And maybe I will . . . my thighs ache just thinking about it—about him. But maybe I also want to let him know that he has to work at it with me. That my legs don’t just part when he looks at me with that sexy smile of his that says he wants to eat me alive.
Maybe I want him to know I’m not like his other women.
I can’t be played.
That I’m more than just a pretty face for him to discard when this promotion is over.
But then again, doesn’t that contradict the whole purpose of casual sex?
See? It’s a lot easier than it sounds. Especially when he’s right there working out like that.
This is going to be a serious problem.
Huge.
Stick around—you should because he’s over there taking off his shirt—and things are just beginning to get good.
“ARE WE IN THE NO talking phase?” Zane asks as he looks over at me where I sit in the make-up chair. I’m having my hair done in the studio dressing room of the local morning TV show in New Orleans.
“The no talking phase?” I murmur when I know damn well what he means: the part where I make sure I’m not alone with him at all today so that we don’t have to have that awkward silence pressuring us to talk about what happened when we both don’t want to.
“Yeah. You’re avoiding me every chance you get.” He’s buttoning up his shirt and I avert my eyes. Seeing skin is bad. Very bad. Especially when I got very little sleep thinking about that skin and how it felt sliding on top of mine.
“I am not,” I say, very well aware that we have an audience of make-up and hair artists around us who already think we’ve been sleeping together.
He eyes me and a ghost of a knowing smirk curls up one corner of his mouth. Why am I suddenly nervous? “Good to know,” he says. “How are you?”
“Fine.” I keep my eyes straight ahead at the mirror in front of me and focus there.
“Fine?”
“Yes, fine.”
“I love when you give me one word responses almost as much as when you use adverbs. It tells me you’re trying not to ignore me but you’re failing miserably.” He chuckles and moves behind me. His reflection in the mirror is from his shoulders down so I can’t see his eyes.
“Are you trying to push my buttons?” I ask.
“We both know I know how to do that successfully.”
I ignore his innuendo. “You sure do. Too bad pushing those buttons will have you ending up in the dog house.”
“We all make mistakes,” he murmurs as he traces a fingertip down my bare shoulder. “It’s just that sometimes I like to make mistakes four and five times, you know, just to be sure they’re worth making.”
How is it with a few words in that sexy voice of his that every ounce of blood feels like it’s fallen to the delta of my thighs?
And more importantly? Is he saying what I think he’s saying? That he wants to sleep together again too?
“Is that so?”
“Mmm-hmm,” he murmurs. “You jumped out of bed and left. I was lonely.”
My cheeks burn bright. “I had things to do.”
He lifts a brow as he bends down, meeting my eyes in the mirror’s reflection, and plants the softest of kisses to the back of my neck. He leaves his lips there, the heat of his breath feathering over my skin so that every single nerve in my body feels like it’s somehow connected to that one spot. “Yeah. Me.”
Sex. It oozes out of everything about him. The gruffness of his voice. The look in his eye as he stares at me. The run of his hand up and down my bare arm.
And I’m not the only one who notices it. There are a few knowing glances exchanged between the hair and make-up ladies as I open my mouth to speak and then close it.
“Ladies? Can you excuse us for a moment?” he asks.
“Of course,” the cosmetologists say, suddenly on the move from their stations as I start to get that fluttery feeling in my throat, worried about what exactly Zane is going to do when we’re alone.
When the door shuts, he moves before me, blocking the mirror I’m staring at, and waits until I lift my eyes to meet the amusement in his.
“You can stop the show, now. They’re gone,” I say.
“I wasn’t putting one on.” I hate that those five simple words have my pulse picking up its pace despite my rationale telling me he’s just a sweet talker. “Doesn’t every woman deserve to be treated like they matter after they’ve slept with someone?” he asks.
Oh. My. Who is this guy?
I try to wrap my head around this man and the fact that he sounded like a player when I heard him talking with his friend Jack, and yet this—that comment—is nothing like what a player would say . . . well, that is unless he’s still trying to play me.
Is he? Am I just one more gullible female to him? Or is this the real him when no one’s around?
Hating that I don’t know and confused over why I even care when I told him point blank last night that this was just sex, I build a wall around me just in case.
“What’s going on, Zane?”
“I was just wondering how we were going to do this?”