
She heard his loud thoughts, permutations of that quick brain running a mile a minute. “Might need something bigger than that.”
Suddenly he was no longer blanketing her in the rock-hard embrace of his body. She went to turn and he checked her with a gruff, “No.”
Her breath hitched in anticipation. Trying to interpret the sounds behind her was a new brand of torture. That schwipp noise? His belt removal. Soft plucks signaled shirt buttons entering a state of undone. A light whoosh of fabric falling to the terrace assured her this beautiful man would be naked if she turned around.
Turning around was all she could think about.
“I don’t care how good you look naked, Brody Kane, you won’t get a word out of me.” She knew it was all fun and games, but his patience at her reticence had to be wearing thin.
“Look at me.”
She did. Oh, how she did.
Her gaze strayed down his magnificent body—the lightly matted chest, the happy trail, his perfect cock already springing to life, muscular legs that tapered to…TARDIS socks?
“You’re wearing them?” Her gift. It should not be sexy, but it was, and more than a little heart-shattering.
He placed his hands on his hips, standing before her like a golden god, the winking city lights making him glow. “These socks really pissed me off, Emma. Everything about this situation”—he motioned between them—“pissed me off. Your strip-club antics, your cranky cat, your cute-awful singing, your walking around half naked in my T-shirt in my home. My perma-boner, your jealous nipples, my inability to get any work done in your presence. My inability to get any work done when not in your presence. Most of all, what pissed me off is that stubborn streak of yours.”
Something shifted inside her, something huge. Admitting all this couldn’t have been easy for someone as reserved as Brody. He was taking a chance here. On her.
Defenses in tatters, she could no longer resist his lie-detecting stare, not when he was standing there, naked and unafraid. She needed to be seen by him, right down to the marrow.
“What do you want to know?”
Foxy fast, he’d taken her in his arms, soothing her tremble before she even knew it was racking her body.
“Anything, Emma. Anything that will let me inside that beautiful skull of yours.”
She hauled in a breath and spoke into the warm skin of his neck. “I—I lied to get the job at Score Property. Faked my résumé.”
“Lots of people do that,” he said, no surprise in his voice. “It’s not a big deal.”
It was to her, and she didn’t want him to dismiss it as merely the standard tactics of a desperate job hunter. Daisy had moved to Chicago, following some deadbeat who treated her like shit, and Emma had swooped in to pick up the broken pieces when he screwed her over. Though Emma couldn’t leave her sister behind, she could leave her past. Become respectable.
“If you knew what trouble I’d turn out to be, you’d never have hired me.”
“I have no regrets about hiring you. You are the best assistant I’ve ever had, and the black-and-white of that résumé can’t tell me different.”
“The real résumé might make you reconsider. Education—biker bars, honky-tonks, and pool halls. Experience—a shit-ton of bad choices with men who treated me with the same low level of respect I felt for myself.”
He held her tighter. “You don’t have to do this.”
“You wanted to know. You wanted to work out the puzzle. Skills—faking it until making it, so mobile she can up sticks at a moment’s notice, no shame whatsoever—” The volume of her voice escalated in tandem with her need to make him understand. She was unworthy of his kindness and frankly, it was killing her.
“Baby,” he soothed.
She went for the kill shot. “My sister’s in rehab and my dad’s a jailbird.”
The words hung in the air like dense weighted objects waiting to crash. Her breath hung with it. He should have frozen, pushed her away, anything but what he did.
He kissed her gently on the top of her head.
Tears welled in her eyes, and she burrowed closer into the safety of all that warm skin. He was naked, yet she was the one completely and utterly exposed.
“Is your sister’s problem related to your debt problem?”
She nodded against his shoulder. “I’m supposed to take care of her. She’s three years younger than me and all our lives, I’ve been the one who cleaned her cuts, brushed her hair, read her a bedtime story. Sang stupid songs together.”
“No momma?”
“She ran out when I was eight, and Dad was in and out of prison. We lived with my grandmother, on and off, sometimes in foster care, but mostly it was just us.”
“Mostly it was you, brave girl.”