Her eyes widened in amazement. “I thought you knew my father better than that, Kell? You evidently have no clue how bad he wants me married and knocked up.”
“Oh, I can safely say I know your father’s plans as well as anyone.” He grinned mockingly. “But I know how to be careful, Emily.”
“You’re just like him.” She could see the same arrogance, the same determination stamped on his features that she often saw on her father’s. “So certain you’re right and that you can have what you want the way you want it. I’m not a prize, Kell, and I’m not a plaything to relieve your boredom.”
His smile was blatant male confidence and sexual intent.
“No, you’re a habitual virgin who’s too frightened to take what you want.” He lifted the beer, drank again, and his eyes gleamed with amused certainty.
“Are you insane?”
“I’m horny.” He shrugged. “So hard for a taste of that sweetness you were rubbing in my face at that strip club, I can barely walk for it.”
“So that makes it okay?”
“That makes it more than okay, sugar. That’s going to make it a certainty. Because I might be harder than hell, but right now, I bet you dollars to doughnuts your panties are wet again. Shall we put it to the test?”
He was insane. He was crazy. He was the most impossibly confident man she had ever laid her eyes on. He was totally unlike the bodyguards. He didn’t bother to hide his lust and he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of it.
Her gaze raked over his tall, muscular body. She paused at his thighs, seeing the length of his erection beneath his jeans. The impressive bulge was a temptation in and of itself.
“You think you can handle me.” She smiled slowly. “I can see it in your face. You think all you have to do is get me addicted to your touch, to touching you, and everything else will be a piece of cake.”
His lips quirked in response.
“You are so deluded.” She dropped her arms and moved closer, watching his eyes narrow as she brushed against him, stopping a breath from his hard chest as she let one hand drift across his tight abs.
“Am I?”
“You are.” Her fingers brushed over his belt before she began to slowly loosen it. “I could become addicted, Kell. So easily.” His eyes narrowed as the belt came undone and her fingers tugged at the metal button holding his jeans. “I could do all the things I’ve researched, hungered for, dreamed about.” The second button came undone. “I could go crazy with you in my bed.” The third button, the fourth.
His jeans parted beneath her fingers, revealing the snug white briefs he wore and the heavy ridge of flesh beneath.
“Teasing, sugar?” he dared her. His voice. His eyes. They sent out a challenge she couldn’t resist.
Carefully she eased the material of his briefs over the hard flesh, catching her breath on a silent moan as the thick, heavy wedge of flesh was revealed. Dark, pulsing with blood and strength, the head engorged, flushed nearly purple with arousal and heat as a creamy drop of semen beaded at the flushed crest.
“I don’t tease,” she whispered.
She had known what she wanted as she came to him, and she had been certain he wouldn’t allow it. That he would steal control, that he would take her as he wanted, not as she wanted.
But he stood still, his body growing more tense by the second.
Emily could feel the hunger rising inside her now, beating at her brain, searing through her bloodstream. Her mouth watered with the need to taste him, to put to action all the research she had done on going down on a man.
“Take your shirt off.” She meant to whisper the words, she hadn’t meant to make it a command.
But the shirt came off. Slowly. Too slowly. Revealing tighter than tight abs, a rippling chest, and powerful arms.
She had to touch him. She didn’t have a choice. Bronzed flesh filled her vision as her hands, pale against his skin, pressed against his stomach and eased upward, scraping over the sprinkling of black hair that bisected it. Feeling the rush of heat from his flesh, the pounding of his heart. The prickle of the small hairs against her palms was electric.
“How long since you’ve touched a man, Emily?” he asked her then. “Since you’ve let your senses be captured?”
She shook her head slowly, dazed, mesmerized by the pleasure building in her palms and rushing through her body.
“Too long.” She could barely breathe, could barely remember. “So long.”
> Her fingers curled against his chest as her head lowered. She wanted to taste him. Her tongue touched flesh and he jerked beneath the caress. But he didn’t touch her. He didn’t hold her. He didn’t force her to do what he wanted.