The Pudgy Prude, as one of her boyfriends once dubbed her, wasn’t entirely without sexual desire. She masturbated, she thought fiercely. She knew how to get off, she knew how to want to be touched, how to imagine being touched, she knew how to touch herself. She just hadn’t particularly cared if any of the men she actually knew got close enough to touch her. But she had always been smart enough to maintain a distance between herself and the type of man that she knew would completely run her over.
Men like her father. Strong, determined, dominant men who enforced their control, supposedly for a woman’s own good. Daughter or wife. For their own peace of mind, such men made certain that the women they loved were smothered beyond hope.
The exact type of man that turned her on the most. Especially the type whose glance assured a woman that he had the soul of a bad boy. A man who could turn the bedroom into an adventure. Men like Kell Krieger and the stranger in the strip joint.
Why was she thinking about Krieger now? It had been so many years since she had seen him that she wondered if she would even recognize him now. She knew her father met with him fairly often and still counted him as a friend. But Kell was the one man her father had never suggested as one of her bodyguards.
Of course, Kell hadn’t been like other men. She had no doubt in her mind he might be more adventurous to a woman than her father deemed necessary.
Unfortunately, Emily craved adventure. And not just in the bedroom. But outside of it. She craved a challenge and she hungered to live. If a man couldn’t provide both, then what good was he?
The men her father sent as potential candidates, aka bodyguards, had never really tempted her. They whined too much. They were too scared of her father to even suggest a little fun, and all they wanted to do was call and ask his permission for the least little bit of adventure.
She rolled her eyes at the thought of it. Sometimes, she wondered if what she craved even existed. A man who was strong inside and out. A man who knew the world wasn’t fair, and knew he had to take responsibility for his part in it. A man who knew there was more to sex than simply the act and that there was more to a woman than breasts and thighs and what lay beyond. A man who accepted the fact that a woman might need adventure as well.
That was what she craved. A man she could trust enough not just to give in to her desires with, but to accept her need to live. A man who, even if he wasn’t there forever, was at least there long enough to care about fulfilling not just the physical desires, but the adventurous ones as well.
Until now, whenever she thought of the perfect lover, Kell’s face had always filled her imagination when she fantasized. Now, a stranger had taken his place.
She was definitely fantasizing now. Much to her own dissatisfaction, because masturbation hadn’t helped. She had tried that the moment she was naked. Despite the orgasm that had rippled through her at the club, her body was still simmering with need when she returned home. Unfamiliar, desperate need.
She knew how to hurt for sex now; unfortunately, Emily knew she was doomed to disappointment. There wasn’t a chance in hell the object of her lust could be allowed into her life. She doubted he would even want to be.
Men like that did not “do” chubby little schoolteachers with no intentions of entering the darker side of life.
Emily didn’t do drugs and had no intentions of trying them. She wasn’t a part of the criminal element, as he surely was, and she had no desire to dance on the fringes of it by becoming involved with someone like that. The need for adventure only went so far.
Now, if she could just convince her body of that, because it wasn’t listening very well. It was definitely interested, even now, hours later.
She paced her living room, following the path of the thick throw rugs that lay between the overstuffed furniture and heavy walnut coffee table. The evening sun glinted off the hardwood floor, and sent warmth blazing through the room as Atlanta’s heat shimmered beyond the patio doors.
Outside, her small courtyard, which was surrounded by a heavy brick wall, looked cool and inviting, but not as peaceful as it had once been. The shade of the ornamental trees and the blooms of summer’s splendor couldn’t quench the lust that filled her. Finally. She couldn’t shake her reaction to today’s events, no more than she could shake her arousal.
For as long as she could remember, her ultimate fantasy image had been the leather-wearing, motorcycle-riding bad boy. That was her weakness. When she was in high school she had watched them from afar, lusted, dreamed of them, but she had known them too well to ever be drawn in by them.
But today, she had almost succumbed.
She twisted her fingers together as she paused at the sliding glass doors that led to the courtyard and frowned at her own blurred image there.
She wasn’t really pretty. She was sort of plain and not the type of girl that the bad boys had ever noticed. Which had suited her fine until now. With her shoulder-length auburn hair, plain blue eyes, and less than slender build, she didn’t exactly draw men to her. There were too many women much pret
tier than she, and much more exotic. Women who knew their own sexuality and how to please a man. Women who didn’t freak out when a man blew on the sensitive flesh between their thighs.
She had come for a stranger.
When his face had flushed and the heavy lust in his expression had hit her, a second before his breath had rushed over her sex, she had known she had made a horrible mistake. She should have never risked herself that way, her identity, her safety, her father’s reputation.
Her own peace of mind.
She dropped her head against the cool glass of the door, her lips tipping into a grimace of regret. It would have been nice. To touch that hard body, to feel his muscles tensing beneath her fingertips, to feel his hands sliding over her.
He had smelled so clean, so masculine. There hadn’t been a scent of drunkenness or sloth, just clean male. No heavy aftershave or cologne. Just hard, primal male. The type of male that never gave women like her a second look.
It was the lace underwear, the sexy dance, the overwhelmingly sexual nature of the atmosphere that had surrounded him. He hadn’t really been aroused by mousy, pudgy, quiet Emily Stanton. And it was better that way, wasn’t it?
The harsh ringing of her cell phone interrupted her thoughts. Turning to the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room, Emily snatched up the phone, checked the caller ID and answered it quickly, knowing what was coming.
“Hi, Daddy.” She pushed the thought of bad boys to the back of her mind for the man who had cared for her, cherished her. And fought to restrain her.